Arnaldo Dante Momigliano (5 September 1908 – 1 September 1987) was an Italian historian of classical antiquity, known for his work in historiography, and characterised by Donald Kagan as "the world's leading student of the writing of history in the ancient world". He was a MacArthur Fellow in 1987.
. . .Momigliano was born on 5 September 1908 in Caraglio, Piedmont. In 1936, he became Professor of Roman History at the University of Turin, but as a Jew, soon lost his position due to the anti-Jewish Racial Laws enacted by the Fascist regime in 1938, and moved to England, where he remained. After a time at Oxford University, he taught Ancient History at the University of Bristol where he was made a lecturer in 1947. He went to University College London and was elected Chair of Ancient History from 1951 to 1975. He was a Fellow of the Warburg Institute and supervised the PhD of Wolf Liebeschuetz. Momigliano visited regularly at the University of Chicago where he was named Alexander White Professor in the Humanities, and at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. He wrote reviews for The New York Review of Books. In addition to studying the ancient Greek historians and their methods, he also took an interest in modern historians, such as Edward Gibbon, and wrote a number of studies of them.
After 1930, Momigliano contributed a number of biographies to the Enciclopedia Italiana; in the 1940s and 1950s he contributed biographies to the Oxford Classical Dictionary and Encyclopædia Britannica. In his retirement, he was made a distinguished visiting professor for life at the University of Chicago and held fellowships at All Souls College, Oxford and Peterhouse, Cambridge. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1969 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1971.In 1974 he was made an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
"On Pagans, Jews, and Christians" (Wesleyan University Press):
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."
"On Pagans, Jews, and Christians" By Arnaldo Dante Momigliano, Wesleyan University Press, 1987.
