But with equal reason the political life of nations
has during thousands of years again and again reverted to the
lines which Cæsar drew; and the fact that the peoples to whom
the world belongs still at the present day designate the highest
of their monarchs by his name, conveys a warning deeply signifi-
cant, and unhappily fraught with shame.
has during thousands of years again and again reverted to the
lines which Cæsar drew; and the fact that the peoples to whom
the world belongs still at the present day designate the highest
of their monarchs by his name, conveys a warning deeply signifi-
cant, and unhappily fraught with shame.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v17 - Mai to Mom
attacking me right and left!
Ah!
it
is contrary to fair play; I shall cry out murder.
Cathos [to Madelon] - It must be acknowledged that he says
things in a manner altogether his own.
Madelon - His way of putting things is exquisitely admirable.
Cathos [to Mascarille] - You are more afraid than hurt, and
your heart cries out before it is touched.
Mascarille — The deuce! why, it is sore from head to foot.
Translation of Charles Heron Wall.
## p. 10206 (#634) ##########################################
10206
THEODOR MOMMSEN
(1817-)
BY WILLIAM CRANSTON LAWTON
DHE popular conception of a learned German professor is of
a short-sighted, spectacled, absent-minded recluse buried
among his books, absorbed in some narrow and remote line
of research for which a single lifetime is all too brief, or preparing a
ponderous book which perhaps ten men in the world can read. The
type is not wholly imaginary, though like the buffalo it is already near
extinction.
Above all others in our time, however, Theodor Mommsen is an
illustration of patriotic and civic usefulness, not merely combined
with the most learned research, but illuminated and strengthened in-
calculably by those very studies. His political sympathies, his open
affiliations in the national legislature, have been with the extreme
radical wing of that great “Liberal movement which made the
new German empire possible. Thoroughly believing that democratic
freedom of discussion is the firmest final basis for a strong central
government, he has often offended those in high office by his fear-
less criticisms. Once indeed he was actually brought to trial (1882)
for sharp words directed against Prince Bismarck. His triumphant
acquittal revealed and strengthened the popular pride in the brave
citizen and the most illustrious of German scholars.
Mommsen is primarily interested in the life and growth of politi-
cal institutions. All his manifold activity is centred about this chief
study. It was natural, then, that the Roman State, the greatest organ-
ization in all human history, should have engaged his lifelong devo-
tion.
Professor Mommsen is most widely known to the general reading
public, in and out of Germany, as the author of a “popular” Roman
history. This great work indeed put forth with little citation of
authorities. The solid pages usually run calmly on without any array
of polemic or pedantic foot-notes. Nevertheless, the apparatus, the
scaffolding as it were, undoubtedly exists still in the author's note-
books. Indeed, such material has been liberally furnished whenever
the same subject has been treated in University lectures. More-
over, this stately masterpiece of constructive work is firmly founded
upon special studies as wide-reaching and as thorough as were ever
undertaken. Professor Mommsen's practical and juristic mind inclines
## p. 10206 (#635) ##########################################
THECLIN
## p. 10206 (#636) ##########################################
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܃ ܃ ܃ : ; . ܬ ];)
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1
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}
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f- ', . *
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܂. ܢ ܝ | ܙ ;- |: ܙ)i
down or is it were's win, Lip Clit sil in: .
lots ben 1:1. 5. ! igre
| ":::-,
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; :iܪ ܝ܀: ' ܢ:' fi ;' :"ܢ
ܢ ܢ ܂ ܃܇ - . . 'i. :v j،،܃ ܂ ܃ ܃ ܂r. :;)
܆܆܃ ܃ 1) ܐܢ ܀. ܀ ii , : ܒܝܢii:܃ ܃ ܃ ܝ
r- " y) Iܝ ܢ܂ : :fi ? { . 11 ܝ ܝ ܨ ، '( - :(I
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## p. 10206 (#637) ##########################################
THEODOR MOMMSEN.
## p. 10206 (#638) ##########################################
i
## p. 10207 (#639) ##########################################
THEODOR MOMMSEN
10207
him to brush aside the fables and romances of Livy's first decade.
Instead, he endeavors to recover from the usages and institutions
of later Rome the probable conditions of the earlier time. Naturally
this often necessitates closely reasoned argument, — and uncertain
results at best.
In the later portions Professor Mommsen is on firmer ground;
but his judgments of men like Cicero, whom he detests, and Cæsar,
whom he almost adores, are as far as possible from a mere scholarly
dependence on ancient authorities. Everywhere he is quite suffi-
ciently inclined to appeal to modern parallels and illustrations. The
section on the political history of the early empire has never yet
appeared; but the imperial government of Roman provinces is treated
in exhaustive volumes, already published, and destined to become an
integral part of the completed work.
This latter essay may serve to remind us that Professor Mommsen
has accomplished a still more monumental task, as chief editor of the
great Corpus of Latin Inscriptions, perhaps the greatest memorial of
German scholarship and of imperial liberality toward learning. The
constructive power which has multiplied the value of Mommsen's life
work is clearly seen even in his writings for a more learned audience.
Thus the great inscription of Ancyra, which is almost an autobiogra-
phy of the Emperor Augustus, has been reproduced, annotated, and in
brief, put completely at the service of the general student, in a spe-
cial volume. In the same way, such large and debatable subjects as
(Roman Coinage,' (Roman Chronology,' and even “The Dialects of
Lower Italy,' have been treated in scholarly monographs. Every
student who has ever felt the influence of Mommsen, through his
books, in the lecture-room, above all in the seminar, will testify to
the value of this constructive and organizing mind.
The entire record of man's organized life appears to Mommsen,
as it did to Von Ranke and to Freeman, as one great story of devel-
opment in many chapters, each of which may throw light on all the
rest, and no less on the future pathways of civilization. The mature
conclusions of such a student are almost equally stimulating whether
we agree readily with his general views or not. This may be hap-
pily exemplified by a passage from the introduction of "The Provinces,
from Cæsar to Diocletian,'- a passage which traverses boldly all our
traditional impressions as to the state of the subjugated races under
Roman imperialism. Like the more extended citation below, this
passage is quoted from the excellent English version of William P.
Dickson:
« Old age has not the power to develop new thoughts and display creative
activity, nor has the government of the Roman Empire done so; but in its
sphere, which those who belonged to it were not far wrong in regarding as
## p. 10208 (#640) ##########################################
10208
THEODOR MOMMSEN
the world, it fostered the peace and prosperity of the many nations united
under its sway longer and more completely than any other leading power has
ever succeeded in doing. It is in the agricultural towns of Africa, in the
homes of the vine-dressers on the Moselle, in the fourishing townships of the
Lycian mountains, and on the margin of the Syrian desert, that the work of
the imperial period is to be sought and to be found. Even now there are
various regions of the East, as of the West, as regards which the imperial
period marks a climax of good government, very modest in itself, but never
withal attained before or since; and if an angel of the Lord were to strike
the balance whether the domain ruled by Severus Antoninus was governed
with greater intelligence and the greater humanity at that time or in the pres.
ent day, whether civilization and national prosperity generally have since that
time advanced or retrograded, it is very doubtful whether the decision would
prove in favor of the present. ”
Theodor Mommsen was born at Garding in Schleswig, November
30th, 1817; graduated at Kiel, studied archæology in France and
Italy 1844-7, and in 1848 became professor of jurisprudence at Leip-
zig. His political activity in those troublous years brought about his
dismissal in 1850. From 1852 to 1854 he held the professorship of
Roman law at Zurich; 1854-8 at Breslau; and finally in 1858 entered
upon the professorship of ancient history at Berlin, where this sturdy
octogenarian scholar is still (1897) actively engaged in his university
lectures, as well as in his manifold literary and scholarly undertak-
ings.
Hizriam Cranston Lawton
.
THE CHARACTER OF CÆSAR
From the History of Rome)
T"
he new monarch of Rome, the first ruler of the whole domain
of Romano-Hellenic civilization, Gaius Julius Cæsar, was in
his fifty-sixth year (born 12th July, 652 A. U. C. ) when the
battle of Thapsus, the last link in a long chain of momentous
victories, placed the decision of the future of the world in his
hands. Few men have had their elasticity so thoroughly put to
the proof as Cæsar: the sole creative genius produced by Rome,
and the last produced by the ancient world, which accordingly
moved on in the track that he marked out for it until its sun had
set. Sprung from one of the oldest noble families of Latium,
which traced back its lineage to the heroes of the Iliad and the
kings of Rome, and in fact to the Venus-Aphrodite common to
## p. 10209 (#641) ##########################################
THEODOR MOMMSEN
10209
both nations, he spent the years of his boyhood and early man-
hood as the genteel youth of that epoch were wont to spend
them. H had tasted the sweetness as well as the bitterness of
the cup of fashionable life, had recited and declaimed, had prac-
ticed literature and made verses in his idle hours, had prosecuted
love intrigues of every sort, and got himself initiated into all the
mysteries of shaving, curls, and ruffles pertaining to the toilette
wisdom of the day, as well as into the far more mysterious art
of always borrowing and never paying.
But the flexible steel of that nature was proof against even
these dissipated and fighty courses: Cæsar retained both his
bodily vigor and his elasticity of mind and heart unimpaired.
In fencing and in riding he was a match for any of his soldiers,
and his swimming saved his life at Alexandria; the incredible
rapidity of his journeys, which usually for the sake of gaining
time were performed by night,-a thorough contrast to the pro-
cession-like slowness with which Pompeius moved from one place
to another,- was the astonishment of his contemporaries and
not the least among the causes of his success. The mind was
like the body. His remarkable power of intuition revealed itself
in the precision and practicability of all his arrangements, even
where he gave orders without having seen with his own eyes.
His memory was matchless; and it was easy for him to carry
on several occupations simultaneously with equal self-possession.
Although a gentleman, a man of genius, and a monarch, he had
still a heart. So long as he lived, he cherished the purest ven-
eration for his worthy mother Aurelia (his father having died
early). To his wives, and above all to his daughter Julia, he
devoted an honorable affection, which was not without reflex in-
fluence even on political affairs. With the ablest and most excel-
lent men of his time, of high and of humble rank, he maintained
noble relations of mutual fidelity, with each after his kind. As
he himself never abandoned any of his partisans after the pusil-
lanimous and unfeeling manner of Pompeius, but adhered to his
friends — and that not merely from calculation — through good
and bad times without wavering, several of these, such as Aulus
Hirtius and Gaius Matius, even after his death gave noble testi-
monies of their attachment to him.
If in a nature so harmoniously organized there is any one trait
to be singled out as characteristic, it is this: that he stood aloof
from all ideology and everything fanciful. As a matter of course
XVII–639
## p. 10210 (#642) ##########################################
IO2IO
THEODOR MOMMSEN
a
ence.
Cæsar was a man of passion, for without passion there is no
genius; but his passion was never stronger than he could control.
He had had his season of youth, and song, love, and wine had
taken joyous possession of his mind; but with him they did not
penetrate to the inmost core of his nature. Literature occupied
him long and earnestly; but while Alexander could not sleep for
thinking of the Homeric Achilles, Cæsar in his sleepless hours
mused on the inflections of the Latin nouns and verbs. He made
verses as everybody then did, but they were weak; on the other
hand he was interested in subjects of astronomy and natural sci-
While wine was and continued to be with Alexander the
destroyer of care, the temperate Roman, after the revels of his
youth were over, avoided it entirely. Around him, as around
all those whom the full lustre of woman's love has dazzled in
youth, fainter gleams of it continued imperishably to linger;
even in later years he had his love adventures and successes with
women, and he retained a certain foppishness in his outward ap-
pearance, or to speak more correctly, a pleasing consciousness of
his own manly beauty. He carefully covered the baldness which
he keenly felt, with the laurel chaplet that he wore in public in
his later years; and he would doubtless have surrendered some of
his victories if he could thereby have brought back his youthful
locks. But however much, even when monarch, he enjoyed the
society of women, he only amused himself with them, and allowed
them no manner of influence over him. Even his much-censured
relation to Queen Cleopatra was only contrived to mask a weak
point in his political position.
Cæsar was thoroughly a realist and a man of sense; and
whatever he undertook and achieved was penetrated and guided
by the cool sobriety which constitutes the most marked pecul-
iarity of his genius. To this he owed the power of living ener-
getically in the present, undisturbed either by recollection or
by expectation; to this he owed the capacity of acting at any
moment with collected vigor, and 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 what-
ever 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
“marvelous serenity” which remained steadily with him through
good and evil days; to this he owed the complete independence
## p. 10211 (#643) ##########################################
THEODOR MOMMSEN
IO2II
which admitted of no control by favorite, or by mistress, or even
by friend. It resulted, moreover, from this clearness of judgment
that Cæsar never formed to himself illusions regarding the power
of fate and the ability of man; in his case the friendly veil was
lifted up which conceals from man the inadequacy of his working.
However prudently he planned and contemplated all possibilities,
the feeling was never absent from his heart that in all things,
fortune, that is to say accident, must bestow success; and with
this may be connected the circumstance that he so often played
a desperate game with destiny, and in particular again and again
hazarded his person with daring indifference. As indeed occas-
ionally men of predominant sagacity betake themselves to a pure
game of hazard, so there was in Cæsar's rationalism a point at
which it came in some measure into contact with mysticism.
Gifts such as these could not fail to produce a statesman.
From early youth, accordingly, Cæsar was a statesman in the
a
deepest sense of the term; and his aim was the highest which
man is allowed to propose to himself, - the political, military,
intellectual, and moral regeneration of his own deeply decayed
nation, and of the still more deeply decayed Hellenic nation inti-
mately akin to his own. The hard school of thirty years' expe-
rience changed his views as to the means by which this aim was
to be reached; his aim itself remained the same in the times
of his hopeless humiliation and of his unlimited plenitude of
power, in the times when as demagogue and conspirator he stole
towards it by paths of darkness, and in those when as joint
possessor of the supreme power and then as monarch, he worked
at his task in the full light of day before the eyes of the world.
All the measures of a permanent kind that proceeded from him
at the most various times assume their appropriate places in the
great building-plan. We cannot therefore properly speak of iso-
lated achievements of Cæsar; he did nothing isolated.
With justice men commend Cæsar the orator for his mascu-
line eloquence, which, scorning all the arts of the advocate, like
a clear flame at once enlightened and warmed. With justice
men admire in Cæsar the author the inimitable simplicity of
the composition, the unique purity and beauty of the language.
With justice the greatest masters of war of all times have
praised Cæsar the general, who, in a singular degree disregarding
routine and tradition, knew always how to find out the mode of
warfare by which in the given case the enemy was conquered,
## p. 10212 (#644) ##########################################
102 1 2
THEODOR MOMMSEN
and which was consequently in the given case the right one;
who, with the certainty of divination, found the proper means for
every end; who after defeat stood ready for battle like William
of Orange, and ended the campaign invariably with victory; who
managed that element of warfare, the treatment of which serves
to distinguish military genius from the mere ordinary ability of
an officer,—the rapid movement of masses, — with unsurpassed
perfection, and found the guarantee of victory not in the massive-
ness of his forces but in the celerity of their movements, not in
long preparation but in rapid and bold action even with inade-
quate means. But all these were with Cæsar mere secondary
matters: he was no doubt a great orator, author, and general, but
he became each of these merely because he was a consummate
statesman.
The soldier more especially played in him altogether an ac-
cessory part; and it is one of the principal peculiarities by which
he is distinguished from Alexander, Hannibal, and Napoleon, that
he began his political activity not as an officer but as a dema-
gogue. According to his original plan he had purposed to reach
his object, like Pericles and Gaius Gracchus, without force of arms;
and throughout eighteen years, as leader of the popular party,
he had moved exclusively amid political plans and intrigues:
until, reluctantly convinced of the necessity for a military sup-
port, he headed an army when he was already forty years of age.
It was natural that even afterwards he should remain still more
statesman than general; like Cromwell, who also transformed
himself from a leader of opposition into a military chief and
democratic king, and who in general, little as the Puritan hero
seems to resemble the dissolute Roman, is yet in his develop-
ment, as well as in the objects which he aimed at and the
results which he achieved, of all statesmen perhaps the most akin
to Cæsar. Even in his mode of warfare this improvised general-
ship may still be recognized: the enterprises of Napoleon against
Egypt and against England do not more clearly exhibit the artil-
lery lieutenant who had risen by service to command, than the
similar enterprises of Cæsar exhibit the demagogue metamor-
phosed into a general. A regularly trained officer would hardly
have been prepared, through political considerations of a not
altogether stringent nature, to set aside the best-founded military
scruples in the way in which Cæsar did so on several occasions,
most strikingly in the case of his landing in Epirus.
## p. 10213 (#645) ##########################################
THEODOR MOMMSEN
10213
Several of his acts are therefore censurable from a military
point of view; but what the general loses the statesman gains.
The task of the statesman is universal in its nature, like Cæsar's
genius: if he undertook things the most varied and most remote
one from another, they had all, without exception, a bearing on
the one great object to which with infinite fidelity and consistency
he devoted himself; and he never preferred one to another of the
manifold aspects and directions of his great activity. Although
a master of the art of war, he yet from statesmanly consider-
ations did his utmost to avert the civil strife, and when it never-
theless began, to keep his laurels from the stain of blood.
Although the founder of a military monarchy, he, yet with an
energy unexampled in history, allowed no hierarchy of marshals
or government of prætorians to come into existence. If he had
a preference for any one form of services rendered to the State,
it was for the sciences and arts of peace rather than for those of
war.
The most remarkable peculiarity of his action as a statesman
was its perfect harmony. In reality all the conditions for this
most difficult of all human functions were united in Cæsar. A
thorough realist, he never allowed the images of the past or ven-
erable tradition to disturb him; with him nothing was of value
in politics but the living present, and the law of reason: just as
in grammar he set aside historical and antiquarian research, and
recognized nothing but on the one hand the living usus loquendi
and on the other hand the rule of symmetry.
A born ruler, he
governed the minds of men as the wind drives the clouds, and
compelled the most heterogeneous natures to place themselves
at his service; - the smooth citizen and the rough subaltern, the
noble matrons of Rome and the fair princesses of Egypt and
Mauritania, the brilliant cavalry officer and the calculating banker.
His talent for organization was marvelous. No statesman has
ever compelled alliances, no general has ever collected an army
out of unyielding and refractory elements, with such decision,
and kept them together with such firmness, as Cæsar displayed
in constraining and upholding his coalitions and his legions.
Never did regent judge his instruments and assign each to the
place appropriate for him with so acute an eye.
He was monarch; but he never played the king. Even
when absolute lord of Rome, he retained the deportment of the
party leader: perfectly pliant and smooth, easy and charming in
## p. 10214 (#646) ##########################################
10214
THEODOR MOMMSEN
conversation, complaisant towards every one, it seemed as if he
wished to be nothing but the first among his peers.
Cæsar entirely avoided the blunder of so many men other.
wise on an equality with him, who have carried into politics the
tone of military command; however much occasion his disagree-
able relations with the Senate gave for it, he never resorted to
outrages such as that of the eighteenth Brumaire. Cæsar was
monarch; but he was never seized with the giddiness of the
tyrant. He is perhaps the only one among the mighty men of
the earth who in great matters and little never acted according
to inclination or caprice, but always without exception according
to his duty as ruler; and who, when he looked back on his life,
found doubtless erroneous calculations to deplore, but no false
step of passion to regret. There is nothing in the history of
Cæsar's life which even on a small scale can be compared with
those poetico-sensual ebullitions - such as the murder of Kleitos
or the burning of Persepolis — which the history of his great
predecessor in the East records. He is, in fine, perhaps the only
one of those mighty men who has preserved to the end of his
career the statesman's tact of discriminating between the possi-
ble and the impossible, and has not broken down in the task
which for nobly gifted natures is the most difficult of all, - the
task of recognizing, when on the pinnacle of success, its nat-
ural limits. What was possible he performed; and never left
the possible good undone for the sake of the impossible better,
never disdained at least to mitigate by palliatives evils that were
incurable. But where he recognized that fate had spoken, he
always obeyed. Alexander on the Hyphasis, Napoleon at Mos-
cow, turned back because they were compelled to do so, and
were indignant at destiny for bestowing even on its favorites
merely limited successes; Cæsar turned back voluntarily on the
Thames and on the Rhine; and at the Danube and the Euphra-
tes thought not of unbounded plans of world-conquest, but
merely of carrying into effect a well-considered regulation of the
frontiers.
Such was this unique man, whom it seems so easy and yet is
so infinitely difficult to describe. His whole nature is transparent
clearness; and tradition preserves more copious and more vivid
information regarding him than regarding any of his peers in
the ancient world. Of such a person our conceptions may well
vary in point of shallowness or depth, but strictly speaking, they
## p. 10215 (#647) ##########################################
THEODOR MOMMSEN
10215
cannot be different: to every inquirer not utterly perverted, the
grand figure has exhibited the same essential features, and yet
no one has succeeded in reproducing it to the life. The secret
lies in its perfection. In his character as a man as well as in
his place in history, Cæsar occupies a position where the great
contrasts of existence meet and balance each other. Of the
mightiest creative power and yet at the same time of the most
penetrating judgment; no longer a youth and not yet an old
man; of the highest energy of will and the highest capacity of
execution; filled with republican ideals and at the same time
born to be a king; a Roman in the deepest essence of his nature,
and yet called to reconcile and combine in himself as well as in
the outer world the Roman and the Hellenic types of culture,-
Cæsar was the entire and perfect man. Accordingly we miss in
him more than in any other historical personage what are called
characteristic features, which are in reality nothing else than
deviations from the natural course of human development. What
in Cæsar passes for such at the first superficial glance is, when
more closely observed, seen to be the peculiarity not of the indi-
vidual but of the epoch of culture or of the nation: his youthful
adventures, for instance, were common to him as to all his more
gifted contemporaries of like position; his unpoetical but strongly
logical temperament was the temperament of Romans in general.
It formed part also of Cæsar's full humanity that he was
in the highest degree influenced by the conditions of time and
place; for there is no abstract humanity, - the living man cannot
but occupy a place in a given nationality and in a definite line
of culture. Cæsar was a perfect man just because more than
any other he placed himself amidst the currents of his time, and
because more than any other he possessed the essential peculiar-
ity of the Roman nation — practical aptitude as a citizen — in per-
fection; for his Hellenism in fact was only the Hellenism which
had been long intimately blended with the Italian nationality.
But in this very circumstance lies the difficulty, we may perhaps
say the impossibility, of depicting Cæsar to the life. As the
artist can paint everything save only consummate beauty, so the
historian, when once in a thousand years he falls in with the per-
fect, can only be silent regarding it. For normality admits doubt-
less of being expressed, but it gives us only the negative notion
of the absence of defect; the secret of nature, whereby in her most
finished manifestations normality and individuality are combined,
## p. 10216 (#648) ##########################################
10216
THEODOR MOMMSEN
is beyond expression. Nothing is left for us but to deem those
fortunate who beheld this perfection, and to gain some faint con-
ception of it from the reflected lustre which rests imperishably
on the works tiat were the creation of this great nature.
These also, it is true, bear the stamp of the time. The Ro-
man hero himself stood by the side of his youthful Greek prede-
cessor, not merely as an equal but as a superior; but the world
had meanwhile become old and its youthful lustre had faded.
The action of Cæsar was no longer, like that of Alexander, a
,
joyous marching onward towards a goal indefinitely remote: he
built on and out of ruins, and was content to establish himself
as tolerably and as securely as possible within the ample but yet
definite bounds once assigned to him. With reason, therefore,
the delicate poetic tact of the nations has not troubled itself
about the unpoetical Roman, and has invested the son of Philip
alone with all the golden lustre of poetry, with all the rainbow
hues of legend.
But with equal reason the political life of nations
has during thousands of years again and again reverted to the
lines which Cæsar drew; and the fact that the peoples to whom
the world belongs still at the present day designate the highest
of their monarchs by his name, conveys a warning deeply signifi-
cant, and unhappily fraught with shame.
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## p.
is contrary to fair play; I shall cry out murder.
Cathos [to Madelon] - It must be acknowledged that he says
things in a manner altogether his own.
Madelon - His way of putting things is exquisitely admirable.
Cathos [to Mascarille] - You are more afraid than hurt, and
your heart cries out before it is touched.
Mascarille — The deuce! why, it is sore from head to foot.
Translation of Charles Heron Wall.
## p. 10206 (#634) ##########################################
10206
THEODOR MOMMSEN
(1817-)
BY WILLIAM CRANSTON LAWTON
DHE popular conception of a learned German professor is of
a short-sighted, spectacled, absent-minded recluse buried
among his books, absorbed in some narrow and remote line
of research for which a single lifetime is all too brief, or preparing a
ponderous book which perhaps ten men in the world can read. The
type is not wholly imaginary, though like the buffalo it is already near
extinction.
Above all others in our time, however, Theodor Mommsen is an
illustration of patriotic and civic usefulness, not merely combined
with the most learned research, but illuminated and strengthened in-
calculably by those very studies. His political sympathies, his open
affiliations in the national legislature, have been with the extreme
radical wing of that great “Liberal movement which made the
new German empire possible. Thoroughly believing that democratic
freedom of discussion is the firmest final basis for a strong central
government, he has often offended those in high office by his fear-
less criticisms. Once indeed he was actually brought to trial (1882)
for sharp words directed against Prince Bismarck. His triumphant
acquittal revealed and strengthened the popular pride in the brave
citizen and the most illustrious of German scholars.
Mommsen is primarily interested in the life and growth of politi-
cal institutions. All his manifold activity is centred about this chief
study. It was natural, then, that the Roman State, the greatest organ-
ization in all human history, should have engaged his lifelong devo-
tion.
Professor Mommsen is most widely known to the general reading
public, in and out of Germany, as the author of a “popular” Roman
history. This great work indeed put forth with little citation of
authorities. The solid pages usually run calmly on without any array
of polemic or pedantic foot-notes. Nevertheless, the apparatus, the
scaffolding as it were, undoubtedly exists still in the author's note-
books. Indeed, such material has been liberally furnished whenever
the same subject has been treated in University lectures. More-
over, this stately masterpiece of constructive work is firmly founded
upon special studies as wide-reaching and as thorough as were ever
undertaken. Professor Mommsen's practical and juristic mind inclines
## p. 10206 (#635) ##########################################
THECLIN
## p. 10206 (#636) ##########################################
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܀
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܃ ܃ ܃ : ; . ܬ ];)
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}
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܂. ܢ ܝ | ܙ ;- |: ܙ)i
down or is it were's win, Lip Clit sil in: .
lots ben 1:1. 5. ! igre
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܆܆܃ ܃ 1) ܐܢ ܀. ܀ ii , : ܒܝܢii:܃ ܃ ܃ ܝ
r- " y) Iܝ ܢ܂ : :fi ? { . 11 ܝ ܝ ܨ ، '( - :(I
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## p. 10206 (#637) ##########################################
THEODOR MOMMSEN.
## p. 10206 (#638) ##########################################
i
## p. 10207 (#639) ##########################################
THEODOR MOMMSEN
10207
him to brush aside the fables and romances of Livy's first decade.
Instead, he endeavors to recover from the usages and institutions
of later Rome the probable conditions of the earlier time. Naturally
this often necessitates closely reasoned argument, — and uncertain
results at best.
In the later portions Professor Mommsen is on firmer ground;
but his judgments of men like Cicero, whom he detests, and Cæsar,
whom he almost adores, are as far as possible from a mere scholarly
dependence on ancient authorities. Everywhere he is quite suffi-
ciently inclined to appeal to modern parallels and illustrations. The
section on the political history of the early empire has never yet
appeared; but the imperial government of Roman provinces is treated
in exhaustive volumes, already published, and destined to become an
integral part of the completed work.
This latter essay may serve to remind us that Professor Mommsen
has accomplished a still more monumental task, as chief editor of the
great Corpus of Latin Inscriptions, perhaps the greatest memorial of
German scholarship and of imperial liberality toward learning. The
constructive power which has multiplied the value of Mommsen's life
work is clearly seen even in his writings for a more learned audience.
Thus the great inscription of Ancyra, which is almost an autobiogra-
phy of the Emperor Augustus, has been reproduced, annotated, and in
brief, put completely at the service of the general student, in a spe-
cial volume. In the same way, such large and debatable subjects as
(Roman Coinage,' (Roman Chronology,' and even “The Dialects of
Lower Italy,' have been treated in scholarly monographs. Every
student who has ever felt the influence of Mommsen, through his
books, in the lecture-room, above all in the seminar, will testify to
the value of this constructive and organizing mind.
The entire record of man's organized life appears to Mommsen,
as it did to Von Ranke and to Freeman, as one great story of devel-
opment in many chapters, each of which may throw light on all the
rest, and no less on the future pathways of civilization. The mature
conclusions of such a student are almost equally stimulating whether
we agree readily with his general views or not. This may be hap-
pily exemplified by a passage from the introduction of "The Provinces,
from Cæsar to Diocletian,'- a passage which traverses boldly all our
traditional impressions as to the state of the subjugated races under
Roman imperialism. Like the more extended citation below, this
passage is quoted from the excellent English version of William P.
Dickson:
« Old age has not the power to develop new thoughts and display creative
activity, nor has the government of the Roman Empire done so; but in its
sphere, which those who belonged to it were not far wrong in regarding as
## p. 10208 (#640) ##########################################
10208
THEODOR MOMMSEN
the world, it fostered the peace and prosperity of the many nations united
under its sway longer and more completely than any other leading power has
ever succeeded in doing. It is in the agricultural towns of Africa, in the
homes of the vine-dressers on the Moselle, in the fourishing townships of the
Lycian mountains, and on the margin of the Syrian desert, that the work of
the imperial period is to be sought and to be found. Even now there are
various regions of the East, as of the West, as regards which the imperial
period marks a climax of good government, very modest in itself, but never
withal attained before or since; and if an angel of the Lord were to strike
the balance whether the domain ruled by Severus Antoninus was governed
with greater intelligence and the greater humanity at that time or in the pres.
ent day, whether civilization and national prosperity generally have since that
time advanced or retrograded, it is very doubtful whether the decision would
prove in favor of the present. ”
Theodor Mommsen was born at Garding in Schleswig, November
30th, 1817; graduated at Kiel, studied archæology in France and
Italy 1844-7, and in 1848 became professor of jurisprudence at Leip-
zig. His political activity in those troublous years brought about his
dismissal in 1850. From 1852 to 1854 he held the professorship of
Roman law at Zurich; 1854-8 at Breslau; and finally in 1858 entered
upon the professorship of ancient history at Berlin, where this sturdy
octogenarian scholar is still (1897) actively engaged in his university
lectures, as well as in his manifold literary and scholarly undertak-
ings.
Hizriam Cranston Lawton
.
THE CHARACTER OF CÆSAR
From the History of Rome)
T"
he new monarch of Rome, the first ruler of the whole domain
of Romano-Hellenic civilization, Gaius Julius Cæsar, was in
his fifty-sixth year (born 12th July, 652 A. U. C. ) when the
battle of Thapsus, the last link in a long chain of momentous
victories, placed the decision of the future of the world in his
hands. Few men have had their elasticity so thoroughly put to
the proof as Cæsar: the sole creative genius produced by Rome,
and the last produced by the ancient world, which accordingly
moved on in the track that he marked out for it until its sun had
set. Sprung from one of the oldest noble families of Latium,
which traced back its lineage to the heroes of the Iliad and the
kings of Rome, and in fact to the Venus-Aphrodite common to
## p. 10209 (#641) ##########################################
THEODOR MOMMSEN
10209
both nations, he spent the years of his boyhood and early man-
hood as the genteel youth of that epoch were wont to spend
them. H had tasted the sweetness as well as the bitterness of
the cup of fashionable life, had recited and declaimed, had prac-
ticed literature and made verses in his idle hours, had prosecuted
love intrigues of every sort, and got himself initiated into all the
mysteries of shaving, curls, and ruffles pertaining to the toilette
wisdom of the day, as well as into the far more mysterious art
of always borrowing and never paying.
But the flexible steel of that nature was proof against even
these dissipated and fighty courses: Cæsar retained both his
bodily vigor and his elasticity of mind and heart unimpaired.
In fencing and in riding he was a match for any of his soldiers,
and his swimming saved his life at Alexandria; the incredible
rapidity of his journeys, which usually for the sake of gaining
time were performed by night,-a thorough contrast to the pro-
cession-like slowness with which Pompeius moved from one place
to another,- was the astonishment of his contemporaries and
not the least among the causes of his success. The mind was
like the body. His remarkable power of intuition revealed itself
in the precision and practicability of all his arrangements, even
where he gave orders without having seen with his own eyes.
His memory was matchless; and it was easy for him to carry
on several occupations simultaneously with equal self-possession.
Although a gentleman, a man of genius, and a monarch, he had
still a heart. So long as he lived, he cherished the purest ven-
eration for his worthy mother Aurelia (his father having died
early). To his wives, and above all to his daughter Julia, he
devoted an honorable affection, which was not without reflex in-
fluence even on political affairs. With the ablest and most excel-
lent men of his time, of high and of humble rank, he maintained
noble relations of mutual fidelity, with each after his kind. As
he himself never abandoned any of his partisans after the pusil-
lanimous and unfeeling manner of Pompeius, but adhered to his
friends — and that not merely from calculation — through good
and bad times without wavering, several of these, such as Aulus
Hirtius and Gaius Matius, even after his death gave noble testi-
monies of their attachment to him.
If in a nature so harmoniously organized there is any one trait
to be singled out as characteristic, it is this: that he stood aloof
from all ideology and everything fanciful. As a matter of course
XVII–639
## p. 10210 (#642) ##########################################
IO2IO
THEODOR MOMMSEN
a
ence.
Cæsar was a man of passion, for without passion there is no
genius; but his passion was never stronger than he could control.
He had had his season of youth, and song, love, and wine had
taken joyous possession of his mind; but with him they did not
penetrate to the inmost core of his nature. Literature occupied
him long and earnestly; but while Alexander could not sleep for
thinking of the Homeric Achilles, Cæsar in his sleepless hours
mused on the inflections of the Latin nouns and verbs. He made
verses as everybody then did, but they were weak; on the other
hand he was interested in subjects of astronomy and natural sci-
While wine was and continued to be with Alexander the
destroyer of care, the temperate Roman, after the revels of his
youth were over, avoided it entirely. Around him, as around
all those whom the full lustre of woman's love has dazzled in
youth, fainter gleams of it continued imperishably to linger;
even in later years he had his love adventures and successes with
women, and he retained a certain foppishness in his outward ap-
pearance, or to speak more correctly, a pleasing consciousness of
his own manly beauty. He carefully covered the baldness which
he keenly felt, with the laurel chaplet that he wore in public in
his later years; and he would doubtless have surrendered some of
his victories if he could thereby have brought back his youthful
locks. But however much, even when monarch, he enjoyed the
society of women, he only amused himself with them, and allowed
them no manner of influence over him. Even his much-censured
relation to Queen Cleopatra was only contrived to mask a weak
point in his political position.
Cæsar was thoroughly a realist and a man of sense; and
whatever he undertook and achieved was penetrated and guided
by the cool sobriety which constitutes the most marked pecul-
iarity of his genius. To this he owed the power of living ener-
getically in the present, undisturbed either by recollection or
by expectation; to this he owed the capacity of acting at any
moment with collected vigor, and 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 what-
ever 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
“marvelous serenity” which remained steadily with him through
good and evil days; to this he owed the complete independence
## p. 10211 (#643) ##########################################
THEODOR MOMMSEN
IO2II
which admitted of no control by favorite, or by mistress, or even
by friend. It resulted, moreover, from this clearness of judgment
that Cæsar never formed to himself illusions regarding the power
of fate and the ability of man; in his case the friendly veil was
lifted up which conceals from man the inadequacy of his working.
However prudently he planned and contemplated all possibilities,
the feeling was never absent from his heart that in all things,
fortune, that is to say accident, must bestow success; and with
this may be connected the circumstance that he so often played
a desperate game with destiny, and in particular again and again
hazarded his person with daring indifference. As indeed occas-
ionally men of predominant sagacity betake themselves to a pure
game of hazard, so there was in Cæsar's rationalism a point at
which it came in some measure into contact with mysticism.
Gifts such as these could not fail to produce a statesman.
From early youth, accordingly, Cæsar was a statesman in the
a
deepest sense of the term; and his aim was the highest which
man is allowed to propose to himself, - the political, military,
intellectual, and moral regeneration of his own deeply decayed
nation, and of the still more deeply decayed Hellenic nation inti-
mately akin to his own. The hard school of thirty years' expe-
rience changed his views as to the means by which this aim was
to be reached; his aim itself remained the same in the times
of his hopeless humiliation and of his unlimited plenitude of
power, in the times when as demagogue and conspirator he stole
towards it by paths of darkness, and in those when as joint
possessor of the supreme power and then as monarch, he worked
at his task in the full light of day before the eyes of the world.
All the measures of a permanent kind that proceeded from him
at the most various times assume their appropriate places in the
great building-plan. We cannot therefore properly speak of iso-
lated achievements of Cæsar; he did nothing isolated.
With justice men commend Cæsar the orator for his mascu-
line eloquence, which, scorning all the arts of the advocate, like
a clear flame at once enlightened and warmed. With justice
men admire in Cæsar the author the inimitable simplicity of
the composition, the unique purity and beauty of the language.
With justice the greatest masters of war of all times have
praised Cæsar the general, who, in a singular degree disregarding
routine and tradition, knew always how to find out the mode of
warfare by which in the given case the enemy was conquered,
## p. 10212 (#644) ##########################################
102 1 2
THEODOR MOMMSEN
and which was consequently in the given case the right one;
who, with the certainty of divination, found the proper means for
every end; who after defeat stood ready for battle like William
of Orange, and ended the campaign invariably with victory; who
managed that element of warfare, the treatment of which serves
to distinguish military genius from the mere ordinary ability of
an officer,—the rapid movement of masses, — with unsurpassed
perfection, and found the guarantee of victory not in the massive-
ness of his forces but in the celerity of their movements, not in
long preparation but in rapid and bold action even with inade-
quate means. But all these were with Cæsar mere secondary
matters: he was no doubt a great orator, author, and general, but
he became each of these merely because he was a consummate
statesman.
The soldier more especially played in him altogether an ac-
cessory part; and it is one of the principal peculiarities by which
he is distinguished from Alexander, Hannibal, and Napoleon, that
he began his political activity not as an officer but as a dema-
gogue. According to his original plan he had purposed to reach
his object, like Pericles and Gaius Gracchus, without force of arms;
and throughout eighteen years, as leader of the popular party,
he had moved exclusively amid political plans and intrigues:
until, reluctantly convinced of the necessity for a military sup-
port, he headed an army when he was already forty years of age.
It was natural that even afterwards he should remain still more
statesman than general; like Cromwell, who also transformed
himself from a leader of opposition into a military chief and
democratic king, and who in general, little as the Puritan hero
seems to resemble the dissolute Roman, is yet in his develop-
ment, as well as in the objects which he aimed at and the
results which he achieved, of all statesmen perhaps the most akin
to Cæsar. Even in his mode of warfare this improvised general-
ship may still be recognized: the enterprises of Napoleon against
Egypt and against England do not more clearly exhibit the artil-
lery lieutenant who had risen by service to command, than the
similar enterprises of Cæsar exhibit the demagogue metamor-
phosed into a general. A regularly trained officer would hardly
have been prepared, through political considerations of a not
altogether stringent nature, to set aside the best-founded military
scruples in the way in which Cæsar did so on several occasions,
most strikingly in the case of his landing in Epirus.
## p. 10213 (#645) ##########################################
THEODOR MOMMSEN
10213
Several of his acts are therefore censurable from a military
point of view; but what the general loses the statesman gains.
The task of the statesman is universal in its nature, like Cæsar's
genius: if he undertook things the most varied and most remote
one from another, they had all, without exception, a bearing on
the one great object to which with infinite fidelity and consistency
he devoted himself; and he never preferred one to another of the
manifold aspects and directions of his great activity. Although
a master of the art of war, he yet from statesmanly consider-
ations did his utmost to avert the civil strife, and when it never-
theless began, to keep his laurels from the stain of blood.
Although the founder of a military monarchy, he, yet with an
energy unexampled in history, allowed no hierarchy of marshals
or government of prætorians to come into existence. If he had
a preference for any one form of services rendered to the State,
it was for the sciences and arts of peace rather than for those of
war.
The most remarkable peculiarity of his action as a statesman
was its perfect harmony. In reality all the conditions for this
most difficult of all human functions were united in Cæsar. A
thorough realist, he never allowed the images of the past or ven-
erable tradition to disturb him; with him nothing was of value
in politics but the living present, and the law of reason: just as
in grammar he set aside historical and antiquarian research, and
recognized nothing but on the one hand the living usus loquendi
and on the other hand the rule of symmetry.
A born ruler, he
governed the minds of men as the wind drives the clouds, and
compelled the most heterogeneous natures to place themselves
at his service; - the smooth citizen and the rough subaltern, the
noble matrons of Rome and the fair princesses of Egypt and
Mauritania, the brilliant cavalry officer and the calculating banker.
His talent for organization was marvelous. No statesman has
ever compelled alliances, no general has ever collected an army
out of unyielding and refractory elements, with such decision,
and kept them together with such firmness, as Cæsar displayed
in constraining and upholding his coalitions and his legions.
Never did regent judge his instruments and assign each to the
place appropriate for him with so acute an eye.
He was monarch; but he never played the king. Even
when absolute lord of Rome, he retained the deportment of the
party leader: perfectly pliant and smooth, easy and charming in
## p. 10214 (#646) ##########################################
10214
THEODOR MOMMSEN
conversation, complaisant towards every one, it seemed as if he
wished to be nothing but the first among his peers.
Cæsar entirely avoided the blunder of so many men other.
wise on an equality with him, who have carried into politics the
tone of military command; however much occasion his disagree-
able relations with the Senate gave for it, he never resorted to
outrages such as that of the eighteenth Brumaire. Cæsar was
monarch; but he was never seized with the giddiness of the
tyrant. He is perhaps the only one among the mighty men of
the earth who in great matters and little never acted according
to inclination or caprice, but always without exception according
to his duty as ruler; and who, when he looked back on his life,
found doubtless erroneous calculations to deplore, but no false
step of passion to regret. There is nothing in the history of
Cæsar's life which even on a small scale can be compared with
those poetico-sensual ebullitions - such as the murder of Kleitos
or the burning of Persepolis — which the history of his great
predecessor in the East records. He is, in fine, perhaps the only
one of those mighty men who has preserved to the end of his
career the statesman's tact of discriminating between the possi-
ble and the impossible, and has not broken down in the task
which for nobly gifted natures is the most difficult of all, - the
task of recognizing, when on the pinnacle of success, its nat-
ural limits. What was possible he performed; and never left
the possible good undone for the sake of the impossible better,
never disdained at least to mitigate by palliatives evils that were
incurable. But where he recognized that fate had spoken, he
always obeyed. Alexander on the Hyphasis, Napoleon at Mos-
cow, turned back because they were compelled to do so, and
were indignant at destiny for bestowing even on its favorites
merely limited successes; Cæsar turned back voluntarily on the
Thames and on the Rhine; and at the Danube and the Euphra-
tes thought not of unbounded plans of world-conquest, but
merely of carrying into effect a well-considered regulation of the
frontiers.
Such was this unique man, whom it seems so easy and yet is
so infinitely difficult to describe. His whole nature is transparent
clearness; and tradition preserves more copious and more vivid
information regarding him than regarding any of his peers in
the ancient world. Of such a person our conceptions may well
vary in point of shallowness or depth, but strictly speaking, they
## p. 10215 (#647) ##########################################
THEODOR MOMMSEN
10215
cannot be different: to every inquirer not utterly perverted, the
grand figure has exhibited the same essential features, and yet
no one has succeeded in reproducing it to the life. The secret
lies in its perfection. In his character as a man as well as in
his place in history, Cæsar occupies a position where the great
contrasts of existence meet and balance each other. Of the
mightiest creative power and yet at the same time of the most
penetrating judgment; no longer a youth and not yet an old
man; of the highest energy of will and the highest capacity of
execution; filled with republican ideals and at the same time
born to be a king; a Roman in the deepest essence of his nature,
and yet called to reconcile and combine in himself as well as in
the outer world the Roman and the Hellenic types of culture,-
Cæsar was the entire and perfect man. Accordingly we miss in
him more than in any other historical personage what are called
characteristic features, which are in reality nothing else than
deviations from the natural course of human development. What
in Cæsar passes for such at the first superficial glance is, when
more closely observed, seen to be the peculiarity not of the indi-
vidual but of the epoch of culture or of the nation: his youthful
adventures, for instance, were common to him as to all his more
gifted contemporaries of like position; his unpoetical but strongly
logical temperament was the temperament of Romans in general.
It formed part also of Cæsar's full humanity that he was
in the highest degree influenced by the conditions of time and
place; for there is no abstract humanity, - the living man cannot
but occupy a place in a given nationality and in a definite line
of culture. Cæsar was a perfect man just because more than
any other he placed himself amidst the currents of his time, and
because more than any other he possessed the essential peculiar-
ity of the Roman nation — practical aptitude as a citizen — in per-
fection; for his Hellenism in fact was only the Hellenism which
had been long intimately blended with the Italian nationality.
But in this very circumstance lies the difficulty, we may perhaps
say the impossibility, of depicting Cæsar to the life. As the
artist can paint everything save only consummate beauty, so the
historian, when once in a thousand years he falls in with the per-
fect, can only be silent regarding it. For normality admits doubt-
less of being expressed, but it gives us only the negative notion
of the absence of defect; the secret of nature, whereby in her most
finished manifestations normality and individuality are combined,
## p. 10216 (#648) ##########################################
10216
THEODOR MOMMSEN
is beyond expression. Nothing is left for us but to deem those
fortunate who beheld this perfection, and to gain some faint con-
ception of it from the reflected lustre which rests imperishably
on the works tiat were the creation of this great nature.
These also, it is true, bear the stamp of the time. The Ro-
man hero himself stood by the side of his youthful Greek prede-
cessor, not merely as an equal but as a superior; but the world
had meanwhile become old and its youthful lustre had faded.
The action of Cæsar was no longer, like that of Alexander, a
,
joyous marching onward towards a goal indefinitely remote: he
built on and out of ruins, and was content to establish himself
as tolerably and as securely as possible within the ample but yet
definite bounds once assigned to him. With reason, therefore,
the delicate poetic tact of the nations has not troubled itself
about the unpoetical Roman, and has invested the son of Philip
alone with all the golden lustre of poetry, with all the rainbow
hues of legend.
But with equal reason the political life of nations
has during thousands of years again and again reverted to the
lines which Cæsar drew; and the fact that the peoples to whom
the world belongs still at the present day designate the highest
of their monarchs by his name, conveys a warning deeply signifi-
cant, and unhappily fraught with shame.
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