Theodor Mommsen (1817 - 1903) was a German classical scholar, historian, jurist and politician, generally regarded as the greatest classicist of the nineteenth century. [1] He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1902 for his History of Rome, and his organisation of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum placed the study of antiquity on a systematic documentary footing. [2] He was also a liberal member of the Prussian and German parliaments.
Early life and education
Christian Matthias Theodor Mommsen was born on 30 November 1817 in Garding, in the Duchy of Schleswig, then under Danish rule, the son of a Protestant minister. [1] He was educated at the Christianeum in Altona and from 1838 studied jurisprudence at Kiel University, where he took his doctorate in Roman law in 1843. A travelling fellowship then took him to Italy, where he began the systematic collection of Latin inscriptions that would occupy much of his career. [3]
Politics and academic career
Mommsen worked as a journalist during the revolutions of 1848 and held a professorship at Leipzig, from which he was dismissed in 1851 for his political activity. [1] He then taught Roman law at Zurich and Breslau before being appointed professor of ancient history at the University of Berlin in 1858, a post he held for the rest of his life. He was also permanent secretary of the Prussian Academy of Sciences.
He served as a member of the Prussian House of Representatives and later of the German Reichstag, sitting with liberal parties and opposing Otto von Bismarck on economic and constitutional questions. [3] He also publicly opposed the antisemitic agitation of the 1880s, criticising the historian Heinrich von Treitschke in print.
Major work
Mommsen's Römische Geschichte, published in three volumes between 1854 and 1856, narrated Roman history to the end of the Republic. [2] Written in vigorous prose and shaped by the author's own liberal and nationalist convictions, it reached a wide readership far beyond the academy and was cited by the Swedish Academy when it awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1902, describing him as the greatest living master of the art of historical writing.
His scholarly influence rested equally on collective enterprises. From the 1850s he directed the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, an exhaustive edition of Latin inscriptions from across the Roman world that remains a foundation of ancient history. [4] He also produced authoritative works on Roman constitutional law, Römisches Staatsrecht, and Roman criminal law, edited the Theodosian Code and the writings of Jordanes and Cassiodorus, and made lasting contributions to numismatics and legal history. His total output ran to well over a thousand items.
Later life and legacy
Mommsen continued to write and organise research into old age, though a fire at his Charlottenburg home in 1880 destroyed part of his library and manuscripts. He was made an honorary citizen of Rome and received the order Pour le Mérite for Sciences and Arts. [1] He died in Charlottenburg, near Berlin, on 1 November 1903.
His approach, which treated inscriptions, coins, legal texts and literary sources as a single evidentiary system, defined the methods of modern ancient history. [2] The long-anticipated fourth volume of the History of Rome, covering the emperors, was never written, though lecture notes covering the imperial period were reconstructed and published in the twentieth century.
