Paul Veyne died in 2022, more than half a century after the publication of his Comment on écrit l’histoire. This volume of articles celebrates this influential historian, discusses and critiques his ideas and argues that a new generation of scholars should still read his work. The book studies his output in seven main chapters, each focusing on one key theme, such as Veyne’s approach to epistemology, his use of the notion of euergetism and his history of paganism. As with any essentially hagiographical enterprise, it is impossible to read without returning to and reassessing the underlying object of veneration itself. Peter Garnsey’s detailed review in this journal of Veyne’s work, ‘The Genersosity of Veyne’, JRS 81 (1991), 164–8, still pertains, and here I seek only to update and add to that analysis.

The volume captures the sense of enthusiasm which pervades Veyne’s work. Never one to be tied to narrow academicism, he constantly sought to venture into new territory for the ancient historian, such as the history of the family and, under the influence of his friend Michel Foucault, sexuality. Boehringer’s chapter, for example, on Veyne the historian of sexuality, does a good job at contextualising how innovative this was at a time when homosexuality was still classified as a mental disease by the World Health Organisation. Veyne understood that the ancient world had valued same-sex relationships very differently, allowing him to deconstruct contemporary claims. In doing so, the various chapters also highlight that Veyne’s focus was always on the interaction between the past and present, that history for him should never simply be a matter of study for its own sake, but for the sake of our understanding of the world we inhabit.

This sense of creativity in his work reflected a view of history that moved beyond the limited quantitative approach that was dominant in France at the time. Veyne saw history as a ‘true story’, as the volume’s subtitle alludes to: a version of events with its own narrative and emplotment devices, which could never be adequately represented by data alone. Montlahuc brings this out well in his chapter on Veyne’s analysis of the Roman emperor. Seeing the emperor as far more than just a military dictator, Veyne understood the multifaceted roles required of the imperial office: as a perpetuator of the values of the republic for the people and elite of Rome, while simultaneously being a supreme benefactor for the provinces in the East. Imperial ideology was sufficiently flexible — and for Veyne this made it historically unique — that it could present the ruler as both god and not god, without any apparent contradiction.

Veyne’s approach to the ancient practice of wealthy individuals providing expensive benefits for fellow citizens of their communities also reveals the sophisticated nuance of his thinking. Gray’s chapter on Le Pain et le Cirque shows how such euergetism was in Veyne’s eyes more than simple generosity or patronage. Such giving, he argued, needs to be understood in terms of a particular complex of symbolism within an ethical relationship between the rich and the citizen body, which went beyond any narrow political motivation. It represented a combination of a voluntary desire for self-display and a social expectation of redistribution. This depoliticisation raised many objections (Garnsey’s review is a good example), but highlights that Veyne’s influence is often best located in his complication of what can easily be reduced to naked power relations.

Veyne reissued his epistemological essay in 1978 alongside an essay on the importance of the ‘revolutionary’ Foucault for the study of history. Practices and discourses became the focus, and the historian’s job was now to elucidate how these cultural objects were brought into being and then reproduced. Cournarie’s chapter emphasises how decisive the encounter with Michel Foucault was for Veyne’s thinking. The somewhat name-dropping approach that Veyne often employed when writing about Foucault was no doubt designed to emphasise his proximity to and influence on Foucault, but now mostly seems to serve as an index of anxiety about how his own work fell short in comparison. To be fair, Veyne was never arrogant about his own writings. The title of his How to Write History harked back to Lucian’s work of that name, and indirectly to his satirical treatise A True History, which serves as an anti-manual on good historical practice. Veyne, like his ancient predecessor, did not take things too seriously and it is hard to see him approving of quantified REF impact and the like, even though he would doubtless have scored well.

Looking back at Veyne’s output, it is easy to agree that the new certainties of post-war social science were mere pretensions that history should reject. The range of his thinking is still impressive and, as Le Roux notes in the epilogue, the freedom of his work is refreshing. Compared with the cramped, focused monographs of modern academe, it is hard not to have a sense of nostalgia for a time when such intellectual wanderlust was possible. But there was a downside to this. Veyne’s own editor called him a ‘somewhat self-indulgent and discursive’ writer, and I suspect most presses would now insist on substantial excisions before publication. His keenness to embrace the latest trend sometimes led him beyond what the primary evidence could sustain. In that regard, Veyne’s work belongs to a world where a certain amateurish éclat could make up for any failure of detail. And perhaps, as he himself sensed, it was his friend Foucault who would prove to have the more lasting influence and that any attempt to extract power from the practice of relationships was optimistic at best. This volume, therefore, succeeds in providing an insightful critical overview to Veyne’s most important work, but whether it will persuade readers to go back to the underlying output is less clear.