Theodor Mommsen (1817-1903) taught ancient history at the Friedrich
Wilhelm University in Berlin from 1861.
Theodor Mommsen (1817-1903) taught ancient history at the Friedrich
Wilhelm University in Berlin from 1861.
Mommsen came from a vicar’s family in Garding in southern Schleswig. After private tuition and a grammar school education in Altona, he studied in Kiel from 1838. A scholarship from the Danish government enabled him to stay in Italy from 1844-47, during which time he carried out extensive epigraphic studies. After his return from Italy, Mommsen, working from 1848 as a newspaper editor, became politically involved in the affairs of Schleswig-Holstein. In the same year, he was appointed to an extraordinary professorship in Law in Leipzig. His published attacks on the Saxon government, which had dissolved its parliament, brought about in 1851 his dismissal from his professorship. In 1852, he was given a professorship in Zürich. In 1854, he was given a chair in Roman law in Breslau, where he also lectured in Roman history. In 1858, he was appointed as a full time member of the Berlin Academy to further the project of a comprehensive collection of Latin inscriptions (Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum), then in 1861 as a professor at the University of Berlin.
Mommsen became known to a wide public through his ‘Roman History’ (1852-54, 1885), which reflected the political and social questions of his own time in an intentionally modernizing way. Mommsen saw himself, however, primarily as a jurist and philologist, whose task it was to bring to light the objective testimony of classical antiquity and to ‘put these archives of the past into order’. His work on the CIL, the ‘history of the Roman coinage system’ (1860), his works on authors of the late classical antiquity (within the context of the Momumenta Germaniae Historica) and his works on sources for Roman law all served this purpose. He saw sound reasons for reconstructing the past particularly in the institutions of Roman law, whose systems he reconstructed in his ‘Roman Constitutional Law’ (1871-88) and his ‘Roman Criminal Law’ (1899). He openly accepted that the highly scientific work produced by him demanded from him total commitment, and that with this the distance between him and a wider public would grow.
In addition to his many scientific works, Mommsen gained a seat in the Prussian parliament from 1863-66 for the ‘Fortschritt’ (‘Progressive’) Party, then from 1873-79 for the ‘Nationalliberalen’ (National Liberals’), and then from 1881-84 he was a representative in the Reichstag for the ‘Sexession’, a group which had broken away from the National Liberals. Mommsen’s political opinions which he gave with polemic sharpness were increasingly well received from the late 1870s (as for example with Bismarck after he broke away from the Liberals and during the dispute about anti-Semitism in Berlin) on the basis of his reputation as a world famous researcher. He, however, became increasingly frustrated about the effect he could have as an active citizen in a semi-absolute political system, the cause for which could partly be found in the lack of self-belief by the middle classes.
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