[The titles of the collected essays are listed at the end of the review]
Arnaldo Momigliano (1908-1987) once issued a very stern warning against “the vice of taking the history of historiography as a Sunday pastime, for when one is tired of real historical work and does not have sufficient energy to read books, but only to leaf through them.”[1] For Momigliano the history of historiography on the ancient world was an integral part of his own work as an historian; in this he followed the example of Benedetto Croce (1867-1952) with vigour and originality. Momigliano himself can be considered, I would say, the founder of this field of scholarship that has found many worthy continuators not only among his pupils. However, one cannot fail to agree with Arnaldo Marcone, editor of the volume reviewed here, that at least in Italy “[Momigliano’s] most coherent continuer in this field” (p. 7, my translation) was Leandro Polverini (1935-2023), professor of Roman history at various Italian universities and especially at the University of Roma Tre.[2] The decision to collect twenty-five of Polverini’s essays in a single volume that contains a substantial part of his studies on the subject, published over a period of almost fifty years (the oldest dates back to 1973, the most recent to 2021) in the most diverse venues, in journals and volumes that are sometimes not easy to find either in Italy or abroad[3], seems fully justified.
The essays are subdivided into five sections; the criterion of subdivision is especially evident in the case of the first two sections, each dedicated to a single scholar. Within each section, the essays follow one another in predominantly chronological order, which allows those who wish to read them one after the other to observe how the same subject is investigated with a variation of perspective and documentation, even if there is no lack of repetition and substantial overlapping.
The first section is on Gaetano De Sanctis (1870-1957), the greatest Italian ancient historian of the first half of the 20th century and the founder of one of the major Italian schools of ancient history (Momigliano was among his pupils). The section is opened by the oldest essay in the collection about De Sanctis as a reviewer[4]; it is still, to the best of my knowledge, the most useful study on this subject. The following essay is the introduction to an unpublished chapter of an unfinished volume of De Sanctis’ Storia dei Romani and documents another aspect of Polverini’s tireless scholarly activity: the publication of unpublished works by the great scholars of the past. This activity extends from strictly scholarly works to epistolaries; in this section are presented, as an appendix to the first essay, an exchange between De Sanctis and his teacher Karl Julius Beloch (1854-1929), and, as an appendix to the third, another between De Sanctis and Plinio Fraccaro (1883-1959), the founder of what Polverini considered the other great Italian school of ancient history (among his pupils, one name for all: Emilio Gabba). Significant excerpts from another correspondence, between De Sanctis and Momigliano, are published in the fourth essay of this section, anticipating the complete edition that Polverini managed to complete a few months before his death[5]; even if this essay is a partial publication, it presents the texts with a still useful commentary.
The second section is reserved for the aforementioned Beloch, the German-born scholar later naturalized as an Italian, who introduced the method of source criticism to Italy and was a professor at the University of Rome for over half a century (from 1877). Polverini examines all of Beloch’s vast activity, reserving a more detailed analysis for his Griechische Geschichte and highlighting the changes between the first and second editions. This section also closes with a correspondence: the one between Beloch and Eduard Meyer (1855-1930), reconstructed also thanks to the excavation work carried out by Polverini in the archives of the DDR in the 1980s, well before the fall of the Berlin Wall; it is a significant document for the history of classical studies in Europe and it is a pity that the annotated edition, first announced in 1986, has never seen the light of day.
Compared to the first two sections, the third is less homogeneous, grouping together ten essays on German and Italian historiography between the 19th and 20th centuries; almost all of them have links to the subjects of the previous essays. There are contributions on Karl Christ, the scholar who, influenced by Momigliano, inaugurated the study of modern historiography on the ancient world in Germany; on the work of Guglielmo Ferrero, again with the recovery of a correspondence, that between Ferrero and Eduard Meyer; on Theodor Mommsen and his distinction between Caesar and Caesarism; on Beloch’s introduction of the study of ancient geography in Italy (it is not clear why this essay is placed here and not in the second section). In the two essays dedicated to Ettore Pais (1856-1939), Mommsen’s pupil and opponent of De Sanctis, the reconstruction of his academic life and historiographical conception is intertwined with the events of Italian history starting with Pais’s adhesion first to nationalism and then to fascism. Pais also features prominently in the essay on the academic texts on the Roman empire, in which works by Luigi Pareti and Mario Attilio Levi are also discussed, i.e., the books that attempted to give a foundation to Mussolini’s famous claim about “the reappearance of the empire on the fatal hills of Rome” (quotation from his speech of 9 May 1936). Here Polverini incisively enters into the debate on classical studies and fascism, which started in Italy in the mid-70s from the journal Quaderni di storia, founded by Luciano Canfora, and since then has known moments of great fervour and also of lively controversy even out of Italy. Polverini argues that there has not been “a properly fascist historiography on the Roman world”, but rather a “historiography on the Roman world in the fascist era”, in which “the majority accepted (out of conviction, out of opportunism, out of cowardice) various forms of compromise with the regime, to which some fully adhered, declaring (and perhaps believing) that they were doing Fascist history, in reality placing in a Fascist framework the history they would have done anyway” (p. 374-5). This judgement is based on a distinction that Polverini himself considers “delicate […] and dangerous, but legitimate” (p. 374, all quotations are my translation) between human and political judgement, on one side, and historiographical judgement, on the other; for him the latter must look at how and to what extent the historian’s adherence to a theory or ideology determines the substance of his/her historiography and not just the declarations of method, which sometimes seem to Polverini to go no further than the preface. This is the same perspective with which Polverini also tackles Momigliano’s production “between science and politics”, in particular that preceding Momigliano’s exile caused by the racist laws that Fascism enacted in 1938; speaking for example of the “Prolusione”, a text originally delivered in 1936 but published posthumously in 1989, Polverini distinguishes its “concessions to the Fascist regime” in language and style from the choice of theme: peace, in silent but clear-cut opposition to the warlike climate then dominant. This essay, which, incidentally, I regret having missed when I was also working on this subject[6], has as an appendix another unpublished work unearthed by the author: three Conversations on Nazism that Momigliano held on the BBC’s Radio Londra in August 1943. These are lucid and passionate texts at the same time, which are still worth rereading today even by undergraduate students, indeed perhaps today more than ever. The last essay in this section is a very erudite study dedicated to three 19th-century Italian scholars, all natives of Perugia, the city where Polverini taught for many years: Giovanni Battista Vermiglioli (1769-1848); Ariodante Fabretti (1816-1894); and Giancarlo Conestabile (1824-1877). These are relevant figures not so much for the history of historiography in the strict sense, but for the history of classical studies in Italy: the latter is strongly intertwined with the former. Polverini’s interest in the antiquarianism of pre-unification Italy seems to me to be clearly influenced by Piero Treves[7] (1911-1992), another great pupil of De Sanctis who had, however, complicated relations with Momigliano.
The relationship between classical studies and fascism is also the focus of attention in the next section devoted to cultural institutions, in which one essay deals with the Istituto di studi romani (Institute of Roman Studies) and three with the Istituto Italiano per la storia antica (Italian Institute for Ancient History); both founded by the fascist regime (in 1925 and 1935) as organs of its cultural policy.
The last section, finally, concerns other archival discoveries, including two letters that were previously unknown from the poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) to Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776-1831); this is significant not only for Leopardi’s biography but also for the reconstruction of a page of nineteenth-century European cultural history.
In a book of this size, there are not many misprints and they do not generally hinder reading (I note an “e” instead of “è” on p. 320). Sometimes the different systems used in the original bibliographical citations have not been fully standardised. Very valuable is the presence of an index of modern names, which nevertheless presents some oversights: not all occurrences of some names are recorded (e.g., of Margherita Beloch) and some are missing (e.g., Anna Laura Momigliano, Hans Eduard Meyer, and, sadly, my own…). The editor’s choice not to burden the book with bibliographical update notes is understandable, even if an exception could have been made for what was announced in the texts themselves as being of imminent publication, such as the entry ‘Plinio Fraccaro’ for the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani at p. 556 n. 1.[8]
These are, however, minor flaws that do not detract from the undoubted merits of this work, which provides the scholars with a relevant set of essays and offer also the students a rigorous lesson in method.
Contents
Premessa, di Arnaldo Marcone
I Gaetano De Sanctis
1. Gaetano De Sanctis recensore
2. Introduzione a La Guerra Sociale
3. Fraccaro e De Sanctis
4. Momigliano e De Sanctis
II. Karl Julius Beloch
5. La storia economica nell’insegnamento di Giulio Beloch
6. Giulio Beloch nella storia della storiografia
7. Per la storia della Griechische Geschichte
8. Il carteggio Beloch-Meyer
III. Storiografia tedesca e italiana
9. Karl Christ e la storiografia italiana
10. Cesare e Augusto nell’opera storica di Guglielmo Ferrero
11. Mommsen, Cesare e il cesarismo
12. Il primo insegnamento di Geografia antica in Italia
13. L’impero romano – antico e moderno
14. La storia antica in Italia al tempo della Grande Guerra
15. Alla scuola di Mommsen. Ettore Pais e la storia della colonizzazione romana
16. La storia antica nella storia dell’Italia unita. Il caso di Ettore Pais (1856-1939)
17. Arnaldo Momigliano
18. Vermiglioli, Fabretti, Conestabile fra biografia e storia
IV. Istituzioni culturali
19. L’Istituto italiano per la storia antica
20. La «scuola» di via Milano
21. La riorganizzazione fascista degli studi storici e l’Istituto italiano per la storia antica
22. L’Istituto di Studi Romani fra Mostra Augustea e Storia di Roma
V. Corrispondenze e documenti archivistici
23. Lettere di Giacomo Leopardi a B. G. Niebuhr
24. Una lettera di Borghesi a Niebuhr (e l’iscrizione CIL X 7845)
25. Dal carteggio di Plinio Fraccaro
Indice dei nomi degli studiosi moderni
Notes
[1] Arnaldo Momigliano, review of Helmut Berve, “Storia greca”, Rivista Storica Italiana 71, 1959, pp. 665-672 = Idem, Terzo contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico, Roma, Edizioni di Storia e di Letteratura, 1966, pp. 699-708 (at p. 708). For an analysis of the circumstances in which Momigliano’s review appeared and the controversy that followed, cf. Daniella Bonanno, “Non un ‘passatempo domenicale’. La storia della storiografia secondo Arnaldo Momigliano e la recensione alla “Storia greca” di Helmut Berve”, Hormos, n. s. 16 (2024), https://doi.org/10.7430/HORMOS1622
[2] Obituaries of Leandro Polverini appeared in History of Classical Scholarship 5 (2023), by Lorenzo Calvelli and Federico Santangelo (https://www.hcsjournal.org/ojs/index.php/hcs/issue/view/7 ) and in Hormos, n. s. 16 (2024), by Corinne Bonnet (https://doi.org/10.7430/HORMOS1615 ). The most extensive and in-depth profile I know of Polverini is still Gino Bandelli, “Leandro Polverini e la storiografia moderna sul mondo antico”, Anabases, 12, 2010, pp. 23-43 (https://journals.openedition.org/anabases/1013 ).
[3] A detailed list of Polverini’s writings can be found in the bibliography published on his webpage: https://independent.academia.edu/LeandroPolverini/Bibliography
[4] No less than 224 reviews of De Sanctis were collected by Polverini himself: Gaetano De Sanctis, Scritti minori, VI, 1-2, a cura di Leandro Polverini, Roma, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1972.
[5] Gaetano De Sanctis, Arnaldo Momigliano, Carteggio 1930-1955, edited by Leandro Polverini, Tivoli, Tored, 2022. My review of this volume will appear in the next issue of the Rivista storica italiana.
[6] Cf. Dino Piovan, Il fascismo e la storia greca, in Sulle spalle degli antichi. Eredità classica e costruzione delle identità nazionali nel Novecento, a cura di Jacopo Bassi e Gianluca Canè, Unicopli, Milano 2014, pp. 25-38; Ancient Historians and Fascism: How to React Intellectually to Totalitarianism (or Not), in Brill’s Companion to the Classics, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, edited by H. Roche and K. Demetriou, Brill, Leiden-Boston 2018, pp. 82-105
[7] It suffices here to mention Lo studio dell’antichità classica nell’Ottocento, edited by Piero Treves, Milano-Napoli, Ricciardi, 1962.
[8] The article came out in DBI, vol. 49, 1997, and is now also available online: https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/plinio-fraccaro_(Dizionario-Biografico)/