The Year of Reading Rome (a resolution)
If you’re anything like me you make New Year’s resolutions about reading Mommsen
I’m not concerned here with the most up to date, scholarly treatment of the minutiae of Roman history. I want good, classic accounts of Roman history told in a satisfying way without all the pretense to neutrality and disinterestedness, or the overt theoretical baggage that makes so much modern writing unbearable.
So to help matters along I’ll try to fill the gap with Charles Merivale‘s
- Volume 1
- Volume 2
- Volume 3
- Volume 4
- Volume 5
- Volume 6
- Volume 7
- Volume 8
- Mommsen, History of Rome (2,512 pages)
- 4 volumes from prehistory to the end of the Republic.
- Mommsen, The Provinces, from Caesar to Diocletian (721 pages)
- 2 volumes on the provinces and peoples from Caesar to Diocletian.
- Merivale, History of the Romans Under the Empire (3,445 pgs.)
- 8 volumes bridging the gap between Mommsen and Gibbon.
- Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (3,665 pgs.)
- 7 volumes from the Antonines through the fall of Byzantium.
Of course I already own Mommsen (the original four-volume history and the fifth on the provinces) and Gibbon (the same three-volume set that Grandpa Gene has young Sally read to him on AMC’s Mad Men), so you’re on your own for those.
By my rough estimate the three sets — Mommsen, Merivale, and Gibbon — could be finished before the next New Year by reading 25-30 pages a day.
Who’s with me?
UPDATE:
Laura Gibbs has done anyone contemplating this project a real service by locating all of the necessary volumes on Google Books.
The sequence would be as follows:
About 30 lines a day will do it.
There's 8 Comments So Far
January 2nd, 2011 at 5:30 pm
YES, Dennis! If you set the pace, I will be able to keep up for most of the time I imagine… anyway, I am glad to give it a try. I have prowled through GoogleBooks and found all volumes of Mommsen, Gibbons and Merivale, although the Mommsen and Gibbons are not in the editions you have, so I would need chapter numbers to follow along, rather than page numbers. This sounds like a great way to get (finally) a good education in Roman history.
Here are the GoogleBooks listings for anyone who is interested:
http://ilovegooglebooks.blogspot.com/search/label/RomanHistory
(I like using GoogleBooks because I can put the PDFs on my iPad – I have sometimes run into problems with the Internet Archive PDFs because they won’t show up properly on the iPad).
January 2nd, 2011 at 5:33 pm
I’d be interested in a readalong for the Gibbon, or any one of the others; I’m not sure that I can commit to a yearlong thing at this point, though.
January 2nd, 2011 at 6:50 pm
Dennis, this is super. Let me take a stab at making a GoogleCalendar with a reading schedule, which will be a good way to let people see where things stand at any point if they want to join in. More in a bit.
January 2nd, 2011 at 9:18 pm
Hi Dennis, I used a spreadsheet and Google Calendar to see if the 30 pages/day estimate works, and it does!
Here’s what I came up with:
Roman History Reading Schedule
The only place where I ran into some difficulty is with the relationship between Mommsen’s history and the provinces book. The book numbering in the Provinces book leaves a gap which I think (????) is the gap for the portion of Mommsen that was unfinished when he died. I read at Wikipedia that a “reconstructed” volume has been published that fills the gaps, based on papers Mommsen left, his students’ notes, etc. But at the same time, I am not sure.
Here is where the gap happens:
Dickson ends the history with Book 5 – Chapter 12 (fall of the Republic)
Dickson begins provinces with Book 8 (but he was anticipating the missing volume to be filled in by Mommsen, so I think the missing book 6 and book 7 reflect Mommsen’s unpublished “fourth volume”)
This is all something quite far afield from my usual field of study, so please let me know if that is correct, or if there is indeed some Mommsen we need to include that I have not included! :-)
January 2nd, 2011 at 11:30 pm
Hi Laura,
I almost included a note about the Provinces as optional or to be read alongside Merivale. Mommsen himself said that the ‘missing’ books were not going to be written, and didn’t need to be:
“That the present portion does not attach itself immediately to the preceding, is a matter of little moment …. … I am of opinion that, for the purposes of the cultured public, in whose minds this History is intended to promote an intelligent conception of Roman antiquity, other works may take the place of the Two Books, which are still wanting between this (the Eighth) and the earlier ones, more readily than a substitute can be found for that now issued.”
Book 6 would have covered the death throes of republicanism and the establishment of the principate, but Mommsen didn’t feel it was needed:
“The struggle of the Republicans in opposition to the monarchy erected by Caesar, and the definitive establishment of the latter, are so well presented in the accounts handed down to us from antiquity that every delineation amounts essentially to a reproduction of their narrative.”
Book 7 would have been a biographical history of Rome through the emperors, which, again, he found unnecessary:
“The distinctive character of the monarchical rule and the fluctuations of the monarchy, as well as the general relations of government influenced by the personality of the individual rulers, which the Seventh Book is destined to exhibit, have been at least subjected to frequent handling.”
And he justified book 8 as necessary to clear up misperceptions commonly held about the imperial period.
“Of what is here furnished—the history of the several provinces from the time of Caesar to that of Diocletian,—there is, if I am not mistaken, no comprehensive survey anywhere accessible to the public to which this work addresses itself ; and it is owing, as it seems to me, to the want of such a survey that the judgment of that public as to the Roman imperial period is frequently incorrect and unfair.”
Merivale seems to fill the gap nicely, but perhaps Mommsen’s note about the importance of such a work as the Provinces should keep it on the list.
Now do we fit it in? Should it follow Merivale?
January 3rd, 2011 at 12:39 am
I would vote for reading Mommsen all together, rather than trying to read two different authors at once. I’m guessing we are going to see all of these books infused with a lot of the personal passions and prejudices of each author. It sounds like reading the provinces book would be a good way to expand our understanding of Mommsen’s thinking about Rome before moving on to Merivale.
January 3rd, 2011 at 12:17 pm
I’ll start it with you, although if I am physically well enough to make it out to my local community college, I want to take trigonometry this winter, and I may have to fall away to get my math homework done. I have read six of the seven volumes of Colleen McCulleough’s historical novels on the family of Caesar, but that, of course deals only with the end of The Republic to the death of Ceasar.
January 3rd, 2011 at 6:34 pm
Hello Harlan! That is one of my motivations in reading through these histories also – I have read Roman historical fiction (I recently got very interested in the novels of Robert Harris, both his Roman novels and his modern historical fiction, and I also like Colleen McCullough’s books very much) – now I am ready to read some history, too! :-)
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