Theodor Mommsen

THE conditions of human life vouchsafe an immortality of personal fame to every great artist, but the scholar’s portion is usually to be forgotten ; he builds his share of the City of Knowledge, proud if they who come after him carry on the work along his lines, content if they tear down what he has done, and use for a fairer building the stones which he has quarried. For a few brief years after his death the fragrance of his personality may linger, the impact of the whole man may still be felt, but slowly he will pass over into the long list of scholars known only to scholars, and even to most of them only by name. We must needs remind ourselves of these things because they are truths which we are apt to forget in the presence of an individual case, truths which we are only too ready to doubt in the fullness of our present knowledge. And yet, if they are true, a great scholar’s life when it is completed deserves an immediate study before the color has faded from the sunset sky. It is safe to say that none of us will ever again see the like of Theodor Mommsen, and the elements of the scholar’s life which we may study elsewhere, piecing them together, here a bit and there a bit, are found combined in him, and writ so large that even the most unsympathetic must be impressed by them.

Christian Matthias Theodor Mommsen was born November 30, 1817, at Garding, a small village in SchleswigHolstein, not far from the North Sea. It was not without result that his earliest years were passed in the borderland of Germany, in a province whose heart was with Germany, but whose land was then reckoned a part of Denmark, in the years when the reaction from Napoleon was setting in, and the German national feeling was springing into life. Up to the age of seventeen he lived with his parents in company with his two younger brothers, Tycho (born 1819), afterwards known for his work on Pindar and Horace, and August (born 1821), whose reputation rests principally on his studies in Greek and Roman chronology. After spending five years at the Gymnasium at Altona (near Hamburg), he matriculated in 1838, aged twenty-one, at the University of Kiel. There he studied for another five years, attaining his Doctorate of Philosophy in 1843 with a modest treatise on a subject connected with Roman Law, the forerunner of so many hundreds of monographs from his pen. In the following year he obtained a traveling fellowship, which enabled him to pursue his studies in Italy. He spent there the years 1843—47. These Wanderjahre were a time of wonderful development for the young Mommsen. He made the acquaintance of the great Borghese, the most famous authority of his day on Roman Inscriptions. Subsequently (in 1852) the dedication of Mommsen’s first great work, the Inscriptions of the Kingdom of Naples, to Borghese, “ Magistro, Patrono, Amico,” bears tribute to these years. The thirty-year-old student was already looking far into the future, for in the last year of the Italian stay (1847) he published a Plan for a Corpus of Latin Inscriptions. As early as 1844 the famous jurist Savigny had proposed to the Berlin Academy that Mommsen be put in charge of the Collection of Roman Inscriptions which the Academy proposed to publish. But when Mommsen’s ideas had been explained to them they feared the expense and favored a rival claimant, a certain Zumpt, who proposed an economical (and worthless) rehashing of existing printed collections, whereas Mommsen demanded that the original stones be sought for again and recopied. It took Mommsen a year to establish his point, and he was compelled to give tangible proof of it in his Inscriptions of the Kingdom of Naples, published independently, before he was eventually put in charge of the undertaking.

It is characteristic of the man that even in the midst of this scholastic work in the congenial surroundings of Italy his ear should not have been deaf to the call of his fatherland. Christian VIII of Denmark had begun to threaten the liberty of Schleswig-Holstein, and Mommsen the epigraphist became apparently lost temporarily in Mommsen the patriot. With his wonted energy he not only returned to Schleswig-Holstein, but became the editor of a political paper in Rendsburg. In the nature of things his work there came to an end in the early months of 1848, when Friedrich VII succeeded Christian VIII, Denmark became a constitutional monarchy, and the war of the Duchies began. And so in 1848 the editor of the SchleswigHolsteinische Zeitung became the Professor of Roman Law in the University of Leipsic. It need not surprise us that in this same year the ex-editor, now professor, should publish a learned work on Roman surveying, nor that in the following year his political interests, invoking his sympathy with Prussia, should have made him so hostile to the Saxon authorities that he was compelled to resign his professorship and seek refuge in hospitable Switzerland. Nothing daunted by his voluntary exile, he accepted a professorship at the University of Zurich in 1852, and made the most of his opportunities. These were the years in which he was quietly working on his Roman History ; but alongside of this he found time to turn his environment to a profitable use, writing the admirable article on Switzerland in Roman Times, and publishing a collection of the Latin inscriptions found in Switzerland. These small articles are characteristic of the man’s ever present consciousness of environment and his sympathetic touch with it. In 1854 his Roman History began to appear, and at the same time he was transferred from Zurich to Breslau, again as Professor of Roman Law. The success of the Roman History was phenomenal, and in less than a decade it had been translated into most of the European languages. It was largely owing to the success of the book that he was called to Berlin in 1858 to a professorship of Ancient History.

In the year of his coming to Berlin falls the publication of his Roman Chronology, a work which, altogether aside from its historical value, is of peculiar personal interest because it was largely inspired by the writings of his brother August, and was written in opposition to his theories. The preface gives a frank statement of the case, and combines in a rare degree personal sympathy and admiration for “ brother August ” and reckless objective criticism of the theories of “ A. Mommsen,” ending with a prayer to the reader not to confuse the two standpoints. “ If future biographers shall repeat in connection with this controversy the note in the list of the Roman Consuls, ‘ Hei fratres gemini fuerunt,’ let them do so unhindered. But those who wish to know the truth in the matter will, I hope, convince themselves that the personal element does not enter into the discussion.” We can only wish that the same distinction of person and thing had characterized all his subsequent expression of opinion in other connections.

From 1858 on, except for one short interval, his home was in Berlin ; and, for most of these forty-five years till his death, in the modest little house in Charlottenburg where he died. During this almost half-century his scholarly activity continued unbroken up to within a few days of his death, for it would be a great error to consider that his outside interests, notably his political life, in any wise interfered with his literary activity. The two proceeded side by side, each inevitably bound up with tlie other. In 1863 the first volume of Corpus of Latin Inscriptions appeared, his own work, in preparation for which he had been planning and toiling for almost twenty years. In the following year came the first of his two volumes of monographs on Roman History. Seven years later the Roman Constitutional Law appeared, a stupendous undertaking, as technical and erudite as the Roman History was popular and simple. Events were moving rapidly for him in these years. In 1872 he founded a periodical devoted to the Science of Inscriptions, — a sort of lightweight cavalry troop, preceding the slow moving infantry of the Corpus. In the following year he was made Perpetual Secretary of the Berlin Academy, and at the same time a member of the Prussian House of Representatives. Until 1882 he continued a member of the Prussian Diet, identifying himself with the Liberal party, and more particularly with that portion of it which stood aloof from Socialism. In these years following the Franco-Prussian war all eyes were turned on Bismarck. Mommsen’s attitude here was one of intense hostility. He saw in Bismarck not the man who had given unity to Germany, Mommsen’s own ideal, but merely the triumphant aristocrat with whom he could have no sympathy. His hostility led him so far as to speak of Bismarck’s policy as a “ swindle.” He was brought to trial for his words, and though he was ultimately acquitted by the Court of Appeals, it was in a sense the end of his active political life.

However, during the decade (1873— 82) the scholar was not forgotten in the politician. In 1877, on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, a memorial album was published in his honor by his friends and pupils. Six different languages are used as the medium of expression, and almost every branch of the study of antiquity is represented. In return Mommsen sent to each of the contributors a little volume entitled “ Roman History by Theodor Mommsen: Volume IV,” — a reference to the famous fourth volume of his History, which has never appeared. It was inscribed with this motto : —

The book contained merely a reprint of a small article published in Hermes some time before. But while the fourth volume was never written, Volume V, the History of the Roman Provinces under the Empire, appeared in 1885. A great multitude of short articles and many revisions of already published works helped to fill up the next fourteen years. But his main occupation during this time was the preparation of the work on Roman Criminal Law, which appeared in 1899, — a closely printed book of over a thousand pages, crowded with references, and accompanied by all the paraphernalia of scholarship, published by this wonderful old gentleman in his eighty-second year. It is hardly necessary to add that this was his last large book, although he continued to publish articles until the end, and was at work on the Lives of the Roman Emperors when death stopped his busy pen, which had been writing for threescore years.

Mommsen’s biography is more than a bibliography, for, wonderful as were his works, he was more man than book. We instinctively apply to him his own words : “ Each one must specialize in one branch of learning, but not shut himself up in it. How miserable and small is the world in the eyes of the man who sees in it only Greek and Latin authors or mathematical problems ! ” There was no danger of this in his case, for in him were combined the man of books, the man of letters, the man of the state, and the man of the world. Scholarship, letters, and politics were all united in an unforgettable personality. Personally he was a curious combination of the ascetic savant and the man of the world; rising at five to drink a cup of cold coffee to begin his work, so absent-minded that he failed to recognize his own children on the street, so helpless that he put his crying baby in a scrap-basket and covered it with papers to deaden the noise, so absorbed that he set his hair on fire while looking for a book, — and yet alongside of this, the social favorite, a perfect dinner companion, fond of dining out and of entertaining. It is perhaps foolhardy at this early date to try to estimate the value of his life, and to appraise his worth along the various lines of activity which he pursued, and yet already certain great facts are evident.

With that curious fallacy of self-estimation of which history brings so many instances in the case of great men, Mommsen possibly set more store by his political work than by his scholarship or his letters, and probably he would rather go down in history as a great statesman than as a great scholar. Certainly in the last twenty years of his life the one drop of bitterness in his cup of joy was his lack of political power and influence. He cast longing eyes away from the honors of scholarship heaped at his feet to the laurels of the statesman which were being decreed to others. It is true that those who knew him cannot conceive of him other than he was, and Mommsen without the political instinct would be a riddle beyond solution. His political interests are absolutely essential to his life; out of them much that is otherwise a puzzle may be explained, and his greatest and most popular work owes its greatness and popularity alike to them. It was no affectation, but the necessary expression of the whole man because he was a whole man. He never exchanged living citizenship in the present in return for the doubtful honor of being more at home in the ancient world than in the modern. His studies never brought with them that paralyzing conviction of the cyclic movement in history and the vanity of present endeavor. From the stirring year of 1843 on, when his sympathy for Schleswig-Holstein’s liberty led him to seek Prussia, for sixty years he continued a German and a Prussian, — a valiant fighter for the liberty of the individual and the unity of the German people. He was devoid at once of all self-seeking and all fear. In 1850, with Haupt and Jahn, he lost his professorship at Leipsic in his defiance of Saxony ; and what the youth of 1850 dared then, the old man of 1882 dared in his defiance of Bismarck. But, after all, it was Mommsen the scholar that lent dignity to Mommsen the politician. His vehemence of expression, which merely quickens our attention when it is turned against Cicero, makes us move uneasily when it strikes Bismarck, or the French, or the English. Especially in his later years he spoke with a freedom which the world loved, because it was the grand old man who spoke, and the world felt honored that he should speak of it at all; but his was never the sane, equable speech of the calm, deliberate statesman. However, just as little as we could afford to lose the touch of the born statesman Gladstone writing on the Homeric problem, just so little could we afford to lose the sight of the born scholar Mommsen attacking Bismarck. Homer and Bismarck were not much injured, while Gladstone and Mommsen gained infinitely. The eye which saw so clearly the Cæsar of two thousand years ago was holden that it could not see the Cæsar of his own day. Whatever his political errors and indiscretion may have been, in at least two points he was a rock of strength, — in his opposition to the fatuous anti - Semitic movement in recent years, and in his championship of academic freedom.

But the man who failed to be in politics all he desired to be, succeeded in scholarship and in literature beyond his highest expectations. He was certainly the greatest scholar of our time, and in point of toilsome erudition turned into knowledge, it is doubtful if the world has ever seen his superior. To Mommsen, history and jurisprudence were inseparably combined, but any estimate of him must distinguish between the two fields, because, great as were his deserts in both, he accomplished a very different thing in one case than in the other. At the time when Mommsen turned to the study of Roman jurisprudence, private law had been rescued from the philologists by Savigny and his predecessors, but public law was still in the grasp of men who cared more about history than law, and more about literature than both law and history. It was fortunate that Mommsen’s early training had taught him more of law than the average philologist knew, and that he was not a philologist attacking the study of law, but an out-and-out jurist, philologically trained. The result was that he accomplished what neither jurists nor philologists before him had been able to do, — namely, he presented Roman law as a lawyer would present it, but with the philological knowledge which a lawyer would ordinarily lack. His treatment marks, therefore, a distinct advance both in method and in knowledge : in method, because the subject was treated as jurisprudence, not as philology demanded; in knowledge, because the philologist found new material, which had hitherto escaped the jurists.

Many men go into the vineyards of history and gather the grapes, many others press out the wine, but there are few who do both, as Mommsen did. There is hardly a source of Roman history where he has not been at work at some time in his busy life, improving texts, arranging chronology, pointing out parallels, explaining allusions. The largest source of all, the material in inscriptions, has been so widened and clarified by his life work on the Corpus of Latin Inscriptions that it has become almost a new field. Of course there were many collaborators; that very fact redounds to his credit, partly because he was one of the greatest exponents of the coöperative method in scholarship, and partly because the presence of these collaborators, while it made the task feasible, by no means removed many of its difficulties. The ability to pick the best men, to gain their coöperation, and to keep them at the height of their output, and their output at its highest quality, — these are the traits of a great general, and here, too, Mommsen was tried and not found wanting. The infinitude of small detail incident to the publication of a volume of inscriptions is fully known only to one who has attempted it, but even a layman cannot pick up a volume of the Corpus without an overwhelming sense of the multitude of minute facts requisite to the proper fulfillment of the task. Yet in all the volumes for which Mommsen is directly responsible, inaccuracies are so rare that a positive interest attaches to one little inscription to which Mommsen wrote a Latin comment with this humiliating confession: “ I have unfortunately neglected to make a note of where I found this inscription.” One is tempted to feel that here in the Corpus and in his publication of the Monumenta Germaniæ, the sources of early German history, that better part of his work lies which shall not be taken from him. It does not seem possible that scholarship will ever reach the point where these books will be out of date. Certainly no scholar now living can point out any reason why this should ever be so. But if that which is not at present conceivable should eventually be realized, if the day should come when some grand international Academy should reëdit the body of Roman inscriptions along some new and superior line, so that the present Corpus would have merely historic interest, Mommsen’s name would still live, and that in a totally different connection, in the realm not of pure scholarship, but of mere literature.

Some one has well said that but for the Roman History Mommsen would be a great man “taken on faith.” That is probably true, but we have the Roman History, — perhaps the most remarkable piece of German literature written in the middle of the nineteenth century. It is a wonderful testimony to the power of humanity over humanity that the most human work which Mommsen wrote should be the most popular. The Roman History was the expression of the whole, man, and if ever it should cease to have value as Roman history, it will never cease to be of value as a spiritual document, as a picture of the hopes and ideals of Theodor Mommsen. By a happy chance, when the book was brought into the world it appeared in the naked simplicity of its narrative without the swaddling clothes of footnotes and sources. The clear-cut style showed forth to its best advantage. The world at large took its statements on faith, scholars were at liberty to test them in other books of Mommsen himself, or of other men. At the time when his history was published the world was feeling the reaction which was bound to follow the renunciation demanded by the new critical method of Niebuhr. That scholar had shown most brilliantly what Roman history was not. He had made many erasures. It remained for Mommsen to fill them up and show what Roman history was. Mommsen had to help him, what Niebuhr had not had, the comparative method. Yet it is not even this method with its results, nor yet his commercial theory of the origin of Rome, which elevates his book to its rank in literature. It was the fact that the author wrote it out of the fullness of his own feelings. Rome had done, so Mommsen thought, what his own Germany had failed to do. With a careful guarding of all the liberties of the individual she had worked out her own unity. And so Mommsen read Roman history in the light of the nineteenth century, and studied contemporary politics in the light of Roman history. A book thus written with the heart enforcing the head could not fail of success. Impartial history it is not, but literature it is, — and of the first order. And yet, with all its exaggeration it does not go wide of the mark, and it is a question whether the artist Mommsen did not come nearer to ultimate historical truth than the scholar Mommsen did in his more objective works. It may lose in calm judicial weighing of opinion, but in passion and dramatic effect it gains almost the value of the narrative of a contemporary historian.

We are in an age of extreme reticence in regard to opinion. We are willing to write endless columns of the debit and credit of historical facts, yet few have the courage to add up and strike the balance. But learning can ripen into knowledge only in the sunshine of opinion. Mommsen opened up to the world a wealth of historical sources. Other men will use them, and scholarship will be advanced by them, yet their names and the name of Mommsen will be hidden under their own massive constructions. But the Roman History as a work of art is an abiding possession, never out of date as literature, a memorial to its author more lasting than bronze.

Jesse Benedict Carter.