Popular religious beliefs and the late Roman historians
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9348437 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Arnaldo Momigliano (University College London, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1972 |
| Volume | 8 |
| Pages | 1-18 |
| Publication date | 1972-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Studies in Church History (BOOK_SERIES) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0424-2084 • E-ISSN: 2059-0644 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0424208400005386 |
| OpenAlex | W2316633549 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 32 |
| References cited | 3 |
Students of historiography have become increasingly gloomy in their evaluation of the Greek founding fathers of historiography. All the limits, the shortcomings, and the failures of conventional history writing – the histoire événementielle of French terminology – have been laid at the door of Thucydides. Herodotus has escaped obloquy, either because he offered a promise of variety, curiosity, humour and sensitiveness which Thucydides spoiled, or because (as Professor Seth Benardete says in a very recent book) ‘his foundations are not those of modern historiography’. Thucydides has become the great villain of historiography in so far as he identified history with political and military events. Professor Moses Finley and I may in the past have said some unkind words about Thucydides – so did the late Professor Collingwood. But we are now made to look like mild apologists of Thucydides by Hermann Strasburger. This most penetrating interpreter of ancient historians has treated Thucydides’s approach to history as the survival of a prehistoric mode of thinking, for which war was the most important event. According to Strasburger, Thucydides excluded das Humanum from history and therefore derived his scale of values from ‘prescientific and ultimately precivilised, prehistoric strata of thought’. Strasburger tries to show that some hellenistic historians, such as Agatharchides and Posidonius, showed more interest in the business of peaceful coexistence than Thucydides ever did, but he is under no illusion about their ultimate success. Thucydides’s historical approach prevailed: deviationists were silenced. The Romans inherited from the Greeks a type of historical writing for which war was the central theme. What Thucydides did not know was not history
Archaeology · Art · Greeks · Historiography · Literature · Political science · Politics · Terminology · Classical Antiquity Studies · Classics · History · Law · Philosophy
Wiara w omeny w relacjach późnoantycznych autorów chrześcijańskich
Polybius, Rome and the Hellenistic World
Art and architecture
Emperors, government and bureaucracy
Education in the Roman empire
Orthodoxy and heresy from the death of Constantine to the eve of the first council of Ephesus
Government and administration
Rural life in the later Roman empire
The army, c. 420–602
Specialized production and exchange
The army
Asceticism
Land, labour and settlement
Law in the western kingdoms between the fifth and the seventh century
Senators and senates
Armies and society in the later Roman world
Administration and politics in the cities of the fifth to the mid seventh century
Education and literary culture
Emperor and court
The successors of Constantine
Late Roman social relations
Polytheist religion and philosophy
Monasticism
The family in the late Roman world
The cities
Religion and the Construction of a Christian Roman Polity
News and Frontier Consciousness in the Late Roman Empire
The Cambridge Ancient History
The Cambridge Ancient History
Leadership for the Christian Empire
Superstitio' in the Codex Theodosianus and the Persecution of Pagans1
Dream Interpretation
| Unique citing works | 32 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.78 |
| Citation span | 1985 - 2020 (36) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 32 |