The History of Rome (Mommsen)

Theodor Mommsen’s The History of Rome (originally Römische Geschichte) is a multi-volume study of ancient Rome. The first three volumes, covering the Roman Republic, were released by Reimer & Hirzel in Leipzig between 1854 and 1856.

A later volume dealt with the Roman Empire’s provinces, and in 1992 a book on the Empire reconstructed from student lecture notes appeared. The initial three volumes earned immediate and broad praise; as one contemporary put it, “The Roman History made Mommsen famous in a day.” Still consulted and cited with qualifications, it remains the most famous work of the prolific Mommsen. The Nobel Prize committee specifically mentioned this work when awarding him the prize.

Genesis

The project grew out of Mommsen’s earlier research in ancient Roman studies. He had not planned to write a history, but the chance came in 1850 when, as a thirty-two-year-old special professor of law at the University of Leipzig, he gave a public lecture on the Gracchi. The publishers Reimer and Hirzel attended, and two days later asked him to write a Roman history for their series. Having been dismissed from the university for revolutionary activities, Mommsen accepted “partly for my livelihood, and partly because the work greatly appeals to me.”

The publishers wanted a respected academic work that fit their acclaimed history series, but also one with literary merit accessible to the educated public. Mommsen, active in recent advances in Roman studies and with some journalistic experience, seemed well placed to become a popular academic author. He wrote to a colleague, “It is high time for such a work… it is more than ever necessary to present to a wider audience the results of our researches.”

Original

Originally planned as five volumes covering Rome from its beginnings to Emperor Diocletian (284–305), the first three volumes—covering Rome’s origins through the fall of the Republic and ending with Julius Caesar’s reforms—were published in 1854, 1855, and 1856 as Römische Geschichte. Their success was immediate. Readers found a professional scholar writing with “such vigor and life, such grasp of detail combined with such vision, such self-confident mastery of a vast field of learning.” In the third volume, as the narrative reached the Republic’s final political crisis, Mommsen “wrote with a fire of imagination and emotion almost unknown in a professional history. Here was scientific learning with the stylistic vigor of a novel.” In Germany, the first three volumes remained popular: eight editions appeared during Mommsen’s lifetime, and eight more after his death in 1903.

Later volumes

A planned fourth volume on the Empire was delayed while Mommsen worked on a fifteen-volume collection of Roman inscriptions, which required his efforts as researcher, writer, and editor for many years. After repeated postponements, the fourth volume was abandoned—or at least never published; an early manuscript may have been lost in a fire. Instead, in 1885 Mommsen produced a volume on the imperial provinces. In Germany it appeared as volume five of his Römische Geschichte.

Its thirteen chapters treat each province as a separate subject, lacking the running, often dramatic political narrative of the earlier volumes. The English translation was titled The Provinces of the Roman Empire from Caesar to Diocletian. In 1992, a reconstructed version of the missing fourth volume was published, based on lecture notes taken by two of Mommsen’s students, Sebastian Hensel and his son Paul Hensel, during lectures at the University of Berlin from 1882 to 1886.

Alexander Demandt discovered the notes in 1980 at a used bookshop in Nuremberg, and they were edited by Barbara Demandt and Alexander Demandt into the German text Römische Kaisergeschichte.

In English

The contemporary English translation was done by William Purdie Dickson, professor of divinity at the University of Glasgow. The first three German volumes (containing five “books”) appeared in English from 1862 to 1866, published by R. Bentley & Son in London. Dickson prepared further editions over several decades, keeping pace with Mommsen’s German revisions.

In total, close to a hundred editions and reprints of the English translation have been published. In 1958, Dero A. Saunders and John H. Collins prepared a shorter English version, selecting material from the final two “books” of the three-volume history. This abridgment focuses on the social-political struggles leading to the Republic’s fall, with new annotations and a revised translation, presenting Mommsen’s narration of the grave political drama with rigor.