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On Pagans, Jews, and Christians
Sales Date: 1987-11-01
357 Pages, 6.00 x 9.00 in
An analysis of the relationships between pagan Greece, imperial Rome, Judaism, and Christianity.
Arnaldo Momigliano is the greatest contemporary scholar of the history and historiography of classical civilization. M.I. Finley has written in the New Statesman that "there is no one alive today who knows the subject as he does."
On Pagans, Jews, and Christians is an important addition to his masterly work, bringing together nineteen essays written in the past five years from sources such as The New York Review of Books, The American Scholar, and the Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. It is written with literate clarity and elegance, humane wisdom, and breadth of intellect.
The focus of this book is the secular cultures of pagan Greece and imperial Rome, and the religious cultures of Judaism and Christianity which, in turn, grew from and influenced them and the modern world. For Momigliano, religion, secular ideology, and politics live in and illuminate the present. Chapters include "The Jews of Italy" (history viewed in the autobiographical perspective of the Momigliano family), "The Disadvantages of Monotheism for a Universal State," "How to Reconcile Greeks and Trojans," and "The Theological Efforts of the Roman Upper Classes in the First Century B.C."
A new book by Arnaldo Momigliano is always a scholarly event.
Preface
List of Abbreviations
Biblical Studies and Classical Studies: Simple Reflections upon Historical Method
Historiography of Religion: Western Views
The Origins of Universal History
The Theological Efforts of the Roman Upper Classes in the First Century B.C.
Religion in Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem in the First Century B.C.
How Roman Emperors Became Gods
What Josephus Did Not See
Some Preliminary Remarks on the "Religious Opposition" to the Roma Empire
The Disadvantages of Monotheism for a Universal State
Ancient Biography and the Study of religion in the Roman Empire
Roman Religion: The Imperial Period
The New Letter by "Anna" to "Seneca"
The Life of St. Macrina by Gregory of Nyssa
A Medieval Jewish Autobiography
A Note on Max Weber's Definition of Judaism as a Pariah-Religion
The Jews of Italy
Gershom Scholem's Autobiography
How to Reconcile Greeks and Trojans
Georges Dumezil and the Trifunctional Approach to Roman Civilization
Notes
Index
ARNALDO MOMIGLIANO held university chairs in three countries; at the time of his death in 1987, he was professor emeritus of University College, London, Alexander White Professor at the University of Chicago, and Professore Ordinario di Storia Antica, Scoloe Normale Superiore, Pisa. He had lectured at numerous other universities and colleges, among them Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Princeton, and the universities of California, Michigan, Rome, and Turin. His books include Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography (Wesleyan 1977) and New Paths of Classicism in the Nineteeth Century. Momigliano has received the Feltinelli Prize of the Academia Lincei, the Kaplun Prize of the University of Jerusalem, and the Kenyon Medal for Classical Studies of the British Academy. In 1987 he was appointed a MacArthur Fellow.
"The work of a master. With rare lucidity and startling freshness of approach, the author has confronted those themes, first developed among Greeks, Romans, Jews, and Christians in the ancient world, that still preoccupy a modern Western culture."
~Peter Brown
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