Barthold Georg Niebuhr

• 1. Introduction

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  Barthold Georg Niebuhr was born in Copenhagen on the 27th of August 1776, the son of Carsten Niebuhr, a prominent German geographer. He grew up to become a statesman, banker, and historian, eventually earning the title of Germany's leading historian of Ancient Rome. But the path from a diplomat's private secretary to a founder of modern scholarly historiography ran through banking crises, battlefield chaos, and a cathedral library in Verona where a lost ancient text had been hiding for centuries. What did a year spent farming in Edinburgh have to do with understanding Roman land law? How did a man who struggled to get along with his own government colleagues reshape the way the entire world reads the past? And who was the fifth-century Roman poet whose fragments Niebuhr found by chance in a Swiss monastery? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. A Scholar Before His Time

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  By 1794, the teenage Niebuhr had already become an accomplished classical scholar who read several languages. That year he entered the University of Kiel to study law and philosophy, and the friendships he formed there would follow him for decades. At Kiel he met Madame Hensler, the widowed daughter-in-law of one of the professors and six years his senior. Through her he came to know her sister, Amelie Behrens, who would later become his wife.

  In 1796, he left university life to become private secretary to the Danish finance minister, Count Schimmelmann. The posting lasted only two years before Niebuhr gave it up to spend a year in Great Britain, where he studied agriculture and physics in Edinburgh. That detour turned out to matter enormously for his later work. He reflected on it directly: "my early residence in England gave me one important key to Roman history. It is necessary to know civil life by personal observation in order to understand such states as those of antiquity." He added that he never could have understood certain aspects of Roman history without having first observed England.

  By 1799 he was back in Denmark, where he entered state service. In 1800 he married Amalie Behrens and settled in Copenhagen. Four years later, in 1804, he became chief director of the national bank, a post that placed him at the centre of Danish financial life. His first wife died in 1815; the following year he married Margarete Henslen, born in 1787, with whom he had one son named Marcus and three daughters.

• 3. Banker to Historian

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  In September 1806, Niebuhr left his Danish post for a similar appointment in Prussia, arriving on the eve of the catastrophe of Jena. That battle, a crushing defeat for Prussia against Napoleon's forces, proved to be the moment that forged much of what Niebuhr stood for. He accompanied the fugitive Prussian government to Königsberg and made himself useful in the commissariat, then served as commissioner of the national debt and worked to block poorly designed schemes of taxation.

  Prussia briefly sent him to the Netherlands as minister, where he tried without success to secure a loan. His temperament, which contemporaries described as extremely sensitive, made diplomatic life difficult. He clashed repeatedly with the statesman Hardenberg and other senior ministers. By 1810, he stepped back from public life and accepted what would prove to be the far more congenial appointment of royal historiographer and professor at the University of Berlin.

  His lectures at Berlin drew on his banking expertise in unexpected ways. His analysis of Roman economy and government fired German patriotism in his students, and he was seen as both a leader of the Romantic era and a symbol of the national spirit that emerged in the wake of Jena. He was also, in equal measure, a product of the Enlightenment: his methods depended on philological analysis and a careful attention to both general patterns and particular details in the historical record.

• 4. Rome Recovered

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  Niebuhr's Berlin lectures became the foundation for his great work Römische Geschichte, whose first edition in two volumes appeared between 1811 and 1812. The timing was poor: political upheaval meant the books attracted little attention on publication. By 1813, Niebuhr himself had been pulled back toward the conflict. He joined the Landwehr, the citizen militia raised against Napoleon, and tried without success to gain admission to the regular army. He edited a patriotic journal called the Prussian Correspondent, joined the headquarters of the allied sovereigns, and witnessed the battle of Bautzen in person. He also took part in minor negotiations as the war ground toward its end.

  After accepting the post of ambassador at Rome in 1816, Niebuhr made one of the great accidental discoveries in the history of scholarship. On his way to the city, he stopped at Verona and found in the cathedral library the long-lost Institutes of Gaius, a foundational Roman legal text. He passed the find along to the jurist Savigny, though initially under the mistaken belief that he had located a fragment of the Roman jurist Ulpian instead. Whether he was there by design or by coincidence remains disputed among scholars; the evidence, according to those who have studied the question, points toward a fortunate coincidence.

  His Roman residence yielded further recoveries. He discovered and published fragments of Cicero and Livy, and assisted Cardinal Mai in an edition of Cicero's De re publica. He also contributed chapters to Beschreibung Roms, the great topographical study of ancient Rome compiled by Christian Charles Josias Bunsen and Ernst Zacharias Platner. On a journey home from Italy, he stopped at the Abbey of St. Gall and deciphered fragments of Flavius Merobaudes, a Roman poet of the fifth century, from a palimpsest. As a diplomat, he brokered the understanding between Prussia and the Pope sealed by the bull De salute animarum in 1821. In 1822, he was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

• 5. Bonn and the Finished History

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  Niebuhr resigned the Rome posting in 1823 and settled at Bonn, where he spent the rest of his life apart from occasional visits to Berlin as councillor of state. At Bonn he rewrote the first two volumes of his Roman History substantially; the revised edition appeared between 1827 and 1828. He then composed a third volume, carrying the narrative down to the close of the First Punic War. That volume, together with a fragment he drafted in 1831, was edited after his death by Johannes Classen and published in 1832.

  Beyond the Roman History, Niebuhr contributed to August Bekker's edition of the Byzantine historians, known as the Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae. He also delivered lecture courses on ancient history, ethnography, geography, and the French Revolution. For his son Marcus he wrote Griechische Heroengeschichte, a history of Greek heroes first published in 1842, which eventually reached an eleventh edition by 1896.

  In February 1830, fire destroyed his house in Bonn, though most of his books and manuscripts survived. The French revolution of July that same year hit him hard. He regarded it as an omen of catastrophe for the future of Europe, and the anxiety it triggered darkened his final months. He died in Bonn on the 2nd of January 1831, aged fifty-four. A medal was commissioned in his honour in 1842.

• 6. A New Science of the Past

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  The Encyclopaedia Britannica's 1911 assessment, quoted by Leonhard Schmitz in his 1861 preface to the English version of Mommsen's History, captures the paradox at the centre of Niebuhr's reputation. Even if every positive conclusion he reached had been proved wrong, the text argued, his claim to be the first scholar who treated the ancient history of Rome in a scientific spirit would remain intact. His new principles, it insisted, would lose nothing of their importance.

  What were those principles? Niebuhr brought inference in to replace discredited tradition, and he demonstrated that history could be written even where original records were absent. His reading of the conflicts between the patricians and plebeians as rooted in original differences of race drew attention, for the first time in modern scholarship, to the importance of ethnological distinctions in historical analysis. More broadly, by treating laws, customs, and social structures as more significant than the legendary figures who supposedly created them, he pushed historiography toward what later generations would call the history of institutions. The influence of scientific racism on some of his theoretical moves has since been examined critically by later scholars.

  His practical influence on the transmission of ancient texts extended to the scholars who followed him. The first English translation of the Roman History was made by F. A. Walter in 1827, but it was quickly overtaken by the translation of the revised edition, produced by Julius Hare and Connop Thirlwall and completed by William Smith and Leonhard Schmitz; the last edition of that translation appeared between 1847 and 1851. The Institutes of Gaius that Niebuhr found in Verona and passed to Savigny became, once properly edited, one of the most studied legal texts of antiquity.