Andreas Alföldi (1895–1981) was one of the most eminent scholars of Roman history in the twentieth century.Footnote ¹ Working intensively on nearly all aspects of Roman history from its earliest beginnings to the ‘crisis’ of the third century, his research was often groundbreaking and from early on it included the material evidence such as epigraphy, numismatics and art history. The bibliography of his extensive writings consists of more than 300 titles.Footnote ² After working in Hungary in the 1920s to 40s, Alföldi was forced by the Hungarian government to live in Western exile after World War II. From 1947 he stayed in Switzerland, where he held chairs first in Berne (1948–52) and later in Basel (1952–56). At the age of 60, he was finally appointed as professor by the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton (1956–81), an honour he himself commented on by citing Seneca: volentem ducunt fata, nolentem trahunt (p. 61). During his lifetime he published in Hungarian and German, Italian and French, and, especially after his move to Princeton, in English. In some way his internationality is reflected by the forms of his name he used throughout his career: beginning with the Hungarian ‘András’, to German ‘Andreas’, to English ‘Andrew’.

The articles collected in the volume under review are no less international since the authors come from various nations submitting papers in English, German, French and Italian, which were originally read at an international conference that took place at the University of Wales in 2011, 30 years after Alfödi's death.Footnote ³ This nicely produced volume opens with a picture of Alföldi sub auspiciis Theodori Mommsen and a dedication to dis manibus Andreas Alföldi and Géza Alföldy, since the latter, supporting the conference and submitting two articles to this volume, died only a few months after the conference.

The editors’ introduction provides a good impression of what follows. The aim of the volume is ‘to present readers with a range of critical assessments of some of the main aspects of Alföldi's scholarship’ (p. 20). The seventeen papers can be roughly divided into two sections: while the first three articles concentrate on Alföldi's academic biography (J.G. Szilágyi, ‘András Alföldi and Classical Studies in Hungary’; S. Rupprecht, ‘Andreas Alföldi und die Alte Geschichte in der Schweiz’; A. Marcone, ‘Alföldi e Rostovtzeff’), each of the following deal with one specific aspect of his research. A general index and an index locorum offer quick access to the articles. The volume has been edited carefully with only very few minor spelling errors (all in German quotations, e.g. p. 230: ‘gerfuen’ for ‘gerufen’; p. 13 n. 4: ‘pflug’ for ‘Pflug’).

Throughout, the articles are well written and highly informative; some of them even have an autobiographical touch. Since not all of them can be discussed in detail here, I will focus on a few examples. In the first section Rupprecht's reconstruction of Alföldi's Swiss years is very impressive. After consulting numerous archives she is able to show how precarious the first years of exile must have been to Alföldi and his family. Marcone's paper points out how Alföldi as well as Rostovtzeff took archaeological and other non-literary material into account far more than contemporary scholars (pp. 68; 73). A good part of his paper offers a very dense introduction to Alföldi's use of numismatic evidence (pp. 67–73), which makes the title of the article slightly misleading. Complementary to Marcone's attempt is G. Alföldy's ‘The Crisis of the Third Century from Michael Rostovtzeff and Andrew Alföldi to Recent Discussions’, in which the author shows how recent scholarship – including Alföldy himself – is still working on the concept of a ‘world crisis’ in the third century a.d., a concept which had been originally established by Alföldi and Rostovtzeff.

One of the fields Alföldi worked on throughout his lifetime was the Historia Augusta. In a brilliant paper, ‘Andreas Alföldi and the Historia Augusta’, A.R. Birley shows how Alföldi's research developed from an early paper published in 1927 to the establishment of the ‘Historia Augusta Colloquium’ which was held periodically in Bonn from the 1960s. Through Alföldi's contributions to the Cambridge Ancient History on the third century a.d., his ideas became familiar to a wider public (p. 226). It was especially A. Momigliano who, in 1954, attacked Alföldi's interpretation of the structure and dating of the HA. As Birley shows, Momigliano's criticism of Alföldi's position was not only driven by intellectual uneasiness, but also by strong personal resentments (pp. 231–2). In 2014 – in the period between the conference and the publication of the present volume – Alan Cameron, who was ‘clearly influenced by Momigliano’ (as Birley writes, p. 232), has shown this debate from the perspective of Momigliano's ‘school’.Footnote ⁴

The field of research in which Alföldi's achievements are undisputed is the history of Roman Pannonia. In the last paper, ‘Roman Pannonia from Andrew Alföldi to the Twenty-First Century’, G. Alföldy makes it clear that most of our knowledge of this region in Roman times is based – directly or indirectly – on Alföldi's research: it was he who ‘laid the foundations for historical and archaeological research in Pannonia for generations’ (p. 306).

If we want to sum up the position of Andreas Alföldi in early twenty-first century scholarship, the papers in the present volume offer an ambiguous picture. On the one hand, the editors place him among Niebuhr, Mommsen, Rostovtzeff, De Sanctis, Momigliano and Syme (p. 12), and in matters of outcome, variety and mastery of material evidence they are surely right. Furthermore, Alföldi's influence cannot be denied, especially if we take into account the various studies which omit to cite his works explicitly but reflect his positions subcutaneously. On the other hand, as the excellent articles by P.F. Mittag (‘Alfödi and the Contorniates’, esp. p. 266), F. Ziosi (‘Andreas Alföldi and Constantine’) and T.P. Wiseman (‘Early Rome and the Latins: Dogma, Evidence and Authority’) show, Alföldi's sharp and often axiomatic assumptions are not always proved by evidence. Nevertheless, in most cases Alföldi's works are still worth reading, even in those cases in which recent scholarship has found other ways of explaining historical phenomena – as T.P. Wiseman in his fine paper puts it, ‘The great strength of Alföldi's scholarship is his combination of immense learning with an equal mastery of the artefactual evidence’ (p. 83).