(Christian Matthias) Theodor Mommsen - Life, Scientific Works, Mommsen as scientific editor and organiser, Mommsen as politician, Trivia

Historian, born in Garding, N Germany. He studied jurisprudence at Kiel, examined Roman inscriptions in France and Italy for the Berlin Academy (1844–7), and held a chair of law at Leipzig (1848–50). In 1852 he became professor of Roman law at Zürich, in 1854 at Wroc?aw, Poland (formerly Breslau, Prussia), and in 1858 professor of ancient history at Berlin. He edited the monumental Corpus inscriptionum Latinarum, helped to edit the Monumenta Germaniae historica, and from 1873–95 was permanent secretary of the Academy. In 1882 he was tried and acquitted on a charge of slandering Bismarck in an election speech. His greatest works remain his History of Rome (3 vols, 1854–5) and The Roman Provinces (1885) (trans titles). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1902.

Christian Matthias Theodor Mommsen (30 November 1817–1 November 1903) was a German classical scholar, jurist and historian, generally regarded as the greatest classicist of the 19th century. His works on Roman law and on the law of obligations had a significant impact on the German civil code (BGB).

Life

Mommsen was born in Garding in Schleswig as a son of a poor minister.

Mommsen studied jurisprudence at the University of Kiel (Holstein) from 1838 to 1843. During the revolution of 1848, Mommsen worked as a correspondent in Rendsburg, supporting the annexation of Schleswig-Holstein and constitutional reform. When Mommsen protested the new constitution of Saxony in 1851, he had to resign. Mommsen became a research professor at the Berlin Academy of Sciences in 1857.

In 1858 Mommsen was appointed as a member of the Academy of Sciences in Berlin, and he also became professor of Roman History at the University of Berlin in 1861, where he held lectures up to 1887. Mommsen received high recognition for his scientific achievements: the medal Pour le Mérite in 1868, honorary citizenship of Rome, and the Nobel prize for literature in 1902 for his main work Römische Geschichte (Roman History). Mommsen had sixteen children with his wife Marie (daughter of the editor Karl Reimer from Leipzig), some of whom died at young age.

Mommsen worked hard.

Scientific Works

Mommsen published hundreds of works - a 1905 bibliography lists over 1,000 items - and effectively established a new framework for the systematic study of Roman history. Although the unfinished History of Rome has been widely considered as his main work, the work most relevant today is perhaps the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, a collection of Roman inscriptions he contributed to the Berlin Academy.

History of Rome: Mommsen's most famous work appeared in three volumes between 1854 and 1856, and exposed Roman history up to the end of the Roman republic and the rule of Julius Caesar, whom Mommsen portrayed as a gifted statesman. Mommsen never wrote a continuation of his Roman history to incorporate the imperial period. In 1885 a presentation of the Roman provinces in the imperial period appeared as volume 5 of Roman History (The Provinces of the Roman Empire from Caesar to Diocletian). Roman Constitutional Law: (1871-1888) This systematic treatment of Roman constitutional law in three volumes has been of importance for research on ancient history.

Mommsen as scientific editor and organiser

While he was secretary of the Historical-Philological Class at the Berlin Academy (1874-1895), Mommsen organised countless scientific projects, mostly editions of original sources.

Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum

At the beginning of his scientific career, Mommsen already envisioned a collection of all known ancient Latin inscriptions when he published the inscriptions of the Neapolitan Kingdom (1852). Fifteen of them appeared in Mommsen's lifetime and he wrote five of them himself.

Further editions and research projects

Mommsen also published the fundamental collections in Roman law: the Corpus Iuris Civilis and the Codex Theodosianus.

Mommsen as politician

Mommsen was a delegate to the Prussian Landtag in 1863-1866 and again in 1873-1879, and delegate to the Reichstag in 1881-1884, at first for the liberal German Progress Party (Deutsche Fortschrittspartei), later for the National Liberal Party (Nationalliberalen), and finally for the Secessionists.

In 1881 Mommsen strongly disagreed with Bismarck about social policies in 1881. In 1879 his colleague Heinrich von Treitschke (the so-called 'Berliner Antisemitismusstreit') begun a political campaign against Jews and Mommsen criticized him sharply in public.

Trivia

Mommsen was both the oldest person to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature and the first-born laureate;

Fellow Nobel Laureate (1925) Bernard Shaw cited Mommsen's interpretation of the last First Consul of the Republic, Julius Caesar, as one of the inspirations for his 1898 (1905 on Broadway) play, "Caesar and Cleopatra."