User:Ifly6/Rome, modern histy

Mommsen

Adapted from Rebenich, Stefan (2022). "Theodor Mommsen's History of Rome and its political and intellectual context". In Arena, Valentina; Prag, Jonathan (eds.). A companion to the political culture of the Roman republic. Wiley Blackwell. pp. 81ff. ISBN 978-1-4443-3965-9. LCCN 2021024437.

• Reception
  • Overwhelmingly influential. Initially published in 1854. So much so, "we have only begun in recent years [then being 1920] to shake ourselves free of the spell he laid upon us"
  • 19th century reviews were panegyrical, believing that Mommsen had produced a "historiographical masterpiece"
• Engaged historiography
  • Mommsen won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1902.
  • Topic of book is Caesar and the aristocracy. He conceives of failed reforms and political disintegration. "[Mommsen's] image [of Caesar] replaced previous characterisations almost completely... not due to any new features, but,... to the 'merging of this personality, his actions, and his works' and 'the mastery of his depiction'".
  • View of Caesar came from the Spring of Nations and Frankfurt. It was written as a history for his own time. Engaged little with other scholars, only implicitly with Niebuhr, Drumann, and Droysen.
    • Attacked all of Caesar's enemies. "He was neither able, nor wished to understand them in perspective of their own times, because a task of historical writer consisted, in his view, showing to his reader the formative forces of history". Also attacked Cicero as having no conviction and no passion.
    • Caesar instead was a God: a "creative genius", a "realist", a "man of sense", a "statesman in the deepest sense of the term", and both a sublime democrat and monarchist. "He considered Caesar a personification of the historical necessity... [Mommsen created] a secular hagiography out of Caesar's life".
• Mommsen used very clearly modernising language.
  • Consul → Bürgermeister (mayor), Proconsul → Landvogt (governor); senatorial aristocracy → Junker (squires); equites → capitalists. "But that was not enough[:] Rome became a place where the struggles of the Frankfurt national parliament were re-enacted and where people fought for the liberal demands of the German bougeoisie"... "He transferred the utopia of a classless society of citizens to the Tiber".
  • Mommsen also was a nationalist who wanted the unification of the German people and saw in Rome's unification of Italy allegories. The Social war became "the national question" and he similarly supported Italian unification. Mommsen liked Sulla because "the real and final author of the full political unity of Italy" and believed the price was "not too dearly purchased". This is some real teleological bull.
  • His terminology "was not a goal in of itself but a means of political instruction". By "transferring the standpoint of modern party politics to Roman history, Mommsen confirmed Nietzsche's verdict [that] 'people have always endeavoured to understand antiquity by means of the present".
  • Mommsen's success was in part because he wrote like a newsman and defended a heretical thesis that was concordant with his zeitgeist. By 1902, "on read the History of Rome as a plea for an enlightened absolutism that would overcome untrammelled despotism".
• Mommsen's legacy is more mixed. Gelzer and Syme reacted to it strongly. Nobody "sings the hymn that Mommsen wrote to Caesar any longer". Many still believe in Mommsen's incompetent elite thesis, however. People still discuss the Social War in terms of Italian unity. Article thinks that Mommsen was committed to the "historical-critical method".
  • Teleological history certainly, his claims of truthfulness were assertions. His "own judgements and evaluations played the role of a decisive criterion of truth and he attributed to them a universal validity".
  • "The book was a political manifesto of the liberal protestant bourgeoisie". His praise for nationalism, liberalism, and modernism fit the German bourgeoisie's own national self-conceptions.