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Updated: June 28, 2025
No doubt but that like German scholars in general he could talk English, but he stuck to German and I was rather glad he did so; I could take him in better as he discoursed fluently in his mother-tongue. Mommsen was a man of sharp corners who often in his political career brought grief to adversaries who tried to handle him without gloves.
Mommsen, in his address mentioned above, characterizes him as "the man who knew how to describe, as well as how to win, battles, the master of style in his rare speeches, the clever and sympathetic investigator of and writer on manifold ethnic life, the scientific explorer of the regions on the rivers Tigris and Euphrates."
AUTHORITIES. Niebuhr, Lectures on the History of Rome; Mommsen, History of Rome; Arnold, History of Rome; Merivale, History of the Romans; Gibbon, Decline and Fall; Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities gives the details, and points out the old classical authorities, as does Napoleon's Life of Caesar.
The greatest work of the imperial age must be sought in its provincial administration. The significance of this we have come to understand, as not even Gibbon understood it, through the researches of Mommsen.
My speech was long, over an hour, for I had a message to deliver, and was determined to give it a message which I hoped might impress upon my great audience reasons for a friendly judgment of my country. As I began, Mommsen came to my side just back of me, his hand at his ear, listening intently.
Even the Latin stock, inhabiting the country from the Tiber to the Volscian mountains, which furnished the first inhabitants of the city, cannot be clearly traced, since we have no traditions of the first migration of the human race into Italy. It is supposed by Mommsen that the peoples which inhabited Latium belong to the Indo-Germanic family.
It was great by comparison, and of course overwhelmingly great when there were none but insignificant competitors to challenge it. Mommsen holds that, in the fourth and fifth centuries after the foundation of Rome, 'the two main competitors for the dominion of the Western waters' were Carthage and Syracuse.
At my own table and elsewhere he more than once became, in a measure, like the Mommsen of old. One utterance of his amused me much. My wife happening, in a talk with him, to speak of a certain personage as "hardly an ideal man," he retorted: "Madam, is it possible that you have been married some years and still believe in the ideal man?"
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.
Gibbon's work has richly deserved its life of more than one hundred years, a period which I believe no other modern history has endured. Niebuhr, in a course of lectures at Bonn, in 1829, said that Gibbon's "work will never be excelled." Mommsen, prevented by age and work from being present, sent his tribute.
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