Читать книгу A Companion to the Political Culture of the Roman Republic - Группа авторов - Страница 73

But what legacies remain from Mommsen’s History of Rome? Mommsen’s assessments and judgements, both partial and hauntingly vivid, proved to be extremely influential in classical scholarship. It is not only the obvious qualities of his work that contributed to this, but also the fact that during Mommsen’s lifetime, because of his influence and impact, no competing projects were able to offer an alternative vision. The History of Rome is a masterful historical narrative that, thanks to its author’s brilliant capacity for organising material, had acquired enormous significance and pushed other alternative views out of the public eye. It was only in the twentieth century that research in ancient history addressed critically the dominant paradigms of interpretation which Mommsen had developed in his History of Rome. It suffices to mention Matthias Gelzer and Ronald Syme, each of whom tried to create their own response to Mommsen’s reconstruction of the Roman Republic: one, by researching not only the political and legal, but also the social system of the Roman Republic; the other, by reassessing the Roman revolution (on Mommsen and Gelzer, cf. Strauß 2017; cf. Chapter 7). No one sings the hymn that Mommsen wrote to Caesar any longer. However, the image of an incompetent ruling elite unwilling to conduct reforms, who considered themselves entitled and obliged to get rid of Caesar is, despite all the controversies, still in broad circulation. The struggle of the Italian allies against Rome is still being discussed under the slogan of Italian unity (cf. e.g. Mouritsen 1998; Chapter 23). Despite more than 150 years of intensive scholarly work on the Roman Republic and its destroyer, ancient history is still under the influence not only of Mommsen’s Römisches Staatsrecht, but also of The History of Rome (cf. Nippel and Seidensticker 2005; Hölkeskamp 2010: 27ff.; Walter 2017: 107ff.).

Theodor Mommsen’s History of Rome is a milestone on the path from an Enlightenment model of history to modern historiography. Its goal is a more scientific presentation, combined with an ‘aestheticisation’ of history. Narrative holds centre stage, but it no longer presents arguments or examples as in earlier, more rhetorical, styles of historiography. It demonstrates a methodologically correct, rationally justified reconstruction of historical continuities based on independent research: ‘Things that already happened provide the connection with things that are just taking form and are yet to be fully realised. However, even this connection is not to be assumed arbitrarily: it happened in a certain way, thus and thus, and not otherwise. It is, in its turn, an object of knowledge’ (1874: vii). Intuition or ‘divination’, as Niebuhr used to call it, were only allowed to compensate for the deficiencies of the sources, ‘their falsification and sparseness’ (Niebuhr 1843: 11).

Mommsen attempted, using the example of the history of the Roman Republic, to derive inductively some universal contexts and tendencies from the contingent events of the past. In his History of Rome he combined historical research with narrative techniques of his time. However, the claim that it depicted the historical truth and showed ‘how it all really happened’, to quote Ranke again, had no supporting structure, but was only stated categorically. Mommsen’s own judgements and evaluations played the role of a decisive criterion of truth and he attributed to them a universal validity. The usurpation of the past was employed to create a tradition.

At the same time, the book was the political manifesto of the liberal protestant bourgeoisie. The goal of the progress of world history was the unification of states. National teleology took the place of older emphases on the unfolding of sacred history. A nation is simultaneously a project and a projection. The nationalist language of modernity was looking back to the Roman Republic. Cosmopolitan reason was declared out of date. Constitution, traditions, religion, language, culture and the sphere of intellectual work were all national characteristics. Mommsen’s History of Rome stands for the historiographical appropriation of Roman history by the German bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century. As a literary work of art, it retains its irresistible fascination even today.

Mommsen’s History of Rome retains as much importance at the beginning of the twenty-first century as in the nineteenth, owing to ‘the energy, the radicalism’ with which the author ‘uncovers the unavoidable and sometimes paradoxical gap between the action and the thought, the praxis and the theory’ (Walther 2005: 241).