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In two congratulatory documents on the occasion of Moltke's ninetieth birthday, Theodor Mommsen, the historian, has summed up the results of the great soldier's life-work in the address presented by the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin, and in the honorary tablet of the German cities. These inscriptions may be found in Mommsen's Reden und Aufsaetze.
Of Mommsen's History of Rome she said, "It is so fine that I count all minds graceless who read it without the deepest stirrings." The study necessary to make one familiar with fifteenth century times was almost limitless. No wonder she told Mr. Cross, years afterward, "I began Romola a young woman, I finished it an old woman"; but that, with Adam Bede and Middlemarch, will be her monument.
The former surname can only he a corruption of Asiagenus the form which later authors substituted for it which signifies not the conqueror of Asia, but an Asiatic by birth. II. VIII. Religion Mommsen's German version, and added in a note that I had not been able to find the original. Several scholars whom I consulted were not more successful; and Dr. Mommsen was at the time absent from Berlin.
In particular Justinian and the Roman authorities, among whom he stands as chief, were the objects of Mommsen's research. From jurisprudence he passed to the study of general history, and of the most interesting period of Rome he absorbed into his mind all the lore that has survived.
Mommsen's dashing criticism on Cicero's writings appears just, though we might trust the critic more if we did not find him in the next page evading the unwelcome duty of criticising Caesar's "Bellum Civile," under cover of some sentimental remarks about the difference between hope and fulfilment in a great soul.
Mommsen and Curtius in their detailed investigations received applause from those who adhered rigidly to the scientific view of history, but when they addressed the public in their endeavor, it is said, to produce an effect upon it, they relaxed their scientific rigor; hence such a chapter as Curtius's "The years of peace," and in another place his transmuting a conjecture of Grote into an assertion; hence Mommsen's effusive panegyric of Cæsar.
He recalled Gibbon's lamentation over the age of the Antonines, and Mommsen's grave doubt whether, taken as a whole, the area once covered by the Roman Empire can be said to be substantially happier now than in the days of Severus. O corruptio optimi!
We remember Mommsen's verdict: "On the Roman oligarchy of this period no judgment can be passed save one of inexorable and remorseless condemnation." The farther we see into the facts of Roman history in our endeavors to read the life of Cicero, the more apparent becomes its truth. But Cicero, though he saw far toward it, never altogether acknowledged it.
The whole subject of the Menippean satires is brilliantly treated in Mommsen's History of Rome, and Riese's edition of the satires, to both which, if he desire further information, we refer the reader. The genius of Varro, however, more and more inclined him to prose. The model for these was furnished by Heraclides Ponticus, a friend and pupil of Plato, and after his death, of Aristotle.
Then in 111 or 112 according to Mommsen's Chronology Trajan bestowed upon him a signal mark of his esteem by selecting him for the Governorship of the province of Pontus and Bithynia, which he had transferred from the list of senatorial to that of imperial provinces.
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