A History of Rome

Now onto my first review. Whew! We'll begin almost chronologically with Theodor Mommsen (leaving out poor Prudhomme as my library doesn't stock him, alas).

Name: Theodor Mommsen

Year Won: 1902

Read: "A History of Rome"

Original Language: German

Reason: "the greatest living master of the art of historical writing, with special reference to his monumental work, A History of Rome"

About: A History of Rome is a 2,000 page non-fiction chronicling the history of Rome from the origins of Rome to its fall. It's incredibly detailed, involving just about every dispute imaginable, reasons for why one event or another happened, biographies, trade agreements, war and negotiations. It's got it all...like...EVERYTHING.

It's a LOT. I read maybe 200 pages of it as it's just a LOT. Too much for me, honestly.

What I liked: Mommsen does a really great job not just of describing events, but explaining why they happened. He uses a lot of detail, including economic and census data, that makes it much less "Julius Caesar did so and so on such and such a date" and more "because there was a famine and this was a grain producing area, it made sense to launch an invasion". He skillfully weaves together the lives of luminaries with the economic and political conditions of the time. This isn't super unique now, but I imagine it was revolutionary in 1854 (when he released the first volume).

What I disliked: It's...dry. So like, I get that it's history, but modern retellings of history tend to use a lot of narrative non-fiction (which is far more pleasant to absorb as a lay reader). This is an advance that is clearly far in the future for Mommsen, so I can't fault him. But it didn't make reading this all that fun. It was more a fairly dry chronicle of the Roman Empire.

Would I read it again: No. I didn't even finish the full 2,000 pages.

Should it have won the Nobel? Probably. I'm not sure what it was competing with, but it is a MONUMENTAL work and probably was one of the first places in which history was told with as much an eye for politics and economics as Names and Places. With that said, it feels more like it deserves a Nobel Prize for History (I know, one such thing doesn't exist...) than a Nobel Prize for Literature.

Who would enjoy: If anyone is interested in a lengthy, detailed description of Rome, this will do it for you. I suspect there are modern volumes that involve more recent archeological history (and may be more fun in the retelling), but for complexity, I think it's this or Gibbon. (And if you love Gibbon, why not try Mommsen too?)

Next up, the guy with a lot of letters that don't exist in English: Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson