What is the significance of the history of scholarship for the discipline under examination? One possibility, mused Arnaldo Momigliano in 1956, was that it might become a distraction or even a threat. ‘There will be studies of Ranke by people who know nothing of the history of the Popes, and of Mommsen by scholars ignorant of Roman law. Instead of scholars who examine the history of a problem in order to resolve it, there will all too often be students of the history of a problem who have no interest in the problem’ (Quinto contributo (1975), 891). Mischievously placed at the end of this volume, a collection of essays on different aspects of M.'s scholarship and intellectual biography by a distinguished group of his ‘disciples’ (as Oswyn Murray terms them), Tim Cornell's piece on Momgliano and Biography implicitly questions the whole enterprise by citing his own comments on biographical approaches to the history of scholarship. Will we understand M.'s ideas better by delving into the sometimes murky events of the 1930s, with his efforts to win an academic position, his relations with various colleagues and his membership of the Fascist party, as Guido Clemente does? What is the relevance of M.'s own religious beliefs and convictions — a theme considered by Averil Cameron in relation to Christianity, John North in relation to the interaction of different religions and above all Tessa Rajak in relation to Judaism — to his substantive analysis of the rôle of religion in history, and in Late Antiquity in particular? Fascinating as this material is, and so too the personal reminiscences of encounters with M., one senses the concern of at least some contributors that the man himself might not have approved of such a volume in his honour, or at least might have questioned the value of its contribution.

There are three main reasons why such a concern proves to be groundless, and why this volume is well worth reading for any thoughtful ancient historian. The first is the quality and depth of the scholarship in these essays. This is not a basic introductory guide to M.'s work; on the contrary, it is more or less essential to have read at the very least Peter Brown's 1988 obituary of M. in Proceedings of the British Academy and several of his major works to appreciate the arguments developed here, and preferable to be familiar with the various studies in English and Italian of his life and thought published over the last couple of decades. With such a grounding, the significance of analyses such as Murray's account of how M. interpreted Edward Gibbon's contribution to the emergence of a ‘modern’ historiography in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, or Anthony Grafton's elegant demonstration of the fruitfulness of M.'s reading of early Christian historiography as the foundation of a new critical approach, especially in its citation of documents as the basis for proper historical argument, becomes unmistakable.

The second reason is the quality of the contributors, drawn from the original participants in the seminars that M. organized at the Warburg Institute between 1967 and 1983, along with two Italian scholars who worked for him as research assistants and participated in similar seminars at Pisa. It is not just the eminence of the names, but their evident devotion to M.'s intellectual ideals, always seeking to connect the personal and biographical to broader historical and historiographical issues. No one here is concerned solely with cataloguing M.'s laundry lists or charting his personal feuds (even if one might have wished for a full-length account of his complex relationship with Ronald Syme, based on the passing references here). Each chapter takes the opportunity to relate the detailed study of M.'s intellectual development to its wider context and to the subsequent development of the discipline: the history of scholarship compared with the modern vogue for reception studies (Murray), issues of historical periodization (Carlotta Dionisotti), conceptions of early Middle Eastern political systems (Amélie Kuhrt), the papers on religion already mentioned from Rajak, Cameron and North, and Alan Cameron's fascinating discussion of the Historia Augusta and its problems — a Fälschung, but what kind of Fälschung? One might occasionally wish for an external commentator, or at least a more critical perspective (Rajak comes closest, perhaps simply because she finds more to puzzle over in M.'s writings and remarks than the others do; perhaps because the theme of Judaism was both more personal and more complicated for him). But this never becomes just a private conversation for devotees and former pupils, even if those of us who know M. solely through his writings are left with twinges of envy.

And that, of course, is the third reason for reading this collection; the spirit of M., the ideas and still more the questions that he contributed to the field, continue to animate the study of classical antiquity. M.'s insistence on the indivisibility of historical and historiographical analysis is a powerful inspiration and model, even if less influential in the discipline as a whole than it ought to be. As Grafton suggests in his conclusion, M.'s central message is that studying the history of scholarship is a powerful means of making classical scholarship less provincial. This is certainly true of reading M., and developing a deeper understanding of his work through the reflections of his former pupils and colleagues.