Beiheft 21
New Paths of Classicism in the Nineteenth Century
Cover image: a notebook used by Theodor Mommsen for his Römische Geschichte, or History of Rome.
+ ARNALDO MOMIGLIANO, Niebuhr and the Agrarian Problems of Rome, History and Theory 21 (December 1982), Bei. 21, 3-15.
The sharp distinction between right of private ownership and right of occupation as formulated by Barthold Niebuhr in 1810-1811 has ever since been the center of discussion, interpretation, and doubt in any comparison between Roman property law and other legal systems. Fearful of the establishment of a modern agrarian law by contemporary radicals, he tried to prove that the Romans had never used agrarian laws to undermine the private ownership of land. Niebuhr hoped to separate what he considered the just claims of agrarian reforms from the unjust attacks against private property. Niebuhr's acquaintance with the Indian agrarian situation enabled him to understand the real nature of the ager publicus Jin Rome. A conservative, Niebuhr hoped to save the aristocracy from itself; an outsider in aristocratic society by virtue of his peasant ancestry, he was sympathetic to the peasantry as well.
+ ARNALDO MOMIGLIANO, From Mommsen to Max Weber, History and Theory 21 (December 1982), Bei. 21, 16-32.
In 1856, Mommsen responded to the increased interest in primitive German communism sparked by Marx and Engels by showing that the early Romans did not lag behind the early Germans in their collective attitudes. Fustel managed to have the property structure of the Roman gens as the archetype of primitive private property; whereas Mommsen, Maine, and Bonfante identified the gens with the primitive communist village. This was possible because we know little about the nature and function of the early Roman gens. Compared to these writers, Weber was much more interested in historical times than in the origins of private ownership in Rome. Where Mommsen saw the origins of Roman civilization in the fight of sturdy peasants to keep their own fields, Weber depicted these same Rornans at a later stage where they had degenerated into greedy landowners and were prepared to separate themselves from the cities they had created.
+ ARNALDO MOMIGLIANO, Hermann Usener, History and Theory 21 (December 1982), Bei. 21, 33-48.
Usener's use of philology and more specifically of comparative philology for the transformation of the study of religion during the late nineteenth century resulted from a slow realization of certain potentialities of philology which he and others had not grasped before. When Usener aimed at a definite and systematic examination of pagan elements in Christianity, with the ultimate purpose of preparing their elimination from modern Christianity, he made the decisive move from what we would call the humanistic tradition of the textual critic and interpreter to the task of the philological - and by implication antitheological - interpreter of religion. An interpretation of Usener in terms of a modified Kantian problematic about the relation between phenomenon and noumenon would show that Usener struggled to find in human language the channel toward the Noumenon.
+ ARNALDO MOMIGLIANO, Religious History without Frontiers: J. Wellhausen, U. Wilamowitz, and E. Schwartz, History and Theory 21 (December 1982), Bei. 21, 49- 64.
Wellhausen, Usener, Wilamowitz, and Schwartz found common presuppositions in a philological method which relied on the instrument of text analysis and avoided any theological or dogmatic interference. Wellhausen became a hero to Wilamowitz and Schwartz because he showed them that the same method was legitimate both in sacred and profane texts. He also confirmed them in what they had already learned from Usener: that repudiation of theological presuppositions did not mean absence of religious emotions. But Wellhausen, Wilamowitz, and Schwartz had in common political emotions which were alien to the contemplative Usener.