page_title: History of Rome (Mommsen)
section_title: Revolution(s)
hierarchical_section_title: History of Rome (Mommsen) / Commentary I / Revolution(s)
caption_attribution_description: The Frankfurt Parliament in Frankfurt's Paulskirche in 1848/49. Coloured, contemporary engraving. View at the President's table, over which the portrait Germania by Philipp Veit emerges.
context_page_description: The History of Rome is a multi-volume history of ancient Rome written by Theodor Mommsen. Originally published by Reimer & Hirzel, Leipzig, as three volumes during 1854–1856, the work dealt with the Roman Republic. A subsequent book was issued which concerned the provinces of the Roman Empire. Recently published was a further book on the Empire, reconstructed from lecture notes. The initial three volumes won widespread acclaim upon publication; indeed, "The Roman History made Mommsen famous in a day." Still read and qualifiedly cited, it is the prolific Mommsen's most well-known work. The work was specifically cited when Mommsen was awarded the Nobel Prize.
context_section_description: In 1961 the British historian Edward Hallett Carr published his What is History?, which became well known. Therein Carr conjectured that the very nature of writing history will cause historians as a whole to reveal themselves to their readers as 'prisoners' subject to the context of their own age and culture. As a consequence, one may add, every generation feels the need to rewrite history so that it better fits their own situation, their point of view. To illustrate his point here, Carr selected as exemplars a number of well-regarded historians, among them being Theodore Mommsen.
  Accordingly, Carr informs us that Mommsen's multivolume work Römische Geschichte (Leipzig 1854–1856) may tell the perceptive modern historian much about mid-19th-century Germany, while it is presenting an account of ancient Rome. A major recent event in Germany was the failure of the 1848–1849 Revolution, while in Mommsen's Roman History his narration of the Republic draws to a close with the revolutionary emergence of a strong state executive in the figure of Julius Caesar. Carr conjectures as follows.
  "Mommsen was imbued with the sense of need for a strong man to clean up the mess left by the failure of the German people to realize its political aspirations; and we shall never appreciate its history at its true value until we realize that his well-known idealization of Caesar is the product of this yearning for the strong man to save Germany from ruin, and that the lawyer-politician Cicero, that ineffective chatterbox and slippery procrastinator, has walked straight out of the debates of the Paulikirche in Frankfurt in 1848."
  Far from protesting or denying such an observation, Mommsen himself readily admitted it. He added, "I wanted to bring down the ancient from their fantastic pedestal on which they appear in the real world. That is why the consul had to become the burgomaster. Perhaps I have overdone it; but my intention was sound enough."
  Alongside Carr on Mommsen, Carr likewise approaches George Grote's History of Greece (1846–1856) and states that it must also reveal that period's England as well as ancient Greece. Thus about Grote's book Carr conjectures.
  "Grote, an enlightened radical banker writing in the 1840s, embodied the aspirations of the rising and politically progressive British middle class in an idealized picture of Athenian democracy, in which Pericles figured as a Benthamite reformer, and Athens acquired an empire in a fit of absence of mind. It may not be fanciful to suggest that Grote's neglect of the problem of slavery in Athens reflected the failure of the group in which he belonged to face the problem of the new English factory working class.
  "I should not think it an outrageous paradox", writes Carr, "if someone were to say that Grote's History of Greece has quite as much to tell us about the thought of the English philosophical radicals in the 1840s as about Athenian democracy in the fifth century B.C." Prof. Carr credits the philosopher R. G. Collingwood as being his inspiration for this line of thinking.
  Robin Collingwood, an early 20th-century Oxford professor, worked at building a philosophy of history, wherein history would remain a sovereign discipline. In pursuing this project he studied extensively the Italian philosopher and historian Benedetto Croce (1866–1952). Collingwood wrote on Croce, here in his 1921 essay.
  "Croce shows how Herodotus, Livy, Tacitus, Grote, Mommsen, Thierry, and so forth, all wrote from a subjective point of view, wrote so that their personal ideals and feelings coloured their whole work and in parts falsified it. Now, if this is so, who wrote real history, history not coloured by points of view and ideals? Clearly no one. ... History, to be, must be seen, and must be seen by somebody, from somebody's point of view. ... But this is not an accusation against any particular school of historians; it is a law of our nature."
  In summary, Edward Carr here presents his interesting developments regarding the theories proposed by Benedetto Croce and later taken up by Robin Collingwood. In doin
caption: Democratically elected National Assembly at St. Paul's Church, Frankfurt, 18 May 1848.
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