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CHAPTER 6 Theodor Mommsen’s History of Rome and Its Political and Intellectual Context
Stefan Rebenich
(Translated from German by Antonina Kalinina)
6.1 British Receptions
When Theodor Mommsen travelled to Oxford in the autumn of 1886 to inspect some manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, he paid a visit to his British colleague, William Warde Fowler, at Lincoln College. The then-Rector of the college, William W. Merry, a classical scholar himself, used the occasion of a dinner to let his German guest know that he did not at all appreciate the censorious image of Euripides found in The History of Rome. Mommsen objected: ‘If I were to write that passage again now, I should put it still more strongly’ (Fowler [1909] 1920: 251). Fowler himself emphasised in retrospect ‘the force of his convictions’ and ‘the strength of his language’ and concluded: ‘The audacity of some of his judgements of men and institutions almost paralysed criticism, and we have only begun in recent years to shake ourselves free from the spell he laid upon us’ (Fowler [1909] 1920: 259). Indeed, Mommsen’s contemporaries read The History of Rome and suffered together with his protagonists. The intellectual brilliance of his arguments and the one-sidedness of his judgements fascinated, tormented and appalled them.
Mommsen’s The History of Rome was also known, and influential, in England. In his obituary of Mommsen, published in 1903, Francis W. Haverfield wrote: ‘The success of the work was immediate. Within ten years it had been translated into almost every European language, and it has since dominated the schools’ (Haverfield 1904: 85). The work was, and still is, a success worldwide. It has been translated, completely or in part, into Danish, English, French, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Hungarian, Rumanian, Russian and Spanish (see Zangemeister 2000: 283–290). There are many special editions and the text of The History of Rome is available both on a CD and on the internet.
As early as the original three-volume edition, published between 1854 and 1856 by the Weidmannsche Buchandlung in Leipzig, it had become well known in the English-speaking world. In April 1862, The Edinburgh Review wrote categorically: ‘This is the best history of the Roman Republic.’ The author (G. Smith) continued with a panegyric to Mommsen who ‘may occasionally expose himself to the charge of dogmatism, of paradox, of a somewhat Caesarean morality, of a tendency to quiz and sneer which is out of place and contrary to good taste. But, taking his work as a whole, his complete mastery of the subject, the variety of his gifts and acquirements as an ethnologist, a comparative philologist and a historian, his graphic power in the delineation of national and individual character, the boldness and freedom from the trammels of conventional views with which he treats history both in the mass and in the detail, his vigour and coherency in narration and the vivid interest which he inspires in every portion of the book, he is, we venture to pronounce, without an equal in his own sphere’ (The Edinburgh Review 115, No. 234, April 1862: 224). Other readers, too, were full of praise and even spoke of ‘the best complete Roman history in existence’, and expressed their joy that the book ‘is far easier and more pleasant to read than many of the productions of his learned fellow-countrymen’ (E.A. Freeman in The National Review 8, January–April 1859: 317). The German historian was compared to Edward Gibbon, Thomas Babington Macaulay and George Grote. According to these reviews, with his three volumes of The History of Rome, Theodor Mommsen had created an historiographical masterpiece, a work of enormous importance. The theologian William P. Dickson, later the Professor of Divinity of the University of Glasgow, produced an English translation in several volumes after 1862, which kept generations of readers under its spell. It was often praised as ‘clear and readable’, although at times also criticised for following the German original too literally (The London Review and Weekly Journal of Politics, Literature, Art, & Society 4.95, 26 April 1862: 395). His rendering of the fifth volume of The History of Rome dealing with ‘The Provinces of the Roman Empire from Caesar to Diocletian’ was published in 1886. Shortly afterwards, Dickson was blamed for having ‘apparently proceeded upon the worst principles a translator could set before him, of taking as little trouble as possible, and of running his so-called English sentences too often in the mould of the original. His preface reads like a profession of incompetence, and it is much to be regretted that so powerful a writer as Mommsen should not have found a translator whose English was to be compared with the German original’ (The Literary World: A Monthly Review of Current Literature 18.8, 1887: 118).
6.2 Historiographie engagée
In Germany, it all had started with a scandal. Theodor Mommsen’s History of Rome, published when he was not even 40 years old, had shocked many contemporaries. They spoke of a ‘lack of tranquility and dignity’, or ‘of the newspaper style at its worst’ (cf. 1968: 112ff.). But some 50 years later, in December 1902, its author received the Nobel Prize in literature, becoming the first German to do so. What is The History of Rome about and what were the causes of its amazing success?
The subject of the book is the political history of Rome, from its early beginnings to Caesar’s