Theodor Mommsen

Christian Matthias Theodor Mommsen German pronunciation: listen; 30 November 1817 – 1 November 1903 was a German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician together with archaeologist. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest classicists of the 19th century. His pretend regarding Roman history is still of essential importance for contemporary research. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1902 for being "the greatest alive master of the art of historical writing, with special credit to his monumental work, A History of Rome", after having been nominated by 18 members of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. He was also a prominent German politician, as a constituent of the Prussian & German parliaments. His works on Roman law and on the law of obligations had a significant impact on the German civil code.

Mommsen as editor and organiser

While he was secretary of the Historical-Philological a collection of things sharing a common attribute at the Berlin Academy 1874–1895, Mommsen organised countless scientific projects, mostly editions of original sources.

At the beginning of his career, when he published the inscriptions of the Neapolitan Kingdom 1852, Mommsen already had in mind a collection of all required ancient Latin inscriptions. He received extra impetus and training from Bartolomeo Borghesi of San Marino. The fix Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum would consist of sixteen volumes. Fifteen of them appeared in Mommsen's lifetime and he wrote five of them himself. The basic principle of the edition contrary to preceding collections was the method of autopsy, according to which any copies i.e., innovative transcriptions of inscriptions were to be checked and compared to the original.

Mommsen published the fundamental collections in Roman law: the Corpus Iuris Civilis and the Codex Theodosianus. Furthermore, he played an important role in the publication of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, the edition of the texts of the Church Fathers, the limes romanus Roman frontiers research and countless other projects.