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A feature that determined the success of the first three volumes was that Mommsen gave a touch of contemporary life to the events of the Roman Republic by using ‘modern expressions’ and allusions to ‘modern circumstances’. The ‘naïveté or impertinence’ of the young author, later a subject of mockery by the older Mommsen himself, manifests itself not only in his biased exegesis of the sources and his nonchalant dismissal of the scholarly literature, but also in an uncompromisingly modernising language. A consul becomes a ‘Bürgermeister’ (mayor) and a proconsul a ‘Landvogt’ (governor) (see Chapter 18). Mommsen calls the senatorial land-owning aristocracy ‘Junker’ (squires), whilst the equestrians are ‘capitalists’. Sulla is a ‘Don Juan of politics’ (Dickson 3 [1863]: 389), whereas Cato the Younger is a ‘Don Quixote’ (Dickson 4.1 [1866]: 7). The disputes in the Roman Senate are just like those in the English Parliament – between the optimates and the populares in the former, and the Liberals and the Conservatives in the latter. He spoke of the right and the left, of ultras and radicals who fight each other. It was progress and reaction that confronted each other. Mommsen attacked the hereditary privileges of the aristocratic ‘scum’ as forcefully as the servility of the democrats. In a letter to his friend Wilhelm Henzen, to whom these anachronisms appealed very little, Mommsen defended his method by referring to a plan ‘to make the ancients step down onto the ground, to bring them, from their fantastic buskins, which they usually wear when appearing in front of most of the public, into the real world, down to the reader, where people hate and love, talk and fight, fantasize and lie’ (Hartmann 1908: 62f.). What Mommsen unfolded here is an altogether revolutionary program for the popularisation of scholarship.

But that was not enough. Rome became a place where the struggles of the Frankfurt national parliament were re-enacted and where people fought for the liberal demands of the German bourgeoisie. Mommsen left no space for doubt that in antiquity there was no such thing as ‘the great fundamental idea of a modern republican-constitutional state, viz., the expression of the sovereignty of the people by a representative assembly’(Dickson 3 [1863]: 239). His understanding of a parliamentary system was rooted in the political philosophy of the liberal theorists. Only representation was able, in his view, to fulfil the new expectations that arose from the progress of civilisation and to foster national unity. The Roman res publica with its unlimited people’s sovereignty (see Chapter 16; Chapter 7) could not, therefore, serve as a model for a modern republic. On the contrary, the crisis of the Roman Republic had demonstrated the fatal consequences that might result from the lack of a representative system. However, Mommsen drew an ideal picture of a Roman community of citizens that ‘like the Germanic and not improbably the primitive Indo-Germanic communities’ forms ‘the real and ultimate basis of the political idea of sovereignty’ (Dickson 1 [1862]: 81). In it, he discerned ‘a free people’, ‘understanding a duty of obedience, disowning all mystical ideas of divine right, absolutely equal in the eye of the law and one with another, bearing the sharply defined impress of a nationality of their own’ (Dickson 1 [1862]: 85; see also Chapter 28). ‘All that was good and great’, was, he emphasised, ‘the work of civil equality’ (Dickson 2 [1862]: 349). He transferred the utopia of a classless society of citizens to the Tiber: ‘the deepest and noblest conception lying at the root of the Roman commonwealth, that within the circle of Roman citizens there should be neither master nor slave, neither millionaire nor beggar, but that above all a like faith and a like culture should signalize all Romans’ (Dickson 2 [1862]: 419).

However, ‘freedom to a nation apart from union and unity’ (Dickson 2 [1862]: 247) was unbearable to Mommsen. The History of Rome became a plea for the united Italy. In the very first pages, one reads that ‘we intend to relate the history of Italy, not simply the history of the city of Rome. Although, in the formal sense of political law, it was the civic community of Rome which gained the sovereignty first of Italy and then of the world, such a view cannot be held to express the higher and real meaning of history. What has been called the subjugation of Italy by the Romans appears rather, when viewed in its true light, as the consolidation into an united state of the whole Italian stock – a stock of which the Roman were doubtless the most powerful branch, but still were a branch only’ (Dickson 1 [1862]: 7). Here again the historian’s claim to truth gets the better of the historical fact: the major focus of his attention is not the expansion of Rome across the Mediterranean region but the unification of Italy (see Chapter 23). A few years earlier, Mommsen had demanded, in his pamphlet on the ‘Fundamental Rights of the German People’, the ‘final unification of our great people’ (Mommsen 1969: 7). In The History of Rome, the Social War became ‘the national question’. Just as he had called for Prussia to join Germany when he was a journalist during the revolution of 1848, now he called for the integration of Rome into the Italian state, praised the political advocates of the Italian interests in Rome, and described the ‘struggle for the freedom and nationality’ (Dickson 1 [1862]: 373) through which the Italic peoples had to go once again, against Rome. The Roman nation is, like the German nation, a utopia, an appellative authority. Mommsen in his work generated a synthesis of nation and history.

In the meantime, he had learned a bitter lesson, that an aim with which ‘the history of every people… ought to end’ (Dickson 1 [1862]: 43), the unification of the nation, could not happen without an enabling power that could accomplish it – sometimes by force (see Chapter 29). That is why he liked Sulla who was, according to Mommsen, ‘the real and final author of the full political unity of Italy’ and whose ‘gain’ was ‘not too dearly purchased even by so many troubles and streams of blood’ (Dickson 3 [1863]: 386). The end justifies the means, a cloak of understanding silence covers Sulla’s brutal methods during the Social War. The national state is the telos of history, German or Roman, and a territorial integrity is its ultimate commandment: ‘A great nation does not surrender what it possesses except under the pressure of extreme necessity’ (Dickson 1 [1862]: 377). In 1865, Mommsen will approve of the annexation of Schleswig-Holstein by Prussia: ‘If the national state can heal any wound, it may also strike any’ (Mommsen 1905: 381). Mommsen derived the legitimacy of destructive power politics from historical necessity.

Unity and freedom, power and law – all converged in the personality of Caesar. A man who was granted the nation’s ‘supreme and unlimited confidence’ (Dickson 4.2 [1866]: 465) conceded ‘to the community of the people at least a formal share in the sovereignty’ (Dickson 4.2 [1866]: 476). Quite a few of Mommsen’s contemporaries made a connection between his extolling of Caesar and the person of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte who, on 2 December 1852, following a plebiscite, was declared the emperor of France and ascended the throne as Napoléon III. Therefore, he distanced himself from allegations that his ‘lawless cult of genius’ alongside his praise of a ruler legitimised by a plebiscite would justify the actual politics of Napoléon III, and Caesarism in its Bonapartist form. So in the 1857 second edition of the third volume, he states that ‘the history of Caesar and of Roman Imperialism, with all the unsurpassed greatness of the master-worker, with all the historical necessity of the work, is in truth a sharper censure of modern autocracy than could be written by the hand of man’ (Dickson 4.2 [1866]: 466).

Mommsen’s three-volume History of Rome struck a nerve with contemporaries. His modernising language was not a goal in itself but a means of political instruction to which he ultimately sacrificed even scholarship. By effectively transferring the standpoint of modern party politics to Roman history, Mommsen confirmed Nietzsche’s verdict: ‘people have always endeavoured to understand antiquity by means of the present’ (Nietzsche 1911: 113). The History of Rome is a tendentious history. But that is precisely why it became such an enormous success – in every country where it was read. On its own, the book would not have become a classic were it not written so brilliantly and if it did not fill an empty niche in the book market. The three-volume History of Rome (1811–1832) by Barthold Georg Niebuhr was extremely learned but unreadable – a quality acknowledged by British reviewers as well. Mommsen, unlike his erudite predecessor, learned to write in a newspaper’s editorial office. His model was the English autodidact Edward Gibbon, whose magnum opus, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1788) defended, with the pathos of the Enlightenment, the heretical thesis that Christianity was the main culprit for the fall of the Roman empire. Mommsen also gave a clear structure to the enormous mass of his material, and defended a provocative thesis, told his stories in a lively and witty manner and, moreover, possessed a significantly stronger grasp of the sources and scholarly literature. Nevertheless, Mommsen was in awe of Gibbon’s literary mastery. He did not compete with Gibbon: his history of the Roman imperial period remained unwritten.

The History of Rome owes its existence to two factors. First, the publishers Karl Reimer and Salomon Hirzel, owners of the Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, showed an acute intuition for the right topic and the right author. Furthermore, because of the political vicissitudes of the era, the author had, against his own will, the free time necessary to write down his ideas. Since he was fired for political reasons, the Saxonian professor, whose future was unclear and who was worried about making a living, was forced to accelerate the pace of his project while still in Leipzig. Even after he received the call to the chair at Zurich, negotiations with the Berlin Academy about founding a comprehensive corpus of Latin inscriptions were moving forward quite slowly, so that Mommsen still had time to focus on his manuscript.

At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, to write like Mommsen was the desire of quite a few historians with literary ambitions. No one was able to do it. The 1902 Nobel Prize made the work immortal. Mommsen became a Nobel Laureate in Literature at the moment when the literature of the fin-de-siècle had long ago said farewell to the poetological and narrative principles that were shared by The History of Rome and the novels of its time, and had turned instead to experiments with symbolic and naturalistic techniques. The Nobel Prize committee decided to honour a work of the past because the book’s emphasis on progress, and its political message, appealed to it. At that point, one read The History of Rome as a plea for an enlightened absolutism that would overcome untrammelled despotism. Furthermore, the circumstances of the vote were favourable, too. The committee asked the Berlin Academy for help in nominating possible candidates and thus Adolf Harnack, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and other influential scholars brought Mommsen’s name into play. The 85-year-old Laureate described the prize, that equalled more than 150,000 Marks, as a lottery win.