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Theodor Mommsen

61 quotes

“..As Salmanezer and Nebuchadnezzar had formerly carried the Jews to Babylon, so now from all the frontier provinces of the new kingdom (of Armenia) - from Corduene, Adiabene, Assyria,Cilicia,Cappadocia - the inhabitants, especially the Greek or half-Greek citizens of the towns, were compelled to settle with their whole goods and chattels in the new capital, one of those gigantic cities proclaiming rather the nothingness of the people than the greatness of the rulers, which sprang up in the countries of the Euphrates on every change in the supreme sovereignty at the fiat of the new grant Sultan. the new 'city of Tigranes", Tigranocerta, situated in in the most southern province of Armenia, not far from the Mesopotamian frontier, was a city like Nineveh and Babylon, with walls fifty yards high, and the appendages of palace, garden and park that were appropriate to sultanism In other respects, too, the new great king proved faithful to his part. As amidst the perpetual childhood of the East the childlike conceptions of kings with real crowns on their heads have never disappeared, Tigranes, when he showed himself in public, appeared in the state and costume of a successor of Darius and Xerxes, with the purple fagtan, the half white half-purple tunic, the long plaited trousers, the high turban, and the royal diadem - attended moreover and served in slavish fashion, wherever he went or stoood, by four "kings.”
Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) said by 1903 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This (The launching of an invasion into Armenia) was itself hazardous; but the smallness of the number (of the army, not more than 15,000 men) might be in some degree compensated by the tried valour of the army consisting throughout of veterans. A much worse circumstance was the temper of the soldiers, to which Lucullus, in his high aristocratic fashion, had given far too little heed. Lucullus was an able general, and - according to the aristocratic standard - an upright and benevolent man, but very far from being a favorite with his soldiers. He was unpopular, as a decided adherent of the oligarghy;unpopular, because he had vigorously checked the monstrous usury of the Roman capitalists in Asia Minor; unpopular, on account of the toils and fatigues which he inflicted on his troops; unpopular, because he demanded strict discipline in his soldiers and prevented as far as possible the pillage of the Greek towns by his men, but withal caused many a waggon and many a camel to be alden with the treasures of the East for himself; unpopular too on account of his manner, which was polished, stately, Hellenising, not at all familiar, and inclining, wherever it was possible, to ease and pleasure. There was no trace in him of the charm which creates a personal bond between the general and the soldier.”
Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) said by 1903 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“n a word, this new office of Imperator was nothing else than the primitive regal office re-established; for it was those very restrictions--as respected the temporal and local limitation of power, the collegiate arrangement, and the cooperation of the senate or the community that was necessary for certain cases-- which distinguished the consul from the king.(17) There is hardly a trait of the new monarchy which was not found in the old: the union of the supreme military, judicial, and administrative authority in the hands of the prince; a religious presidency over the commonwealth; the right of issuing ordinances with binding power; the reduction of the senate to a council of state; the revival of the patriciate and of the praefecture of the city. But still more striking than these analogies is the internal similarity of the monarchy of Servius Tullius and the monarchy of Caesar; if those old kings of Rome with all their plenitude of power had yet been rulers of a free community and themselves the protectors of the commons against the nobility, Caesar too had not come to destroy liberty but to fulfil it, and primarily to break the intolerable yoke of the aristocracy. Nor need it surprise us that Caesar, anything but a political antiquary, went back five hundred years to find the model for his new state; for, seeing that the highest office of the Roman commonwealth had remained at all times a kingship restricted by a number of special laws, the idea of the regal office itself had by no means become obsolete. At very various periods and from very different sides-- in the decemviral power, in the Sullan regency, and in Caesar's own dictatorship--there had been during the republic a practical recurrence to it; indeed by a certain logical necessity, whenever an exceptional power seemed requisite there emerged, in contradistinction to the usual limited -imperium-, the unlimited -imperium- which was simply nothing else than the regal power.”
Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) said by 1903 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But while at the bottom of the national life the slime was thus constantly accumulating more and more deleteriously and deeply, so much the more smooth and glittering was the surface, overlaid with the varnish of polished manners and universal friendship. All the world interchanged visits; so that in the houses of quality it was necessary to admit the persons presenting themselves every morning for the levee in a certain order fixed by the master or occasionally by the attendant in waiting, and to give audience only to the more notable one by one, while the rest were more summarily admitted partly in groups, partly en masse at the close—a distinction which Gaius Gracchus, in this too paving the way for the new monarchy, is said to have introduced. The interchange of letters of courtesy was carried to as great an extent as the visits of courtesy; "friendly" letters flew over land and sea between persons who had neither personal relations nor business with each other, whereas proper and formal business-letters scarcely occur except where the letter is addressed to a corporation. In like manner invitations to dinner, the customary new year's presents, the domestic festivals, were divested of their proper character and converted almost into public ceremonials; even death itself did not release the Roman from these attentions to his countless "neighbours," but in order to die with due respectability he had to provide each of them at any rate with a keepsake. Just as in certain circles of our mercantile world, the genuine intimacy of family ties and family friendships had so totally vanished from the Rome of that day that the whole intercourse of business and acquaintance could be garnished with forms and flourishes which had lost all meaning, and thus by degrees the reality came to be superseded by that spectral shadow of "friendship," which holds by no means the least place among the various evil spirits brooding over the proscriptions and civil wars of this age.”
Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) said by 1903 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is a dreadful picture—this picture of Italy under the rule of the oligarchy. There was nothing to bridge over or soften the fatal contrast between the world of the beggars and the world of the rich. The more clearly and painfully this contrast was felt on both sides—the giddier the height to which riches rose, the deeper the abyss of poverty yawned—the more frequently, amidst that changeful world of speculation and playing at hazard, were individuals tossed from the bottom to the top and again from the top to the bottom. The wider the chasm by which the two worlds were externally divided, the more completely they coincided in the like annihilation of family life—which is yet the germ and core of all nationality—in the like laziness and luxury, the like unsubstantial economy, the like unmanly dependence, the like corruption differing only in its tariff, the like criminal demoralization, the like longing to begin the war with property. Riches and misery in close league drove the Italians out of Italy, and filled the peninsula partly with swarms of slaves, partly with awful silence. It is a terrible picture, but not one peculiar to Italy; wherever the government of capitalists in a slave-state has fully developed itself, it has desolated God's fair world in the same way as rivers glisten in different colours, but a common sewer everywhere looks like itself, so the Italy of the Ciceronian epoch resembles substantially the Hellas of Polybius and still more decidedly the Carthage of Hannibal's time, where in exactly similar fashion the all-powerful rule of capital ruined the middle class, raised trade and estate-farming to the highest prosperity, and ultimately led to a— hypocritically whitewashed—moral and political corruption of the nation. All the arrant sins that capital has been guilty of against nation and civilization in the modern world, remain as far inferior to the abominations of the ancient capitalist-states as the free man, be he ever so poor, remains superior to the slave; and not until the dragon-seed of North America ripens, will the world have again similar fruits to reap.”
Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) said by 1903 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Few men have had their elasticity so thoroughly put to the proof as Caesar-- the sole creative genius produced by Rome, and the last produced by the ancient world, which accordingly moved on in the path that he marked out for it until its sun went down. 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 both nations--he spent the years of his boyhood and early manhood as the genteel youth of that epoch were wont to spend them. He had tasted the sweetness as well as the bitterness of the cup of fashionable life, had recited and declaimed, had practised 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 still more mysterious art of always borrowing and never paying. But the flexible steel of that nature was proof against even these dissipated and flighty courses; Caesar retained both his bodily vigour and his elasticity of mind and of 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 procession-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 veneration for his worthy mother Aurelia (his father having died early); to his wives and above all to his daughter Julia he devoted an honourable affection, which was not without reflex influence even on political affairs. With the ablest and most excellent men of his time, of high and of humbler rank, he maintained noble relations of mutual fidelity, with each after his kind. As he himself never abandoned any of his partisans after the pusillanimous 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, gave, even after his death, noble testimonies of their attachment to him.”
Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) said by 1903 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Caesar did not confine himself to helping the debtor for the moment; he did what as legislator he could, permanently to keep down the fearful omnipotence of capital. First of all the great legal maxim was proclaimed, that freedom is not a possession commensurable with property, but an eternal right of man, of which the state is entitled judicially to deprive the criminal alone, not the debtor. It was Caesar, who, perhaps stimulated in this case also by the more humane Egyptian and Greek legislation, especially that of Solon,(68) introduced this principle--diametrically opposed to the maxims of the earlier ordinances as to bankruptcy-- into the common law, where it has since retained its place undisputed. According to Roman law the debtor unable to pay became the serf of his creditor.(69) The Poetelian law no doubt had allowed a debtor, who had become unable to pay only through temporary embarrassments, not through genuine insolvency, to save his personal freedom by the cession of his property;(70) nevertheless for the really insolvent that principle of law, though doubtless modified in secondary points, had been in substance retained unaltered for five hundred years; a direct recourse to the debtor's estate only occurred exceptionally, when the debtor had died or had forfeited his burgess-rights or could not be found. It was Caesar who first gave an insolvent the right--on which our modern bankruptcy regulations are based-- of formally ceding his estate to his creditors, whether it might suffice to satisfy them or not, so as to save at all events his personal freedom although with diminished honorary and political rights, and to begin a new financial existence, in which he could only be sued on account of claims proceeding from the earlier period and not protected in the liquidation, if he could pay them without renewed financial ruin.”
Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) said by 1903 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“..whatever may have been the style and title, the sovereign ruler was there, and accordingly the court established itself at once with all its due accompaniments of pomp, insipidity, and emptiness. Caesar appeared in public not in the robe of the consuls which was bordered with purple stripes, but in the robe wholly of purple which was reckoned in antiquity as the proper regal attire, and received, sitting on his golden chair and without rising from it, the solemn procession of the senate. The festivals in his honour commemorative of birthday, of victories, and of vows, filled the calendar. When Caesar came to the capital, his principal servants marched forth in trips to great distances so as to meet and escort him. To be near to him began to be of such importance, that the rents rose in the quarter of the city where he lived. Personal interviews with him were rendered so difficult by the multitude of individuals soliciting audience, that Caesar found himself compelled in many cases to communicate even with his intimate friends in writing, and that persons even of the highest rank had to wait for hours in the ante-chamber. People felt, more clearly than was agreeable to Caesar himself, that they no longer approached a fellow-citizen. There arose a monarchical aristocracy, which was a remarkable manner at once new and old, and which had sprung out of the idea of casting into the shade the aristocracy of the oligarchy by that of the royalty, the nobility of the patriciate. The patrician body still subsisted, although without essential privileges as an order, in the character of a close aristocratic guild; but as it could receive no new gentes it had dwindled away more and more in the course of centuries, and in Caesar's time there were not more than fifteen or sixteen patrician gentes still in existence. Caesar, himself sprung from one of them, got the right of creating new patrician gentes conferred on the Imperator by decree of the people, and so established, in contrast to the republican nobility, the new aristocracy of the patriciate, which most happily combined all the requisites of a monarchichal aristocracy - the charm of antiquity, entire dependence on the government, and total insignificance. On all sides the new sovereignty revealed itself.”
Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) said by 1903 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We have reached the end of the Roman republic. We have seen it rule for five hundred years in Italy and in the countries on the Mediterranean; we have seen it brought to rum in politics and morals, religion and literature, not through outward violence but through inward decay, and thereby making room for the new monarchy of Caesar. There was in the world, as Caesar found it, much of the noble heritage of past centuries and an infinite abundance of pomp and glory, but little spirit, still less taste, and least of all true delight in life. It was indeed an old world; and even the richly-gifted patriotism of Caesar [b] could not make it young again. The dawn does not return till after the night has fully set in and run its course. But yet with him there came to the sorely harassed peoples on the Mediterranean a tolerable evening after the sultry noon; and when at length after a long historical night a new day dawned once more for the peoples, and fresh nations in free self-movement commenced their race towards new and higher goals, there were found among them not a few, in which the seed sown by Caesar had sprung up, and which were and are indebted to him for their national individuality.[/b]”
Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) said by 1903 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“While the Macedonians proper on the lower course of the Haliacmon (Vistritza) and the Axius (Vardar), as far as the Strymon, were an originally Greek stock, whose diversity from the more southern Hellenes had no further significance for the present epoch, and while the Hellenic colonization embraced within its sphere both coasts -on the west with Apollonia and Dyrrachium, on the east in particular with the townships of the Chalcidian peninsula - the interior of the province, on the other hand, was filled with a confused mass of non-Greek peoples,[...] The Greek cities, which the Romans found existing, retained their organisation and their rights; Thessalonica, the most considerable of them, also freedom and autonomy. There existed a League and a Diet ('koinon') of the Macedonian towns, similar to those in Achaia and Thessaly. It deserves mention, as an evidence of the continued working of the memories of the old and great times, that still in the middle of the third century after Christ the diet of Macedonia and individual Macedonian towns issued coins on which, in place of the head and name of the reigning emperor, came those of Alexander the Great. The pretty numerous colonies of Roman burgesses which Augustus established in Macedonia, Byllis not far from Apollonia, Dyrrachium on the Adriatic, on the other coast Dium, Pella, Cassandreia, in the region of Thrace proper Philippi, were all of them older Greek towns, which obtained merely a number of new burgesses and a different legal position, and were called into life primarily by the need of providing quarters in a civilised and not greatly populous province for Italian soldiers who had served their time, and for whom there was no longer room in Italy itself. The granting of Italian rights certainly took place only to gild for the veterans their settlement abroad. That it was never intended to draw Macedonia into a development of Italian culture is evinced, apart from all else, by the fact that Thessalonica remained Greek and the capital of the country.”
Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) said by 1903 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Provinces of the Roman Empire, vol.1, translated by W.P.Dickson, from the 1909 edition (Chicago, Ares Publishers, 1974), pp. 299–301.
“It is not meant to be denied that in a policy of conquest consistency is a dangerous praise, and that Trajan after his fashion yielded in these enterprises more than was reasonable to the effort after external success, and went beyond the rational; but wrong is done to him when his demeanor in the East is referred to blind lust of conquest. He did what Caesar would have done had he lived. His policy is but the other side of that of Nero's statesmen, and the two are as opposite, as they are equally consistent and equally warranted. Posterity has justified more the policy of conquest than that of concession.”
Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) said by 1903 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source