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Updated: June 28, 2025
The historian Mommsen has written that we are probably inferior both in intelligence and in humanity, in prosperity and in civilisation, at the close of this century to what the human race was under Severus Antonius; and it is true." Adone did not seem to hear. What were these abstract reasonings to him? All he cared for were his river and his fields.
Pompey had triumphed three times, had been Consul at an unnaturally early age with abnormal honors, had been victorious east and west, and was called "Magnus." He did not as yet fear to be overshadowed by Cæsar. Cicero was his bugbear. Mommsen I believe to be right in eschewing the word "Triumvirate."
"Oh, Madame, if I explain anything to you, it will mix up everything. Be content with knowing that in that memoir poor Marmet quoted Latin texts and quoted them wrong. Schmoll is a Latinist of great learning, and, after Mommsen, the chief epigraphist of the world. "He reproached his young colleague Marmet was not fifty years old with reading Etruscan too well and Latin not well enough.
Their patient quarry work in archeology and in comparative philology laid the foundations for the new history-writing of Heeren and Mommsen; and their scholarship to-day is still of the digging kind. They seldom produce a Jebb, a Jowett, a Verrall, and never that type of scholar, wit and poet combined, a Lowell or an Arthur Hugh Clough.
As a consequence "learning," as it was understood by Casaubon, Scaliger, Bentley, Johnson, and Gibbon, as it was understood by Littré, Döllinger, and Mommsen, may be said to have disappeared in England. Cardinal Newman, Mark Pattison, Dr. Pusey, were said to be very learned, but it was a kind of learning which kept very much to itself.
From the fervid admiration for the Roman Republic which animated the men of the French Revolution to the unmeasured Cæsarian apologies of Duruy and of Mommsen, from the ardent cult of Brutus to the detailed studies on the Roman administration of the first two centuries, all historians have studied and regarded Roman history mainly from the point of view of the struggle between the two principles that yet to-day rend in incurable discord the mind of old Europe and from which you have emerged fortunate!
One or two further memorable incidents of 1903 may be recorded. Theodore Mommsen, the now aged historian of Rome, the greatest scholar of his time, died in November. He was in his day a Liberal parliamentarian of no mean ability; but for such men there is no career in Germany. However, as it turned out, the German people's loss proved to be all the world's gain.
That evening, in Common Room, he told what he had seen; and no amount of polite scepticism would convince him that it was but the hallucination of one who had been reading too much Mommsen. He persisted that he had seen what he described. It was not until two days had elapsed that some credence was accorded him. Yes, as the landau rolled by, sweat started from the brows of the Emperors.
He had a pretty house in the new quarter of Berlin, and was most hospitable. He had an interesting dinner there with some of the literary men and savants Mommsen, Leppius, Helmholtz, Curtius, etc., most of them his colleagues, as he was a member of the Berlin Academy.
Curio was the more important of the two, and required the larger bribe. The story comes to us from Appian, but the modern reader will find it efficiently told by Mommsen. The Consul had fifteen hundred talents, or about £500,000! The sum named as that given by Cæsar to Curio was something greater, because he was so deeply in debt!
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