The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (Sather Classical Lectures)

Sather Classical Lectures

by Arnaldo Momigliano, Riccardo Di Donato (Foreword)

Here, at last, are the long-awaited Sather Classical Lectures of the great historian Arnaldo Momigliano, In a masterly survey of the origins of ancient historiography, Momigliano captures those features of an ancient historian's work that not only gave it importance in its own day but also encouraged imitation and exploitation in later centuries. He reveals the extent to which Greek, Persian, and Jewish historians influenced the Western historiographic tradition, and then goes on to examine the first Roman historians and the emergence of national history. In the course of his exposition, he traces the development of antiquarian studies as distinctive branch of historical research from antiquity to the modern period, discusses the place of Tacitus in historical thought, and explores the way in which ecclesiastical historiography has developed a tradition of its own. All these lectures illustrate Momigliano's unrivaled ability to combine the study of classical texts and the history of classical scholarship. First delivered in 1962, the lectures were revised during the next fifteen years and then held for annotation that was never completed. They are now published from the author's manuscripts, collated and checked by Momigliano's literary executor, Anne Marie Meyer, of the Warburg Institute, with a foreword by Riccardo Di Donato, of the University of Pisa. The text is printed as the author left it. Sather Classical Lectures, 54

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Classics, Ancient History, Philosophy

180 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

Reviews

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recommended for historians. 500(ish) word review on my blog: http://dearreaderblog.com/2014/06/30/...

[Judy]

"In pre-exilic times the Jews had chronicles of their kings. The author or authors of the present Books of Kings used them. But the Books of Kings we read now are not comparable with the ordinary Royal Chronicles we know from Assyria and must assume to have existed in Persia. The Books of Kings are a record of events connected with the relationship between Jehovah and the Hebrew nation as a whole. This of course applies even more to the definite post exilic products which we call the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah and Chronicles. These are the histories of a religious society. Two or three centuries later the author of the First Book of Maccabees showed this tradition of the political and religious historian was still alive among the Jews.
In Greece, chronicles played a modest part, if any, in the origins of Greek historiography. Books on individual nations and accounts of big wars almost certainly preceded local history. Thanks to Herodotus and Thucydides the Greeks acquired what was going to remain their characteristic historiography, the history of one big historical event or of one or more cities in their internal upheavals and external warfare. Starting from very different presuppositions Greeks and Jews both developed a kind of history which was not a chronicle of individual kings or heroes, but a chronicle of a political community. Both the Jewish and Greek type of political history broke with the Persian or more generally Oriental type of history centered on the performances of individual kings or heroes: it expressed the life of societies deliberating and acting with clear purposes under the leadership of far-seeing men " pp. 16-17
"It is yet a further arbitrary generalization to maintain that a Christian historian will write better history than a pagan historian simply because he is Christian. Herodatus is better than any medieval historian I know of with the possible exception of Ibn Khaldur - who was not a Christian and believed circular processes of history. " p. 30
"What I think is typically Greek is the critical attitude towards the recording of events, that is, the development of critical methods of enabling us to distinguish between facts and fancies. To the best of my knowledge no historiography earlier than the Greeks or independent of it developed these critical methods; and we have inherited the Greek methods." p. 30
"Hecataeus did find an objective criterion for a choice between facts and fancies. He was not longer at the mercy of the Muses. he turned to foreign evidence." p. 32
"...the pre-Greek stage of Latin history writing involves some very important aspects of Latin culture: how it suddenly jumped from a stage of crude annalistic historical writing, first in Greek... then in Latin; and how it created the prototype of modern national history." p. 81
"The Romans, not the Greeks transmitted to the Renaissance the notion of national history. Livy was the master. " p. 81
"Like the Greeks, the Roman historians remained essentially equipped either to collect and criticize mythical traditions or to observe and report contemporary history. They were hardly able to examine the historical as opposed to the mythical past., if by examination we mean a systematic (not an occasional) study of primary evidence. They could collate and criticize reports by preceding historians, but their study of more remote history never had the value and cogency of their study of contemporary history.....: p. 107