Fowler, 'Studies on Modern Scholarship', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9502
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9502-fowler-studies
@@@@95.2.3, Momigliano, Studies in Modern Scholarship
A.D. Momigliano, Studies on Modern Scholarship. Ed. G.W.
Bowersock and T.J. Cornell with new translations by T.J. Cornell.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Pp. 341. $40.00
(hb), $17.00 (pb). ISBN 0-520-07001-1 (hb), 0-520-08545-0 (pb).
Reviewed by Robert L. Fowler -- University of Waterloo
It was an excellent idea to provide this selection of
Momigliano's superb and famous essays. Some of the English ones
have been reprinted before, but they are accompanied here by many
new translations. Moreover, the clear focus of the collection,
indicated by the title, makes it highly attractive. These are
studies on modern scholarship; if any selection is to be made
from M.'s vast output, it is wise to concentrate on the kind of
essay for which he was best known, and in which he was at his
best. The editors have selected well; I have no serious quarrel
with what has been omitted, except that a case might be made for
throwing in "Le regole del giuoco nello studio della storia
antica" (Sesto contributo alla storia degli studi classici e
del mondo antico [Rome 1980 (1974)] 1 ff.). "Modern" seems to
mean 19th and 20th centuries: none of the essays on Gibbon,
therefore; fair enough. Where a choice existed between several
essays on the same subject, one can generally see why the editors
have chosen the one they did; but cross-references to the others
would have been helpful. Included are chapters on Creuzer; Grote;
Rostovtzeff; Burckhardt; De Sanctis; Syme; Croce; Beloch;
Bernays; Droysen; Fustel de Coulanges; Reinhardt; Schwartz;
Freeman; Meyer; Dumezil; K.O. Mueller; Bachofen, Warde Fowler,
and Cumont; and the long essay "New Paths of Classicism in the
Nineteenth Century," a rather heterogeneous collection of
thoughts on Niebuhr, Mommsen, Max Weber, Fustel again, Usener,
Wellhausen, Wilamowitz, and Schwartz again. Scores of other
writers are touched on in passing. The volume is a treasurehouse
and ought to be owned by anyone at all interested in the history
of our discipline, or in history.
M.'s stature is beyond dispute. All his work combines the
highest intelligence with the keenest insight and most
industrious learning. No one can fail to profit from him, or fail
to marvel at the virtuosity with which he conducts the orchestra
of ideas resounding on every page. No labyrinth of personal
connections, -isms, and historical nexuses seems too complicated
for him to find the way through; only occasionally does his
lucidity waver, but so great is the respect he commands that
one's first instinct (at least mine) is to assume that the
confusion lies with the reader, not the writer.
Inevitably there are judgments with which one disagrees. In
a book of thousands it could hardly be otherwise. More to the
point they are worth disagreeing with. Contrast the book in which
one loses interest because disagreeing toto caelo.
--"Oxford went German when the Oxford Movement was defeated" (p.
122), followed by a discussion of Mark Pattison. Oxford--insofar
as any one statement can be predicated of the place--did not go
German until Eduard Fraenkel arrived. Pattison was not
representative. M.'s remarks on him would be given a better
perspective by recalling the element of truth in George Eliot's
striking caricature of Pattison as Mr. Casaubon in
Middlemarch, or Rhoda Broughton's as Professor Forth in
Belinda. He was an utterly repellent person whose memoirs
become interesting at precisely those moments when he ceases to
speak of himself. --One may doubt the conclusion that Droysen
did not continue his Hellenistic history because he did not know
what to do with the Jews. That he was the spouse and best friend
of Jews hardly seems to support M.'s case, as he seems to think;
rather the opposite. Probably he just got interested in other
things. --Of the four main elements identified in Fustel's work
on p. 173 ("the development of the organisation of the state from
gens to city through curia and tribe; the
parallelism of Indian, Greek, and Roman institutions; the
evolution of religion from the worship of ancestors to the gods
of nature... [and] the link between private property and the
history of ancient religion"), it seems incredible that M.
chooses the last as the most important for the development of
ancient history in the past century, especially since he easily
shows elsewhere in the book how weak the theory is (p. 240). He
must be thinking only of Fustel's emphasis on private property,
leaving aside its supposed connection with religion. --While the
remarks on Wilamowitz on p. 185 are sound and perceptive, the
judgment on p. 272 about his religion is very wide of the mark:
It was no accident that Wilamowitz got into trouble with
Nietzsche very early. Throughout his long life he was involved in
the business of keeping his classicism within an undogmatic,
vaguely Christian religious tradition. The man who ended his
career at eighty-two with a book on the faith of the Greeks had
started to write about Greek religion sixty years before. He was
probably no more certain of his own beliefs when he was eighty
than he had been when he was twenty-five. He only knew he could
not consider himself a Christian in any serious sense.
Leaving aside the reasons for his quarrel with Nietzsche,
which were largely personal, and where they were not, had nothing
to do with Christianity, the remarks on Wilamowitz' religion are
inconsistent with his intelligence and could only be right if,
like many intelligent people, he left his reason behind when he
entered the realm of religion. But they are not right. From the
age of 18 to 82 he called himself a Platonist and meant it.
Wilamowitz seems vague about Christianity only because Plato
seems vaguely Christian; one would no more reasonably fault him
on these grounds than one would fault Jesus himself for being
only vaguely Jewish. Elsewhere in the book M., though not
hostile, is less than warm towards Wilamowitz; certain aspects of
his character did not appeal to him, as is plain from "Premesse
per una discussione su Wilamowitz," Sesto contributo (Rome
1980 [1973]) 337-49. --To complain two years after the
publication of ATL III that "[w]e have no up-to-date
history of... the Athenian empire" (28) seems petulant, and to
argue in an inaugural lecture at University College, London in
1952 that "all students of ancient history know in their heart
that Greek history is passing through a crisis" (16), quite apart
from questions of tact, seems a tendentious exaggeration that
must have baffled anyone within a hundred miles of a practising
historian--Gomme, for instance, or Jacoby, or Wade-Gery; to say
nothing of the archaeologists. --Finally, the trenchant comment
that opens "New Paths of Classicism in the Nineteenth Century"
(223): In our time there is a great danger that those who talk
most readily about historians and scholars may not know too much
about history and scholarship. Housman's homosexuality or
Wilamowitz' erratic behavior with his father-in-law Mommsen are
easier to describe than Housman's achievements as an editor of
Manilius or Wilamowitz' understanding of Aeschylus. Similar
thoughts were expressed in a review of Herbert Butterfield's
Man on his Past (1956), reprinted in Quinto
contributo (Rome 1975) 891 ff. (I translate): In our time
there is a danger that the study of the history of historiography
will become a specialty in its own right, with the consequence
that we will have Ranke scholars who do not know the history of
the papacy, and Mommsen scholars who do not know Roman public
law; instead of researchers who examine the history of a problem
in order to solve it, we have all too often students of the
history of a problem who are not interested in the problem. And
again in "Le regole del giuoco," already cited: To judge a modern
study in Greco-Roman history without knowing the ancient sources
is in the better case impressionistic; in the worse and more
common case it is a sign of arrogant ignorance. A great part of
what we hear about Gibbon, Niebuhr, Grote, Meyer, Rostovtzeff--to
say nothing of lesser or insignificant figures--, not being
grounded in a knowledge of the documents on which these
historians worked, is useless. One sees what he means, of
course, and M. was hardly unaware of the part that personality
plays in scholarship. One can only agree that the personalia have
their place, and should be kept there. But in itself there is no
reason why classical scholarship and classical scholars cannot be
studied as a phenomenon of western society by someone who is not
a classicist. Historians of science, though they need to know
something of science, are not often scientists, and are probably
not interested in the same kinds of questions as the scientists
themselves. To some readers M. may be too severe in his
concentration on politics, philosophy, and religion; humans are
made of more than this. And in point of fact, the part played by
Housman's homosexuality in his personality is a great deal
more difficult to describe than his achievement as an
editor of Manilius.
The personality of these essays is strong. The overriding
interest in biography and the belief in the greatness of
individuals; the pursuit of true historical judgment and the
abomination of relativism while recognizing the inescapability of
context; the assessment of the universal in history allied with
insistence on the primacy of empirical investigation and respect
for evidence; the simple love of ideas--all are combined in a
powerful persona. The implicit and explicit exhortation to
historians to assess their position over against their
predecessors makes it certain that, all the while M. was taking
the measure of his illustrious subjects, he was taking his own. A
better example of a man building his own monument with his life's
work is hard to think of. One volume of the Contributi
followed another like megaliths. The earliest essay in the
volume, as Cornell notes in the excellent introduction to the
book, is clearly programmatic.
M. was justified in his assessment of himself as a scholar.
But the place in his life and character of the book's most
persistent Leitmotif--liberty and liberalism--will surely
become the subject of heated debate, once the new evidence
concerning his relations with the fascist party in the 30's, to
which Bowersock alludes in the introduction, is published. Any
assessment must wait till then. But whatever the outcome of the
debate, M.'s scholarship remains. Cornell in the introduction
quotes M. himself: "The fact that Georges Dumezil was, we are
told, a supporter of the Action francaise is not an argument
against his theories on Indo-European society. In an age of
ideologies, we must be careful to submit scholarly results to the
sole legitimate criterion of evaluation, which is the reliability
of the evidence." De Man was different: the revelations instantly
showed his theories up for what they were, a hoax of a philosophy
that implicitly suspended morality and thus the need to excuse
one's actions. Momigliano's essays shall be read as long as
history is read, and we are grateful to the editors for the
service they have done.