After the publication of his first studies on Romanity “De collegi et sodaliciis Romanorum” Y “Roman tribes“Between 1843 and 1844, the young Mommsen traveled to France and Italy. With his first writings he expressed his incipient, but solid, passion for ancient Rome. During his stay in Italy, between 1844 and 1847, thanks to the knowledge of the Italian language acquired in his student days, he broadened his interest in the ancient and modern Italian world. There he met with intellectuals and the humble, became interested in political events and popular culture, met antiquarians and poets but, above all, lived intensely the emotions that the discovery of each ancient Roman inscription provoked in him.
He analyzed the old Italian idioms by posting “Studi Oschi“, in 1845, which would follow”The dialects of southern Italy“. Among the many scholars he met, he was particularly linked with the numismatist and epigraphist Bartolomeo Borghesi, who became the inspirer of his collection”Inscriptiones Regni Neapolitani latinae“and to what Mommsen would dedicate it.
In 1848 he returned to his homeland having obtained a chair of teaching Romance languages in Leipzig, which, however, he lost two years later as a result of his political activism, during the popular liberal movements of 1848. It is at this stage that he conceived, at the request from the publishers Reimer (whose daughter Marie he married in 1854) and Hirzel, his masterpiece, the
“Roman history“.
He moved first to Zurich and then to Wroclaw (still belonging to Germany) at whose universities he resumed teaching the Romance languages. In this last city it began with the publication of the first volume that was published in 1854 and continued with the other three in the following two years. The “Roman history“, it was translated into several languages, for which it became famous throughout Europe.
About 30 years later, in 1884, he would publish a fifth volume covering the first two centuries of the Roman Empire, until
Diocletian. He then went to Berlin, where the Academy of Science entrusted him with the direction of the “Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum“, a monumental work of immense value, which remains today the basis of epigraphic studies for a broader understanding of life in the ancient world. In 1861 he was awarded the position of Professor of Ancient History. He also resumed the activity politics as a liberal deputy, a position he held for a total of eleven years, in the Prussian Chamber of Deputies, between 1863 and 1879, and then in the Reichstag, between 1881 and 1884.
Theodor Mommsen He died in Charlottenburg, a large Berlin neighborhood, on November 1, 1903, at the age of 86.
It is said that he said of himself (according to Emil Hübner), on the day he turned 60: “The lawyer went to Italy and the historian returnedIn fact, from a love of legal matters, he devoted himself to researching history and the classical world until he became the greatest classical historian of his century. His vast editorial production was largely devoted to Romanity. : he entered reality and dissected all aspects, ananizing language, law, currency, units of measurement, agricultural techniques, the Etruscan civilization that preceded him, politics and internal organization, revolutionizing the perspective and the study method.