Theodor Mommsen Quotes

Of all pitiful parts, there is none more pitiful than for passing for more than one really is. And it is the fate of monarchy that this misfortune inevitably clings to it. For barely once in a thousand years, does there arise among the people a man who is a king not merely in name, but in reality.

..whatever may have been the style and title, the sovereign ruler was there, and accordingly the court established itself at once with all its due accompaniments of pomp, insipidity, and emptiness. Caesar appeared in public not in the robe of the consuls which was bordered with purple stripes, but in the robe wholly of purple which was reckoned in antiquity as the proper regal attire, and received, sitting on his golden chair and without rising from it, the solemn procession of the senate. The festivals in his honour commemorative of birthday, of victories, and of vows, filled the calendar. When Caesar came to the capital, his principal servants marched forth in trips to great distances so as to meet and escort him. To be near to him began to be of such importance, that the rents rose in the quarter of the city where he lived. Personal interviews with him were rendered so difficult by the multitude of individuals soliciting audience, that Caesar found himself compelled in many cases to communicate even with his intimate friends in writing, and that persons even of the highest rank had to wait for hours in the ante-chamber. People felt, more clearly than was agreeable to Caesar himself, that they no longer approached a fellow-citizen. There arose a monarchical aristocracy, which was a remarkable manner at once new and old, and which had sprung out of the idea of casting into the shade the aristocracy of the oligarchy by that of the royalty, the nobility of the patriciate. The patrician body still subsisted, although without essential privileges as an order, in the character of a close aristocratic guild; but as it could receive no new gentes it had dwindled away more and more in the course of centuries, and in Caesar's time there were not more than fifteen or sixteen patrician gentes still in existence. Caesar, himself sprung from one of them, got the right of creating new patrician gentes conferred on the Imperator by decree of the people, and so established, in contrast to the republican nobility, the new aristocracy of the patriciate, which most happily combined all the requisites of a monarchichal aristocracy - the charm of antiquity, entire dependence on the government, and total insignificance. On all sides the new sovereignty revealed itself.

Philip of Macedonia leading the way, were induced to interfere in the relations of the west. We have already set forth to some extent the origin of this interference and the course of the first Macedonian war (540-549); and we have pointed out what Philip might have accomplished during the second Punic war, and how little of all that Hannibal was entitled to expect and to count on was really fulfilled. A fresh illustration had been afforded of the truth, that of all haphazards none is more hazardous than an absolute hereditary monarchy. Philip was not the man whom Macedonia at that time required; yet his gifts were far from insignificant He was a genuine king, in the best and worst sense of the term. A strong desire to rule in person and unaided was the fundamental trait of his character; he was proud of his purple, but he was no less proud of other gifts, and he had reason to be so. He not only showed the valour of a soldier and the eye of a general, but he displayed a high spirit in the conduct of public affairs, whenever his Macedonian sense of honour was offended. Full of intelligence and wit, he won the hearts of all whom he wished to gain, especially of the men who were ablest and most refined, such as Flamininus and Scipio; he was a pleasant boon companion and, not by virtue of his rank alone, a dangerous wooer. But he was at the same time one of the most arrogant and flagitious characters, which that shameless age produced. He was in the habit of saying that he feared none save the gods; but it seemed almost as if his gods were those to whom his admiral Dicaearchus regularly offered sacrifice--Godlessness (-Asebeia-) and Lawlessness (-Paranomia-). The lives of his advisers and of the promoters of his schemes possessed no sacredness in his eyes, nor did he disdain to pacify his indignation against the Athenians and Attalus by the destruction of venerable monuments and illustrious works of art; it is quoted as one of his maxims of state, that "whoever causes the father to be put to death

The strict conception of the unity and omnipotence of the state in all matters pertaining to it, which was the central principle of the Italian constitutions, placed in the hands of the single president nominated for life a formidable power, which was felt doubtless by the enemies of the land, but was not less heavily felt by its citizens. Abuse and oppression could not fail to ensue, and, as a necessary consequence, efforts were made to lessen that power. It was, however, the grand distinction of the endeavours after reform and the revolutions in Rome, that there was no attempt either to impose limitations on the community as such or even to deprive it of corresponding organs of expression—that there never was any endeavour to assert the so-called natural rights of the individual in contradistinction to the community—that, on the contrary, the attack was wholly directed against the form in which the community was represented. From the times of the Tarquins down to those of the Gracchi the cry of the party of progress in Rome was not for limitation of the power of the state, but for limitation of the power of the magistrates: nor amidst that cry was the truth ever forgotten, that the people ought not to govern, but to be governed.

It is true that to one who was a rustic and a soldier the political proceedings of the capital were strange and incongruous: he spoke as ill as he commanded well, and displayed a far firmer bearing in the presence of the lances and swords of the enemy than in presence of the applause or hisses of the multitude; but his inclinations were of little moment. The hopes of which he was the object constrained him.

An independent state does not pay too dear for its independence in accepting the sufferings of war when it cannot avoid them

History has a Nemesis for every sin—for an impotent craving after freedom, as well as for an injudicious generosity.

The party of reform emerges, as it were, personified in Marcus Porcius Cato (520-605). Cato, the last statesman of note belonging to that earlier system which restricted its ideas to Italy and was averse to universal empire, was for that reason accounted in after times the model of a genuine Roman of the antique stamp; he may with greater justice be regarded as the representative of the opposition of the Roman middle class to the new Hellenico-cosmopolite nobility. Brought up at the plough, he was induced to enter on a political career by the

[the] qualities -those of good soldiers but bad citizens - explain the historical fact, that the celts have shaken states everywhere,but founded none.

It is not meant to be denied that in a policy of conquest consistency is a dangerous praise, and that Trajan after his fashion yielded in these enterprises more than was reasonable to the effort after external success, and went beyond the rational; but wrong is done to him when his demeanor in the East is referred to blind lust of conquest. He did what Caesar would have done had he lived. His policy is but the other side of that of Nero's statesmen, and the two are as opposite, as they are equally consistent and equally warranted. Posterity has justified more the policy of conquest than that of concession.

All the Hellenistic States had thus been completely subjected to the protectorate of Rome, and the whole empire of Alexander the Great had fallen to the Roman commonwealth just as if the city had inherited it from his heirs. From all sides kings and ambassadors flocked to Rome to congratulate her; they showed that fawning is never more abject than when kings are in the antechamber...w:Polybius dates from the battle of Pydna the full establishment of the universal empire of Rome. It was in fact the last battle in which a civilized state confronted Rome in the field on a footing of equality with her as a great power; all subsequent struggles were rebellions or wars with peoples beyond the pale of the Romano-Greek civilization -- with barbarians, as they were called. The whole civilized world thenceforth recognized in the Roman senate the supreme tribunal, whose commissions decided in the last resort between kings and nations; and to acquire its language and manners foreign princes and youths of quality resided in Rome. A clear and earnest attempt to get rid of this dominion was in reality made only once -- by the great Mithradates of Pontus. The battle of Pydna, moreover, marks the last occasion on which the senate still adhered to the state-maxim that that they should, if possible, hold no possessions and maintain no garrisons beyond the Italian seas, but should keep the numerous states dependent on them in order by a mere political supremacy. The aim aim of their policy was that these states should neither decline into utter weakness and anarchy, as had nevertheless happened in Greece nor emerge out of their half-free position into complete independence, as Macedonia had attempted to do without success. No state was to be allowed to utterly perish, but no one was to be permitted to stand on its own resources... Indications of a change of system, and of an increasing disinclination on the part of Rome to tolerate by its side intermediate states even in such independence as was possible for them, were clearly given in the destruction of the Macedonian monarchy after the battle of Pydna, the more and more frequent and more unavoidable the intervention in the internal affairs of the petty Greek states through their misgovernment, and their political and social anarchy, the disarming of Macedonia, where the Northern forntier at any rate urgently required a defence different from that of mere posts; and, lastly, the introduction of the payment of land-tax to Rome from Macedonia and Illyria, were so many symptoms of the approaching conversion of the client states into subjects of Rome.

All power, as well as all the impotence of democracy is based on faith

The belief that it is useless to employ partial and palliative means against radical evils, because they only remedy them in part, is an article of faith never preached unsuccessfully by meanness to simplicity, but it is none the less absurd.

An equally characteristic feature in the brilliant decay of this period was the emancipation of women. In an economic point of view the women had long since made themselves independent;(57) in the present epoch we even meet with solicitors acting specially for women, who officiously lend their aid to solitary rich ladies in the management of their property and their lawsuits, make an impression on them by their knowledge of business and law, and thereby procure for themselves ampler perquisites and legacies than other loungers on the exchange. But it was not merely from the economic guardianship of father or husband that women felt themselves emancipated. Love-intrigues of all sorts were constantly in progress. The ballet-dancers (-mimae-) were quite a match for those of the present day in the variety of their pursuits and the skill with which they followed them out; their primadonnas, Cytheris and the like, pollute even the pages of history. But their, as it were, licensed trade was very materially injured by the free art of the ladies of aristocratic circles. Liaisons in the first houses had become so frequent, that only a scandal altogether exceptional could make them the subject of special talk; a judicial interference seemed now almost ridiculous. An unparalleled scandal, such as Publius Clodius produced in 693 at the women's festival in the house of the Pontifex Maximus, although a thousand times worse than the occurrences which fifty years before had led to a series of capital sentences,(58) passed almost without investigation and wholly without punishment. The watering-place season—in April, when political business was suspended and the world of quality congregated in Baiae and Puteoli— derived its chief charm from the relations licit and illicit which, along with music and song and elegant breakfasts on board or on shore, enlivened the gondola voyages. There the ladies held absolute sway; but they were by no means content with this domain which rightfully belonged to them; they also acted as politicians, appeared in party conferences, and took part with their money and their intrigues in the wild coterie-doings of the time. Any one who beheld these female statesmen performing on the stage of Scipio and Cato and saw at their side the young fop—as with smooth chin, delicate voice, and mincing gait, with headdress and neckerchiefs, frilled robe, and women's sandals he copied the loose courtesan— might well have a horror of the unnatural world, in which the sexes seemed as though they wished to change parts. What ideas as to divorce prevailed in the circles of the aristocracy may be discerned in the conduct of their best and most moral hero Marcus Cato, who did not hesitate to separate from his wife at the request of a friend desirous to marry her, and as little scrupled on the death of this friend to marry the same wife a second time. Celibacy and childlessness became more and more common, especially among the upper classes. While among these marriage had for long been regarded as a burden which people took upon them at the best in the public interest,(59) we now encounter even in Cato and those who shared Cato's sentiments the maxim to which Polybius a century before traced the decay of Hellas,(60) that it is the duty of a citizen to keep great wealth together and therefore not to beget too many children. Where were the times, when the designation "children-producer" (-proletarius-) had been a term of honour for the Roman?

As the grave closes alike over all whether important or insignificant, so in the roll of Roman magistrates the empty scion of nobility stands undistinguishable by the side of the great statesmen [men] who had been at the head of the Roman commonwealth, as well as this Roman statesmen and warrior, might be commemorated as having been of noble birth and of manly beauty, valiant and wise; but there was no more to record [of their lives and deeds]] regarding them... The senator was intended to be no worse and no better then other senators, nor at all to differ from them. It was not necessary and not desirable that any burgess should surpass the rest, whether in showy silver plate and Hellenic culture, or in uncommon wisdom and excellence. The Rome of the period belonged to no individual; it was necessary that the burgesses should all be alike.."