Theodor Mommsen

Christian Matthias Theodor Mommsen was born in 1817 at Garding, in the Duchy of Schleswig, then under the Danish crown, and grew up in Holstein, where his father was a Lutheran pastor. Largely taught at home, he studied law at Kiel, sharing lodgings with the future poet Theodor Storm, with whom he and his brother Tycho published a book of verse. A Danish grant took him to France and Italy to study Roman inscriptions, and in 1848 he worked as a journalist for the Schleswig-Holstein cause. His liberal politics cost him his chair at Leipzig; after Zurich and Breslau he settled in Berlin, where he taught Roman history from 1861.

The three volumes of The History of Rome (1854–56), carried down to the age of Caesar, were written early and with unusual verve. Mommsen drew on law, coinage and inscriptions, yet judged Roman politicians as sharply as contemporaries, and his portrait of Caesar was among the sources of Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra. The planned volume on the empire never came; a fifth, on the provinces, appeared in 1885. His more lasting scholarly monument is the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, the vast collection of Latin inscriptions he conceived and directed, alongside standard editions of Roman legal texts and the systematic Roman Constitutional Law.

Mommsen was also a parliamentarian, sitting as a liberal in the Prussian House of Representatives and the Reichstag, quarrelling with Bismarck and publicly denouncing Heinrich von Treitschke’s antisemitic campaign, though his nationalism could turn harsh, as in his contempt for Czech aspirations. In 1902, aged eighty-five, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, one of the very few historians so honoured. He died in Charlottenburg the following year; his descendants included the historians Hans and Wolfgang Mommsen.