A historian of Rome won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1902
Theodor Mommsen is among the very few writers of non-fiction ever awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, for his History of Rome. Yet the project that matters most today is his vast catalogue of Latin inscriptions, built on the rule that every copy be checked against the original stone.
Mommsen was born on 30 November 1817 in Garding, in Schleswig, then ruled by Denmark, and raised in Bad Oldesloe, where his father was a Lutheran minister. Unable to afford Göttingen, he studied Roman law at Kiel, where he roomed with the future poet Theodor Storm and published a book of verse with him and his brother Tycho. A Danish royal grant let him study inscriptions in France and Italy.
In 1848 he reported from Rendsburg in support of German claims to Schleswig-Holstein, was pushed out by the Danes, and turned to academic life. From 1861 he taught Roman history in Berlin until 1887. His History of Rome appeared in three volumes between 1854 and 1856, and an English translation ran through many editions. The Corpus of Latin inscriptions grew to seventeen volumes, fifteen published in his lifetime and five prepared by him personally; the last came out in 1986. He produced over 1,500 works in all.
At 2 a.m. on 7 July 1880 fire broke out in the library of his Berlin house. He was burned trying to save papers and was held back from going in again. Several borrowed manuscripts perished, including one lent by Trinity College, Cambridge. He and his wife Marie had sixteen children, and two great-grandsons became historians.
In politics he sat in the Prussian parliament and the Reichstag as a liberal, clashed so sharply with Bismarck in 1881 that he narrowly avoided prosecution, and co-founded an association against antisemitism in 1890. Yet he also wrote contemptuously of Czechs in 1897. When Mark Twain attended a Berlin banquet in 1892, the entire hall rose, stamping and cheering, as the small, long-haired Mommsen walked in. He died on 1 November 1903.
Source: Theodor Mommsen
