THE HISTORY OF ROME.
By TheodorMommsen. Edited by Dero A. Saunders '35and John H. Collins. New York: MeridianBooks, 1958. 600 pp. $8.50.
Theodor Mommsen's massive The Historyof Rome, published in Germany more than a century ago, is to the Roman Republic what Gibbon's Decline and Fall is to the Empire. Not only are both works scholarly and literary masterpieces, but they have also determined most of the basic attitudes we still have toward those two epochs of Roman history. It is only fitting, therefore, that Dero Saunders' superb Viking Portable edition of Gibbon should be followed by this one of Mommsen.
This volume is a skillful abridgement of roughly the latter half of Mommsen's work. It deals with perhaps the most exciting and significant period in all Roman history, the years of revolution from 133 to 45 B.C. which began with the rise of the popular politician and ended with the collapse of the republican government and the dictatorship of Julius Caesar. In confining themselves to this period, the editors have given us the best of Mommsen: his penetrating analysis of political maneuvering, his caustic portraits of such luminaries as Pompey the Great, Cicero, and Cato the Younger, and his magnificent assessment of the achievements of Caesar, "the. consummate statesman," "the entire and perfect man." While Mommsen's account has often been questioned in matters of detail, its vividness and vigor have never been equalled.
In preparing this edition, the editors used the standard English translation of The History by W. P. Dickson, a Victorian clergyman. As they admit, scarcely a sentence of Dickson's version has been left untouched. Punctuation has been modernized, sentence structure recast, archaisms deleted or replaced. Whatever one may think of such procedures, the result is a thoroughly readable modern version of Mommsen which captures perhaps more of the spirit of the original than did the Victorian translation from which it was taken.
If it is true as the editors claim that 99 out of 100 American college graduates would not recognize the name of Theodor Mommsen, this volume should be a major step in the direction of remedying that situation.
