Europe dates a new era from his restoration of the western empire.

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THEODOR MOMMSEN

History of Rome

Theodor Mommsen was born at Garding in Schleswig on November 30, 1817.  He studied at Kiel University for three years, examined Roman inscriptions in France and Italy from 1844 to 1847, and attained his first professorship at Leipzig in 1848, and the Berlin Chair of Ancient History in 1858.  His greatest work was the “History of Rome,” published in 1854, and its successor, the “Roman Provinces.”  On this work he brought to bear a research and a scholarship of almost unparalleled range and completeness.  He was a man capable of vehement and occasionally unreasonable partisanship, and a strict and cold-blooded impartiality would have tempered the enthusiasm of some of his portraits and the severity of others.  These defects, however, are less obvious when his history is condensed in small compass.  There are cases in which his judgments are open to adverse criticism.  But at the present day it may safely be affirmed that there is no extant history of Rome down to the establishment of the empire which can be regarded as rivalling that here presented.  Upwards of 900 separate publications remain as a monument of Mommsen’s industry.  He died on November 1, 1903.

Iapygians, Etruscans, and Italians, the last certainly Indo-Europeans, are the original stocks of Italy proper.  Of the Italians there are two divisions, the Latin and the Umbro-Sabellian.  Central Italy was occupied by the Latins, who were established in cantons formed of village groups; which cantons at an early age formed themselves into the loose Latin League, with Alba at its head.

The Roman canton, on both banks of the Tiber, concentrated itself on the city earlier than others.  The citizens consisted of the families which constituted the larger groups of clans or gentes, formed into those tribes.  The remainder of the population were their dependents or slaves.  At the head of the family was the father, and the whole community had its king, standing to it in the same relation as the father to the family.  His power, within the law, was absolute; but he could not override it or change it on his own authority.  This required the formal assent of the assembled citizens.  The heads of the clans formed a separate body—­the Senate—­which controlled the appointment of the king, and could veto legislation.

By admission of aliens and absorption of other communities, swelling the number of dependents, was gradually created a great body of plebeians, non-citizens, who began to demand political rights; and whom it was necessary to organise for military purposes which was done by the “Servian Constitution.”  Gradually Rome won a supremacy in the Latin League, a position of superiority over the aggregate of the other cantons.