Theodor Mommsen

German historian

• Born: November 30, 1817
• Birthplace: Garding, Schleswig (now in Germany)
• Died: November 1, 1903
• Place of death: Charlottenburg, Germany

Mommsen transformed the study of Roman history by correcting and supplementing the literary tradition of the ancient historians with the evidence of Latin inscriptions. Going beyond the usual focus on the generals and emperors, Mommsen championed study in all aspects of ancient societies.

Early Life

Now considered a German historian, Theodor Mommsen (MOM-zehn) was born a Danish subject in a town that later became part of Germany. The eldest son of a poor Protestant minister, he was reared in Oldesloe, where he was educated by his father until 1834, when he attended school in Altona, outside Hamburg. In 1838, he entered the University of Kiel to study jurisprudence, which at the time involved a thorough grounding in Roman law. Under the influence of Friedrich Karl von Savigny’s writings on the interrelationship of law and history, Mommsen’s interest shifted to Roman history by the time he completed his doctorate in 1843. Equally influential were Otto Jahn’s lectures on epigraphy, the study of inscriptions, which convinced Mommsen of the need for a complete collection of Latin inscriptions.

With a grant from the Danish government, Mommsen traveled through Italy from 1844 to 1847, collecting inscriptions and studying ancient Italian dialects. At the suggestion of the Italian scholar Bartolomeo Borghesi, he concentrated on Naples, and his subsequent monograph, Inscriptions regni Neapolitani Latinae (1852; inscriptions of the Latin Neopolitan kingdom), impressed scholars with its philological method and organization.

When Mommsen returned to take a post in Roman law at the University of Leipzig in 1848, Schleswig was agitating for union with Prussia. An ardent German patriot, Mommsen was caught up in the revolutionary nationalism, and his academic career was momentarily interrupted. Slightly injured in a street riot, Mommsen stayed behind when his brothers took up arms against the Danish crown, and instead he furthered the cause as editor and writer for the Schleswig-Holsteinische Zeitung.

In the reaction after the failed uprising, Mommsen was eventually dismissed from his teaching post in 1851. After a period of what he termed exile in Zürich, he returned to Germany in 1854 to teach at the University of Breslau, before settling permanently in Berlin, first with the Berlin Academy of Sciences and then with the University of Berlin.

Life’s Work

Nineteenth century scholars, Germans in particular, applied scientific methods to the humanities in the belief that just as Charles Darwin had demonstrated the laws of natural selection, they could discover the laws of historical and social evolution. Some scholars were led by the evolutionary analogy, with its emphasis on the survival of the fittest, to dismiss questions of morality in their desire to establish the inevitability of historical development. This was especially true in Germany, where the nationalistic yearning for political unification had been building ever since Napoleon I’s power over the German states had been broken. Consequently, German scholars often found it easy to let supposedly objective science serve political ends.

Mommsen never overtly subverted scholarship to nationalism; however, the tendency was manifest in his most famous work, Römische Geschichte (1854-1856; The History of Rome , 1862-1866), which covers Roman history up to the end of the republic. Never intending to write for a general audience, Mommsen was approached in 1851 by his future father-in-law, the publisher Carl Reimer, who persuaded him to undertake the project.

Immediately famous, even notorious, The History of Rome was not only the first comprehensive survey of Roman history but also a passionate narrative of the rise and fall of the republic, brought to life by Mommsen’s vivid and partisan portraits of historical personalities. With a dynamic, journalism-influenced style, Mommsen drew on familiar political and historical incidents and presented even abstract ideas in concrete imagery to make Roman history accessible to a wide audience.

The History of Rome impressed the scholarly community with its rigorous questioning of the ancient historians, but it was faulted for not citing sources or acknowledging any possible differences in interpretation. Moreover, many believed that he went so far in his demythologizing that he falsely recast Roman history in terms of his biased perspective of German politics.

These critics feared that The History of Rome’s adulatory depiction of Julius Caesar as the savior of Rome dangerously glorified power and buttressed Prussian militarism. Despite a belief in the generally progressive and civilizing effect of the emergence of powers such as Rome or Germany, Mommsen was not authoritarian so much as elitist, believing that the best government was that of an intellectual aristocracy in support of an enlightened leader such as Caesar. Because the closest example in German history was Prussian leadership in the tradition of Frederick the Great, Mommsen initially supported Prussia’s central role in German unification.

However, when other Germans surrendered to, even welcomed, outright domination, masterfully managed by the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck, Mommsen felt betrayed. He opposed the extralegal and self-interested ambitions of Bismarck in Germany and of Napoleon III in France, though The History of Rome was often used to justify their actions. Mommsen served in both the Prussian and German legislatures, where he resisted Germany’s colonial and economic policies. When he denounced protectionism as a swindle, Mommsen was brought into court by Bismarck on a charge of libel. Though acquitted, Mommsen largely withdrew from politics after 1884.

It was in the calmer arena of the university that Mommsen made his more important though less famous contributions to scholarship. Mommsen’s collection of Neapolitan inscriptions had made it obvious that he was the man to undertake a more comprehensive cataloging of all Latin inscriptions, a project already begun by the Berlin Academy. He was appointed editor in 1858 and worked on the project the rest of his life, demonstrating the highest standards of scholarly and organizational brilliance. To eliminate any possibility of forgery or error, he insisted on the examination of the actual inscriptions instead of secondhand reports. With the first volume of the monumental Corpus inscriptionum Latinarum (1863-1902; collection of Latin inscriptions), Mommsen transformed Roman historiography by providing it with an extensive factual basis. At the time of Mommsen’s death, Corpus inscriptionum Latinarum contained 130,000 inscriptions in fifteen volumes, six of which he edited himself.

Though this would have been the life’s work of other men, Mommsen also reconstructed Roman law in Römisches Staatsrecht (1871-1888; Roman constitutional law) and Römisches Strafrecht (1899; Roman criminal law). In the tradition of Savigny, Mommsen examined Roman law not as an abstract system but as a cultural and historical development determined by power struggles in the Roman Republic and Empire.

Despite reiterated plans to continue The History of Rome, Mommsen did almost no work on a narrative history of the empire. Instead, he published Das Weltreich der Caesaren (1885; The Provinces of the Roman Empire from Caesar to Diocletian , 1886), which, though termed a continuation of his The History of Rome and accessible to the nonscholar, is quite different from the earlier work. Nonnarrative and nonpartisan, The Provinces of the Roman Empire is a study based on the Latin inscriptions gathered from the areas that were once under Roman domination, revealing the empire to have been far more stable than the traditional focus on dynastic struggles suggested.

Over the years, Mommsen became a well-known character in Berlin. Active up to his death at the age of eighty-five, he worked late each night but arrived at the university each morning at eight, even using the tram ride to read. Although he was neither a graceful man nor, with his shrill voice, a particularly good lecturer, he commanded absolute respect. Mesmerized by his piercing blue eyes and intellectual authority, his students sat in total silence as Mommsen raced through prepared lectures. Rigorous in his criticism, he was equally generous in his assistance to his former students and left a lasting legacy with the generation of scholars he trained to his own exacting standards of research. At a time when solitary labor was still normal for scholars, Mommsen contributed to many cooperative efforts, started several international journals, and helped found the International Association of Academies in 1901.

Said by some to be intolerant of equals, Mommsen was no recluse, surrounding himself with students, friends, and a large family. Marie Reimer, to whom Mommsen was married in 1854, bore him sixteen children and for nearly fifty years provided her husband with a comfortable and supportive domestic life.

Significance

Theodor Mommsen is universally acknowledged as one of the nineteenth century’s most important historians. In his own lifetime, Mommsen’s eminence was recognized when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1902. Because so much of his work dealt with matters of interest only to scholars, however, his fame is overshadowed by that of the great narrative historians, such as Leopold von Ranke.

With his amazing capacity for work, Mommsen put his name to more than a thousand published articles in his nearly sixty-year career. Highly regarded for an imaginative handling of voluminous statistics and detail as well as memorable epigrams and pithy summations, most of Mommsen’s writing is still of interest mainly to specialists. Except for his The History of Rome, he wrote little narrative history, focusing instead on gathering and interpreting the inscriptions on stone and coins left by the Romans and correcting the less reliable written tradition. The Corpus inscriptionum Latinarum, which continues to grow, is indispensable for Roman studies, as are his studies of Roman law; yet much of his other work was superseded even in his own lifetime as others built on his pioneering work and methodology.

Throughout his career, Mommsen represented the best in humanistic scholarship. Dedicated to putting all studies on the most rigorous scientific footing, Mommsen never lost sight of the human element, which transcends national and racial considerations. Despite the controversy still surrounding The History of Rome, Mommsen’s positive estimation of Caesar is shared by most scholars today, and his animated style exerted a beneficial influence on later German writing. His emphasis on the nonliterary sources encouraged scholars to shift their attention away from dynastic history to many areas of ancient societies. Welcoming innovative ideas and methods regardless of their political or personal consequences, Mommsen was always more interested in forwarding scholarship than in preserving his preeminence.

Bibliography

Broughton, T. Robert S. Introduction to The Provinces of the Roman Empire, by Theodor Mommsen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968. Provides biography with an overview of Mommsen’s major works and a discussion of reasons for his not finishing The History of Rome. Examines Mommsen’s innovative scholarship and traces his influence on historiography into the mid-twentieth century. Contains a bibliography.

Gooch, George Peabody. “Mommsen and Roman Studies.” In History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century. London: Longmans, Green, 1913. Chronological overview of Mommsen’s life and his major work, detailing his many interests and activities along with contributions to the work of others. Conceding Mommsen’s historical biases and tendency to esteem the victorious too highly, Gooch ranks Mommsen along with Ranke for demythologizing Roman history and encouraging new trends in scholarship. Contains valuable bibliographical footnotes.

Haverfield, F. “Theodor Mommsen.” The English Historical Review 19 (January, 1904): 80-89. An obituary assessing Mommsen’s character and contribution. In a review of Mommsen’s main works, Haverfield analyzes the historian’s remarkable combination of imagination, hard work, and organizational brilliance. Stresses Mommsen’s pioneering use of inscriptions and cooperative projects in scholarship.

Kelsey, Francis W. “Theodore Mommsen.” Classical Journal 14 (January, 1919): 224-236. A comprehensive biographical and character sketch with attention to the influences of Mommsen’s teachers and colleagues. Argues that Mommsen was not so much an innovator as a brilliant and diligent realizer of the innovations of others. Details Mommsen’s helpfulness as a teacher and includes a portrait of his happy domestic life.

Thompson, James Westfall, and Bernard J. Holm. A History of Historical Writing. Vol. 2. New York: Macmillan, 1942. Contends that through mastery of scholarship and a scientific approach to evidence, Mommsen revolutionized the study of Roman history. Examines Mommsen’s elitist views and adulation of Caesar, dismissing their connection to German militarism and anti-Semitism. Includes a biographical sketch, a physical description, and a good bibliography.