it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.
Here is Buffa's take on Theodor Mommsen's History of Rome:
Visiting Berlin in the latter part of the nineteenth century, Mark Twain found himself in a restaurant in which everyone seemed to go mad. Dozens of university students, raising their sabres, suddenly shot to their feet. “There was an excited whisper at our table,” Twain reported. Everyone stomped and clapped and banged their beer mugs. A little man with long hair and an “Emersonian face edged his way past us and took his seat. I could have touched him with my hands - Mommsen! - think of it!”Visit D.W. Buffa's website.
Theodor Mommsen, the historian of the Roman Republic, was not just famous; he was considered a very great man. It was generally agreed, among the literate public on both sides of the Atlantic, that, as one prominent scholar put it, “There is probably no other instance in the history of scholarship in which one man has established so complete an ascendancy in a great department of learning.” And this when learning, serious learning, was more respected than it had been before or would be again. Born in 1817, Mommsen had studied Roman law and antiquities as a university student and then, in 1843, received a grant from the Danish government for a journey to Italy that would prove decisive for his later career. He studied Roman inscriptions - the words and phrases, the language, on Roman medals and Roman buildings - and became the leading authority in the field. In 1848, a professor of civil law at Leipzig, he supported the monarchy over the Republicans in the attempted revolution of that year, and then, when the reaction came, opposed the measures taken against those who had been involved in the revolt. Dismissed from his position, he found asylum in Switzerland where from 1854 to 1856 he wrote his monumental History of Rome.
Because Mommsen was not only German but a German professor, the first thought of an American reader is that his History of Rome must be dull as dust, largely unintelligible, and full of unimportant facts and endless arguments about matters no one cared about at the time and no one wants to hear about now, the kind of dreary monologue that makes you wonder if you will ever find the patience to get through even half of it’s nearly twenty-five hundred pages. And then you open the first volume and before you have finished reading the first page you realize what a fool you have been to have waited this long to read what in every sense is a classic. and that there is every possibility that whatever you thought you knew about Roman history, the history before Rome became an empire and freedom vanished from the world, is quite probably wrong. Cicero, who you thought a deeply intelligent public servant who tried to warn Rome about the danger of ambitious men, is for Mommsen little more than a journalist who only wrote what he thought others wanted to hear; Julius Caesar, who you thought wanted absolute power, is for Mommsen a perfect human being.
Gibbon wrote the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Mommsen wrote what should have been entitled The Rise and Fall of the Roman Republic. He traces, and tries to explain, the movement of Rome from a single city to the sovereignty of all of Italy, and from there to the sovereignty of all the countries of the Mediterranean. These were not two successive parts of a single development, the gradual unfolding of an imperial ambition: “The Romans achieved the sovereignty of Italy, because they strove for it; the hegemony - and the sovereignty which grew out of it - over the territories of the Mediterranean was to a certain extent thrown into the hands of the Romans by the force of circumstances without intention on their part to acquire it.”
The question of course is why? Why did the Romans strive for the sovereignty of Italy? What drove them to rule more than themselves in their own city, the way the Athenians or the Spartans had done in Greece? Mommsen insists it was the difference in character, the difference in what the Romans and the Greeks thought important, or, more precisely, how the Romans and the Greeks thought about themselves. The Romans did not think about themselves at all: they were Romans and nothing more. There was a “total want of individuality in the Italian and especially the Roman character, as contrasted with the boundless variety, lineal, local, and personal, of Hellenism.” We “nowhere encounter a distinct individual figure.” It was “not individual genius that ruled in Rome and through Rome in Italy; it was the one immoveable idea of a policy propagated from generation to generation in the senate….” The Romans were forced into a single type, a uniform identity. Under “the rigid discipline of its moral police all the idiosyncrasies of human character were extinguished. Rome reached a greatness such as no other state of antiquity attained; but she dearly purchased her greatness at the sacrifice of the graceful variety, of the easy abandon, and of the inward freedom on Hellenic life.”
After a series of war that reinforced belief in the martial virtues, Rome obtained control of all of Italy, but instead of acting as an occupying power, the Roman senate understood “that the only means of giving permanence to despotism is moderation on the part of the despots.” The dependent communities were given Roman citizenship or were allowed to enjoy their own communal constitutions, and with “a clear-sightedness and magnanimity unparalleled in history, waived the most dangerous of all the rights of government, the right of taxing its subjects.”
It is seldom noted how the simple facts of geography can change the history of the world. Sicily lies less than a mile from the mainland of Italy. When Carthage, which had become a great power, invaded the island, Rome understood that it would have to fight a war which must ultimately end either in its own destruction or the annihilation of Carthage. The size of the forces involved was at times staggering. In the spring of 258 B.C., the Romans with 330 ships containing 100,000 men in crews and a landing party of 40,000 met off the coast of Libya a Carthaginian fleet of 350 vessels with approximately the same number of men. Three hundred thousand sailors and soldiers were brought into action. The Carthaginians lost four times asmany ships as the Romans, but the war was only beginning and each side would suffer far greater losses before it was over.
The losses were far greater on land. At the Battle of Cannae in which Hannibal secured a victory which threatened the very existence of Rome, it was slaughter. “Never, perhaps, has an army of such size been annihilated on the field of battle so completely, and with so little loss to its antagonist, as was the Roman army at Cannae.” While Hannibal lost 6,000 men, only 6,000 of the 76,000 Romans who took to the field survived. The rules of war were different then. A city under siege by the Romans held out until “almost all who were capable of bearing arms had fallen in the struggle before the walls; a large portion of the inhabitants fell by their own hand after the capitulation - the mercy of the victor consisted in allowing the Abydenes the term of three days to die voluntarily.” Publius Scipio, who led the fight, and eventually won the war against Hannibal, compelled a town to surrender and turn over the 400 young men who had led the resistance. By his order their hands were cut off.
Hannibal and Scipio died the same year. When Hannibal was born, “Rome was contending with doubtful success for the possession of Sicily; when he died Rome was ‘mistress of the world.’” Publius Scipio, who more than anyone else brought this about, died bitter at the way he had been treated. He had added to the empire Spain, Africa and Asia. “His proud spirit, his belief that he was different from and better than, other man, gave offense to many, and not without reason.”
After Carthage was defeated, after Rome was everywhere triumphant, Cato, who understood how much depended on the continued maintenance of Roman discipline, wondered what “would happen to Rome when she should no longer have any state to fear?” The answer was not long in coming. There was now an empire to govern, and playing “the part of governors demoralized the Roman ruling class with fearful rapidity.” Few governors returned with “clean hands: and veterans came home “wealthy men.” War became a “traffic in plunder.” Everything was now about money, and the division between rich and poor grew greater and became dangerous. “The often used and often abused phrase of a commonwealth composed of millionaires and beggars applied nowhere so completely as to the Rome of the last age of the republic….” Rome was the center of an empire, and the most important city in the world. Everyone who wanted to be known, known and admired, wanted to live there and be part of it. As residence became more desirable, Rome became more and more expensive. Money, “and nothing but money, became the watchword for high and low.” The constant, and increasing, quest for wealth changed the Roman character. The patriotic ardor which at one point in the Carthaginian war led some of Rome’s citizens to provide on their own two hundred ships and sixty thousand sailors, an action Mommsen thought unprecedented in history, had all but vanished.
The rich had all the advantages, but the poor still had the vote. The rich wanted power; the poor wanted to be entertained. The ability to supply that entertainment became “practically a qualification for holding the highest offices in the state.” As was almost inevitable, the size and splendor of the entertainment offered “became gradually the standard by which the electorate measured the fitness of the candidates for the consulship.” Politics became the prerogative of the wealthy, and entertainment the opiate of the masses, which like any addiction became constantly a greater need. In l86 B.C., gladiatorial games gained admission to Rome. Twenty years later, in the Triumphal Games, the first Greek flute players gave a performance. It failed to please, and the musicians were ordered to fight - to box - with each other “instead of playing, upon which the delight knew no bounds.”
The populace - the ‘People of Rome’ - “was a great lord and desired as such to receive attention.” They crowded in to watch first wild animals, then human beings, forced to fight to the death, and did it in such numbers that the sale of programs listing the names and specialities of the participants became a lucrative business. And then, finally, the gladiatorial games “which revealed, at the same time that they fostered, the worst demoralization of the ancient world, took the last step, the “horrible innovation,” by which the crowd, the Roman citizenry that had once been more than willing, eager, to sacrifice themselves for the safety and glory of Rome, decided whether those vanquished in the arena should live or die.
The Roman citizen, once trained to the military discipline of the camp, had now become little more than an urban mob, depending on the state for what it needed to live, and drawn to any demagogue who promised more of what it wanted. Gladiators gave them the vicarious pleasure of violence, blood, and death; actors and dancing girls, which had become two of the highest paid professions in Rome, gave them other ways to amuse themselves without any effort of their own. This corruption, this loss of ancient discipline and order, had, however, one advantage: It made possible the emergence of an individual who might, through his own extraordinary gifts, attract the support of the poor and with that support end the dominance of the privileged rich. The corruption of the Roman republic brought Julius Caesar to power and in the guise of democracy gave Rome an emperor.
Mommsen has nothing but praise for what Caesar was and for what Caesar did. He was, not only in politics, but “in the department of language also the greatest master of his time.” In his treatise on the Gallic war, “there is diffused a bright serenity, a simple charm, which are no less unique in literature than Caesar is in history.” Something similar could be said about Theodor Mommsen. He has written a history that teaches as much about the present as it does about the past, the way in which a republic becomes first a nation then an empire, and how, what was a commonwealth of common effort and shared sacrifice becomes one “composed of millionaires and beggars,” ready to fall under the spell of anyone who promises to give them more of what they think they want. Mommsen’s History of Rome tells us how all of this might be avoided.
Anyone fortune enough to read this great work will understand what Mark Twain felt that evening, long ago, in Berlin: “I could have touched him with my hands - Mommsen! - think of it!”
Buffa's previous third reading essays: The Great Gatsby; Brave New World; Lord Jim; Death in the Afternoon; Parade's End; The Idiot; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; The Scarlet Letter; Justine; Patriotic Gore; Anna Karenina; The Charterhouse of Parma; Emile; War and Peace; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Bread and Wine; “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities; Eugene Onegin; The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay; The Europeans; The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction; Doctor Faustus; the reading list of John F. Kennedy; Jorge Luis Borges; History of the Peloponnesian War; Mansfield Park; To Each His Own; A Passage To India; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; The Letters of T.E. Lawrence; All The King’s Men; The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus; Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt; Main Street; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Fiction's Failure; Hermann Hesse's Demian; Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July; Caesar’s Ghost; The American Constitution; A Tale of Two Cities; The Leopard; Madame Bovary; The Sheltering Sky; Tocqueville’s America and Ours; American Statesmen; Ancient and Modern Writers Reconsidered; Père Goriot; The Remarkable Edmund Burke; The Novels of W.H. Hudson; America Revised; The City And Man; "The Use And Abuse Of History"; I, Claudius; The Closing of The American Mind.
--Marshal Zeringue