854 THEODORE MOMMSEN. 



Gorman V, and who viewed Roman events in the litifht of the events he 

 had lived to see in Germany in the forties and fifties of the last 

 century— Mommsen was almost driven to write a Roman history both 

 intensely interesting and essentially un-Roman. For the Roman world 

 within the times of the Republic or in the times of the Empire was so 

 utterly difierent from anything" that had developed or gTown up in 

 Germany, that no diligence in research nor any philosophical effort 

 of the self-sustained mind could enable a German to write up events 

 utterly different in character and drift from those of his own country 

 and time. It is well known how bitterly Mommsen has fallen foul of 

 Cicero: how in the passages relating to the great orator and statesman 

 Mommsen tried to excel in that Schnodderigkeit or caddishness with 

 which great men of letters who were also statesmen have always been 

 treated by the recluse scholar. I^ord Bacon, Ednumd Burke, Adolphe 

 Thiers, and others are naturally hateful to the politisirenden Philolo- 

 gen, as Monmisen himself called them. No Frenchman or Englishman 

 could have committed such an a))surdity. Boissier in France and 

 Professor Tyrrell in Dublin, the latter in his magnificent edition of 

 Cicero's letters, the former in his exquisite book, Ciceron et ses Amis, 

 have long shown the inaccuracy and falsehood of all that Drumann 

 and Mommsen had said about Cicero. 



Both the British and the French scholar had from the history of 

 their own countries been well acquainted with historical types not 

 luisimilar to that of Cicero. The German had no such type to 

 enlighten him. And as in this case, so in cases of far greater impor-" 

 tance. Take, for instance, Mommsen's historic judgment on the most 

 important institution of Rome — on the tribunate. 



It is well known that the tril)unate is at once the strangest and the 

 most important institution of ancient Rome. The strangest, because 

 no modern nation has at any time thought of investing an}- magis- 

 trate, whether a pope, a king, a minister, or a judge, with powers as 

 extensive, as comprehensive, and dangerous as the Romans did with 

 regard to their tril)une.>. The tribune was enabled, if unchallenged 

 by one of his nine colleagues, to stop any wheel of any part of the 

 Roman State machinery. The senate as well as the assembly, the law 

 courts as Avell as the religious institutions were, as it were, at the 

 mercy of an irresponsible tribune. This, it must l)e admitted, is posi- 

 tively incomprehensible, and such of us as want to derive from the 

 study of history more than a mere mass of names and dates, can not 

 t)ut approach the Roman history of Mommsen with the hope and 

 expectation to find some reasonable explanation of the fact that the 

 Romans, that is, an eminently practical and sober nation, permitted 

 their tribunes to wield a power greater and more irresponsible than 

 that commanded by even the mightiest pope of the middle ages. , 



