Published by: lucius5 (Karma: 1660.85) on 27 February 2009 | Views: 1426
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Theodor Mommsen (1818-1903) was one of the greatest of Roman historians and the only one ever to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. His fame rests on his History of Rome, but the volumes that would have concluded it were never completed. A History of Rome under the Emperors takes the place of that great lost work, representing Mommsens view of the missing period. In 1980, Alexander Demandt discovered in a second-hand bookshop a full and detailed handwritten transcript of the lectures on the Roman Empire given by Mommsen between 1863 and 1886, and written down by two of his students. The transcript has been edited to provide an authoritative reconstruction of the book Mommsen never wrote, the history of the Roman Empire. The book caused a sensation when it was published in Germany in 1992 and was front-page news in many newspapers. Now available in paperback in English, it provides an authoritative survey of four centuries of Roman history.
