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The History of Rome
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This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
610 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 18, 2013
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722 people want to read
About the author
Theodor Mommsen
758 books90 followersChristian Matthias Theodor Mommsen was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1902, for being "the greatest living master of the art of historical writing, with special reference to his monumental work, A History of Rome."
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Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews
July 17, 2013
Of all the Nobel winners, there was only one of them who was awarded for history. He was Theodor Mommsen, and he won in 1902 for his History of Rome.
The feat has never been replicated since then, so it prompted me to look up the work that won the Nobel Prize for him and attempt to read it. I didn't expect much, but it was indeed brilliant. Mommsen describes the milieu and the politics of Rome. Democracy was initiated by Gaius Gracchus until eventually perfected by Caesar despite staunch opposition. The work still remains to be a lucid and beautiful illustration of that time, and proof that truth is indeed sometimes stranger than fiction. Heroic profligates like Sulla appeared in history at times: these are the people who single-mindedly pursue an ideal and then step back once it has been achieved; insipid and arrant clowns as Pompey also act as counterpoints to once-in-a-millennium people such as Julius Caesar, and the whole gamut of treachery, perfidy, larceny and robbery pepper the pathway of Rome to civilization and to finally becoming a proper empire.
It may not be one of my favorites, but it is one of the best works, not only of history, but of literature. For that it gets a perfect score from me.
The feat has never been replicated since then, so it prompted me to look up the work that won the Nobel Prize for him and attempt to read it. I didn't expect much, but it was indeed brilliant. Mommsen describes the milieu and the politics of Rome. Democracy was initiated by Gaius Gracchus until eventually perfected by Caesar despite staunch opposition. The work still remains to be a lucid and beautiful illustration of that time, and proof that truth is indeed sometimes stranger than fiction. Heroic profligates like Sulla appeared in history at times: these are the people who single-mindedly pursue an ideal and then step back once it has been achieved; insipid and arrant clowns as Pompey also act as counterpoints to once-in-a-millennium people such as Julius Caesar, and the whole gamut of treachery, perfidy, larceny and robbery pepper the pathway of Rome to civilization and to finally becoming a proper empire.
It may not be one of my favorites, but it is one of the best works, not only of history, but of literature. For that it gets a perfect score from me.
June 7, 2017
So, here I am at the end of Book Five. There were less cumbersome options when choosing to dive into a Mommsen writing. Having committed to reading a work by every Nobel Laureate for Literature and Mommsen being only the second chronologically, it would have been wiser to choose a shorter, singular work. But too many of the man's contemporaries like Mark Twain raved about his comprehensive History of Rome and so, alas, this long and exhaustive project. Mommsen is accused of tediousness in his style but, in truth, he is just immensely comprehensive and invested in his quest to show us our ancient past. And, of course, this isn't just about Rome but western civilization from Rome's founding and it's earliest monarchic origin, through its various republican and democratic incarnations bringing us full circle with the return of monarchy under Julius Caesar. This project required a commitment of an hour almost daily over eight months but it was worth the investment in that so many holes of my historical knowledge have now been filled. Mommsen wrote more about Rome's later eras which I will likely dive into later. For now, I move on both exhausted and grateful for this literary journey well written and well spoken.
April 20, 2014
An abridged version of Mommsen's 1857 multi-volume history of Rome during the collapse of the Republic and the very beginning of the Empire. Extremely clear & readable! Maps would have been a helpful addition- but otherwise, excellent.
On a scarier note. Much of what led to the Roman Republic's demise is very similar to what's occurring now with the US Republic. Arguments over the franchise and who is a "Roman citizen", including limits on immigration; Intransigence of the oligarchs, greed of the capitalist and political classes; A useless Senate more interested in itself than in the Republic. Scary, because there's no reason it can't happen here! Could the US Republic be lurching in this direction? Will a Caesar come to our rescue, bring stability at the cost of liberty...?
On a scarier note. Much of what led to the Roman Republic's demise is very similar to what's occurring now with the US Republic. Arguments over the franchise and who is a "Roman citizen", including limits on immigration; Intransigence of the oligarchs, greed of the capitalist and political classes; A useless Senate more interested in itself than in the Republic. Scary, because there's no reason it can't happen here! Could the US Republic be lurching in this direction? Will a Caesar come to our rescue, bring stability at the cost of liberty...?
i-want-money
November 9, 2012Just what the PhD ordered--another multi-volume History which I'll read, when? Or afford?
But, Gutenberg:
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10706
Thanks, Moonbutterfly!
But, Gutenberg:
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10706
Thanks, Moonbutterfly!
September 11, 2017
Insgesamt öde und dröge. Eine sehr behäbige, nervende Sprache, fast ohne Absätze, mit lauter wards. Dafür den Nobelpreis? Nun, immerhin gibt es diesen grandiosen Satz: “Daß von Hellas und Italiens vergangener Herrlichkeit zu dem stolzeren Bau der neueren Weltgeschichte eine Brücke herüberführt, daß Westeuropa romanisch, das germanische Europa klassisch ist, daß die Namen Themistokles und Scipio für uns einen anderen Klang haben als Asoka und Salmanassar, daß Homer und Sophokles nicht wie die Veden und Kalidasa nur den literarischen Botaniker anziehen, sondern in dem eigenen Garten uns blühe, das ist Cäsars Werk; und wenn die Schöpfung seines großen Vorgängers im Osten von den Sturmfluten des Mittelalters fast ganz zertrümmert worden ist, so hat Cäsars Bau die Jahrtausende überdauert, die dem Menschengeschlecht Religion und Staat verwandelt, den Schwerpunkt der Zivilisation selbst ihm verschoben haben, und für das, was wir Ewigkeit nennen, steht er aufrecht.”
April 24, 2017
Only read selected excerpts from a abridged Nobel prize edition. Too much detail regarding factions and ideas that can't fully be understood without previous knowledge about Ancient Rome.
December 27, 2025
I first encountered Mommsen in 2011, and I remember the encounter less as an act of reading than as a prolonged intellectual wrestle.
‘The History of Rome’ is not a book one simply “gets along with.” It resists the reader. It demands stamina, attention, and a willingness to think historically rather than narratively.
Three months of steady toil went into finishing it—and when I finally emerged, the exhaustion was inseparable from admiration.
This is what encountering a classic often feels like: not pleasure in the immediate sense, but enlargement after the fact.
Mommsen’s Rome is not a romantic ruin or a museum of marble ideals. It is a living, contentious organism—political, legal, economic, and violently human.
Across five volumes, he reconstructs Roman history not as a parade of emperors and battles, but as the evolution of institutions, laws, and civic habits. What distinguishes Mommsen from earlier classical historians is his insistence that Rome’s greatness—and its eventual collapse—cannot be understood without understanding its legal imagination.
Rome, for him, is not first a military empire, but a juridical one.
This approach is precisely what makes the book arduous. Mommsen does not flatter the reader with dramatic pacing. He expects patience. The prose is dense with constitutional detail, social classifications, and political nuance.
One often feels submerged in senatorial procedure, land laws, and the mechanics of republican governance. Yet this density is not gratuitous. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, a pattern emerges: Rome’s history becomes legible as a series of structural tensions—between patrician and plebeian, oligarchy and popular sovereignty, tradition and necessity.
Mommsen’s Julius Caesar, famously, dominates the later volumes—not as a mere conqueror, but as a tragic political intelligence confronting a republic no longer capable of governing its own success.
Here Mommsen’s admiration is evident, sometimes controversially so. Caesar appears as both symptom and solution, the embodiment of Rome’s contradictions. One may disagree with Mommsen’s judgments, but one cannot accuse him of superficiality. His Rome is argued into existence.
What struck me most, reading the work in full, was how modern it felt beneath its nineteenth-century rhetoric.
Questions of constitutional breakdown, populism, elite paralysis, and the tension between legality and necessity resonate powerfully. This is history written with an eye on political reality, not antiquarian nostalgia.
Calling ‘The History of Rome’ a classic is not an act of courtesy; it is a statement of endurance. This is a book that changes the way one thinks, but only after it has tested one’s willingness to think rigorously.
The three months it took me were not a cost—they were the price of entry. And like most true classics, Mommsen’s work repays effort not with ease, but with depth that lingers long after the final page.
Yet this opening experience, demanding as it was, barely gestures toward the full scope of Mommsen’s achievement. To read ‘The History of Rome’ attentively is to undergo a slow recalibration of what history itself can be.
Mommsen does not narrate events so much as he anatomizes them. His method is closer to diagnosis than storytelling: Rome is a body politic subject to pressures, imbalances, inherited conditions, and catastrophic failures. The wars, reforms, and revolutions that punctuate the narrative matter less as spectacles than as symptoms.
The early volumes, dealing with Rome’s obscure beginnings and republican formation, are particularly instructive in this regard. Mommsen treats legend and myth not as embarrassments to be discarded, but as evidence of civic self-understanding. Romulus, the kings, the early assemblies—these are read as symbolic articulations of social order.
From the outset, Rome appears as a community struggling to reconcile hierarchy with participation, authority with consent. The seeds of later crises are already present, embedded in land distribution, military obligation, and the relationship between citizenship and service.
What makes Mommsen’s account distinctive is his insistence that political conflict is not an aberration but a constitutive force. The so-called “Struggle of the Orders” is not, in his telling, a simple march toward democratic progress.
It is a prolonged negotiation between entrenched privilege and collective pressure, producing compromises that stabilize Rome temporarily while storing up future tensions.
Laws are passed, offices opened, rights extended—but each solution creates new fault lines. History advances, but never cleanly.
This emphasis on institutional evolution explains why Mommsen can feel unforgiving to readers accustomed to character-driven history. Individuals matter deeply in his account, but only insofar as they embody structural forces.
Even figures as vivid as the Gracchi are treated less as martyrs than as political agents operating within constrained possibilities. Their failure is tragic not because they were noble, but because the republic lacked mechanisms to absorb the reforms it desperately required.
In Mommsen’s hands, tragedy arises not from moral weakness alone, but from systemic rigidity.
The middle volumes, chronicling Rome’s expansion across Italy and the Mediterranean, reveal Mommsen at his most unsentimental. Imperial growth is not celebrated as destiny fulfilled. Instead, it appears as a destabilizing success.
Conquest enriches Rome materially while hollowing it out politically. The influx of wealth corrodes civic equality; provincial administration strains republican norms; military loyalty shifts from the state to individual commanders.
What is remarkable is how clearly Mommsen sees these processes—not as moral decline in the abstract, but as predictable outcomes of institutional mismatch.
Here the reader begins to sense why Mommsen’s Rome feels uncannily modern. The problem is not that Rome becomes corrupt, but that it becomes too large, too complex, for the political forms that once sustained it.
The republic’s genius lay in governing a city-state; its failure lay in trying to govern an empire without reinventing itself.
This insight, articulated with relentless precision, gives the work its enduring relevance. One reads Mommsen not merely to understand antiquity, but to reflect on governance, power, and legitimacy across time.
Mommsen’s treatment of law deserves particular emphasis, for it is here that his scholarship most decisively reshapes historical writing. Law, in ‘The History of Rome’, is not a dry appendix but the central nervous system of the state. Legal categories define citizenship, property, obligation, and authority.
They determine who counts, who commands, and who obeys. By foregrounding legal development, Mommsen restores agency to structures often treated as background. The republic does not fail despite its laws; it fails because its laws, once adaptive, become inflexible under new conditions.
This focus also explains Mommsen’s controversial admiration for Caesar. Caesar, in Mommsen’s reading, understands that legality without functionality is a dead letter. He grasps that the republic’s forms have outlived their capacity to govern reality. Whether one agrees with this assessment or not, it is difficult to deny its intellectual coherence.
Caesar emerges not as a tyrant driven by ambition alone, but as a statesman confronting a constitutional impasse. His dictatorship is framed less as betrayal than as an attempt—perhaps doomed, perhaps necessary—to resolve contradictions the senate refused to face.
Critics have long accused Mommsen of projecting nineteenth-century political ideals onto antiquity, and the charge is not without merit. His admiration for decisive leadership, his skepticism toward oligarchic obstruction, and his faith in legal rationalization bear the marks of his own historical moment.
Yet this is precisely what gives the work its vitality. Mommsen does not pretend to neutrality. He argues with Rome, through Rome, and sometimes against it. The result is not distortion, but dialogue—a sustained engagement between past and present.
Stylistically, the book reflects this argumentative intensity. The prose is muscular, occasionally abrasive, and often impatient with sentimentality. There are moments when the reader longs for narrative relief, for a pause in the analytical onslaught. But these moments are integral to the experience.
Mommsen writes as a thinker in motion, not as a curator arranging artifacts. His sentences press forward, driven by judgment as much as by evidence. To read him is to feel history being thought through rather than merely recounted.
The final volumes, shadowed by the republic’s collapse, are perhaps the most sobering. There is no triumphalism here, no easy moral resolution. The transition from republic to empire is depicted as both inevitable and tragic.
Necessary reforms arrive too late or in distorted form; political violence becomes normalized; legality is preserved in name while hollowed out in practice. By the end, one senses that Rome survives, but at the cost of the very civic life that once defined it.
What remains after five volumes is not a timeline but a mindset. Mommsen teaches the reader to see history as a process shaped by constraints, incentives, and institutional design. He refuses the comfort of simple heroes and villains. Even his admiration is conditional, his criticism precise.
The reward for enduring the book’s demands is not mastery of Roman facts—though one gains that too—but a deeper understanding of how political orders rise, adapt, and fail.
Looking back on that three-month encounter, I realize that the difficulty was part of the education. ‘The History of Rome’ does not court the reader’s affection; it earns the reader’s respect.
It forces one to slow down, to reread, to argue silently with its claims. In an age of instant summaries and streamlined narratives, Mommsen’s work stands as a rebuke to intellectual impatience.
It insists that understanding power takes time.
Ultimately, this is why the book endures. Not because it is flawless—no classic is—but because it continues to provoke thought. It asks readers not merely to learn about Rome, but to confront enduring questions about governance, law, and human ambition.
To finish Mommsen is to feel changed, not uplifted but sharpened.
And that, perhaps, is the highest praise one can give a work of history.
Most recommended.
‘The History of Rome’ is not a book one simply “gets along with.” It resists the reader. It demands stamina, attention, and a willingness to think historically rather than narratively.
Three months of steady toil went into finishing it—and when I finally emerged, the exhaustion was inseparable from admiration.
This is what encountering a classic often feels like: not pleasure in the immediate sense, but enlargement after the fact.
Mommsen’s Rome is not a romantic ruin or a museum of marble ideals. It is a living, contentious organism—political, legal, economic, and violently human.
Across five volumes, he reconstructs Roman history not as a parade of emperors and battles, but as the evolution of institutions, laws, and civic habits. What distinguishes Mommsen from earlier classical historians is his insistence that Rome’s greatness—and its eventual collapse—cannot be understood without understanding its legal imagination.
Rome, for him, is not first a military empire, but a juridical one.
This approach is precisely what makes the book arduous. Mommsen does not flatter the reader with dramatic pacing. He expects patience. The prose is dense with constitutional detail, social classifications, and political nuance.
One often feels submerged in senatorial procedure, land laws, and the mechanics of republican governance. Yet this density is not gratuitous. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, a pattern emerges: Rome’s history becomes legible as a series of structural tensions—between patrician and plebeian, oligarchy and popular sovereignty, tradition and necessity.
Mommsen’s Julius Caesar, famously, dominates the later volumes—not as a mere conqueror, but as a tragic political intelligence confronting a republic no longer capable of governing its own success.
Here Mommsen’s admiration is evident, sometimes controversially so. Caesar appears as both symptom and solution, the embodiment of Rome’s contradictions. One may disagree with Mommsen’s judgments, but one cannot accuse him of superficiality. His Rome is argued into existence.
What struck me most, reading the work in full, was how modern it felt beneath its nineteenth-century rhetoric.
Questions of constitutional breakdown, populism, elite paralysis, and the tension between legality and necessity resonate powerfully. This is history written with an eye on political reality, not antiquarian nostalgia.
Calling ‘The History of Rome’ a classic is not an act of courtesy; it is a statement of endurance. This is a book that changes the way one thinks, but only after it has tested one’s willingness to think rigorously.
The three months it took me were not a cost—they were the price of entry. And like most true classics, Mommsen’s work repays effort not with ease, but with depth that lingers long after the final page.
Yet this opening experience, demanding as it was, barely gestures toward the full scope of Mommsen’s achievement. To read ‘The History of Rome’ attentively is to undergo a slow recalibration of what history itself can be.
Mommsen does not narrate events so much as he anatomizes them. His method is closer to diagnosis than storytelling: Rome is a body politic subject to pressures, imbalances, inherited conditions, and catastrophic failures. The wars, reforms, and revolutions that punctuate the narrative matter less as spectacles than as symptoms.
The early volumes, dealing with Rome’s obscure beginnings and republican formation, are particularly instructive in this regard. Mommsen treats legend and myth not as embarrassments to be discarded, but as evidence of civic self-understanding. Romulus, the kings, the early assemblies—these are read as symbolic articulations of social order.
From the outset, Rome appears as a community struggling to reconcile hierarchy with participation, authority with consent. The seeds of later crises are already present, embedded in land distribution, military obligation, and the relationship between citizenship and service.
What makes Mommsen’s account distinctive is his insistence that political conflict is not an aberration but a constitutive force. The so-called “Struggle of the Orders” is not, in his telling, a simple march toward democratic progress.
It is a prolonged negotiation between entrenched privilege and collective pressure, producing compromises that stabilize Rome temporarily while storing up future tensions.
Laws are passed, offices opened, rights extended—but each solution creates new fault lines. History advances, but never cleanly.
This emphasis on institutional evolution explains why Mommsen can feel unforgiving to readers accustomed to character-driven history. Individuals matter deeply in his account, but only insofar as they embody structural forces.
Even figures as vivid as the Gracchi are treated less as martyrs than as political agents operating within constrained possibilities. Their failure is tragic not because they were noble, but because the republic lacked mechanisms to absorb the reforms it desperately required.
In Mommsen’s hands, tragedy arises not from moral weakness alone, but from systemic rigidity.
The middle volumes, chronicling Rome’s expansion across Italy and the Mediterranean, reveal Mommsen at his most unsentimental. Imperial growth is not celebrated as destiny fulfilled. Instead, it appears as a destabilizing success.
Conquest enriches Rome materially while hollowing it out politically. The influx of wealth corrodes civic equality; provincial administration strains republican norms; military loyalty shifts from the state to individual commanders.
What is remarkable is how clearly Mommsen sees these processes—not as moral decline in the abstract, but as predictable outcomes of institutional mismatch.
Here the reader begins to sense why Mommsen’s Rome feels uncannily modern. The problem is not that Rome becomes corrupt, but that it becomes too large, too complex, for the political forms that once sustained it.
The republic’s genius lay in governing a city-state; its failure lay in trying to govern an empire without reinventing itself.
This insight, articulated with relentless precision, gives the work its enduring relevance. One reads Mommsen not merely to understand antiquity, but to reflect on governance, power, and legitimacy across time.
Mommsen’s treatment of law deserves particular emphasis, for it is here that his scholarship most decisively reshapes historical writing. Law, in ‘The History of Rome’, is not a dry appendix but the central nervous system of the state. Legal categories define citizenship, property, obligation, and authority.
They determine who counts, who commands, and who obeys. By foregrounding legal development, Mommsen restores agency to structures often treated as background. The republic does not fail despite its laws; it fails because its laws, once adaptive, become inflexible under new conditions.
This focus also explains Mommsen’s controversial admiration for Caesar. Caesar, in Mommsen’s reading, understands that legality without functionality is a dead letter. He grasps that the republic’s forms have outlived their capacity to govern reality. Whether one agrees with this assessment or not, it is difficult to deny its intellectual coherence.
Caesar emerges not as a tyrant driven by ambition alone, but as a statesman confronting a constitutional impasse. His dictatorship is framed less as betrayal than as an attempt—perhaps doomed, perhaps necessary—to resolve contradictions the senate refused to face.
Critics have long accused Mommsen of projecting nineteenth-century political ideals onto antiquity, and the charge is not without merit. His admiration for decisive leadership, his skepticism toward oligarchic obstruction, and his faith in legal rationalization bear the marks of his own historical moment.
Yet this is precisely what gives the work its vitality. Mommsen does not pretend to neutrality. He argues with Rome, through Rome, and sometimes against it. The result is not distortion, but dialogue—a sustained engagement between past and present.
Stylistically, the book reflects this argumentative intensity. The prose is muscular, occasionally abrasive, and often impatient with sentimentality. There are moments when the reader longs for narrative relief, for a pause in the analytical onslaught. But these moments are integral to the experience.
Mommsen writes as a thinker in motion, not as a curator arranging artifacts. His sentences press forward, driven by judgment as much as by evidence. To read him is to feel history being thought through rather than merely recounted.
The final volumes, shadowed by the republic’s collapse, are perhaps the most sobering. There is no triumphalism here, no easy moral resolution. The transition from republic to empire is depicted as both inevitable and tragic.
Necessary reforms arrive too late or in distorted form; political violence becomes normalized; legality is preserved in name while hollowed out in practice. By the end, one senses that Rome survives, but at the cost of the very civic life that once defined it.
What remains after five volumes is not a timeline but a mindset. Mommsen teaches the reader to see history as a process shaped by constraints, incentives, and institutional design. He refuses the comfort of simple heroes and villains. Even his admiration is conditional, his criticism precise.
The reward for enduring the book’s demands is not mastery of Roman facts—though one gains that too—but a deeper understanding of how political orders rise, adapt, and fail.
Looking back on that three-month encounter, I realize that the difficulty was part of the education. ‘The History of Rome’ does not court the reader’s affection; it earns the reader’s respect.
It forces one to slow down, to reread, to argue silently with its claims. In an age of instant summaries and streamlined narratives, Mommsen’s work stands as a rebuke to intellectual impatience.
It insists that understanding power takes time.
Ultimately, this is why the book endures. Not because it is flawless—no classic is—but because it continues to provoke thought. It asks readers not merely to learn about Rome, but to confront enduring questions about governance, law, and human ambition.
To finish Mommsen is to feel changed, not uplifted but sharpened.
And that, perhaps, is the highest praise one can give a work of history.
Most recommended.
September 8, 2023
I’m a hiker, and there are some hikes that you go into knowing they are going to be brutally hard, long slogs, that will at least have a pretty view or give you a rush of accomplishment. I once did an eleven-hour hike to the top of Mount Rundle that gave me that incredible feeling despite its gruelling nature. Some books can be like that too. I knew The History of Rome was a long read and I went in expecting it to be a slog. However, unlike Rundle, I gave up on this one part way through. Simply put, it was too long and too dry for me to continue. Nevertheless, I do have good things to say about it and I think it is a perfectly recommendable book for a certain audience.
Mommsen’s History of Rome is an extensive work that reviews the rise of Rome as a kingdom and mostly as a republic. From what I understand, this is the definitive historical work that is foundational to most modern research on the subject of the Roman Republic. Mommsen himself, who mostly wrote throughout the mid and late 1800s, won the Nobel Prize in literature for his efforts. The Kindle edition of the book that I read is divided into and contains all five volumes that are organized by topic. The book is considered a masterclass in classical history and a must-read for those who desire to research and best understand the ancient Roman world.
Mommsen disregards the traditional and mythological portions of Rome’s history and approaches the subject with a scientific and historical mindset, making it very factual and truthful in alignment with the archeological evidence and theories that existed at the time of publication. Even though I am more partial to a Roman history that includes the intervention of the gods and supernatural events, it is surprisingly refreshing to simply focus on the natural and practical elements that go into founding a nation.
Mommsen’s work easily reflects his deep study and research into the topic. From what I understand, he pioneered the translation of ancient Latin inscriptions at archaeological sites in Italy and was incredibly accomplished and passionate about his field of work. To this end, his honour for the Roman culture is felt throughout his work, yet, without shying away from some of Rome’s failures.
To put it bluntly, this book is long and dry. Perhaps my issues with the book mainly lie in the way it was translated into English, but as much as I tried to push through, I just found the book dull. The History of Rome is worth recommending to history buffs or those who are looking for an interesting academic read. But It is not for casual readers, although the language level of my translation seems accessible to most readers. Don’t get me wrong, it has the occasional highlight, such as its description of the various Rome superstitions and schools of learning, and the Pyrrhic War. However, I spent months reading this book on and off and found I had only gotten about 20 percent through. I finally decided that this would be one of the few books I would leave incomplete.
The History of Rome is an important historical and academic work that certainly must be read by researchers on this topic. At the very least, it is an excellent resource and reference book into the life of the ancient Roman Republic. However, it is long, it is dry, and it is simply a slog to read through cover-to-cover. For these reasons, I give it a two out of five star rating.
Mommsen’s History of Rome is an extensive work that reviews the rise of Rome as a kingdom and mostly as a republic. From what I understand, this is the definitive historical work that is foundational to most modern research on the subject of the Roman Republic. Mommsen himself, who mostly wrote throughout the mid and late 1800s, won the Nobel Prize in literature for his efforts. The Kindle edition of the book that I read is divided into and contains all five volumes that are organized by topic. The book is considered a masterclass in classical history and a must-read for those who desire to research and best understand the ancient Roman world.
Mommsen disregards the traditional and mythological portions of Rome’s history and approaches the subject with a scientific and historical mindset, making it very factual and truthful in alignment with the archeological evidence and theories that existed at the time of publication. Even though I am more partial to a Roman history that includes the intervention of the gods and supernatural events, it is surprisingly refreshing to simply focus on the natural and practical elements that go into founding a nation.
Mommsen’s work easily reflects his deep study and research into the topic. From what I understand, he pioneered the translation of ancient Latin inscriptions at archaeological sites in Italy and was incredibly accomplished and passionate about his field of work. To this end, his honour for the Roman culture is felt throughout his work, yet, without shying away from some of Rome’s failures.
To put it bluntly, this book is long and dry. Perhaps my issues with the book mainly lie in the way it was translated into English, but as much as I tried to push through, I just found the book dull. The History of Rome is worth recommending to history buffs or those who are looking for an interesting academic read. But It is not for casual readers, although the language level of my translation seems accessible to most readers. Don’t get me wrong, it has the occasional highlight, such as its description of the various Rome superstitions and schools of learning, and the Pyrrhic War. However, I spent months reading this book on and off and found I had only gotten about 20 percent through. I finally decided that this would be one of the few books I would leave incomplete.
The History of Rome is an important historical and academic work that certainly must be read by researchers on this topic. At the very least, it is an excellent resource and reference book into the life of the ancient Roman Republic. However, it is long, it is dry, and it is simply a slog to read through cover-to-cover. For these reasons, I give it a two out of five star rating.
July 31, 2021
Un testo monumentale dietro cui sta uno studio immenso e una sapienza storica veramente immensa, se si pensa che è stato scritto nell'800 senza ausilio di mezzi tecnologici ma solo per ricerca sui luoghi e sulle fonti. Per questo meriterebbe 5 stelle. Ancora oggi le basi dello studio della storia romana repubblicana sono quelle delineate dal Mommsen. Ha inoltre il merito di raccontare in modo quasi romanzesco alcune vicende, anche se lo stile risente del tempo e quindi può sembrare pomposo (in questo non aiuta la traduzione italiana fatta in pieno periodo fascista, con un lessico ricercato, da addetti ai lavori).
Paradossalmente, è un testo che illustra piuttosto bene anche la storia e la cultura a cavallo tra XIX° e XX° secolo. E qui vengo ai difetti. Uno è la prolissità. Nei capitoli di azione il testo si distende ampio ma lo si segue. Nei capitoli meno narrativi, in cui si analizzano le arti, la cultura e la lingua latine, è piuttosto noioso. L'altro (grave) difetto (credo comune ai suoi contemporanei) e il fare storiografia giudicando i tempi andati col metro di oggi. Ogni aspetto della vita e della cultura, ogni comportamento è giudicato sulla base di valori non contemporanei e con categorie moderne (riferimenti alla democrazia parlamentare, per esempio, che sono tirati un po' per i capelli, anche se magari possono servire per far capire meglio). Al Mommsen per esempio stava notevolmente antipatico Cicerone, che viene stroncato come scrittore e come uomo. Lo stesso giudizio piuttosto spietato viene espresso su Pompeo, che emerge come un eterno indeciso, mentre è piuttosto benevolo con il grande Cesare. Ma il difetto peggiore è sicuramente l'alone nazionalistico che pervade il testo. Interi capitoli sulla cultura sono letti alla luce di una sorta di superiorità tedesca (la frase secondo cui i tedeschi sono eredi dei greci, la cui filosofia e cultura Mommsen ritiene superiore a quella italica, mentre gli italiani non sono mai stati poeti di alto livello... fa sorridere se pensiamo a Dante, Petrarca... e alla enorme differenza che esiste tra greci e tedeschi. Oggi diciami che siamo tutti eredi dei Greci e anche dei Romanim in quanti Europei). In questo senso, dicevo, il testo insegna a noi posteri anche il quadro del dibattito culturale tra '800 e '900, intriso appunto di pregiudizi su popoli e razze, su presunte superiorità, che poi ahimé porteranno a certi estremi. E il Mommsen era un liberale. Quindi se un liberale aveva queste idee (oggi quasi ridicole) immaginiamoci quale dovesse essere il dibattito tra i monarchici e tra quelle forze estremiste che poi avranno il loro peso nei decenni successivi. Insomma, un testo assolutamente fondamentale per la storia antica ma che sente tutti i suoi anni e ha il limite di una impostazione non totalmente scientifica ed eccessivamente giudicante. Tanto di cappello comunque a uno studioso di importanza mondiale.
Paradossalmente, è un testo che illustra piuttosto bene anche la storia e la cultura a cavallo tra XIX° e XX° secolo. E qui vengo ai difetti. Uno è la prolissità. Nei capitoli di azione il testo si distende ampio ma lo si segue. Nei capitoli meno narrativi, in cui si analizzano le arti, la cultura e la lingua latine, è piuttosto noioso. L'altro (grave) difetto (credo comune ai suoi contemporanei) e il fare storiografia giudicando i tempi andati col metro di oggi. Ogni aspetto della vita e della cultura, ogni comportamento è giudicato sulla base di valori non contemporanei e con categorie moderne (riferimenti alla democrazia parlamentare, per esempio, che sono tirati un po' per i capelli, anche se magari possono servire per far capire meglio). Al Mommsen per esempio stava notevolmente antipatico Cicerone, che viene stroncato come scrittore e come uomo. Lo stesso giudizio piuttosto spietato viene espresso su Pompeo, che emerge come un eterno indeciso, mentre è piuttosto benevolo con il grande Cesare. Ma il difetto peggiore è sicuramente l'alone nazionalistico che pervade il testo. Interi capitoli sulla cultura sono letti alla luce di una sorta di superiorità tedesca (la frase secondo cui i tedeschi sono eredi dei greci, la cui filosofia e cultura Mommsen ritiene superiore a quella italica, mentre gli italiani non sono mai stati poeti di alto livello... fa sorridere se pensiamo a Dante, Petrarca... e alla enorme differenza che esiste tra greci e tedeschi. Oggi diciami che siamo tutti eredi dei Greci e anche dei Romanim in quanti Europei). In questo senso, dicevo, il testo insegna a noi posteri anche il quadro del dibattito culturale tra '800 e '900, intriso appunto di pregiudizi su popoli e razze, su presunte superiorità, che poi ahimé porteranno a certi estremi. E il Mommsen era un liberale. Quindi se un liberale aveva queste idee (oggi quasi ridicole) immaginiamoci quale dovesse essere il dibattito tra i monarchici e tra quelle forze estremiste che poi avranno il loro peso nei decenni successivi. Insomma, un testo assolutamente fondamentale per la storia antica ma che sente tutti i suoi anni e ha il limite di una impostazione non totalmente scientifica ed eccessivamente giudicante. Tanto di cappello comunque a uno studioso di importanza mondiale.
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November 15, 2022This very lengthy abridgment of a segment of the author’s multi volume history of Rome was enough of a challenge to work through. It certainly reinforced my understanding of the events and nature of the eras. While the writing was a bit convoluted, it was good to have an author who expresses his perspective. There are probably too many excellent, more recent explorations of the aspects of Roman history for me to commit to reading the full set of volumes, but it is good to know they are there!
March 31, 2022
Großartig. Aufschlussreiche Analysen und eine wundervolle Sprache. Passt hervorragend zu Robert Fabris Werken oder eine Runde Rome: Total War.
August 25, 2025
The first book is very dry, with tons of words and locations that you have never heard of, if you are not somewhat familiar with the history of Italy. But if you can get passed the first book, you will be blessed with one of the best history book of all time.
December 18, 2025
Sobre todo por esta maravillosa obra, tiene una gran bibliografía Mommsen, pero su historia de Roma por su magnitud y brillantez es su mejor obra, además fue galardonado con el Premio Nobel de
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 8, 2024
Umfassend, detailiert, faktenreich, aber trockener als zwei Wochen altes panis.
January 26, 2014
A great read. The book is an adaptation of the fourth and fifth books of Mommsen's massive work, covering the history of Rome from the end of the Third Punic War to the death of Caesar.
It reads easily, mostly because Mommsen presents this time as a unified drama: the decay of the Roman republic to an oligarchy and the different assaults on the entrenched oligarchs of the Senate by the Gracchi brothers, Marius, and finally and successfully, by Caesar.
It is also entertaining because his judgments on individual characters wind through the entire work and have all the delicacy of a chainsaw; he repeatedly castigates Cicero, Cato, and Pompey. His heavy-handedness is annoying at times, especially to one who loves Cicero the author and has sympathies with Cato. His judgment of Pompey as a mediocre man was the most startling, though, as it is difficult to reconcile with his own descriptions of Pompey's achievements as a general. Mommsen finishes his work with an extensive and fascinating analysis of Caesar, whom he reveres.
It reads easily, mostly because Mommsen presents this time as a unified drama: the decay of the Roman republic to an oligarchy and the different assaults on the entrenched oligarchs of the Senate by the Gracchi brothers, Marius, and finally and successfully, by Caesar.
It is also entertaining because his judgments on individual characters wind through the entire work and have all the delicacy of a chainsaw; he repeatedly castigates Cicero, Cato, and Pompey. His heavy-handedness is annoying at times, especially to one who loves Cicero the author and has sympathies with Cato. His judgment of Pompey as a mediocre man was the most startling, though, as it is difficult to reconcile with his own descriptions of Pompey's achievements as a general. Mommsen finishes his work with an extensive and fascinating analysis of Caesar, whom he reveres.
September 7, 2007
one of the great
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August 19, 2012It is a great book on ancient Rome !
July 1, 2016
Took me year, certainly worth it.
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December 3, 2018Interessante nella prima parte, ma diventa poi un poco noioso. Ristabilisce l'importanza degli etruschi nella storia e nell'arte.
August 5, 2020
A well-written documentation of the Roman military occupation projects in Germany, Gaul, Britain, and the Balcan.
May 25, 2021
Immer noch ein Standardwerk.
July 16, 2021
So boring, didn't even come close to finishing.
December 30, 2021
Bad quality scan
This is a bad quality scan and not an e-book. Not worth buying. There are e-book versions of the same book.
This is a bad quality scan and not an e-book. Not worth buying. There are e-book versions of the same book.
February 2, 2023
Reads like a textbook. Still, a great resource for research and / or term paper. Enjoy!
June 5, 2023
Nobelprijs 1902. Dit was niet om door te komen. Heb het na enkele tientallen pagina's weggelegd.
April 29, 2024
onestamente abbandonato dopo i primi capitoli, con ancora Augusto che pacifica la Germania. sarà un limite mio ma il susseguirsi di evento con il tono piatto di un libro di scuola anche no.
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