Andreas Alföldi (1895–1981) was an eminent ancient historian, numismatist, archaeologist and epigraphist. His scholarly output, as vast as it was diverse, covered archaic Rome, the late Republic, the provinces of the Roman Empire, especially the Danube region, and late antiquity. Alföldi’s work was marked by extraordinary erudition, by his ability to draw on all manner of evidence, no matter how disparate, 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 largely 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 offers a wide-ranging assessment of Alföldi’s arguments and ideas, both those that have been influential and those that have been superseded or neglected, and explores an academic career that began in Alföldi’s native Hungary and ended in exile in the United States.
Circa l’autore
Federico Santangelo is Professor of Ancient History at Newcastle University.