A Window into the Roman Empire

by Peter Nimitz

This essay appears in Issue 3 of the Mars Review of Books. Visit the MRB store here.

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The History of the Roman Republic

by Theodor Mommsen, Translated and edited by Arthur C. Howland

Rogue Scholar Press, 430 pp., $19.00

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We are often told that those who do not learn the lessons of the past are condemned to repeat them. But to learn from the past one must first understand it. A misapprehension of history, or a narrow focus on irrelevancies, can poison one’s fate just as badly as can ignorance. Roman history, with which educated Americans are usually at least vaguely familiar, is commonly examined in order to gain insight into the workings of the United States. America and Rome’s shared republican governments and growth from small states to powerful hegemons do offer obvious historical parallels. But the parallels can easily become misleading if one fails to dig into the details.

After the fall of the western half of the Roman Empire to the barbarians in the fifth century AD, knowledge of the Empire’s history was shattered. For a thousand years, fragments of memory were preserved in the eastern Mediterranean, where civilization had survived, and in scattered western monasteries. With the spread of European literacy in the 16th century and the resulting Republic of Letters in the 17th and 18th centuries, Roman history was slowly rediscovered. Old sources were uncovered and translated. New compilations and analyses of Roman history, such as Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, were published. It was in this milieu that German classicist, archaeologist, and historian Theodor Mommsen, winner of the 1902 Nobel Prize in Literature, thrived.