6.3 The Actualisation of History
A feature that determined the success of the first three volumes was that Mommsen gave a touch of contemporary life to the events of the Roman Republic by using ‘modern expressions’ and allusions to ‘modern circumstances’. The ‘naïveté or impertinence’ of the young author, later a subject of mockery by the older Mommsen himself, manifests itself not only in his biased exegesis of the sources and his nonchalant dismissal of the scholarly literature, but also in an uncompromisingly modernising language. A consul becomes a ‘Bürgermeister’ (mayor) and a proconsul a ‘Landvogt’ (governor) (see Chapter 18). Mommsen calls the senatorial land-owning aristocracy ‘Junker’ (squires), whilst the equestrians are ‘capitalists’. Sulla is a ‘Don Juan of politics’ (Dickson 3 [1863]: 389), whereas Cato the Younger is a ‘Don Quixote’ (Dickson 4.1 [1866]: 7). The disputes in the Roman Senate are just like those in the English Parliament – between the optimates and the populares in the former, and the Liberals and the Conservatives in the latter. He spoke of the right and the left, of ultras and radicals who fight each other. It was progress and reaction that confronted each other. Mommsen attacked the hereditary privileges of the aristocratic ‘scum’ as forcefully as the servility of the democrats. In a letter to his friend Wilhelm Henzen, to whom these anachronisms appealed very little, Mommsen defended his method by referring to a plan ‘to make the ancients step down onto the ground, to bring them, from their fantastic buskins, which they usually wear when appearing in front of most of the public, into the real world, down to the reader, where people hate and love, talk and fight, fantasize and lie’ (Hartmann 1908: 62f.). What Mommsen unfolded here is an altogether revolutionary program for the popularisation of scholarship.
But that was not enough. Rome became a place where the struggles of the Frankfurt national parliament were re-enacted and where people fought for the liberal demands of the German bourgeoisie. Mommsen left no space for doubt that in antiquity there was no such thing as ‘the great fundamental idea of a modern republican-constitutional state, viz., the expression of the sovereignty of the people by a representative assembly’(Dickson 3 [1863]: 239). His understanding of a parliamentary system was rooted in the political philosophy of the liberal theorists. Only representation was able, in his view, to fulfil the new expectations that arose from the progress of civilisation and to foster national unity. The Roman res publica with its unlimited people’s sovereignty (see Chapter 16; Chapter 7) could not, therefore, serve as a model for a modern republic. On the contrary, the crisis of the Roman Republic had demonstrated the fatal consequences that might result from the lack of a representative system. However, Mommsen drew an ideal picture of a Roman community of citizens that ‘like the Germanic and not improbably the primitive Indo-Germanic communities’ forms ‘the real and ultimate basis of the political idea of sovereignty’ (Dickson 1 [1862]: 81). In it, he discerned ‘a free people’, ‘understanding a duty of obedience, disowning all mystical ideas of divine right, absolutely equal in the eye of the law and one with another, bearing the sharply defined impress of a nationality of their own’ (Dickson 1 [1862]: 85; see also Chapter 28). ‘All that was good and great’, was, he emphasised, ‘the work of civil equality’ (Dickson 2 [1862]: 349). He transferred the utopia of a classless society of citizens to the Tiber: ‘the deepest and noblest conception lying at the root of the Roman commonwealth, that within the circle of Roman citizens there should be neither master nor slave, neither millionaire nor beggar, but that above all a like faith and a like culture should signalize all Romans’ (Dickson 2 [1862]: 419).
However, ‘freedom to a nation apart from union and unity’ (Dickson 2 [1862]: 247) was unbearable to Mommsen. The History of Rome became a plea for the united Italy. In the very first pages, one reads that ‘we intend to relate the history of Italy, not simply the history of the city of Rome. Although, in the formal sense of political law, it was the civic community of Rome which gained the sovereignty first of Italy and then of the world, such a view cannot be held to express the higher and real meaning of history. What has been called the subjugation of Italy by the Romans appears rather, when viewed in its true light, as the consolidation into an united state of the whole Italian stock – a stock of which the Roman were doubtless the most powerful branch, but still were a branch only’ (Dickson 1 [1862]: 7). Here again the historian’s claim to truth gets the better of the historical fact: the major focus of his attention is not the expansion of Rome across the Mediterranean region but the unification of Italy (see Chapter 23). A few years earlier, Mommsen had demanded, in his pamphlet on the ‘Fundamental Rights of the German People’, the ‘final unification of our great people’ (Mommsen 1969: 7). In The History of Rome, the Social War became ‘the national question’. Just as he had called for Prussia to join Germany when he was a journalist during the revolution of 1848, now he called for the integration of Rome into the Italian state, praised the political advocates of the Italian interests in Rome, and described the ‘struggle for the freedom and nationality’ (Dickson 1 [1862]: 373) through which the Italic peoples had to go once again, against Rome. The Roman nation is, like the German nation, a utopia, an appellative authority. Mommsen in his work generated a synthesis of nation and history.
In the meantime, he had learned a bitter lesson, that an aim with which ‘the history of every people… ought to end’ (Dickson 1 [1862]: 43), the unification of the nation, could not happen without an enabling power that could accomplish it – sometimes by force (see Chapter 29). That is why he liked Sulla who was, according to Mommsen, ‘the real and final author of the full political unity of Italy’ and whose ‘gain’ was ‘not too dearly purchased even by so many troubles and streams of blood’ (Dickson 3 [1863]: 386). The end justifies the means, a cloak of understanding silence covers Sulla’s brutal methods during the Social War. The national state is the telos of history, German or Roman, and a territorial integrity is its ultimate commandment: ‘A great nation does not surrender what it possesses except under the pressure of extreme necessity’ (Dickson 1 [1862]: 377). In 1865, Mommsen will approve of the annexation of Schleswig-Holstein by Prussia: ‘If the national state can heal any wound, it may also strike any’ (Mommsen 1905: 381). Mommsen derived the legitimacy of destructive power politics from historical necessity.
Unity and freedom, power and law – all converged in the personality of Caesar. A man who was granted the nation’s ‘supreme and unlimited confidence’ (Dickson 4.2 [1866]: 465) conceded ‘to the community of the people at least a formal share in the sovereignty’ (Dickson 4.2 [1866]: 476). Quite a few of Mommsen’s contemporaries made a connection between his extolling of Caesar and the person of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte who, on 2 December 1852, following a plebiscite, was declared the emperor of France and ascended the throne as Napoléon III. Therefore, he distanced himself from allegations that his ‘lawless cult of genius’ alongside his praise of a ruler legitimised by a plebiscite would justify the actual politics of Napoléon III, and Caesarism in its Bonapartist form. So in the 1857 second edition of the third volume, he states that ‘the history of Caesar and of Roman Imperialism, with all the unsurpassed greatness of the master-worker, with all the historical necessity of the work, is in truth a sharper censure of modern autocracy than could be written by the hand of man’ (Dickson 4.2 [1866]: 466).
Mommsen’s