In the nineteenth century, the German program of Altertumswissenschaft had a lasting influence on classical studies throughout the western world, representing a profound break in the exploration not only of Late Antiquity but of antiquity as a whole (Rebenich 2000a). Independent scholarly methods and enterprises that had been pursued in the Netherlands, France, England, and Italy up till then were abandoned. Within a few decades, the Altertumswissenschaft, established by Christian Gottlieb Heyne (1729-1812) at the University of Gcittingen, had succeeded in transforming an aristocratic hobby into an academic discipline and promoting a new professorial elite. The interpretation of written records, based on a thorough survey of the sources, now became the cognitive process crucial to historical research. The fundamental principle of this research was objectivity; but belief in the inherent significance of historical events was also important, as was the role of the individual. Following the lead of Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776-1831) and August Boeckh (1785-1867), many authors of the period saw the central responsibility of the scientific disciplines relating to antiquity as cognitio totius antiquitatis, that is, as an understanding of the classical heritage in its entirety: pagan as well as Christian; of the early Greek period just as much as of the late Roman period. Prodigious joint productions - Corpora, Monumenta, and Thesauri - made the legacy of the ancient world more accessible (Rebenich 1999). Scholars adopted with fresh confidence an empirical style of historical analysis. Faith in progress and scientific optimism characterized this new professional study of antiquity in universities and academies. The work of Theodore Mommsen (1817-1903), who demanded that scholars ‘‘organize the archives of the past’’ according to a detailed program of his own devising, provides the best-known example (Rebenich 2002). A large-scale enterprise emerged, devoted to the study of antiquity, that impressively confirmed the efficiency of Quellenforschung but also encouraged a division between the editing and the interpretation of sources, thus turning many scholars into mere laborers. The historicization of the ancient world necessarily implied the rejection of an earlier view - that antiquity represented some sort of norm, or that it validated a contemporary aestheticism. The unique position of antiquity, especially that of the Greeks, was sacrificed.
The ideal of totality regarding the study of antiquity implied the collecting, critical editing, and historical evaluation of Christian and late antique evidence. Consequently, the heros ktistes of modern Roman classical studies, Theodor Mommsen, had already, at the beginning of his academic career, dealt with questions about the history and chronology of the written records of the Later Roman Empire, especially Roman law and its sources. His understanding of constitutional law made him presume a clear division between the early and high empire and Late Antiquity. Mommsen contrasted the principate of Augustus with the ‘‘dominate’’ of the late empire, a period that, as he argued, began with Diocletian and was characterized by an excessive veneration of the emperor as dominus in a supposedly ‘‘oriental’’ (that is, predominantly Persian) style.
For many different disciplines the historico-critical method now formed the basis for their examination of Late Antiquity. The central task, for those who adopted this approach, was the editing of the relevant sources. The editions thus created formed a reliable basis for all historical reconstructions of Late Antiquity (and continue to do so). In 1828, Niebuhr created the Bonner Corpus der byzantinischen Geschichtsschreiber; from 1866 onward the Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum latinorum was published in Vienna; and from 1928 onward Eduard Schwartz (1858-1940) set about editing the Acta conciliorum oecumenicorum. In 1891, the committee on the fathers of the church was founded at the Academy in Berlin, where historians, theologians, and classicists together edited the Griechische christliche Schriftsteller der ersten (drei) Jahrhunderte. This venture demonstrates how textual criticism historically surmounted the paradigm of decline: the theologians regarded the edition of the fathers as a vital instrument for the historically reliable reconstruction of the dogmatic conditioning of early Christianity; the historians wanted to reconstruct the history of Christianity in the Roman state; and the philologists intended to write a history of the literature of both the high and the later empire (Rebenich 2001).
Ancient writers were now published who had previously been ignored, either because their subjects did not coincide with popular taste, or because scholars schooled in the Latin of Cicero took exception to their barbaric style. With his great editions for the Monumenta Germaniae historica, Mommsen made accessible the history of Late Antiquity (Croke 1990b). He himself edited the History of the Goths by Jordanes, the Variae of Cassiodorus, and the Chronica minora; and he energetically assisted with other editions. Additionally, there are his great patristic editions: the Life of Severin by Eugippius, the Liber pontificalis, and Rufinus’ translation of Eusebius’ Historia ecclesiastica. Mommsen also made outstanding contributions to the collections of legal texts of Late Antiquity. He published between 1868 and 1870, with the help of Paul Kruger, the vast two-volume edition of the Digesta, followed in 1872 by a more concise volume that was part of the Corpus iuris civilis. He did extensive preliminary work for the edition of the Codex Theodosianus, published posthumously in 1904. These editions of Christian and late classical texts formed the basis for linguistic discussions about ‘‘vulgar’’ Latin and a distinctively Christian Latin (‘‘eine christliche Sondersprache’’) that prompted an intensive debate in the twentieth century (Mohrmann 1977: 111-40).
Mommsen had intended to create, in collaboration with the Protestant ecclesiastical historian Adolf Harnack (1851-1930), a prosopography of Late Antiquity. But this large-scale interdisciplinary project, which sought to create a fundamental prosopographical reference work for secular and ecclesiastical historians, as well as for theologians and philologists, failed - its objective was too broad - and it was finally abandoned in the 1930s. The materials collected, however, served as a basis for the Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire and the Prosopographie chr'etienne du bas-empire (Rebenich 1997a; 1997b: 247-326).
World History
