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Updated: June 28, 2025
The real reason why Mommsen and Duruy are to-day so little read, why at the beginning of the twentieth century Roman history no longer stirs enthusiasm through their books is, above all, this: that readers no longer find in those pages what corresponds directly to living reality.
Here in my time, were Lepsius and Curtius, Virchow and Hoffman, Ranke and Mommsen, the world's first scholars in the past and present.
I follow the ordinary date, which has been fixed by the positive statement that Caesar was fifty-six when he was killed, the date of his death being March, B.C. 44. Mommsen, however, argues plausibly for adding another two years to the beginning of Caesar's life, and brings him into the world at the time of the battle at Aix.
But to write a confession of one's faith cannot but be regarded as a thousand times more pretentious, since it takes for granted that the writer attaches worth, not only to the experiences and investigations of his life, but also to his beliefs. Whoever would have desired to possess the confessions, say, of a Ranke or a Mommsen?
On the mantelpiece, by a frog smoking a red pipe, a paper fan on which was painted the Bayreuth Theater. On the two bookshelves were a few books Luebke, Mommsen, Schiller, "Sans Famille," Jules Verne, Montaigne. On the walls large photographs of the Sistine Madonna, and pictures by Herkomer, edged with blue and green ribbons.
Mommsen thinks that he saw in them an effective leaven of cosmopolitanism and national decomposition, and to that intent gave them special privileges; but this seems a perverse reason to assign for the grant of the right to maintain in all its thoroughness their national life, and for their exemption from all Imperial or municipal burdens that would conflict with it.
"Still, if my memory does not play me false," said Lichonin, with calm causticity, "I recollect that no further back than past autumn we with a certain future Mommsen were pouring in some place or other a jug of ice into a pianoforte, delineating a Bouratian god, dancing the belly-dance, and all that sort of thing?" Lichonin spoke the truth.
Mommsen, who was certainly biassed by no feeling in favor of Cicero, declares that Catiline in particular was "one of the most nefarious men in that nefarious age. His villanies belong to the criminal records, not to history." All this is no evidence. Cicero and Sallust may possibly have combined to lie about Catiline.
For brief reading: DE COULANGES, The Ancient City, Chaps. I-X. LECKY, History of European Morals, Chap. V. SCHMIDT, Social Results of Early Christianity, Chap. For more extended reading: HEARN, The Aryan Household. HOWARD, History of Matrimonial Institutions. GROTE, History of Greece. MOMMSEN, The History of Rome. On the early Hebrew family: MCCURDY, History, Prophecy, and the Monuments, Vol.
Some idea was abroad that Caesar had meant to transfer the seat of government to Ilium, and after Actium the same intention was ascribed to Augustus, probably without reason; but the third ode of Horace's third book seems to express the popular rumour, and in an interesting paper Mommsen has stated his opinion that the new master of the Roman world may really have thought of changing the seat of government to Byzantium, the supreme convenience and beauty of which were already beginning to be appreciated.
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