BOOKS

Chips from a German workshop

Jasper Griffin

A HISTORY OF ROME UNDER THE EMPERORS by Theodor Mommsen, edited by Thomas Wiedemann Routledge, £40, pp. 642 Theodor Mommsen (1817-1902) is the man whom most professional ancient historians would name as the single great- est contributor to our knowledge of ancient Rome. His daemonic energy and indomitable power of work enabled him to achieve an output which seems almost incredible. He was himself enormously pro- ductive. He published massive pioneering works on Roman coins, inscriptions, chronography and historians, apart from his irreplaceable masterworks on the con- stitutional and the criminal law of Rome (the Staatsrecht and the Strafrecht), in addi- tion to his History of Rome. What is more, he was one of the greatest organisers in the annals of scholarship.

As secretary for many years of the Berlin Academy, he was able to force through his grandiose plans for a reliable publication of all known inscriptions in Latin, a work which kept a whole team of scholars busy under his leadership. He also backed the Corpus of all known Roman coins. He was an inspiring force in the mammoth project of editing and publishing the texts in the series of Ancient Monuments of Germany, several of which he edited himself. He was at the back of the Thesaurus of the Latin Language, another jumbo project, charac- teristic of the energy and optimism of the late 19th century, an heroic age in the his- tory of scholarship. The Thesaurus started to appear in the 1890s and is now about two-thirds finished.

It comes as a chastening shock to find that such a man was no mere Dryasdust, remote from human affections or the inter- ests of a citizen. He was the father of 11 children; he was involved in national poli- tics, an advanced liberal (but with no sym- pathy for socialism), who was dismissed from his position at the University of Leipzig for his political activities, served as elected member both of the Prussian par- liament and of the Imperial Reichstag, and was sued for libel, at the age of 65, by Bis- marck, for having said that the policy of the Iron Chancellor's party was a 'policy of swindling'. How did those Victorians do it all? Mommsen's comment on Bismarck's action was that it was 'nicht gentleman- like'. He had an excellent command of English and was interested in both the his- tory and the literature of this country; he was distressed by the anti-British policies pursued by Germany in the last years of his life.

In 1902 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, the only historian to be so honoured, for his History of Rome, a book which had appeared almost 50 years before, and which remained unfinished. What Mommsen had produced in the early 1850s, under pressure for money at a time of financial insecurity, was an account of Rome from the earliest period to the moment before the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC. The whole of the Empire stretched before Mommsen. The world awaited it with impatience. Gradually it became clear that the world would wait in vain. In the 18805 he produced what he called Volume Five of his History, a two- volume work on the Roman provinces, much less fiery and controversial, contain- ing a mass of learning, invaluable as a picture of what really went on in the Empire.

Mommsen's interests in coins and inscriptions differed radically from that of most of his predecessors. He was not con- tent to stay at the level of antiquarianism, collecting, comparing, appreciating. This material was to be used for the purposes of real history; which was not to be concerned solely with the doings of kings, generals, and armies, but to include the whole of life. The influence of Macaulay, whose History of England had appeared in the late 1840s, is clear. Mommsen declares that his aim is

to make the ancients come down from the fantastic buskins [high actor's boots] on which they appear to the general public, and to enter the real world, a world where people hate and love, saw and carpenter, have dreams and are deceived: so the consul had to become a Biirgermeister and so on.

The ancient writers of history, their eyes on grander things, are not eager to give us this sort of information. As Mommsen says in the introduction to his book on the provinces:

Anyone who has recourse to the so-called authorities for this period, even the best of them, finds it hard to control his anger at the telling of what deserved to be suppressed, and the suppression of what should have been told.

It has always been known that Mommsen lectured on the Roman Empire, and the possibility of getting hold of his lecture notes has from time to time tantalised German scholars and amateurs. In 1980 Professor Alexander Demandt of the Free University, Berlin, found in a Nuremberg shop a set of full and intelligent notes, taken by two members of Mommsen's audience: rather touchingly, they were father and son. From this source, plus other less full records, he and his wife have reconstructed the lectures, which created some stir when they were published in Ger- many, and which now appear in English. What, in fact, do we find?

It must be emphasised that Mommsen himself did not authorise the publication of his lectures, even in the form in which he himself will have had them; much less the publication of notes on them taken down by students. The lectures contain many things which it is hard to imagine even Mommsen, an undaunted spirit if ever there was one, committing to print in any- thing like this form. There are contradicto- ry judgments on a good many things, some of them thrown off, no doubt, on the spur of the moment, by a lecturer who says else- where that lecturing is 'of all occupations the most frivolous'.

The son of a Protestant pastor, he was no friend to the Christian religion. In the fam- ily he was not called 'Theodor', the name of a saint, but Jens; on this Demandt says: `Christianity was so alien to him . . that he preferred to be called Jens.' But a mere 32 pages later Professor Wiedemann assures us:

If the historian was usually called 'Jens' by his family, this was because it had been tradi- tional in the family, and did not imply any rejection of the Christian symbolism of the name 'Theodor'.

And these professors think it is possible to know about ancient history!

In his History of Rome Mommsen simply omitted any mention of Christianity; in his lectures he is quoted as going so far as to say:

Bearing all these factors in mind, one might almost be tempted to say that the persecu- tions of the Christians were excusable. The state had to defend itself against proselytism, against hierarchy, against all the principles of Christianity.

We are reminded that he was a great admirer of Gibbon; and we get a glimpse of a reason why he was reluctant to write up his views of a period which saw the triumph of that religion.

Mommsen was notorious for his admira- tion of Caesar, to whom he ascribes every virtue. He says of his decision to stop his History just before Caesar's assassination, 'I no longer have the passion to describe his death.' Passion is in fact very important to Mommsen. Of Caesar's rival Pompey he says:

He was not cruel, as he has been called. He was perhaps worse than cruel: he was cold and passionless, in good and evil alike.

Of Cicero, the great master of Latin prose, a man whom he detested, he says: 'Cicero had no conviction and no passion: he was nothing but an advocate, and not a good one' — an obviously absurd appraisal of a man so invariably successful in the law- courts that people said he had a 'tyranny' there. Caesar, then, was 'as a matter of course a man of passion, for without pas- sion there is no genius'; despite the fact, clear enough to Mommsen, that his atti- tude — to politics, to his opponents, to war itself — was typically one of ironic superi- ority. He possesses passion, it really seems, by definition, because his powers were so great.

Nobody in the Empire comes up to Caesar. What is more, Rome itself is really dead: after Caesar, military monarchy was all that was left for Rome. 'The Roman essence was withering and dying, the Empire went on like a machine' — for centuries, we are tempted to retort. In fact, he insists, Rome had been doomed ever since the second century BC, when the mid- dle class was squeezed out of existence, and foreign conquests became too great for the old system to be able to manage them. In this book he expresses that view with even more emphatic disgust:

What, above all, made the principate so nefarious was its utter dreariness, emptiness and poverty of spirit . . . The Emperors soon ushered in total intellectual senility. From the capital, the corruption of language and education spread to the provinces.

We seem here to have forgotten about the ordinary people, the carpenters and house- holders, who were to be the subject of Mommsen's History: does their peaceful existence and prosperity do nothing to redeem the period? The aristocratic Republic had not cared much for them (and Mommsen, in another passage, says of the governing class in the late Republic that 'no verdict on them is possible except scorn and condemnation').

As for literature, the future Nobel laure- ate is crushing:

After Augustus, utter tedium reigned . . . Since nothing more was written after this, people had to have recourse to the literature of Augustus' day, which, not altogether justi- fiably, thus came to dominate subsequent generations.

The poet Lucan is 'dreadfully dull'; Seneca's works are 'devoid of content'. Of the Augustans, in fact, 'the poetry of Ovid is no more than rhyming', and 'only his poetry dealing with prostitutes, the Amores and Ars Amatoria, are readable, and this is, after all, a very inferior genre.' Even the Aeneid of Virgil, with its vulgar erotic motif of Aenas and Dido, is mediocre: 'The self- criticism expressed in his desire to burn the poem was entirely justified.' We recall that Mommsen, who here condemns to the flames the masterpiece of Latin poetry, also scorned the works of Cicero, the great- est master of Latin prose, snarling:

Anyone who seeks classic productions in works so written can only be advised to study in literary matters a becoming silence.

The temptation to turn this verdict on its maker is irresistible.

The new material brings us some inter- esting judgments, some of them disconcert- ing. Mommsen, the liberal, regards it as a fatal weakness of the Roman system that slaves were so freely manumitted and became free men — 'manumission was the most deplorable flaw of slavery' — and Augustus was right, since it was impossible to stop the practice, to intervene 'against the most outrageous nuisance — mass emancipation by will and testament'. It is interesting, again, to see the distaste with which Mommsen handles Constantine, the first Christian Emperor, and the care with which he pleads that

whether Constantine himself became a Christian is quite immaterial: his private con- victions are of minimal importance.

So much for the decision that made Chris- tianity, still a minority faith, supreme in the Empire! The scope of Mommsen's lectures is magisterial, the judgments terse and memorable; but without Mommsen's name they would hardly have found a publisher. In Germany the publication is an event; for the rest of us, I suspect, it is not much more than a curiosity. The true monuments to this very great scholar will continue to be his two mighty books on Roman law and the collective scholarly enterprises of which he was the animating and directing spirit.

`Can I use your moisturiser tonight, Mum?