Short answers, pulled from the story.
Barthold Georg Niebuhr was a Danish-German statesman, banker, and historian who lived from 1776 to 1831. He became Germany's leading historian of Ancient Rome and is regarded as a founding father of modern scholarly historiography for introducing scientific, critical methods to the study of ancient sources.
On his way to Rome in 1816, Niebuhr found the long-lost Institutes of Gaius in the cathedral library of Verona. He passed the discovery to the jurist Savigny, initially believing the text was a fragment of the Roman jurist Ulpian.
Römische Geschichte is Niebuhr's major work on Roman history. The first edition appeared in two volumes between 1811 and 1812. A substantially revised edition of the first two volumes was published between 1827 and 1828, and a third volume, edited by Johannes Classen, appeared posthumously in 1832.
Niebuhr spent a year in Edinburgh studying agriculture and physics in 1798. He later wrote that living in England gave him a key to understanding Roman history, explaining that direct observation of civil life was necessary to understand ancient states.
After resigning his position as ambassador to Rome in 1823, Niebuhr settled in Bonn, where he rewrote his Roman History and delivered lecture courses on ancient history, ethnography, geography, and the French Revolution. He remained in Bonn until his death on the 2nd of January 1831.
Travelling home from Italy, Niebuhr deciphered fragments of Flavius Merobaudes, a Roman poet of the fifth century, from a palimpsest at the Abbey of St. Gall. He also discovered and published fragments of Cicero and Livy during his time in Rome.