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Christian Matthias Theodor Mommsen
(1817 - 1903)
German historian and writer, famous for his masterpiece, Romische Geschichte
("The History of Rome"). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1902.
Early years.
Mommsen was the son of a Protestant minister in Garding, Schleswig,
and he grew up in Oldesloe (now Bad Oldesloe). He received his basic
classical training in the senior classes of the Gymnasium (secondary
school) Christianeum in Altona, then part of the Duchy of Holstein.
From 1838 to 1843 he studied jurisprudence at the University of Kiel;
inasmuch as the study of jurisprudence in Germany at the time was largely
a study of Roman law, this had an essential influence on the direction
of his future research. He owed his idea of the close interrelationship
between law and history not so much to his teachers as to the writings
of Friedrich Karl von Savigny, one of the founders of the historical
school of jurisprudence. After he had received his master's and his
doctor's degrees, a research scholarship granted by his sovereign, the
king of Denmark, allowed him to spend three years--from 1844 to 1847--in
Italy. During this time Italy became his second home and the Archaeological
Institute in Rome one of the headquarters from which he pursued his
research. By that time Mommsen had already conceived the plan for the
Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, a comprehensive collection of Latin
inscriptions preserved since antiquity on stone, iron, and other enduring
materials, arranged according to the basic principles of philological
methodology. Having been prepared for this field by the young Kiel professor
Otto Jahn, he soon became a master of epigraphy--the study and interpretation
of inscriptions--under the guidance of Bartolomeo Borghesi, the learned
statesman of San Marino. Within the next several decades Mommsen made
the corpus of Latin inscriptions into a source work that was essential
in complementing the one-sidedly literary tradition and that, for the
first time, made a comprehensive understanding of life in the ancient
world possible.
When he returned from Italy, Mommsen found his country in a state of
mounting unrest. As a native of Schleswig he was a subject of the Danish
king, but he considered himself German, wanted to remain German, and
looked forward to German unity. For him freedom meant not only the independence
of the German states from foreign influence but also the freedom of
the German citizen to adapt himself to any sort of constitution except
that of despotism or a police state. A liberal, he considered the republic
the ideal state, yet he was quite content with a constitutional monarchy
so long as it was not a cover for some sort of pseudo-constitutional
autocracy. Mommsen's political activities began with his editorship
of the Schleswig-Holsteinische Zeitung for the provisional government
established during the revolution of 1848. Yet journalism was not much
to his taste; he was happy when, at the end of 1848, he was offered
a professorship in civil law at the University of Leipzig. Nevertheless,
he remained politically minded as long as he lived--as a thoughtful
and critical observer as well as an active politician. (He was a deputy
in the Prussian Landtag from 1873 to 1879 and in the German Reichstag
from 1881 to 1884.) He continued to devote time and energy to politics,
but it is doubtful that he thereby served his country's and his own
best interests. While he was an acknowledged authority in his field
of scholarship, in politics he remained a camp follower, who achieved
no more than many others. Moreover, he more than once jeopardized his
career by his political activities. Because of his participation in
an uprising in Saxony in May 1849, he lost his professorship and almost
landed in prison.
After his dismissal from his post in Leipzig, Mommsen in 1852 accepted
a professorship in jurisprudence in Zurich. The grief he expressed about
being an "exile" showed how deeply he felt himself to be a
German. In 1854, however, he was offered a professorship in Prussia
at the University of Breslau. It was at this time that he married Marie
Reimer, daughter of a bookseller. Their long and happy marriage produced
16 children.
The historian and his works.
During the years he spent at Leipzig, Zurich, and Breslau, Mommsen wrote
the first three volumes of the Romische Geschichte, up to the Battle
of Thapsus, 46 BC. This work embodied the new historical method applied
to the history of Rome. Mommsen critically examined hitherto unquestioned
traditions and rejected the attitude of the Enlightenment, which had
idealized the classical age. He readily acknowledged himself to be a
disciple of the historian Barthold Georg Niebuhr, who introduced rigorous
criticism of sources into historiography, however much their methods
of research and presentation differed and despite the fact that he went
considerably beyond his great predecessor in demythologizing Roman history.
In Mommsen's view it was important that the ancients should come down
to earth from the Olympian heights upon which they appeared to the mass
of the public. This modern style was not to everyone's taste, for, in
bringing the past to life, he used the political and sociological vocabulary
of the 19th century. When he speaks of the squirearchy and the cloth
exerting their "malignant" influence even in ancient Rome,
it is Mommsen the liberal politician speaking. Nevertheless, his Romische
Geschichte is not a politically tendentious work but a piece of scholarship
of the highest rank, which gains from its distinction of style.
The philologist is regarded as the preserver of verbal tradition, but
as a philologist Mommsen was more than that: he was an artist, and he
proved his artistry in his treatment of language. He disliked any incongruous
mixture of prose styles and, in the Romische Geschichte and Romisches
Staatsrecht ("Roman Constitutional Law"), he created two works,
both of which attain exemplary unity of form and content yet demonstrate
two different styles. Without being a creative poet, he used the means
of poetry and enjoyed exercising his poetic talent. An excellent testimony
to his abilities is the Liederbuch dreier Freunde ("Songbook of
Three Friends"), which he published in 1843 together with his brother
Tycho and the writer and poet Theodor Storm. Throughout his life Goethe
was his ideal not only as a poet but also as "the wisest man of
the century." His perfect command of English, French, and Italian
did much to make his journeys of research successful; he quoted Shakespeare
in his letters almost as often as Goethe.
To many critics Mommsen's glorification of the dictator Caesar and
his disparagement of Caesar's opponents, Pompey and Cicero, seem strangely
inconsistent with his political liberalism. He tried to make his critics
understand that he had praised Caesar only as a saviour of the decaying
state; yet Mommsen's admiration for the autocrat reveals something of
his own character. He himself was an autocrat in his own branch of scholarship,
adopting a manner that his opponents labelled "caesarism."
At the same time, however, he had an unusual need for the fellowship
of like-minded men. He held personal contacts to be one of the most
important elements of life; indeed, it might be said that he had a genius
for friendship. Yet it was mostly a friendship with men who looked up
to him. With anyone who considered himself Mommsen's equal, a friendly
relationship was not likely to last long.
It was only as a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences that Mommsen
could pursue his project of publishing his collection of Latin inscriptions,
and for this reason in 1858 he was offered a post in Berlin. In 1861
he also became a professor in the philosophy faculty at the university;
because of his philological and historical interests he chose that faculty
rather than that of law. As a teacher of Roman history and epigraphy--especially
in his seminars--he trained many students who were later to make their
mark in these fields. The main part of his scholarly work was taken
up with the continuation of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (published
1863 and after). He also acted as adviser on many other great scholarly
enterprises, such as the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, the exploration
of the limes (Roman border fortifications in southwestern Germany),
the numismatic work of the Prussian Academy, and the Thesaurus Linguae
Latinae. Even in old age his mind was open to the new demands of scholarship,
as shown by his interest in the new study of papyrology.
Mommsen's historical work was interrupted by his work on inscriptions;
thus, the Romische Geschichte was never completed. Its first three volumes
had been published in 1854-56. When, several decades later, in Berlin,
Mommsen set out to complete his history, he abandoned the idea of writing
the fourth volume, which was to contain the history of the emperors,
because he felt that he would not be capable of writing it in the same
brilliant style as his history of the republic. The fifth volume (1885)
deals with the history of the Roman provinces in the first three centuries
of the empire. No one but Mommsen could have depicted this period in
so authoritative a manner, for no one else knew the nonliterary sources--the
inscriptions and coins--as did he. The Romische Geschichte has been
translated into English as The History of Rome, with the fifth volume
entitled The Provinces of the Roman Empire.
The greatest monument to Mommsen's scholarship, the work which is of
even greater significance for scholars than the Romische Geschichte,
is Romisches Staatsrecht ("Roman Constitutional Law"), published
in 3 volumes between 1871 and 1888. He himself said that if he were
to be remembered by anything, it would be by this work. The Romans themselves
never codified their constitutional law; Mommsen was the first to do
it. His historical approach to classical scholarship led him to systematize
the innumerable legal details upon which the Roman constitution was
based and to explain this complex body of law through an understanding
of its historical development. Only an individual who, like Mommsen,
was grounded both in law and in the classics would be in a position
to investigate the public law of the Romans, and only an individual
trained to think in historical concepts could understand it.
In public law, criminal law stands side by side with constitutional
law, and Mommsen's last great work, published in 1899, is Romisches
Strafrecht ("Roman Criminal Law").
When Mommsen, who had already become a mythical figure for his contemporaries,
died just four weeks before his 86th birthday, he had attained what
he had always wanted. The task which he had set himself to fulfill,
according to his own almost superhuman standards, he had completed.
This article was written by Lothar F.K. Wickert (d. 1989), who was Professor
of Ancient History at the University of Cologne. He was the author of
Theodor Mommsen: Eine Biographie (1959).
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Biographical and critical works include Lothar Wickert, Theodor Mommsen:
Eine Biographie, 3 vol. (1959-80), and Drei Vortrage uber Theodor Mommsen
(1970).
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