Theodor Mommsen

• 1. Introduction

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  Theodor Mommsen stood up at a formal banquet at the University of Berlin in 1892, and the entire room rose with him. Mark Twain was there, seated at the head table among roughly twenty eminent professors, and he watched as the guards' swords leaped from their scabbards, as a wave of standing figures rolled down the hall, as beer mugs banged and voices shouted. No other guest had received that honor that night. Twain described it plainly: "Just simply a storm." The man at the center of it all was, in Twain's words, a little man with long hair and an Emersonian face, clothed in what Twain called a "titanic deceptive modesty" that made him look like everyone else. He was not a general or a statesman. He was a scholar of ancient Rome. So who was Theodor Mommsen, and how did a jurist from a small Danish-ruled town in Schleswig become the most celebrated classicist of his century, a Nobel Prize winner, and a figure who sparked political storms of his own?

• 2. From Schleswig to Rome

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  Christian Matthias Theodor Mommsen was born on the 30th of November 1817 in Garding, in the Duchy of Schleswig, at a time when that territory was governed by the king of Denmark. His father was a Lutheran minister, and both his parents had roots in Friesland. The family moved to Bad Oldesloe in Holstein, and much of his early education happened at home, with four years at the Gymnasium Christianeum in Altona. He received his diploma in 1837 after studying Greek and Latin. Money was tight enough that Göttingen was out of reach, so he enrolled instead at the University of Kiel, where he studied jurisprudence from 1838 to 1843 and finished with a doctorate in Roman law. His roommate at Kiel was Theodor Storm, who would later become a celebrated poet. The two, along with Mommsen's brother Tycho, even co-wrote a collection of poems titled Liederbuch dreier Freunde. It was his deep grounding in Roman law that pointed Mommsen toward ancient history, a field then still being carved out as its own discipline. A Danish royal grant allowed him to travel to France and Italy to study surviving classical Roman inscriptions in person. That fieldwork planted the seed for a project that would occupy him for the rest of his life.

• 3. Revolution and Exile

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  The year 1848 found Mommsen in Rendsburg, then still under Danish rule, working as a war correspondent and publicly backing the German annexation of Schleswig-Holstein along with constitutional reform. When the Danes forced him out, he moved quickly: he was appointed professor of law at the University of Leipzig that same year. His political instincts kept landing him in trouble. In 1851 he protested the new constitution of Saxony and had to resign his post. He spent time in exile before obtaining a professorship in Roman law at the University of Zurich. In 1854 he moved again, this time to the University of Breslau, where he met the scholar Jakob Bernays. By 1857 he had become a research professor at the Berlin Academy of Sciences. The Berlin appointment opened a long and settled chapter, though his life never became quiet. In 1861 he was named professor of Roman History at the University of Berlin, where he would lecture until 1887. The forced moves of the 1848-1854 period had paradoxically sharpened his scholarly range: jurisprudence, epigraphy, ancient history, and politics had all become part of the same intellectual project.

• 4. The Corpus and the Method

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  As early as 1852, when he published the inscriptions of the Neapolitan Kingdom, Mommsen was already thinking about a far larger ambition: a complete collection of every known ancient Latin inscription. He received training and encouragement from Bartolomeo Borghesi of San Marino. The result was the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, which would eventually run to seventeen volumes, the last of which came out in 1986. Fifteen of those volumes appeared in Mommsen's lifetime, and he personally prepared five of them. What separated this edition from earlier collections was a single methodological commitment Mommsen called autopsy: every modern transcription had to be checked directly against the original stone or surface, not merely copied from previous copies. That discipline, insisting on going back to the primary evidence rather than trusting a chain of reproductions, reshaped the practice of classical scholarship. Mommsen also edited two foundational texts of Roman law, the Corpus Iuris Civilis and the Codex Theodosianus. He helped guide the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, contributed to editions of the Church Fathers, and directed research into the limes romanus, the Roman frontier fortifications. For more than two decades, as secretary of the Historical-Philological Class at the Berlin Academy between 1874 and 1895, he organized these projects and many others, turning the Academy into a production center for scholarly editions. Then, on the 7th of July 1880, a fire broke out at two in the morning in the upper-floor library of his house at Marchstrasse 6 in Berlin. Mommsen was burned while trying to carry out papers before being pulled back. Several manuscripts were destroyed, among them Manuscript 0.4.36, on loan from Trinity College, Cambridge, and what appears to have been the important Jordanes manuscript from Heidelberg University library, plus manuscripts from Brussels and Halle.

• 5. Nobel Prize and Roman History

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  In 1902 Mommsen received the Nobel Prize in Literature, nominated by eighteen members of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. His main work cited was the Romische Geschichte, known in English as The History of Rome. He was, and remains, one of very few non-fiction writers to win that prize. The recognition had been accumulating for decades before Stockholm weighed in: foreign membership of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1859, the Prussian medal Pour le Merite in 1868, honorary citizenship of Rome, election to the American Antiquarian Society in 1870, and election to the American Philosophical Society in 1873. The Roman History left its mark well beyond classical scholarship. Alfred Thayer Mahan, the naval historian and theorist, developed the central argument of his major work The Influence of Sea Power Upon History while reading Mommsen's History of Rome. Bernard Shaw, a fellow Nobel Laureate, cited Mommsen's reading of Julius Caesar as one of the inspirations for his 1898 play Caesar and Cleopatra, which reached Broadway in 1905. And the playwright Heiner Muller wrote a performance text called Mommsens Block in 1993, taking as its starting point the publication of Mommsen's fragmentary notes on the later Roman Empire and the East German government's decision to replace a statue of Karl Marx outside the Humboldt University with one of Mommsen.

• 6. Politician and Contrarian

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  Mommsen served in the Prussian House of Representatives from 1863 to 1866 and again from 1873 to 1879. He then sat in the Reichstag from 1881 to 1884, moving between the German Progress Party, the National Liberal Party, and the Secessionists. He backed German Unification but grew disappointed with the direction of the empire afterward. In 1881 he clashed sharply with Otto von Bismarck over social policy, advising cooperation between Liberals and Social Democrats and using language strong enough that he narrowly escaped prosecution. When his colleague Heinrich von Treitschke launched a political campaign against Jews in 1879, the so-called Berliner Antisemitismusstreit, Mommsen responded with a pamphlet directly attacking Treitschke's views. His position was that antisemitism was a social problem to be answered through voluntary cultural assimilation, drawing a parallel to communities in Schleswig-Holstein, Hanover, and other German territories that had adjusted their distinct customs when joining Prussia. In 1890 he co-founded the Association for Combating Antisemitism, known as the Abwehrverein, a humanist group formed to publicly oppose the spread of antisemitism in Germany. His politics were not consistently liberal in the modern sense, however. He was a committed German nationalist who wrote with hostility toward Slavic peoples. In an 1897 letter to the Neue Freie Presse of Vienna, he referred to Czechs as "apostles of barbarism" and wrote that "the Czech skull is impervious to reason, but it is susceptible to blows." His record on questions of ethnic belonging was contradictory: a co-founder of an anti-antisemitism organization who also advocated violence against other minorities, a Liberal who never fully reconciled those positions.

• 7. Family and Legacy

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  Mommsen married Marie Auguste Reimer in 1854; she was the daughter of the Leipzig publisher and editor Karl Reimer, and they had sixteen children. Their oldest daughter Maria married the classical scholar Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff. Their grandson Theodor Ernst Mommsen, born in 1905 and died in 1958, became a professor of medieval history in the United States. Two great-grandsons, Hans Mommsen and Wolfgang Mommsen, continued the family's presence in German historical scholarship. The town of Garding in western Schleswig, where Mommsen was born, now styles itself "Mommsen-Stadt Garding." A Gymnasium in his hometown of Bad Oldesloe carries his name. His works on Roman law directly shaped the German civil code, a concrete institutional trace running from a 19th-century scholar's legal writing into modern German jurisprudence. The Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, the project he imagined in 1852 and drove for decades, continued to expand after his death on the 1st of November 1903, and its seventeenth volume appeared more than eighty years after he began the work.