A Review: The History of Rome by Theodor Mommsen

5/5 Stars
This book appeared in three volumes released yearly during 1854-1856. The text is further divided into five books. This is a huge text. It's hard to get an exact count because I've read it all in various digitized forms, but I think it would be close to 2,500 pages all told. It's taken me over two years to work my way through it all. I'm not saying it isn't good because it took me so long to read it. It was one of the best and most informative books I've ever read. It was also, at moments, deeply engaging and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. Here's a taste of what this tome covers.

Book I – The Period Anterior to the Abolition of the Monarchy
Here Mommsen's big departure from his contemporaries is his refusal to take the Roman origin myths at face value. He barely talks about the semi-legendary kings and their doings because there is no record of them outside of later storytelling. Instead, he focuses on language and laws to get as clear a picture as possible and he doesn't use guesswork to fill in the gaps which remain. For example, he talks about the ancient “Indo-Germans” and their many splits and migrations. He points out Greek and Latin have the same root word for horse, but different words for grapevine from which he concludes the ancestral Greco-Italians were the same people when they were mounted nomads but divided somewhere in the Balkans before each group traveled south and adopted a settled lifestyle separately. Now this is all basic anthropology today, but I've never read a book this old which uses this kind of evidence to figure out what happened in the past.

Book II – From the Abolition of the Monarchy in Rome to the Union of Italy
First Mommsen notes the differences between the Romans and the other Latins, then between the Latins and the other Italians. He, again, uses the laws of the land to chart the rise in power of Rome. They did it with military might. The confederation of Latin towns called for each city to send soldiers when mutual defense was called for. The Romans gradually re-negotiated the expectations, first offering an equal number of troops as all the other Latin cities combined, then telling the other cities they would handle all the messy fighting. The people of Rome essentially bred the fight out of the other towns in the confederacy to gain the supremacy. Then they went to war with the various Italian cities until Rome alone controlled all of Italy. Mommsen describes this period as the flower of the Republic's youth. Every man was expected to carry arms in times of need (whenever the Senate decided) and if he was rich enough to bring a horse, he was expected to serve in the cavalry. Serve they did, according to Mommsen, just for the honor of performing their civic duty.

Book III – From the Union of Italy to the Subjugation of Carthage and the Greek States
Once all of Italy (north to the Po river) was controlled by Rome, they immediately came into conflicts with their neighbors. Greek city states in Campania had already been taken, but Rome felt threatened by Greeks in Sicily and Sardinia and at Massalia (later known as Marseilles). It was an economic threat. Rome couldn't trade if the Greeks controlled the seas. In numerous campaigns outside Italy whole generations of Roman citizens learned about the wider world from behind their swords. Once Rome had stepped onto the international stage no one could ignore it. More than one king left his throne to the Senate of Rome rather than risk civil war between rival claimants. Mommsen traces how weaknesses in Carthage, Egypt, Greece and the Hellenistic kingdoms of Asia allowed Rome to fill each successive power vacuum. For Rome many were bloodless conquests and sooner than they had really earned it Roman influence reached from the Pillars of Hercules to the Tigris River.

This book contains the best part of Mommsen's whole history: the wars with Carthage. In the first Punic War Romans beat Carthaginian general Hamilcar on Sicily. In the third they captured and destroyed Carthage itself. What is commonly called the Second Punic War, Mommsen calls the Hannibalic War. For good reason; Rome didn't fight Carthage, Hannibal, the son of Hamilcar, invaded Italy and fought Rome. Many people have heard he brought elephants over the alps, but that isn't the most amazing thing about the story to me. After Hamilcar's defeat he left Carthage and when to Spain where he established a military colony specifically to raise a generation of soldiers to march on Rome. Hannibal was the one who ended up carrying out his father's designs. Second most amazing part of the story: this wasn't one season of war. Hannibal's troops were in Italy for twenty years! Read this section of the book, if no other, just for the amazing tale of the Hannibalic War. Alternately, there's a great series of videos about it here.

Book IV – The Revolution
This is more like “the revolutions.” Mommsen charts several attempts by Romans to renegotiate their social contract. For the most part it's the same story as many revolution. There's a put-upon group which demonstrates for more freedoms, they manage to make some kind of headway, but then there's a reaction and things are reversed. The next time around the revolution and the reaction are both more violent. Mommsen argues this cycle took all the vigor out of the Romans. They wasted their time either fighting to guarantee the life of leisure they had come to expect or fighting to be one of the few who enjoyed a life of leisure. No one wanted to do any of the work of nation building. Mommsen identifies the slave economy of Rome as a major influence on this. There was nothing in between abject subjugation and corrupt luxury. The wealthy had no experience in leadership (only in command) and no incentive to compromise. At the end of each cycle of upheaval some Roman came to power at the head of the legions and was granted a dictatorship to make the fighting stop. This fellow would pass some new laws and things would be fine, until he died when the process would start over.

Book V – The Establishment of the Military Monarchy
This is the situation which eventually led back to monarchy; rule by a single individual. The Senate didn't know how to govern (and sometimes refused to). This left the only power of any worth in the land as the personally loyalty soldiers owed to their generals. Enter Gaius Julius Caesar. Caesar, too, developed a personal relationship with his troops while in Gaul and (to make things overly simple) when the current dictator refused to honor the deals he had made with his men, he returned to Rome and replaced him. Mommsen spends a lot of time in this chapter praising Julius Caesar as a singular figure in history, able to what no one else could. He lauds his tact, his discretion and his ability to see beyond petty squabbles to solutions. At the same time he regularly criticizes Caesar for not being even better. For Mommsen, he was the last great republican because he personally killed the Republic.

This was a very good read. I didn't have much depth of knowledge about Rome before reading this book, so I learned a lot. I enjoyed Mommsen's satirical jabs at the politics of his day. He even speculated about the coming confrontation in the United States over slavery. These mentions make the book feel like it must have been up-to-the-minute in its day despite being about events two millennia before it was written. I read this book for two reasons; firstly to give myself a background on Roman history and culture before I read a stack of books on Pompeii and secondly as part of my goal to read at least one book by all the Nobel Laureates in Literature. Mommsen won the prize for his historical writing in general, but this book specifically was mentioned in his award. Two lists checked with one book. I love it. Those check marks were well worth the large time investment.