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Andreas Alföldi in the Twenty-First Century

Edited by James H. Richardson and Federico Santangelo

Andreas Alföldi (1895–1981) was an emi-nent ancient historian, numismatist, ar-chaeologist and epigraphist. His scholarly output, as vast as it was diverse, covered archaic Rome, the late Republic, the prov-inces of the Roman Empire, especially the Danube region, and late antiquity. Alföl-di’s work was marked by extraordinary erudition, by his ability to draw on all manner of evidence, no matter how dis-parate, and by astonishing fertility and originality, and yet, while a number of his publications remain influential, others – some of which were controversial even when they first appeared – are now large-

ly ignored. This volume, which comes some thirty years after Alföldi’s death and a century after his first publication (at just 19 years of age), contains a collection of papers that shed light on Alföldi’s life and discuss his work on a variety of topics, from earliest Rome to late antiquity. It of-fers a wide-ranging assessment of Alföl-di’s arguments and ideas, both those that have been influential and those that have been superseded or neglected, and ex-plores an academic career that began in Alföldi’s native Hungary and ended in exile in the United States.

www.steiner-verlag.de Alte Geschichte

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HABES56

Andreas Alföldi in the Twenty-First CenturyEdited by James H. Richardson and Federico Santangelo

h a b e s

Heidelberger Althistorische Beiträge und Epigraphische Studien

Herausgegeben von

Géza Alföldy †, Angelos Chaniotis und Christian Witschel

Band 56

Andreas Alföldi in the Twenty-First CenturyEdited by James H. Richardson and Federico Santangelo

Franz Steiner Verlag

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Cover illustration: Andreas Alföldi in the German Archaeological Institute at Rome, in:

L. Borhy (ed.), “Von der Entstehung Roms bis zur Auflösung des Römerreiches”.

Konferenz zum Gedenken des hundertsten Geburtstages von Andreas Alföldi (1895–1981),

Budapest 1999, frontispiece.

Andreas Alföldi (1895–1981)

DM

AAGA

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .......................................................................................... 9

James H. Richardson and Federico SantangeloIntroduction ...................................................................................................... 11

János György SzilágyiAndrás Alföldi and Classical Studies in Hungary ............................................ 23

Seraina RuprechtAndreas Alföldi und die Alte Geschichte in der Schweiz ................................ 37

Arnaldo MarconeAlföldi e Rostovtzeff ........................................................................................ 65

T. P. WisemanEarly Rome and the Latins: Dogma, Evidence and Authority ......................... 77

Dominique Briquel« Lavinium’s authentic myth of origin »Perspectives ouvertes par une remarque d’Andreas Alföldi ............................. 89

James H. RichardsonAndreas Alföldi and the Adventure(s) of the Vibenna Brothers ...................... 111

Federico SantangeloSaturnia Regna Revisited ................................................................................ 131

Frank KolbAlföldi, Caesar and the German Tradition of Research on Caesar ................... 153

Pierre AssenmakerPrince héritier et princeps togatus :l’Octavien-Auguste d’Alföldi, entre César et le Principat ............................... 167

Tom R. StevensonAndreas Alföldi on the Roman Emperor as Pater Patriae .............................. 187

8 Contents

Géza Alföldy †The Crisis of the Third Century from Michael Rostovtzeff andAndrew Alföldi to Recent Discussions ............................................................ 201

Anthony R. BirleyAndreas Alföldi and the Historia Augusta ........................................................ 219

Francesco ZiosiAndreas Alföldi and Constantine ..................................................................... 247

Peter Franz MittagAlföldi and the Contorniates ............................................................................ 259

Zsolt VisyDacia … diuturno bello Decibali uiris fuerat exhausta.András Alföldi and the Continuity of Dacia .................................................... 269

Géza Alföldy †Roman Pannonia from Andrew Alföldi to the Twenty-First Century .............. 293

General Index ................................................................................................... 315

Index Locorum ................................................................................................. 325

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The conference from which this volume stems took place on the Lampeter Campus of the University of Wales, Trinity Saint David, from 31 August to 2 September 2011. It was made possible by the generous financial support of the University of Wales, Trinity Saint David and the Institute of Classical Studies. We are deeply grateful to both institutions, to the many colleagues who came to Lampeter for the conference, and to those who agreed to contribute to the volume at a later stage. We should also like to thank László Borhy, Sheila Campbell, Mike Edwards, Marta García Morcillo, Ralph Haeussler, Frédéric Hurlet, Jerzy Linderski, Stefan Rebe-nich, Thomas Rütten, Rowland Smith, Arnaud Suspène, Ildikó Takács, and Kerry Taylor for offering valuable support and advice at various stages.

We have a special debt of gratitude to Peter Agócs, who offered a number of helpful suggestions as we were planning the conference, and later made possible the inclusion of an English version of János György Szilágyi’s paper in this volume. We are also grateful to the Institute of Archaeological Sciences at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest and to László Borhy for authorising the paper’s publication as well as the reproduction of several of the pictures that accompany Frank Kolb’s paper.

We should like to thank the editors of the Heidelberger Althistorische Beiträge und Epigraphische Studien, Angelos Chaniotis and Christian Witschel, for giving this project favourable consideration, and the two anonymous referees for provid-ing valuable comments on an earlier version of the book. Katharina Stüdemann and Sarah Schäfer at Franz Steiner Verlag expertly oversaw the production process of the volume. The final stages of the manuscript’s preparation were greatly assisted by financial support from Massey University and Newcastle University.

The late Géza Alföldy was an enthusiastic supporter and soon a major driving force behind the whole project. The conference sadly turned out to be one of his last public appearances; he took part in it with his customary energy and intellectual vigour, delivering two lectures, taking a leading role in the discussion sessions, and generously sharing ideas on how the project of a volume on the life and work of Andreas Alföldi may best be developed. It is to his memory, as well as Andreas Alföldi’s, that we should like to dedicate this book.

INTRODUCTION

James H. Richardson and Federico Santangelo

Andreas Alföldi died in February 1981. The conference from which this volume derives took place some thirty years after his death – that is, almost a generation, or thereabouts. Certainly in 1981 both editors of this collection were only small children. Although the study of antiquity is one of those fields where older scholar-ship can remain relevant for considerably longer than is the case in others, this is certainly by no means the rule, and much that is written inevitably falls by the way-side. It is, therefore, some measure of the importance and originality of Alföldi’s work that so much of it continues to exert an influence, and that many of his ideas are still being engaged with today. This is the case even for some of those hypo-theses and approaches that have been less well received. It should be noted too that, while it is now slightly more than thirty years since Alföldi died, it is a century since the appearance of his first publication, a book review that came out in 1914, when Alföldi was just 19 years of age.1

In these increasingly bureaucratised times, it is often supposed that an effective way to measure the importance of a scholar’s work is simply to count up the num-ber of references made to it. The relevance of Alföldi emerges clearly from the use of this questionable criterion.2 Anyone who cares to look (if they do not already know) will find that Alföldi’s work continues to be cited in publication after publi-cation, in any contribution that seriously engages with one of the periods or topics with which he had concerned himself. And again, this is the case even for those works that have been less well received. A case in point is his book Early Rome and the Latins, the central thesis of which was challenged by several authoritative reviewers and has now generally been discredited. Subsequent archaeological dis-coveries have also gone a long way towards undermining Alföldi’s thesis. But the book is so extraordinarily rich, erudite, original, and stimulating that no serious student of the period can afford to ignore it.

A considerably better measure of Alföldi’s achievement is the recognition and honours that he received from his peers during his lifetime. The point was already well made by J. F. Gilliam in his obituary for Alföldi, which appeared in 1981 in the American Journal of Archaeology. Gilliam’s words are worth quoting in full (p. 515):

A short list of some of Alföldi’s academic honors should be more instructive than most familiar phrases. He received honorary doctorates from the universities in Utrecht, Ghent, Bonn, and Paris. His academies included the Institut de France, the Swedish, Hungarian, Lincei (Rome),

1 Alföldi 1914.2 One tally may be noted here: the bibliography of Syme’s The Roman Revolution contains more

works by Alföldi than it does by anyone else, apart only from Syme himself.

12 James H. Richardson and Federico Santangelo

Austrian, British, Munich, Mainz, Göttingen, Danish, and Bulgarian. He was an honorary member of many learned societies, among them, the Pontificia Accademia Romana di Archeo-logia, Society of Antiquaries (London), Society for Promotion of Roman Studies, Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, Finnish Archaeological Society, Turkish Historical Society, at least eight Numismatic Societies, Society of Sciences in Lund, and considerably more. Among his special honors were the German Orden pour le mérite für Wissenschaften und Künste, Les palmes académiques (France), the Gold Medal of the City of Rome “Cultori di Roma,” and the Huntington Medal of the American Numismatic Society. For some years he was the only “Ehrenmitglied” of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut.

As F. Kolb has said, ‘[h]ardly any contemporary scholar in his field received as many honors as Alföldi’.3

The range of topics with which Alföldi concerned himself, and of which he had mastery, was extraordinary. At the time of his death his bibliography contained more than 300 items (written in Hungarian, German, English, French, and Italian), and covered considerable ground, both metaphorically and geographically. The main headings alone in the bibliography of Alföldi’s work that was compiled for the obituary published by the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton may suffice to give some impression: ‘Theory and Practice in the Study of Antiquity’, ‘Archaic Rome and the Roman Republic’, ‘The Roman Empire’, ‘The Carpathian Basin in Antiquity’, ‘Crisis and Decline of the Ancient World’, ‘History and Culture of the Peoples of the Steppes’. Under each of these headings can be found a wealth of studies, dealing with archaeology, epigraphy, numismatics, religion, symbolism and ideology, cultural, social, and political history, and more.

Such prolificacy, combined with a command of so many fields inevitably makes any assessment of Alföldi’s overall achievement difficult. As T. P. Wiseman observes in his contribution to this volume, ‘[w]hen the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres published an obituary appreciation of Alföldi, it took three scholars even to attempt to cover his range: Jacques Heurgon on early Rome, Jean-Baptiste Giard on numismatics, André Chastagnol on late antiquity’. The effects of this are also to be seen in the present book, where the attempt to engage with Alföldi’s work has inevi-tably been selective; even apart from the number of people it would take to engage fully with his entire output, the resulting publication would fill several volumes.

Given Alföldi’s distinctions and accomplishments, and the enduring impor-tance of his work, the general lack of international attention which the man himself, and his work as a whole, have received since his death seems striking. After all, Alföldi’s work may be compared for breadth of scope, originality, and intellectual vigour to that of great figures like B. G. Niebuhr, Th. Mommsen, M. Rostovtzeff, G. De Sanctis, A. Momigliano, or R. Syme. But, unlike those scholars, whose lives and work have been the focus of considerable scholarly attention, Alföldi has, by com-parison, been somewhat neglected, and especially so in English-language scholar-ship. (This is somewhat of a paradox, since Alföldi was based at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton from 1956 until his death in 1981, published numerous important studies in English, and had many more translated into that language). Alongside the several obituaries that appeared after his death, volume 33 of the

3 Kolb 1982, 18.

13Introduction

Acta Classica Universitatis Scientiarum Debreceniensis (which was published in 1998) was devoted to Alföldi and his work; a slender, but invaluable volume to commemorate his 100th birthday appeared in 1999; and an essay on Alföldi’s mi-gration to Switzerland by P. Forisek was published in 2008, in a volume in honour of J. Sarkady (volume 16 of Hungarian Polis Studies). Unfortunately, none of these works is particularly easy to get hold of. More readily available, however, is the long essay that can be found in K. Christ’s Neue Profile der Alten Geschichte, which appeared in 1990.

It is to be hoped that this collection will go at least some way towards filling this gap and, ideally, towards stimulating further research, not only on Alföldi’s vast and wide-ranging output, but also on the man himself. As it happens, a major biog-raphy of Alföldi is currently being prepared by P. Forisek (in which Forisek’s own contribution to the Lampeter conference will be incorporated) and will hopefully be available in the not too distant future. Even apart from his scholarship, Alföldi’s life was an extraordinary one, and his flight from Hungary also happens to serve as a timely reminder that freedom to think, speak, and write must never be taken for granted, that its loss has dreadful consequences, and that vigilance is essential, whether the threat is coming from an oppressive political regime, as in Alföldi’s case, or – si parua licet componere magnis – from the ever-increasing commercial-isation of education and academia, as in our own times.

*

The roots of Alföldi’s fascination with the ancient world stretched right back to his childhood. Alföldi was born in Pomáz, Hungary in 1895, and the Roman presence in the area was still evident. As he says himself in the foreword to his book Die Struktur des voretruskischen Römerstaates, he grew up near the site of Aquincum, where Roman masonry was still visible. Roman potsherds were easy to find, and the farmers’ ploughs regularly turned up Imperial coins and other artefacts. The study of this material became one of Alföldi’s lifelong goals.4

For his doctoral dissertation, which he undertook at the University of Budapest and completed in 1918, Alföldi chose to study clay moulds and the portrayal of em-perors on them. The work was written while he was recuperating from a wound he had received while serving in the infantry in World War I. The doctors had intended to amputate his leg, after the wound became infected, but Alföldi (with a pistol to keep them at bay) had refused. The result was eight months spent in hospital.

4 Alföldi 1974, 9: ‘In den Außenbezirken des pannonischen Legionslagers Aquincum, in dessen direkter Nachbarschaft ich aufgewachsen bin, ragte noch an manchen Stellen, römisches Mau-erwerk aus dem Boden hervor. Römische Scherben waren, auf den Feldern verstreut, leicht zu entdecken. Der pflug entriß dem Boden ständig neue Kaisermünzen, Metallgegenstände und Hausrat. Das Leben dieses Eckpfeilers des römischen Wehrsystems, dessen vom selten unter-brochenen Anbranden der Fremdvölker geprägte Geschichte ein Leidensweg gewesen ist, wurde mir durch die Entdeckung ständig neuer Überreste zum täglichen Erlebnis, seine Erfor-schung zum Lebensziel’.

14 James H. Richardson and Federico Santangelo

It was in that same year, 1918, that Alföldi began work at the Hungarian National Museum in Budapest. Then, from 1923 until 1930, he served as Professor of Ancient History at Debrecen, before moving back to Budapest, where he was Professor of both Ancient History and Archaeology of the Hungarian Territory until 1947, in which year he fled from Hungary to Switzerland. The academic environ-ment in which Alföldi worked while he was in Hungary, and the role that he played in it are discussed by J. Szilágyi in his contribution to this volume, while his move to, and time spent in Switzerland (where he taught at Berne from 1948 to 1952, and then at Basle, from 1952 to 1956) are the focus of S. Ruprecht’s paper. Ruprecht’s study also brings to the fore, for the first time, a wide range of archival material that sheds light on the difficult personal and political circumstances that preceded and determined Alföldi’s decision to leave Hungary, the fate of his library and his ar-chive, and his reception in a new academic environment.

According to the accounts of many contemporary witnesses, Alföldi was a charismatic teacher and research supervisor. He gathered a circle of pupils in Buda-pest, and offered a venue for the publication of the work of many of them in a new academic series, the Dissertationes Pannonicae; he also launched a series with similar remit and ambitions, the Dissertationes Bernenses, after his move to Swit-zerland. And yet, when the chance was presented to him of taking up a post that involved no teaching or administrative duties, he keenly accepted, and moved to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. It was at Princeton that he spent the rest of his career and it was there that he continued to pursue his research on a great range of topics, both old and new. He still retained close bonds with Europe, where he travelled regularly and for extended periods; he also maintained a second home in Switzerland. But he never returned to his native Hungary, and he eventually ac-quired US citizenship.5

The quarter of a century during which Alföldi was based at Princeton afforded him the opportunity to write the series of monographs that he had been planning since he was in Hungary, as a letter to U. Kahrstedt published in Ruprecht’s paper shows. Many of those projects were grounded in decades of reading, filing, and on the patient gathering of textual and visual evidence, which is reflected in the exten-sive archive that he gathered in Budapest, and which he managed only in part to take with him to Switzerland. A. Marcone, in his contribution to this volume, rightly notes that Alföldi was deeply loyal to his research interests. If one goes through his bibliography, it readily becomes apparent that he continued to work on the same general themes over the space of several decades. In some cases the same issues were revisited from different viewpoints; in others, various preparatory studies were later brought together and published as a single volume. There is one signifi-cant exception. His work on Pannonia and the Danubian regions – which is dis-

5 After his move to the US, Alföldi went by the name of ‘Andrew Alföldi’, effectively dropping his native first name, András. Much of his work, and not just that published in German, ap-peared under the name ‘Andreas Alföldi’, and this is how we refer to him in the title of the present volume and in this introduction; some contributors, however, have chosen to use ‘An-drew’ or ‘András’ and we have respected their preferences. It is also worth noting that Alföldi signed some of his papers in French as ‘André’ and some of his works in Italian as ‘Andrea’.

15Introduction

cussed in this volume, from different angles, by the late G. Alföldy and by Z. Visy – was brought to an end in the second half of the 1940s, when Alföldi was separated from the relevant section of his extensive Budapest archive.

During his time in Hungary, Alföldi focused heavily on late antiquity. At least four strands in his research may be identified. First, the ground-breaking work on the crisis of the third century AD, an interest which Alföldi shared with M. Ros-tovtzeff, and which he developed from an original angle, that of ‘world crisis the-ory’. The view of a third-century ‘crisis’ was long dominant in scholarship, al-though it has become the object of considerable debate and revision in the last couple of decades, most notably in scholarship in German. A number of scholars, however, including Alföldy in his contribution to this topic in the present volume, still acknowledge its fundamental value.

Secondly, Alföldi had a strong interest in the reconstruction of the religious climate in the city of Rome during the rise of Christianity. In a series of studies published in the 1930s and 1940s, he put forward the view that there was a staunch resistance to the rise of the new religion by sizeable sectors of the Pagan population, especially at the level of the elite. Much of his argument rested on the analysis of notoriously difficult evidence, that of the medallions known as contorniati, which Alföldi proposed to view as pieces of anti-Christian propaganda issued by the mint, under the direct control of the senatorial elite. As P. F. Mittag notes, this view at-tracted heavy criticism, most notably from J. M. C. Toynbee; Alföldi did not come back to these issues in his later published work and did not directly confront the objections that were raised against his reconstruction, although he would have con-ceivably done so in the new work on the contorniates that was in preparation at the time of his death.6

Alföldi’s work on Constantine, which appeared first in Hungarian and subse-quently in English, followed in the same fashion, although it focused on the Chris-tian context. As F. Ziosi shows, it has two fundamentally innovative points: a rejec-tion of the then predominant paradigm developed by J. Burckhardt in the mid-nine-teenth century, which portrayed Constantine as a cynical monarch who exploited Christianity to pursue a plan of tyrannical rule; and a strong interest in the evidence for the Christian iconography in Constantine’s coinage. Both aspects of his ap-proach require considerable qualification in light of the work of the last few dec-ades, but Alföldi’s original assessment of the age of Constantine had a profoundly innovative impact on scholarship on the period.

Fourthly, his interest in the Historia Augusta and its value as a source for the reconstruction of late antiquity informed Alföldi’s teaching and research as early as the late 1920s, as A. R. Birley discusses in his chapter. This interest accompanied Alföldi throughout his life, and fed into several publications that appeared in the

6 Some of the research that Alföldi carried out for this project eventually fed into Alföldi-Alföldi 1990, but as Metcalf 1991, 755 observes in his review of the book: ‘Much of Andreas Alföldi’s original thesis has been reiterated, even down to the verbiage. Large chunks of the original text [of 1943]... have simply been reset. As is noted, Alföldi held to his original thesis right up to his death, but did not have time to formulate his own restatement, so this is perhaps the most ap-propriate reflection of the author’s views’. On this matter, see further Mittag’s chapter.

16 James H. Richardson and Federico Santangelo

decades following his departure from Hungary. Perhaps even more importantly, Alföldi was the driving force behind the formation of a circle of international schol-ars that shared an interest in the Historia Augusta and which in due course gave shape, thanks to the decisive contribution of J. Straub, to the ‘Bonner HA Colloquia’ and their later incarnations.

Particularly noteworthy from the Budapest period are also two deservedly famous papers that appeared in 1934 and 1935: ‘Die Ausgestaltung des monar-chischen Zeremoniells am römischen Kaiserhofe’ (MDAI(R) 49 [1934], 1–118) and ‘Insignien und Tracht der römischen Kaiser’ (MDAI(R) 50 [1935], 1–171), both of which were reprinted together in a single volume, Die monarchische Repräsenta-tion im römischen Kaiserreiche, in 1970. The impact of these studies, as students of medieval and early modern history know, reached well beyond the boundaries of Altertumswissenschaft. The range of Alföldi’s erudition and his unique ability to make textual and visual evidence contribute to a wider and coherent historical reconstruction make these essays necessary reading for anyone who has an interest in the self-representation of monarchic power in any historical period.

Following the move to Switzerland, Alföldi’s research interests expanded even further. He began to publish on early Rome. His first contribution was a book on the origins of the patriciate, Der frührömische Reiteradel und seine Ehrenabzeichen of 1952, which characteristically drew upon a wide range of evidence, literary, numis-matic, and archaeological. At the same time, Alföldi also began to write about the Roman Republic, especially its last century. He never published a comprehensive account of the fall of the Republic, but made an original contribution to the study of this period by focusing on two fundamental strands: the role of the numismatic evidence, on which he published a ground-breaking, if controversial paper in 1956, and the figures of Caesar and Octavian.7

In the very year after his book on the origins of the patriciate came out, there appeared another volume, the Studien über Caesars Monarchie, his first contribu-tion devoted to the study of Julius Caesar. Alföldi’s work on Julius Caesar is possi-bly best known for his interpretation of a denarius which, in his view, depicted alongside Caesar’s image the diadem that had been offered to him at the Lupercalia, and so provided a clear indication of his final aims (see fig. 5 in Kolb’s paper). Many scholars have since asserted that the ‘diadem’ is in fact merely a lituus, and that the die was defective or damaged. Whatever the reality may be, it is important that the interpretation of one coin is not allowed to overshadow (as arguably, to an extent, it has) Alföldi’s wider contribution to the understanding of Caesar’s career and ambitions, which certainly did not rely solely on his interpretation of this one image (this is a point that Kolb makes in his paper on Alföldi’s work on Julius Cae-sar and its place in historiography). As E. Rawson wrote in 1988, Alföldi’s ‘picture of Caesar must count as one of the most challenging presented this century’.8

Alföldi’s interest in Octavian and his rise to power also clearly emerged in the 1950s. As P. Assenmaker notes in his contribution, the critical attitude to the Augus-

7 Alföldi 1956.8 Rawson 1988, 324.

17Introduction

tan settlement that is apparent in his work from this time onwards is at odds with the admiration he had expressed in some of his publications from the 1930s, notably in the essay of 1937 on the cuirass of the Prima Porta Augustus.9 Important method-ological lessons may be learnt from Alföldi’s work on this period. His essays on portraiture on late Republican coinage which appeared in the 1950s laid the foun-dations for the study of Octavian, and opened up a new avenue of enquiry into the political history of the last decades of the Republic. They are perhaps the most im-pressive manifestation of the methodology that Alföldi used in his work on Roman coinage: the analysis of stylistic features is singled out as the key criterion for the dating of coin issues (rather than the evidence of coin hoards, which is the corner-stone of M. Crawford’s discussion in his Roman Republican Coinage of 1974, in which the assessment of Alföldi’s numismatic work is unreservedly critical). While one may have reservations about Alföldi’s conclusions in these studies, they cer-tainly serve as a powerful illustration of one of the main characteristics of his schol-arship, namely his habit of addressing bold, indeed challenging questions by grounding them, first and foremost, in the detailed analysis of difficult and often overlooked evidence.

In order to get a full grasp of Alföldi’s views about Julius Caesar and Octavian, it is also necessary to take into consideration his arguments concerning the concept of the pater patriae, as well as his ideas about the people’s desire for a saviour, someone who would lead the community back to the Golden Age. Alföldi saw the evidence for this desire in the coinage of the last century of the Republic. The result of his work on this theme was a series of papers, published throughout the 1970s, which were subsequently brought together in a single volume, along with his book Aion in Mérida und Aphrodisias (1979), that was entitled (as the papers themselves had been) Redeunt Saturnia Regna (1997). The phrase is of course taken from line six of Virgil’s fourth Eclogue, and had been the main focus of a much earlier paper, ‘Der neue Weltherrscher der vierten Ekloge Vergils’, which was published in Her-mes in 1930, and which came to serve as the proemium of the volume of collected papers. Again, as F. Santangelo notes in his paper, Alföldi’s long-term commitment to some fundamental methodological assumptions and widely encompassing his-torical theses is relevant to the formation of this line of scholarly inquiry. The Re-deunt Saturnia Regna series is based on the view that the numismatic evidence is the best vantage point for the understanding of political and ideological develop-ments. As Alföldi once put it, in a well-known but questionable statement that Mar-cone revisits in his paper, the role of coins may be compared to the role that stamps play (or at least used to play) in the modern world.

The other fundamental theme of the Redeunt Saturnia Regna studies is Alföl-di’s interest in how the views, aspirations, and needs of the masses influenced broader historical developments and, more specifically, the agendas of the political and social elites. Alföldi’s thesis is that the view that the arrival of a saviour and the beginning of a new age were imminent first began to develop among the populace

9 Alföldi 1937. On Alföldi’s politics in the 1930s, cf. Brown 1995, 500 and Birley’s contribution to this volume.

18 James H. Richardson and Federico Santangelo

of the city of Rome after the age of the transmarine wars, and was directly influ-enced by the coming of Near Eastern migrants to Italy. The Roman political elite then responded to this widespread aspiration by acknowledging and developing it in the iconography of the coinage that was struck at the time. The role of the masses in shaping political developments was a central issue during Alföldi’s lifetime, and a recognition of the masses’ historical force and their ability to determine highly transformative outcomes also shaped his approach to the ancient world. It is a view that Alföldi shared with another great historian of antiquity, Rostovtzeff, and which he developed – in this respect – to a greater level of subtlety and originality. Alföldi may have belonged on the right of the political spectrum, but he was no unrecon-structed reactionary: there was no simplistic dismissal of the crowd as a dangerous, uncontrollable force in his historical vision, and he refused to explain Roman reli-gion with a top-down model whereby the elites exploited the gullibility of the mass-es.10 There is a discernible fil rouge joining up his work on Constantine and the age of the so-called Pagan resistance with his exploration of prophetic doctrines in late Republican Rome.

Recognising the historical importance of the masses did not lead Alföldi to overlook the weight of monarchic themes in Roman political discourse; in fact, the history of what he understood to be the Redeunt Saturnia Regna theme is deeply intertwined with the rise of new models of political leadership. His work on the pater patriae resulted in a series of studies, published in the 1950s, and similarly later republished in a single collection (Der Vater des Vaterlandes im römischen Denken, 1971). These studies, which are the focus of T. R. Stevenson’s chapter, foregrounded arguments that Alföldi would later develop in the Redeunt Saturnia Regna papers: the pater patriae, the ‘Father of the Fatherland’, was to be seen as a charismatic leader who would fulfil the desires of the people for a saviour. At the same time, the concept of the pater patriae could be used as a way to mask the sort of power that Alföldi argued was Caesar’s goal. The title rex was offensive at Rome; the title pater patriae, in contrast, was not merely acceptable, but brought with it desirable associations with the fulfilment of popular longings. This should not, however, be seen as some cynical move on Caesar’s part, for Alföldi’s Caesar, as Kolb discusses in his paper, was deeply concerned for the masses; he was a man of genuine clemency, and Caesar’s clementia was, in Alföldi’s view, central to the understanding of the man himself, as well as his ultimate aims.

Alföldi’s work on archaic Rome, which started to appear soon after his move to Switzerland, may, at first sight, seem to represent a significant change in direction from the interests he had hitherto pursued. According to Gilliam, the circumstances of the move, in which materials and unpublished studies, including a supplemen-tary volume to CIL III, were lost, provides a partial explanation.11 But there is actu-ally less of a change than may first be anticipated. His 1930 paper on the fourth

10 Whether Alföldi’s interest in the impact of prophetic doctrines on public opinion had anything to do with his part-Jewish ancestry (a matter that Alföldi discussed sparingly during his life-time, and to which Birley draws attention in his contribution to this volume) remains a matter for speculation.

11 Gilliam 1982, 8.

19Introduction

Eclogue dealt with a number of themes that he would continue to pursue, and as noted earlier, it later came to serve as the first chapter of the Redeunt Saturnia Regna collection. The interest in insignia and symbolism that characterised his pa-pers of the mid-1930s on monarchic ceremonial at the imperial court and the attire of the Roman emperor is also to be seen in his work on early Rome, in particular in his first publication on this period, the book of 1952 on the clothing and insignia of the patrician order, the origins of which Alföldi found in the regal cavalry (Der frührömische Reiteradel und seine Ehrenabzeichen). As Kolb has noted, Alföldi’s work on Pannonia had shaped his thinking in several important areas,12 firstly in his adherence to a model of migration (which is so apparent in his work on the peoples of Etruria and Latium, and pervades works like Early Rome and the Latins), and secondly, in the development of his views about the ways in which Indo-European and Asiatic peoples thought and sought to explain the world around them. Thus his book on Die Struktur des voretruskischen Römerstaates contains discussion of peo-ples such as the Celts, the Chinese, the Germans, the Huns, the Indians, the Iranians, the Mongolians, the Persians, the Scythians, and the Turks, alongside of course the Romans, the Etruscans, and the Greeks. Despite the considerable geographical and chronological range, Alföldi’s views about mythological patterns, for instance, that were, he believed, spread throughout Eurasia allowed him to employ comparative methods, and thus to draw upon an enormous range of evidence, from other peoples and other times. Alföldi’s early work on late antiquity was therefore not without influence on his later work on early Rome. Finally, the simple fact that so many of his arguments were supported with numismatic evidence likewise helps to reduce the sense of a break.

Alföldi’s use of comparative approaches, whether through the study of mytho-logical patterns or patterns in human activity and modes of living, is handled in quite different ways and with quite different results in the papers of D. Briquel and Wiseman. This is in part due to the different approaches of the two scholars; while Briquel employs similar comparative methods in his own work, Wiseman, a cham-pion of empirical observation, has denied the value of such methods.13 In his paper Briquel picks up and develops observations made by Alföldi about the foundation myth of Lavinium which, Alföldi believed, adhered to the same pattern as the foun-dation myth of Rome. Elaborating on this idea, Briquel draws out a series of com-parisons between the foundation myths of Rome, Praeneste, and Lavinium, in order to try to recover the underlying mythical pattern, and so reconstruct the authentic foundation myths of these cities. Wiseman’s contribution, in contrast, focuses on the wider development of Alföldi’s methods, his attitude towards both the sources and his own convictions, and attempts to assess his contribution with reference to a very specific group of scholars, Sir James George Frazer, Georges Dumézil, and Andrea Carandini, scholars who have likewise offered grand reconstructions, and whose own methods and approaches may be broadly comparable with Alföldi’s (at least as far as early Rome is concerned).

12 Kolb 1982, 16–17; Wiseman, in his contribution to this volume, suggests that Alföldi’s experi-ences of central Europe also influenced his views.

13 Cf. Wiseman 1995, 18–30.

20 James H. Richardson and Federico Santangelo

The debate about the use of comparative methods is ultimately a debate about evidence, about what evidence cannot be used, what can, and how. One of the most controversial aspects of Alföldi’s Early Rome and the Latins, and one that is still frequently discussed, was his view that much of what the literary tradition has to say about early Rome is simply unreliable, as the tradition was largely fabricated by one man, Fabius Pictor. Pictor, in Alföldi’s opinion, had sought to present to the wider world an image of Rome as a great and influential city from the earliest stages of its history, whereas Rome had in fact, he believed, long been small and insignif-icant. If the literary evidence presents a distorted and unreliable account of the early history of Rome, as Alföldi believed it did, then any attempt to write an account of that period may seem to be precluded. Alföldi maintained, however, that sufficient reliable material – scraps of literary and archaeological evidence, from Rome, Etru-ria, and elsewhere – did nonetheless survive to allow for the early history of Rome to be pieced together. But, as Wiseman discusses, Alföldi’s approach to the evi-dence was such that he was on occasion able (and willing) to reject it when it did not agree with his argument, and enthusiastically accept it when it did, and to do so, moreover, with the customary, fierce commitment to his own views that often pre-vented him from engaging in a productive debate with his critics. This problem, and the related question of how different types of evidence, from different times and different cultures, can (and cannot) be used together are discussed by J. H. Richard-son, whose paper considers the way in which the evidence for the careers of the Vibenna brothers, Etruscan heroes from Vulci, has been used, by Alföldi and by a number of subsequent scholars.

The question of the evidence and what can be done with it is one that runs through many of the papers in this collection; on the one hand, Alföldi was a pio-neer, a scholar whose use of disparate, difficult, and often overlooked evidence was truly ground-breaking; on the other, many of his methods look dated today, or are simply out of date, and his handling of the literary evidence, especially for early Rome, could be controversial even in his own day. Nonetheless, no matter how his work has fared in the decades since it first appeared, it is above all Alföldi’s unsur-passed knowledge of the ancient evidence and his ability to extract information from even the most difficult of sources and bring together seemingly unrelated ma-terial to answer specific questions that ensure, perhaps more than anything else, that his scholarship remains some of the most stimulating, inspiring, and indeed awe-in-spiring, even when it fails to convince.

*

The aim of this volume is not to produce an account of Alföldi’s life, nor is it to attempt to provide a unilateral vindication of the value and importance of his schol-arly work against its many critics. Its brief is quite simply summarised in the title: ‘Andreas Alföldi in the Twenty-First Century’. The intention is simply to present readers with a range of critical assessments of some of the main aspects of Alföldi’s scholarship, with as broad a coverage as is viable in a single volume. The aim is to establish what place Alföldi’s arguments had in the scholarship of the time when

21Introduction

they were first put forward, how they helped to shape subsequent developments in the debate and, most importantly, what value and interest they may retain today. As will readily become apparent, the answer to each of these questions varies consid-erably as one looks at the different aspects of Alföldi’s vast output. Evaluating the importance of Alföldi’s work also requires some discussion of the reasons that led him to develop certain research questions and to make certain methodological choices. It is on account of this that we have also included a couple of papers dedi-cated primarily to aspects of Alföldi’s life, notably his formation and work in Hun-gary and his exile and move to Switzerland. It is with these that the volume begins.

22 James H. Richardson and Federico Santangelo

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alföldi 1914: A. Alföldi, review of A. Buday, Római felirattan [Roman Epigraphy], ArchErt 34 (1914), 430–431.

Alföldi 1937: id., ‘Zum Panzerschmuck der Augustusstatue von Primaporta’, MDAI(R) 52 (1937), 48–63.

Alföldi 1956: id., ‘The Main Aspects of Political Propaganda on the Coinage of the Roman Repub-lic’, in R. A. G. Carson-C. H. V. Sutherland (eds.), Essays in Roman Coinage Presented to Ha-rold Mattingly, Oxford 1956, 63–95.

Alföldi 1974: id., Die Struktur des voretruskischen Römerstaates, Heidelberg 1974.Alföldi-Alföldi 1990: A. Alföldi-E. Alföldi, Die Kontorniat-Medaillons, Teil 2 – Text, Berlin-New

York 1990.Brown 1995: P. Brown, ‘The Clash of Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art by Thomas

F. Mathews’, The Art Bulletin 77 (1995), 499–502.Gilliam 1982: J. F. Gilliam, ‘Memoir’, in Andrew Alföldi 1895–1981, The Institute for Advanced

Study, Princeton 1982, 3–9.Kolb 1982: F. P. Kolb, ‘Memoir’, in Andrew Alföldi 1895–1981, The Institute for Advanced Study,

Princeton 1982, 11–19.Metcalf 1991: W. E. Metcalf, review of Alföldi-Alföldi 1990, AJA 95 (1991), 755–756.Rawson 1988: E. D. Rawson, review of A. Alföldi, Caesar in 44 v. Chr. and Caesariana. Gesam-

melte Aufsätze zur Geschichte Caesars und seiner Zeit, CR 38 (1988), 324–325.Syme 1939: R. Syme, The Roman Revolution, Oxford 1939.Wiseman 1995: T. P. Wiseman, Remus: A Roman Myth, Cambridge 1995.

ANDRÁS ALFÖLDI AND CLASSICAL STUDIES IN HUNGARY

János György Szilágyi

In choosing the title of my lecture1 I tried to define its subject and the limits of that subject as precisely as I could. Others more expert than I will talk about Alföldi the scholar of ancient history and the archaeological heritage of the lands that eventu-ally became Hungary, or about the historian of early and Imperial Rome, or about his role as a pioneer of modern numismatics. I, for my part, will try to set out the most important aspects of his contribution to the development in Hungary of the disciplines associated with the study of antiquity. I therefore intend to focus on the period before his emigration.

The Roman poet Ennius wrote of himself that he had three hearts (tria corda). Much the same can be said, mutatis mutandis, of Alföldi in the period from the end of the Great War to the years immediately following the Second. Each of his three ‘hearts’ deserves separate consideration. After his return from military service and the publication in 1918 of his doctoral dissertation, he began (or rather resumed) a scholarly career that had started with his publication in 1914 of a sensational review at the age of just nineteen. This was a time when the integrated study of antiquity did not exist in Hungary. Not only had no attempt yet been made to connect re-search on ancient literary sources with archaeology and material culture, but even the archaeologists saw themselves as working in one of two quite distinct fields. In Hungary, as to a great extent in Germany, the fields of classical archaeology and Roman provincial archaeology have traditionally been regarded as separate disci-plines. It was no different at the start of Alföldi’s career. To quote his own words, written in 1927, ‘the archaeologists are divided into two large camps. On the one side stand those interested in the history of art, who use the methods characteristic of that discipline. The other group has broader horizons, in so far as they immerse themselves in the entire material record of a period, interrogating the sources for answers to questions of a historical kind’.2 This was true, more or less, of Hungary at least in the years after the 1914 war; though one must immediately add that, of the four fields of Hungarian Altertumswissenschaft distinguished here by Alföldi (Ancient History being mentioned as the third), all were in crisis when he came on the scene. The new trends that had emerged in international scholarship over the

1 Note of the Editors: This is an English version of a lecture delivered in Hungarian at a confe-rence organised by the Institute of Archaeology at the Lóránd Eötvös University of Sciences in Budapest in December 1995, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Alföldi’s birth (publish ed as Szilágyi 1999). We are deeply grateful to Dr Peter Agócs for offering an English translation of this text to the present volume and to Professor Szilágyi for agreeing to its publication.

2 Alföldi 1927, 125.

24 János György Szilágyi

previous four decades were beginning to bear fruit in Hungary as well, but these promising shoots had wilted during the war and in the years that followed, or had been expelled from the circle of officially recognised and publicly supported insti-tutional research. The state of classical scholarship narrowly defined, and of re-search on the literary heritage of the ancient world, was expressed, if a bit tenden-tiously, by the author (identified only by a monogram) of a piece published in 1921, who wrote that the University, the Academy, the Philological Society, and its Pro-ceedings (then the only organ of scholarly publication in the country) were all ‘loll-ing happily in the sweet embrace of idleness’. At the University, the professors ‘are yet again reading out their lecture notes, thirty years old; and because they have managed to exile all of the younger Dozenten who were teaching modern methods to the students, they themselves have become the main obstacle to any rejuvenation or progress for decades to come’.3

As far as the study of ancient material culture is concerned, the division noticed by Alföldi was nowhere near as sharp in international scholarship as it was in Hun-garian. But it was precisely in this area that the gap, with respect to methods and results, between the way that things were done at home and abroad was largest. In the nineteenth century, independent research on ancient material culture (which, as it was represented mainly through works of art, demanded a scholarly language and discourse appropriate to the subject) was almost unknown in Hungary; indeed, there was for a long time no apparent interest in such work at all. Up to the time of Alföldi’s matriculation as a student in the University, classical art had been taught for thirty-three years by József Hampel (1849–1913), a man incidentally of no small merit in other respects. When he published his History of Ancient Sculpture, his only work on the subject, he had already been teaching it for twenty years. In the preface, he wrote: ‘It had been my intention […] to publish a handbook that is both easy to use and summarises the main debates in the scholarship. To my great sur-prise and gratification, my Cambridge colleague E. A. Gardiner has so successfully fulfilled the purpose I set myself that I was able to complete my work by translating his valuable book into Hungarian’.4 At that time, this procedure, though not always so explicitly or naively expounded, was quite normal in Hungary for such general introductory works.5 A few years later, Nándor Láng (1871–1952), archaeologist and professor of Classics at the University of Debrecen, summarised what was known about ancient Greek art in the first volume of a multi-authored, general His-tory of Art From Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century; he did this with exemplary thoroughness and from a much stronger grounding in the literature, but without the slightest claim to original thought. His chapter remained the most extensive treat-ment of the subject in Hungarian for the next sixty years.6 The author of the corre-sponding Roman section of the History based his account, which was a little over a third as long as the Greek part, on the corresponding chapters of the book by Lübke

3 Gy. H. 1921.4 Hampel 1900, III.5 Szilágyi 1984, n. 40–41 (with the most important bibliography).6 Láng 1906.

25András Alföldi and Classical Studies in Hungary

and Semrau.7 The volume dedicated to ancient art closed with a survey of ‘Archae-ological Monuments in Hungary’ (Magyarország emlékszerű maradványai); such was the label given by the author, Bálint Kuzsinszky (1864–1938) – who would later, as professor, teach Alföldi at the University – to the art of Roman Pannonia, thus clearly distinguishing it, even in his title, from artistic production in the strict sense.8 In this, he was only following a normative view, common in Hungarian and even some foreign archaeological circles at the time and forcefully expressed at the end of his brief chapter on provincial art with a quotation from Hampel that ‘no person of good taste can take any pleasure in provincial stone monuments’. For such works the value and cultural significance of ancient art and its forms and genres remained a mere trope of rhetoric, while its achievements were judged in the unthinking, off-hand manner of people immersed in the pedagogical daily grind, their considerations defined by practical criteria (completeness and conformance to the rules of foreign scholarly writing), and lacking a living connection to field ar-chaeology.

As for the school of thought that Alföldi characterised as ‘art-historical’, it had, when he began his career and in the decades that followed, only a single active ex-ponent in Hungary. This was Antal Hekler (1882–1940). Hekler’s teacher in Mu-nich was Adolf Furtwängler (1853–1907), who combined participation in the exca-vations at Olympia and Aegina with the use of stylistic criticism to reconstruct the masterpieces of classical Greek sculpture, and who pioneered the use of the same method in the study of other genres of artistic production. Hekler returned to Buda-pest from Munich in 1906 after defending his doctorate, which had been written under Furtwängler’s direction, first finding employment for seven years in the Na-tional Museum. In 1911, he became the first Privatdozent in the University in what, for Hungary, was the newly recognised field of classical archaeology. He continued to work until the end of his career within the limits set by the stylistic methods of the Furtwängler school, and this perspective defined even the articles he wrote during his tenure in the Museum on individual objects of Roman provincial art. Alföldi did not attend his lectures, and perhaps he had no chance even to do so; for when he returned from the war, Hekler had swapped his museum job for a univer-sity chair in Art History, after which he only rarely returned to ancient topics, most notably to the work on classical (particularly portrait) sculpture that had first brought him international recognition, expanding his existing oeuvre with one or two short articles on a particular new idea. Even in his university teaching, instead of directing students toward ancient themes, he encouraged them to work on Ba-roque art.

In any case, Alföldi was never much interested in the sort of art history that tried to judge the provincial art of Pannonia by Winckelmannian standards, and which had no interest in the usefulness of art as a source for history-writing. But it is more likely that it was reasons of a more subjective nature, rooted in a basic dif-ference in personalities, which kept him from getting close to Hekler, who after all

7 [Note of the Editors: Lübke-Semrau 1899–1907].8 Zámboki 1906 and Kuzsinszky 1906; the quotation from Hampel which follows here is from p.

542.

26 János György Szilágyi

was his colleague and fellow teacher at the University for fifteen years. This was despite the fact that they shared many views about the role that archaeology ought to play in Hungarian scholarly life, and about the tasks involved in organising re-search. Their professorial activities, that is to say the teaching of Roman provincial archaeology and the history of ancient art, existed side by side without ever really meeting, in the very decade in whose first half – to mention only two emblematic examples – Humfry Payne (1902–1936) was leading the Perachora excavations and writing his book on the marble statues of the Acropolis, and Emil Kunze (1901–1994), while working on the Neolithic and early Bronze-Age ceramics from Or-chomenos, published his monograph on the orientalising reliefs of Crete.9

Hekler (again following his master Furtwängler, who had openly professed his dislike of the book) failed in his own work to notice that the publication in 1901 of A. Riegl’s Spätrömische Kunstindustrie had opened a whole new phase in ‘art-his-torical’ archaeology.10 Nor did Alföldi, although he was aware of its existence, at first see the new perspectives Riegl’s work had opened up, especially for students of Roman provincial archaeology. Instead, it was Riegl’s critics, rather than Riegl himself, who first led him to recognise the importance of art historical methods in ancient historical research.11

Nor was Alföldi especially sanguine about the prospects in 1920s Hungary of the historically-minded archaeology he favoured (which, like research on Ancient History in the strict sense, hardly existed at all in Hungary).12 There was no lack of either industry or enthusiasm for excavating sites in Hungary, or for publishing the results, but this ongoing work, in Alföldi’s own words, did not go beyond mere ‘collection’ on a massive scale. Only Hampel managed to get as far as classifying ‘the ever-increasing mass of finds’.13 As far as the historical analysis of these Hun-garian finds was concerned, Alföldi remained a careful if unambiguous critic of his colleagues: in his words, which threw Kuzsinszki’s achievement as an archaeolo-

9 [Note of the Editors: Payne 1936; Kunze 1931a, 1931b and 1934].10 Cf. Láng 1942, 11.11 See Alföldi 1926a, 350. It is true that in the 1920s, when the final volume of his work was pu-

blished along with a new edition of the first, the general scholarly appreciation of Riegl was rather negative (mainly because of the combined influence of structuralism, which emerged first at this time, and its conservative opponents); his true significance became clear only when his work was rediscovered in the 1940s, and especially after the Second World War (see on this Szilágyi 2005, quoted above). Even in 1937, Alföldi thought that it was ‘Strukturforschung’ that would be able to ‘illuminate the great, immanent forces and laws governing historical de-velopment’ (1937b: 438).

12 The only exception worth mentioning is István Heinlein (1874–1945). About the time Alföldi joined the University staff, Heinlein took over lecturing duties in Ancient History from the former professor, Bálint Kuzsinszky (who after Hampel’s death in 1914 had inherited the chair of Archaeology), which was closer to his own research interests and talents, and so he became Alföldi’s direct predecessor in that chair. Heinlein, in the decade when Alföldi began his career, published almost nothing, and neither his old-fashioned view of history, nor his lecturing style had much of an influence on the students. Gyula Hornyánszky, the only significant, original Hungarian ancient historian of the fin de siècle, changed his whole approach after 1910, which caused (cf. Litván 1978, 2–6) a break in his scholarly work as well.

13 See Alföldi 1927, 126.

27András Alföldi and Classical Studies in Hungary

gist into sharp relief, there had been no attempt to progress further on the road marked out decades earlier by Mommsen, or indeed to diverge from it under the influence of ‘new European scholarly trends’.14

The state in which Hungarian scholarship now found itself, and which Alföldi described in the article of 1927 mentioned earlier, meant that he, during his univer-sity years in Hungary – since the historical situation of Hungary after 1914 hardly offered any other possibilities for study and training – had been able to learn noth-ing apart from excavation techniques (which he never really used) and a decent knowledge of the various categories of archaeological material; he had no one to learn from about the things which interested him most. As he saw it, it was clear that none of the four areas of Altertumswissenschaft was of any appeal to him on its own; what mattered to him from the start was the whole: history in the universal meaning of the word.

Alföldi realised, without any personal encouragement from anyone, that he – as far as was possible – had to get to know all the available sources, of every kind, to the same extent, and acquire a perfect control of the methods uniquely appropriate to each. The most visible and most often mentioned proof of this was the way in which he brought his completely self-taught epigraphic and numismatic studies to a pitch of mastery and perfection; at the same time, over the course of his career as a scholar his interlocutors and readers would frequently notice, suddenly and with intense amazement, from a little offhand remark in conversation or writing just how much he knew about ancient art, and how he was able to quote the works of the Roman classical poets from memory not ten, but hundreds of lines at a time. He clearly felt from the very beginning that all this was absolutely necessary for him to be able to produce the synthesis he had demanded in vain from his archaeologist predecessors, and also in order that he be able to get to the bottom of any small and apparently insignificant problem he encountered in his research. After a few years of intense and entirely self-taught preparation, when, in 1923, he was appointed to a lectureship at the University of Debrecen, the most important themes of his schol-arly research (later of course complemented with newer questions) had already be-gun to appear in his publications; and these continued unbroken to the end of his life, quite apart from his ongoing exploration of problems in the ancient history of Hungary. In 1922, he wrote his first article on the decline and fall of the ancient world; in 1923, on the age of Gallienus and the third-century crisis of the Roman Empire; in 1926, on the official phraseology of the Roman Empire; in 1928, on the Historia Augusta; in 1931, on the theriomorphic world-view of Asian cultures; and in 1932, on the conversion of Constantine.15

As a scholar, Alföldi was a born leader and mentor. While becoming, in just a few years, an internationally recognised researcher who published regularly in the leading German, French and British journals (the latter then a rarity in Hungary), he managed to acquire, and indeed work out in the smallest detail, a conviction that conducting research and organising it were, as activities, as inseparable as focusing

14 Alföldi 1927, 126 and 127.15 In the order of the themes mentioned: Alföldi 1921–22, 1923–26, 1926b, 1928, 1930 (English

version in Alföldi 1997, 1–12); 1931, 1932b.

28 János György Szilágyi

on the details and creating a synthesis. His activities in the period before his exile are and will always be worth remembering, not least because they exemplify the recognition, no less timely today than it was then, that research of a truly high stan-dard can only be carried out in a broadly-based and vibrant academic culture. It was this which Alföldi set himself to create. He summarised the most important desi-derata in detail already in 1926, in an essay of crucial importance in other ways as well. This programmatic piece also makes clear just how much progress was needed in Hungarian classical scholarship before it could reach the level he desired. The end of the war had (in Alföldi’s words) largely killed the academic journals, which needed to be revived, because it would be impossible to keep the discipline going without them. There was a need for at least one central library with a systematic policy of acquiring foreign publications, thus making it possible for Hungarian re-searchers to participate in the ongoing international circulation of scholarly opin-ion. An independent research institute of Archaeology was also needed which would stand over and above the particularism that resulted from the museums’ often short-sighted collection policies on the one hand, with important finds disappearing unnoticed into museum collections that lacked the research capacity to do anything with them, and the one-sidedness or limited research perspectives of the occupants of university chairs on the other. Finally, he explicitly stressed the need for the re-sults of research carried out in Hungary to be published in the international lan-guages of scholarship, since this, quite apart from the fact that it would make Hun-garian research available to the wider world, ‘will also bring an end to the suffocat-ing and provincial way of working which has, alas, driven down strong roots in our academic culture thanks to the isolation of our language…’.16

Summing up, then, it is clear that he saw, quite rightly, that the organisation of academic life and research in Hungarian Classics would have to be begun all over again from scratch, just as he had been forced to develop his own perspectives and methods of research virtually on his own and ex nihilo. He was not, however, alone in these ambitions and this working environment. He received his doctorate in the same year as Károly Kerényi (1897–1973), a man who, though he tended to ap-proach the ideal of a universal science of Antiquity from the literary side, made very similar demands on his country’s scholars and had very similar views on their prob-lems to Alföldi’s. Naturally, they were fated to meet and collaborate. When Alföldi in 1930 was appointed to a lectureship in Budapest, Kerényi was also teaching there. The work Kerényi published in this period focused to a great extent on an-cient art and material culture, while in 1930 Alföldi published an interpretation of Virgil’s fourth Eclogue in Hermes.17 Together, they created the ‘Stemma’ circle, an informal group outside the organised framework of the University and composed of their most talented pupils, which they hoped would revitalise Hungarian classical studies. They parted ways very quickly, however, and the fact that both began their years of exile in the same country did not bring them closer again. The reasons for

16 Alföldi 1926a. On the question of a central research library, see also Alföldi 1946–48, 442–443. Hekler not long before had also stressed the need for such a library, but he had imagined a unified archaeological and art-historical collection (Oroszlán 1940, 112).

17 Alföldi 1930 (= Alföldi 1997, 1–12).

29András Alföldi and Classical Studies in Hungary

this conflicted relationship were doubtless rooted in their very different notions about the aims and function of scholarship, which divided them despite their funda-mental agreement on the need for academic standards and the attraction both felt to the real issues. But it hardened into concrete (though never personal) opposition when the question of what Hungarian classical scholarship was for suddenly be-came an important theme of cultural policy at the highest level of national govern-ment. This was when Alföldi’s second ‘heart’ spoke for the first time.

For anyone living in Hungary in the years after the Great War, it was almost impossible not to see the events of those days (defeat, followed by the dismember-ment of the old Kingdom of Hungary) as a national tragedy. This attitude deter-mined people’s reactions to the trauma as well as their ideas about how to heal it, leading them to ignore the broader context of events and the necessities of national and world history which had led inexorably to the collapse. This historical atmo-sphere explains a certain loss of equilibrium, to which Alföldi’s essay of 1926, mentioned above, attests. Here, and in other writings that followed, as he defined the tasks of research on the history of Hungary before the Magyar conquest, he wished (in his own words) to subordinate the study of the ancient history of modern Hungary to the cause of ‘Magyar cultural superiority’ and the need to legitimise our historical right to the territories lost to Hungary’s neighbours in the treaty of Tri-anon. The double starting point of his research programme – first, that the history of Hungary after the Magyar conquest of AD 896 could not be severed from the earlier history of the country; and second, that the international scholarly commu-nity’s demand (namely that Hungarian historians, as the most competent autho-rities on its sources and problems, should produce authoritative studies of every phase of their country’s history) is both legitimate and just – was indisputable, and is as relevant today as it was all those decades ago. But his placement of these tasks in opposition to what we might call the ‘universal history’ of the ancient world, and his claim that a national archaeology would be ‘vastly superior’ to a universalistic approach that would study history (as he put it) ‘from the Assyrian empire to the American Civil War’, were grievous and fatal errors. Alföldi demanded that the latter should be represented in education only roughly and, as it were, at second hand, while Hungarian scholars concentrated and directed all their energy ‘towards the study of our national history’. With this, he conceded Mommsen’s wish that Hungarian classical scholarship should accept the same provincial role in modern research as Pannonia in the Roman Empire.18 Still more fatal was his desire to subordinate archaeological research to established political goals, which in turn would predetermine which results would be accepted or rejected. With this, he de-nied the very possibility of scholarship as a rational or meaningful human activity. While nothing can exonerate Alföldi for this, it is all the same true that this ten-dency had been there in Hungarian classical scholarship from the very beginning, even if the motives changed with the circumstances.19 In the straitened cultural context of the 1920s, it became the dominant strain in the historical dis ciplines. It

18 Láng 1938, 344.19 See also Szilágyi 1984, 177, 181–182.