Theodor Mommsen

Theodor Mommsen: The Man Who Rebuilt Rome From Stone

In 1902 the Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature to a man who had never written a novel, a poem or a play. Theodor Mommsen was eighty-five — for more than a century the oldest laureate the prize had produced, the second winner in its history, and the first non-fiction writer ever to receive it. The citation called him "the greatest living master of the art of historical writing, with special reference to his monumental work A History of Rome." He had by then published something over 1,500 items. He was also a compromise.

A Minister's Son at Kiel

Mommsen was born on 30 November 1817 at Garding in Schleswig and raised at Bad Oldesloe, where his father was a Lutheran minister. He took Greek and Latin at the gymnasium in Altona and left with his diploma in 1837. The family could not afford a prestigious university, so he enrolled at Kiel to read jurisprudence, studying there from 1838 to 1843 and taking a doctorate in Roman law.

A Danish grant then did more for European scholarship than any curriculum could have. It sent him to France and Italy to examine surviving Roman inscriptions in person — and the habit he formed there, of going to the stone rather than trusting somebody's transcription of it, became the founding principle of his life's work.

Exile by Constitution

The revolutions of 1848 caught him working as a war correspondent and siding with the monarchists. He was made a professor of law at Leipzig that year, and lost the post: in 1851 he protested against Saxony's new constitution and had to resign, going into temporary exile. Zurich took him in 1852, Breslau in 1854, the Berlin Academy in 1857, and in 1861 he became professor of Roman history at Berlin, where he lectured until 1887. He married Marie, daughter of the Leipzig editor Karl Reimer, and they had sixteen children, several of whom died young. Two great-grandsons, Hans and Wolfgang Mommsen, became eminent historians of Germany in their own right.

The History of Rome

*Römische Geschichte* appeared in three volumes between 1854 and 1856 and carried the story from the beginning to Julius Caesar. It was, and is, unlike other scholarship: Mommsen wrote about the late Republic as though reporting on a living political crisis, examining Rome across its political, legal, economic, cultural, geographical and even meteorological dimensions, and refusing the antiquarian's reverent distance. The Academy in 1902 praised the writing as "vivid and empathetic." G. P. Gooch, in 1913, singled out "its sureness of touch, its many-sided knowledge, its throbbing vitality." Arnold Toynbee in 1934 simply called it "a great book" and put it among the masterpieces of Western historical literature.

The fourth volume, on the Empire, never came. It is the most famous gap in modern historiography. What survives are his lecture notes, reconstructed and published in 1992 as *A History of Rome Under the Emperors*, nearly ninety years after his death. Volume five, *The Provinces of the Roman Empire from Caesar to Diocletian*, did appear, in 1885.

Every Latin Inscription in the World

His larger monument is not a book but a machine. Mommsen conceived and led the *Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum*, the systematic collection of every known Latin inscription — sixteen volumes, fifteen of them published in his lifetime, five written by Mommsen himself, and the enterprise continuing long after him. Its governing rule was *autopsy*: see it yourself. He effectively founded epigraphy as a discipline and, with it, a new evidentiary basis for ancient history, one built from tax records, tombstones and boundary markers rather than from the surviving literary authors.

Alongside it he produced *Römisches Staatsrecht*, the three-volume systematic account of Roman constitutional law (1871–1888), foundational for everything since; authoritative work on Roman criminal law and coinage; and editions of the *Corpus Iuris Civilis* and the *Codex Theodosianus*. His Roman law writing fed directly into the drafting of the German civil code.

At two in the morning on 7 July 1880, fire tore through his upper-floor workroom-library at Marchstraße 6 in Berlin. Manuscripts borrowed from Trinity College, Cambridge, from Brussels and from Halle were destroyed, possibly including a Jordanes text from Heidelberg. He kept working.

The Politician

Mommsen sat in the Prussian House of Representatives from 1863 to 1866 and again from 1873 to 1879, and in the Reichstag from 1881 to 1884, passing through the Progress Party, the National Liberals and the Secessionists, concentrating on scientific and educational policy and growing steadily more pessimistic about the German Empire's future. In 1881 he attacked Bismarck over social policy in language strong enough that he narrowly avoided prosecution.

His finest political hour came in 1879. When the historian Heinrich von Treitschke opened a campaign against Germany's Jews, Mommsen answered with a harsh public pamphlet, and in 1890 he helped found the Association for Combating Antisemitism. His proposed remedy — the voluntary cultural assimilation of Jews — has aged poorly, but the willingness of Germany's most decorated scholar to break publicly with a colleague over antisemitism, in 1879, has not.

Why Theodor Is Called a Genius

The quality is a rare double: an archivist's appetite for the smallest verifiable fragment combined with a narrative writer's nerve. Almost nobody has both. Mommsen could spend years collating tombstone abbreviations and then write a history of the Republic that reads like political journalism — which is precisely why a literature prize went to a historian. The Academy's words were "the greatest living master of the art of historical writing"; Toynbee's were "a great book" among the masterpieces of the West. He built the evidentiary infrastructure that all later Roman history stands on, and he made the field readable in the same career.

The counter-case has three parts, all serious. First, the prize itself was a fudge. Mommsen was launched as a compromise candidate after the Academy's secretary Carl David af Wirsén blocked Tolstoy — whose views were judged too anarchistic — and Ibsen, judged too radical. The Swedish professor Johan Bergman called it "a flagrant injustice" that year. Second, the *History of Rome*'s liveliness came at a price: critics dismissed parts of it as journalism, and Egon Friedell argued in 1931 that Mommsen simply imported the nineteenth century into the first century BC, casting Crassus as a speculator out of the reign of Louis Philippe and the Gracchi as socialist leaders. His contempt for the Senate and for Cicero, and his frank hero-worship of Caesar, are the politics of a disappointed 1848 liberal projected backwards. Third, and least excusable: he was a violent German nationalist who took a militant line toward the Slavic nations. The man who fought Treitschke over the Jews had his own list.

Legacy

Mommsen died on 1 November 1903, a year after the Nobel. The *Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum* he began in the 1860s was still being published in 1959 and remains the indispensable reference for anyone working on the Roman world. His constitutional law is still cited; his Caesar reached the general public through George Bernard Shaw's *Caesar and Cleopatra*. What he did, ultimately, was change what counted as evidence about the ancient world — and then prove that scholarship built on scraps of stone could be written well enough to win a prize for literature.

Achievements

• Nobel Prize in Literature — 1902
• Notable work: The History of Rome
• Notable work: Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum