Arnaldo Momigliano, who died in 1987, was the world’s leading student of the writing of history in the ancient world. He examined the historiography not only of the Greeks and Romans but also of the Hebrews, Persians, Babylonians, and Assyrians, among others, and the breadth of his curiosity and learning was unmatched. Born and educated in Italy, he was appointed to the chair of Roman history at the University of Turin at the age of twenty-eight, but as a Jew he was removed from the position by Mussolini’s racial laws. Most of his subsequent work was done in England, first at Oxford and then at University College, London, where he held the professorship of ancient history from 1951 to 1975. From then until his death he was a regular visiting professor at the University of Chicago. He wrote several books: biographies of Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great, and of the Roman Emperor Claudius, and works on The Development of Greek Biography, on Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization, and on The Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity in the First Century. Each is written with grace and is full of learning, careful scholarship, and wisdom, but each is a slim volume that tends to read more like a collection of separate essays about a common subject than like a fully integrated account that sets a problem and proposes a solution. In fact, Momigliano’s favorite form was the learned essay, and he fortunately left