Theodor mommsen biography
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In 1838, he enrolled at the University of Kiel to study jurisprudence, specializing in Roman law. The same year, he married Maria Reimer, the daughter of a bookseller, and they had sixteen children.
The first three volumes of "Roman History" (the second and third volumes published in 1855 and 1856) covered Roman history from its foundation to 46 BCE, when Julius Caesar defeated the armies of the Senate in North Africa.
Three years later, he became professor, a position that he was to hold for forty-five years.
Mommsen was one of the founders of the liberal Deutsche Fortschrittspartei (German Progressive Party). The first volume was dedicated to Count Bartolomeo Borghesi, an Italian politician and scholar who initially supported Mommsen's research.
Political Activism and "Schleswig-Holsteinische Zeitung"
Upon returning to Schleswig in 1847, Mommsen became involved in the democratic movement seeking to free the German-speaking duchies north of the Elbe from Danish rule.
Historians James Thompson and Bernard Holm, co-authors of "The Oxford History of Historical Writing," described Mommsen as "the wonder of German science." According to British historian Francis J. Haverfield, Mommsen was at once "a poet, a lawyer, a critic, and an artist—impressionable, enthusiastic, gifted with imagination."
Theodor Mommsen
Theodor Mommsen (1817-1903): German scholar, the great organizer of the study of Roman history.
Like that other great innovator of the study of ancient history, Heinrich Schliemann, Theodor Mommsen was born in 1817 in northern Germany as a preacher's son.
Mommsen became a research professor at the Berlin Academy of Sciences in 1857. dtv, München, 2001.
Life
Mommsen was born in Garding, Schleswig, and grew up in Bad Oldesloe, where his father was a poor Lutheran minister. He received additional impetus and training from Bartolomeo Borghesi of San Marino.
Römische Geschichte.
Credits
New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopediastandards. The populares were, in Mommsen's view, a political party like his own party, and as a corollary, the optimates represented the Roman conservatives, who showed a remarkable resemblance to the Prussian Junkers.
Julius Caesar was, for Mommsen, the incarnation of the "heroic legislator" (an idea of the French political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau): the Roman politician had swept away the pieces of a corrupt nobility and had created an empire that served the needs of all of its inhabitants.
ISSN 0018-2753.
Notes
- ↑NNDB, Theodor Mommsen.
Although the unfinished History of Rome has been widely considered as his main work, the work most relevant today is perhaps the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, a collection of Roman inscriptions he contributed to the Berlin Academy. The 85-year-old historian did not deliver a Nobel Lecture. He studied Greek and Latin and received his diploma in 1837, graduating as a doctor of Roman law.