On Pagans, Jews, and Christians

An analysis of the relationships between pagan Greece, imperial Rome, Judaism, and Christianity.

Arnaldo Momigliano is the greatest contemporary scholar of the history and historiography of classical civilization. M.I. Finley has written in the New Statesman that "there is no one alive today who knows the subject as he does."

On Pagans, Jews, and Christians is an important addition to his masterly work, bringing together nineteen essays written in the past five years from sources such as The New York Review of Books, The American Scholar, and the Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. It is written with literate clarity and elegance, humane wisdom, and breadth of intellect.

The focus of this book is the secular cultures of pagan Greece and imperial Rome, and the religious cultures of Judaism and Christianity which, in turn, grew from and influenced them and the modern world. For Momigliano, religion, secular ideology, and politics live in and illuminate the present. Chapters include "The Jews of Italy" (history viewed in the autobiographical perspective of the Momigliano family), "The Disadvantages of Monotheism for a Universal State," "How to Reconcile Greeks and Trojans," and "The Theological Efforts of the Roman Upper Classes in the First Century B.C."

A new book by Arnaldo Momigliano is always a scholarly event.