Third reading: D.W. Buffa on Theodor Mommsen's "History of Rome"

The Dark Backward is among D.W. Buffa's more recent novels to be released. The story revolves around not just the strangest case William Darnell had ever tried;

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.

Buffa's latest take in his "Third Reading" series is on Theodor Mommsen's History of Rome. It begins:

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!”

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...[read on]

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

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; History of Rome.

--Marshal Zeringue