Nothing brought as much fame to the author as his portrait of the Roman politician and general, Julius Caesar. His image replaced previous characterisations almost completely and stayed indelibly in readers’ memories. This success was not due to any new features, but, as Friedrich Gundolf put it in 1926, to ‘the merging of his personality, his actions and his works’ – and ‘the mastery of his depiction’ (Gundolf 1926: 63f.).
The endpoint, as well as the climax, of The History of Rome is Gaius Julius Caesar. He overcomes the inexorable downfall of the oligarchy which ruled Rome through the Senate (see Chapter 15). As the people’s general and democratic monarch, he brings an undying glory once again to the ailing res publica. The portrait of the dictator was drawn in the spirit of the liberals of 1848: son of a protestant pastor, Mommsen had fought for a free and united nation during the German Revolutions of 1848–1889. For his political engagement, he lost his professorship at the University of Leipzig in 1851 and went into exile in Switzerland, where he had received a chair of Roman law in Zurich. Mommsen compensated for the defeat of the revolution as a historian, and transferred the political conflicts of his own times back onto the Roman Senate. In his narrative, the two perspectives – one historical, the other contemporary – coexisted. The liveliness and brightness of Mommsen’s deliberately contemporary language was not an end in itself, but a medium of political campaigning, to which he had ultimately sacrificed proper scientific methods. Mommsen wrote his work cum ira et studio. He modernised the historical matter. Affected and wounded by current political events, he transformed the history of republican Rome into a paradigm of historiographie engagée.
Mommsen mined the material for his historiographical construction directly from the ancient sources and did not dedicate much time to scholarly discussion. One would search in vain for references to modern predecessors, as well for any detailed overview of previous research. He engages only in implicit discussion with the Roman histories of Barthold Georg Niebuhr, Wilhelm Drumann and the portrait of Alexander by Johann Gustav Droysen. Opinions that differed from his own were not disproved by argument, but were polemically dismissed. Thus, Mommsen caricatured the ‘childish views of history’ (Dickson 1 [1862]: 186)1 and the ‘foolish absurdities’ of politicising philologists (Dickson 2 [1862]: 480). Academic colleagues furrowed their brows, but the broader audience seemed rather to enjoy that, as Mommsen wrote to his teacher and friend Otto Jahn, ‘an author can, once in a while, put his learning in his back pocket and does not have to display all his erudition’ (Wickert 1962: 179).
Mommsen was partial, but this was a partiality of an agitator who fights alongside the others and not of ‘a preacher who keeps moaning from afar’, to quote Friedrich Gundolf once again (Gundolf 1926: 58). Mommsen disdainfully lashed at all historical figures who happened to be Caesar’s adversaries. He judged them from the distance of a historian, who is a sole sovereign of his field and who believes himself to feel ‘the spirit of history’ (Dickson 4.2 [1866]: 467). He brought historical figures in front of the tribunal of his historical writing, and dispensed justice to them in accordance with his own laws. He was neither able, nor wished to understand them from the perspective of their own times, because a task of a historical writer consisted, in his view, in showing to his reader the formative forces of history.
Most famous of all is his crushing assessment of Cicero, which has angered generations of classicists and which put The History of Rome on the index of prohibited books in the libraries of some classical gymnasia. Cicero is, according to Mommsen, ‘notoriously a political trimmer … belonging properly to no party, or – which was much the same – to the party of material interests’ (Dickson 4.1 [1866]: 208). The ‘weathercock’ Cicero (Dickson 4.1 [1866]: 207) is ‘a statesman without insight, idea or purpose’ and ‘stands quite as low … in the character of an author’, and ‘was in fact so thoroughly a dabbler that it was pretty much a matter of indifference to what work he applied his hand. By nature a journalist in the worst sense of that term – abounding, as he himself says, in words, poor beyond all conception in ideas.’ Having said this, Mommsen arrives at his final verdict: ‘Cicero had no conviction and no passion’ (Dickson 4.2 [1866]: 608f.).
These qualities, which Cicero allegedly lacked, were something that Mommsen’s Caesar possessed in abundance. He was:
penetrated and guided by the cool sobriety which constitutes the most marked peculiarity of his genius. To this he owed the power of living energetically in the present, undisturbed either by recollection or by expectation; to this he owed the capacity of acting at any moment with collected vigour, and of applying his whole genius even to the smallest and most incidental enterprise; to this he owed the many-sided power with which he grasped and mastered whatever understanding can comprehend and will can compel; to this he owed the self-possessed ease with which he arranged his periods as well as projected his campaigns; to this he owed the “marvellous serenity” which remained steadily with him through good and evil days; to this he owed the complete independence, which admitted of no control by favourite or by mistress, or even by friend. (Dickson 4.2 [1866]: 452)
Caesar is for Mommsen ‘a creative genius’ (Dickson 4.2 [1866]: 450), a ‘realist and a man of sense’ (Dickson 4.2 [1866]: 452), ‘a statesman in the deepest sense of the term’ (Dickson 4.2 [1866]: 453); ‘democracy and monarchy should find in Caesar at once their highest and ultimate expression’ (Dickson 4.2 [1866]: 362). He represented the unified nation and possessed the historical right to overturn the supremacy of the dilapidated Senate. The ‘democratic monarchy’ that he created was described by Mommsen as ‘the representation of the nation by the man in whom it puts supreme and unlimited confidence’ (Dickson 4.2 [1866]: 465), who aimed at building ‘not the Oriental despotism of divine right’ (Dickson 4.2 [1866]: 465), but ‘an Italo-Hellenic empire with two languages and a single nationality’ (Dickson 4.2 [1866]: 538). Caesar sensed what the requirements of his times were and by this facilitated historical progress.
Mommsen’s portrait of Caesar was built on his firm belief in the world-changing role of a genius, through which Reason progressively manifested itself in historical reality. He considered Caesar a personification of the historical necessity, an incarnation of Hegel’s World Spirit. Thus Mommsen, the apostate from a Silesian parson’s family, was able, as Alfred Heuß once so aptly put it, to create a secular hagiography out of Caesar’s life (Heuß 1988: 65). Mommsen admitted that it is not possible to present an adequate depiction of Caesar: ‘As the artist can paint everything save the consummate beauty, so the historian, when once in a thousand years he encounters the perfect, can only be silent regarding it’ (Dickson 4.2 [1866]: 457).
Mommsen’s History of Rome ended with the fall of Republican Rome and the apotheosis of Caesar. His sole rule as dictator is part of a different history that Mommsen wanted to tell, but never did. Despite the rumours that appeared every now and again, he did not manage to write the fourth volume that was intended to start with the events after the battle of Thapsus and, ultimately, to give an outline of the imperial era. What we have are students’ notes of the lectures that Mommsen later read at the University of Berlin (cf. Mommsen 1996). They show very clearly that Mommsen never seriously considered writing such a book. His priorities shifted to different subjects. Daily work on the corpus of the Latin inscriptions and other projects left him no time for it – and this work had to remain unfinished also because, in Caesar, Roman history had already come to its climax. Mommsen, as he himself put it in a conversation