MOMMSEN, THEODOR. - Historian, jurist, philologist, b. at Garding in Schleswig on 30 Nov. 1817, d. at Charlottenburg on 1 Nov. 1903.
He completed his studies at the University of Kiel and obtained his doctorate in law there in 1843. Appointed professor of civil law at Leipzig in 1848, he was removed from his chair for political reasons (1850) and moved to Switzerland, where he obtained a chair of Roman law at Zurich (1852). In 1854 he was called to the same teaching post by the University of Breslau, where he remained until 1858, when he moved to Berlin, in order to attend, at the Royal Academy of Sciences (of which he was secretary from 1873 to 1895), to the publication of the Corpus inscriptionum Latinarum. In 1861 he began in Berlin his teaching of Roman history, from the chair that the University had established for him. In 1902 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. His activity, both as an author and as an editor of texts and as an organizer and director of great scholarly enterprises (Corpus nummorum; Vocabularium iurisprudentiae Romanae; Prosopographia imperii Romani) was immense: the works he published amount to about a thousand.
He was, as Vittorio Scialoja affirmed, the « undisputed sovereign » of epigraphy. In 1845, during his first journey to Italy, he visited B. Borghesi, who advised him to study the epigraphy of southern Italy: the Inscriptiones regni Neapolitani (Leipzig 1852) and, slightly earlier, a fundamental study on the southern dialects, Die unteritalischen Dialekte (ibid. 1850), are the fruit of M.'s research during this period. As a result of this he was placed at the head of the work of collecting and publishing all the extant Latin epigraphs, a work that constitutes one of the greatest merits that the Academy of Sciences of Berlin can claim with respect to world culture. While he was attending precisely to the preparation of the Corpus inscriptionum, M. published the three volumes of the Römische Geschichte, Leipzig 1854-56 (Italian trans. by L. di S. Giusto, 3 vols., in 5 tomes, Turin 1925); in 1858 the Römische Chronologie bis auf Caesar, Berlin 1858 (2nd ed., ibid. 1859) and, a little later, the definitive edition of the Geschichte des röm. Münzwesens (ibid. 1860).
But the work that M. himself considered his highest is constituted by the Römisches Staatsrecht (Leipzig, vol. I 1871; vol. II 1874-75; vols. I and II, 3rd ed., 1887, III, 1887-88), the most complete treatment, still today, of the constitutional law of Rome. The fundamental ideas of this work were taken up again in a brilliant volume of synthesis, Abriss des römischen Staatsrechts (Leipzig 1893, Italian trans. by P. Bonfante, Disegno del diritto pubblico romano, 2nd ed., edited by V. Arangio-Ruiz, Milan 1943). In 1884 the V vol. of the Römische Geschichte appeared, moreover independent of the first three: Die römischen Provinzen von Caesar bis Diocletian (Italian trans. by E. de Ruggiero, 2nd ed.,
Rome 1904). Toward the end of his life M. published Das römische Strafrecht (Leipzig 1899), a complete exposition of Roman criminal law and of its procedure through the ages.
To this enormous activity must be added that of editor of texts and documents. To mention only the most important works, to M., in union with P. Krüger, is owed the best edition of Justinian's Digesta (1868-1870); to his collaboration with Krüger and G. Studemund the Collectio librorum iuris anteiustiniani (1890); to him (in union with P. M. Meyer) the critical edition of the Codex Theodosianus (v.), published after his death, on the basis of the corrected proofs that he had left. He further edited the edition of the works of Solinus (Collectanea rerum memorabilium, 1864, 2nd ed., 1895), of Iordanes (Romana et Getica, 1882), of Cassiodorus (Variae, 1894) and that of the I vol. of the Liber Pontificalis (1898). Of the Corpus inscriptionum Latinarum he edited the vols. I (1862; 2nd ed. 1893), III (1873, with two supplements, 1902), V (1872 and 1877), IX and X (1883), collaborating extensively on others. His articles scattered in journals, some of which are of considerable importance for the history of Christianity, are collected in the Gesammelte Schriften (8 vols., Berlin 1905-13).
A deputy to the Prussian Chamber from 1873 to 1882 and to the German Reichstag from 1881 to 1884, of liberal sentiments, he was a tenacious opponent of O. Bismarck. His explicit action was, given the situation of Germany, practically without results; and M. must have suffered much from this, if in a codicil of his will, recently published and dated to the end of 1899 (four years before his death), he manifests his dissatisfaction, which certainly arouses wonder, with the scholarly activity accomplished and adds: « I desired to be a citizen. This is not possible in our nation in which the individual, and even the best, does not transcend service in the ranks and political fetishism ». Words in which is perhaps contained the explanation also of those aspects that seemed least appreciable in his character; which can justify the alternation in him of the tendency to a brilliant and indeed noisy life with moments of depression, which were caught by those who were closest to him; as also certain of his very harsh attitudes on the occasion of scholarly polemics; words that demonstrate how M. had felt deeply and humanly the detachment, which was already taking place in his times in Germany, between the world of culture and that of action.