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In the Roman republic, only the People could make laws and elect politicians to office; the word respublica means ‘The People's business’. So why is it always assumed that the republic was an oligarchy? The reading of late-republican politics as a non-ideological competition for office was created by Gelzer in 1912 in reaction against the ‘party-political’ model presupposed by Mommsen; reinforced by Münzer (1920) and Syme (1939), it was enshrined as accepted doctrine in ‘Paully-Wissowa’. This chapter argues that the Gelzer model relies on the misinterpretation of a key text, that close reading of the contemporary sources reveals far more ideological conflict than the Gelzer model allows, and that one of the results of assuming its truth has been a failure to appreciate the political background of the historian Licinius Macer.

According to Joseph Wells, it was in the 1870s that Greats changed from being pre-eminently philosophical to possessing a strong historical bias: the decade marked a time of great change in the organization of Ancient History at Oxford University, and for the next thirty years it led the way as the best established subject among the arts faculties for teaching and syllabus reform. The new Board of Studies for Literae Humaniores created in 1872 took the decisive conceptual leap of establishing Ancient History as a discipline separate from the authors listed for study. Periods of history were prescribed in the New Examination Statutes, with a choice from two Greek and two Roman. These were to be studied through selected texts: Polybius supplanted Livy, and the early history of Rome disappeared, to be replaced by the late Republic and early Empire. This last change undoubtedly reflects the belated influence of the young Theodor Mommsen's History of Rome.

The official birthday of the Prosopographia Imperii Romani was 31 March 1874. That was the day on which Theodor Mommsen formulated an application to the plenary assembly of the Ködeiresniglich Preuβlische Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin to launch a ‘prosopography of renowned men of the Roman imperial period’ including chronologically ordered lists of consuls and governors and magistrates in general. But in fact, Mommsen had long before planned to add a summary of this kind to the editions of inscriptions. Mommsen himself probably intended PIR to be the foundation for further historical insights. Almost all the prosopographical works on the Roman empire have one thing in common: their source material predominantly or even solely comprises epigraphic texts in Latin and Greek. Of course, other sources are taken into account as well, but the importance of inscriptions is generally much greater.

Several lessons have been leant from the three volumes of PLRE. The scholarly response suggests that the most sought-after attributes of any prosopographical catalogue are clearly formulated and stated criteria for inclusion, consistency in the application of the criteria, and completeness of coverage. In sum, PLRE has caused people to rethink many of the ways in which they look at late antiquity. The development of the material demonstrates the growing diversity of the Mediterranean world: PLRE by PLRE III, one has a massive array of eastern and western non-Romans both within and outside the imperial frontiers. As a result of its increasing inclusivity, PLRE became more of a secular PLA than a PLRE. Overall, this chapter concludes that PLRE has become the one work that must be on the shelves of anyone who proposes to make a comprehensive study of the late antique world.

This chapter talks about John Stuart Blackie as a professor at Edinburgh. According to one of the students, Blackie had a good deal of external resemblance to the German historian Mommsen, but he was distinguished from his more typical continental brethren by the boisterous exuberance of his spirits. He was by far the most picturesque figure in the Edinburgh of his time. In the classroom, students adored Blackie and yet laughed at him. He encouraged liberties and then suddenly would flash into a rage and dismiss the whole class, and refuse to meet them until they apologised. He was an education and an inspiration to the raw country lads who knew nothing beyond their village school and village farm. The Edinburgh town councillors may not have realised they were getting a poet-professor, but they can have had no doubt that Blackie was a committed university reformer.

This introductory chapter begins with an assessment of the Empire’s dependence on the auxilia and distinguishes them from the better known legions. It reviews the history of research and addresses the difficulty of combining historical and archaeological material to analyse military communities in the Roman Empire. In so doing, it underscores the importance of understanding change within these communities in relation to the incorporation of diverse peoples into Roman provincial society. The chapter argues that the regimental communities that formed the auxilia offer a fascinating insight into changing conditions within the empire. These groups go from being non-citizen formations consisting almost exclusively of non-citizens at the beginning of this period to units made entirely of citizens at the end. Crucially, however, the change in their character is not simply concerned with the legal status of their soldiers; it is something that can be observed in their evolving cultural identity. The auxilia are presented as an important case study in the incorporation of both communities and individuals into imperial society.

This chapter details Ernst Kantorowicz's departure from Germany and arrival in the United States. On the night of November 9, 1938, the Nazis unleashed their fury against Jews in “the night of broken glass” (Kristallnacht). Kantorowicz all but certainly would have been arrested in the morning and shipped to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp had he not been sheltered. When the danger passed he managed to obtain the necessary visas. Then, at the beginning of December, he crossed the border to Holland and from there ferried to England. Two months later he sailed for New York. His preparations for departure owed much to the helpfulness of friends, particularly Theodor Mommsen, who had emigrated to America in 1936.

In the first chapter of part four, the author shifts the focus to the German case of neo-Roman mimesis. This process paradoxically begins with the anti-Napoleonic movement’s self-description as barbarians. Focusing on the movement’s intellectuals’ and artists’ engagement with Tacitus’s Germania and Virgil’s Aeneid, the author discusses the philosopher Fichte’s reflections on the deadening effect of Roman mimesis, Kleist’s Virgilian text calling for the annihilation of Rome/Paris, and the ruin paintings of Caspar David Friedrich. The chapter then turns to works by the Prussian architect Schinkel and historian Theodor Mommsen. Analyzing Schinkel’s painting of a triumphal arch and Mommsen’s monumental History of Rome, the author captures the beginnings of a shift from anti-Roman struggle to a German Reich framed as neo-Roman empire.

Big Science (and Big Humanities) were invented in the nineteenth century. Two huge, expensive, and long-lived projects, the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (CIL) of the classical philologists and the Carte du Ciel of the astronomers, created disciplinary archives intended to serve future researchers for centuries and even millennia to come. The CIL would transcribe and publish all known Latin inscriptions from the length and breadth of the ancient Roman empire before they succumbed to the depredations of time. The Carte du Ciel would use the new methods of astrophotography to create a photograph of the sky as seen from the earth circa 1900, which future astronomers could use to detect phenomena that unfolded on a superhuman timescale. Both projects involved international cooperation, industrial-style organization, state funding, and disciplinary stamina on an unprecedented scale. Both raise questions about the investment of resources: why create the archives for future research instead of channeling energies and funds into present inquiry, especially when the topics of future research are uncertain? The answer lies in the melancholy realization of second-wave positivism that the price of progress was ephemeral scientific knowledge. Only the archives seemed to promise permanence.

This chapter discusses the development of the debate on craftsmen and traders in general terms, focusing specifically on the German and Anglo-Saxon scholarly traditions. It assesses the relative impact of new evidence and new ideas on discourse about Roman urban craftsmen and traders in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but it also highlights the key role played by certain individual scholars and their networks, such as Mommsen, Meyer, and Frank, in shaping the debate, as well as the impact of key political developments, particularly the First World War, which ended the German debate, and led to a prominence of US-based scholarship. Cultural developments in the 1960s paved the way for new approaches to the theme, and led to a debate dominated, for the first time, by British scholars.

Within a century of his death, the Younger Pliny was already being confused with his famous uncle, the Elder Pliny. In the 1300s, the two were successfully disentangled, although the error of their origin in Verona (rather than Como) was spread. Statues of the Plinii were erected on Como cathedral in the 1480s as part of a campaign to reassert their citizenship of Roman Comum. Biographical interest in the Younger remained strong in the centuries that followed. Pliny remains the best documented Roman individual, other than emperors, between Cicero and Augustine. The present biography will tell its story through a focus on the locales with which Pliny was most closely associated; but a strong thread of linear narration will be maintained. His Letters are the main source for his life: they need to be evaluated carefully. Four figures will accompany Pliny throughout the biography: Cicero, Tacitus, Epictetus, and Augustine.

This chapter demonstrates that the process of historical mythmaking about Arminius began as early as in Augustan Rome. Ancient historians and poets interpreted the scanty facts concerning Varus’ defeat to present a coherent and meaningful picture. This process began with Tacitus, who called Arminius “doubtless the liberator of Germany.” Modern German historians, e.g. Theodor Mommsen, continued the tradition until a strictly fact-based approach, culminating in the studies by Dieter Timpe and increasingly supported by archaeological evidence, stripped away all legendary and patriotic accretions. Nevertheless, political debates about the importance and meaning of Arminius’ victory for the Romans and for German history are continuing.

In the history of Western political thought, the Roman Republic, not any of the Greek poleis, has been the fruitful object of study when it came to thinking about constitutional government. The decline of the Roman Republic was considered a constitutional problem, and constitutional remedies were sought that would prevent modern states from suffering similar decline. Hence it was Rome, not Athens, which gave rise to sustained constitutional thought about the proper limits of legislative authority and the power of magistrates. This special place of Rome in political and legal thought persisted until at least the rehabilitation of democracy, in particular Athenian democracy, in the nineteenth century.

This chapter juxtaposes the theory and the practice of philology in the late nineteenth-century race to produce a modern critical edition of the Liber pontificalis. The resulting works, one by the French priest and church historian Louis Duchesne, the other by the classicist and German patriot Theodor Mommsen, showcase the editors’ divergent aims in the application of recensionist criticism, shaped as it was by their scholarly, national, religious, and personal loyalties. Mommsen’s edition adheres to the principles of ‘German’ critical philology and its desire to recover the original text; Duchesne’s two volumes exploit the nature of the medieval papal chronicle as a constantly changing ‘living text’ in order to emphasize the historical significance of its reception. Both editions illustrate the themes of marginality and canonicity as they relate to literary genre and historical period, to religious commitment and national sentiment, and to the tension between classical methodology and medieval texts.