was not a goal in itself but a means of political instruction to which he ultimately sacrificed even scholarship. By effectively transferring the standpoint of modern party politics to Roman history, Mommsen confirmed Nietzsche’s verdict: ‘people have always endeavoured to understand antiquity by means of the present’ (Nietzsche 1911: 113). The History of Rome is a tendentious history. But that is precisely why it became such an enormous success – in every country where it was read. On its own, the book would not have become a classic were it not written so brilliantly and if it did not fill an empty niche in the book market. The three-volume History of Rome (1811–1832) by Barthold Georg Niebuhr was extremely learned but unreadable – a quality acknowledged by British reviewers as well. Mommsen, unlike his erudite predecessor, learned to write in a newspaper’s editorial office. His model was the English autodidact Edward Gibbon, whose magnum opus, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1788) defended, with the pathos of the Enlightenment, the heretical thesis that Christianity was the main culprit for the fall of the Roman empire. Mommsen also gave a clear structure to the enormous mass of his material, and defended a provocative thesis, told his stories in a lively and witty manner and, moreover, possessed a significantly stronger grasp of the sources and scholarly literature. Nevertheless, Mommsen was in awe of Gibbon’s literary mastery. He did not compete with Gibbon: his history of the Roman imperial period remained unwritten.
The History of Rome owes its existence to two factors. First, the publishers Karl Reimer and Salomon Hirzel, owners of the Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, showed an acute intuition for the right topic and the right author. Furthermore, because of the political vicissitudes of the era, the author had, against his own will, the free time necessary to write down his ideas. Since he was fired for political reasons, the Saxonian professor, whose future was unclear and who was worried about making a living, was forced to accelerate the pace of his project while still in Leipzig. Even after he received the call to the chair at Zurich, negotiations with the Berlin Academy about founding a comprehensive corpus of Latin inscriptions were moving forward quite slowly, so that Mommsen still had time to focus on his manuscript.
At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, to write like Mommsen was the desire of quite a few historians with literary ambitions. No one was able to do it. The 1902 Nobel Prize made the work immortal. Mommsen became a Nobel Laureate in Literature at the moment when the literature of the fin-de-siècle had long ago said farewell to the poetological and narrative principles that were shared by The History of Rome and the novels of its time, and had turned instead to experiments with symbolic and naturalistic techniques. The Nobel Prize committee decided to honour a work of the past because the book’s emphasis on progress, and its political message, appealed to it. At that point, one read The History of Rome as a plea for an enlightened absolutism that would overcome untrammelled despotism. Furthermore, the circumstances of the vote were favourable, too. The committee asked the Berlin Academy for help in nominating possible candidates and thus Adolf Harnack, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and other influential scholars brought Mommsen’s name into play. The 85-year-old Laureate described the prize, that equalled more than 150,000 Marks, as a lottery win.
6.4 Historiography and Altertumswissenschaft
The author of The History of Rome who was honoured in 1902 had long since turned away from historiography. In 1874, at the pinnacle of his academic fame, Mommsen radically separated the writing of history from historical research. In Berlin, mainly through his work at the Academy of Sciences of which he became a member in 1857, Mommsen put classical scholarship on a new foundation. He organised the work on the ‘Archives of the Past’ (Archive der Vergangenheit) by institutionalising the philological method for historical research and advocated a new program, the Totalitätsideal, in order to reconstruct ancient, and in particular Roman, history. Following the tradition of Friedrich August Wolf and August Böckh, Mommsen took into consideration not just textual sources, but the wide array of material surviving from antiquity. New giant collective enterprises encompassed the entire spectrum of ancient evidence. Through scholarly efforts on an entirely unprecedented scale, ancient sources were collected, catalogued and edited: literary texts, inscriptions, papyri, coins and archaeological remains. Mommsen was not only a brilliant researcher, but also a talented organiser who successfully applied the principles of a factory-like division of labour to scholarship (cf. Rebenich 2009; Kahlert 2017). He passionately pursued these goals and maintained his belief in scientific progress until the very end.
Theodor Mommsen outlined a new route for scholarship: the complete historicising of antiquity; it had nothing in common with either the classicist exaltation or the neohumanist idealisation of antiquity. Wolf and Böckh had never left any space for doubt that the culture of the Greeks and the Romans was the foundation of all learning. Such a view of antiquity as the norm was quite alien to Mommsen. His modern realism attempted to put an end to placing Greeks and Romans on a pedestal – an educational vision to which the German educated middle-class was so attached. He started to see his task more and more as one of organising scholarly work. From now on, his attention was focused only on research that ‘led to a clear knowledge of the real events’ (Mommsen 1905: 10). Instead of a history of the Roman imperial era, he wrote the Roman Constitutional Law (Römisches Staatsrecht), and put legal systematics in place of a historical narrative. Mommsen’s scholarly opus magnum consists of three volumes in five tomes, and amounts to more than five thousand pages. The first volume appeared in 1871. A second and a third edition of the first two volumes followed quickly. In 1888, the work was completed.
In countless papers, he sought to advance historical understanding of Roman antiquity through the acquisition of comprehensive knowledge and meticulous criticism of the sources. No speculations were allowed, positive knowledge was a requirement. Mommsen relied on the power of the historical-critical method and promoted huge collective projects that were supposed to unravel the entire legacy of antiquity. The tiniest fragment was considered worth collecting, as it could become a potential clue for a future discovery. The impact of an individual researcher was therefore radically relativised, as Mommsen made clear in his speech at the Leibniz day of 1895: ‘Our work is not there to glorify a master, and no master’s eye rejoices when looking at it, as it has no master: we are all only journeymen. […] We do not complain, and do not begrudge our lot: the bloom shall fade to give way to the fruit. The best of us, however, feel that we have become experts’ (Mommsen 1905: 196–198).
What did that Mommsen, the Mommsen of great scholarly projects and of intellectual renunciation, think of his own History of Rome? He used to joke about the natural freedom or impertinence of a young author, and in the same breath to complain that the ‘sacred reverie of youth’ was gone and that the ‘divine immodesty’ had left him (cf. 1905–1913, vol. 4: 156–158, here 168). However, he remained faithful to the love of his youth. It was even in later years that the apotheosis of Caesar was brought to fruition by means of source criticism and research on constitutional law. When, in his Berlin days, he was occupied with textual problems of Caesar’s Bellum Gallicum, legal tensions between Caesar and the Senate in 49 bce, and the military system built by Caesar, he left no room for doubt that Caesar’s Realpolitik was superior – not just from a political, but also from a moral point of view. Caesar represented the people – and even more: his steering of the res publica was guided by the people’s sovereignty, and he acted in the interests of the people both in his internal and external politics. Thus, according to ‘history’s court of appeal’, the dictator Caesar received a much more favourable judgement than the emperor Augustus (‘Das Militärsystem Caesars’ [1877] = Mommsen 1905–1913, vol. 4: 156–158, here 168).
In the lectures that Mommsen delivered at the University of Berlin in front of large audiences, he also celebrated his Caesar. In his view, the dictator wanted to found his world rule on the harmonisation of language and culture, and was thus ahead of his time: ‘Caesar’s idea – global in scale, like all his ideas – was to Romanise the entire Empire from the Atlantic Ocean to the Euphrates. This idea was never abandoned; it was maintained throughout the entire imperial age. Caesar’s ideas were far more of a legacy to posterity than those of Napoleon, for example’ (Mommsen 1996: 180).