I've just received my new 1864-67 rebound
Mommsen History of
Rome and want to clarify how it compares with the 1901.
- The dates of my copy can be confirmed as 1864 for volumes 1 and 2, and 1867 for volumes 3, 4.1 and 4.2.
- The scope of my five volumes covers from the earliest times to
Julius Caesar and the legal reforms which he instituted, but not the later
Imperatorial period. This matches what the 1901 edition covers. However the pagination and volumation (??) is completely different, and to further confuse matters, neither edition matches the five "books" that
Mommsen split
his three "volume" original
German edition into. For example, volume 2 of the 1901 edition covers Chapters VII-IX of Book 2, and Chapters I-X of Book 3. Volume 2 of the 1864 edition covers all of Book 3 Chapters I-XIV. I can detect no differences in the actual texts.
None of these correlations matter in the least of course, except to know that all editions in all languages at all times seem to cover the same scope from earliest times to JC, with randomly different splits as to what is in each volume and/or how many volumes there are.
- In the
German edition, these five volumes (1,2,3,4.1,4.2) were originally published in three volumes hence squaring with the Nobel citation that talks about vols 1,2,3 and 5, the latter being the published volume on the Provinces and the missing
vol.4 being the unpublished Imperial volume although it was supposedly
reconstructed from student notes taken in lectures by
Mommsen and published by Clare Krojzl (as co-author with M.) in the 1990s as A
History of
Rome under the Emperors. The latter isn't on Amazon, but over 30 copies are available on Abebooks at moderate prices, as are copies of the Provinces book. Apparently the Krozjl book caused somewhat of a sensation when published in
Germany in 1992, but it's not in Mommsen's immaculate and vibrant Nobel-prize winning prose (and Dickson's
superb translation), rather is based on student scrawls converted into PhD-speak*. Independent reviews of the 1996 English edition more or less said "whateva".
Still, for curiosity and completeness sakes, I've just bought a copy of Krojzl's Imperial "Volume 4" at £15, and a 1969 2-vol hardback reprint of Mommsen's
Provincial "Volume 5" at £12.
* http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/beware-the-jargon-in-academic-speak/91656.article :
radicals went into university and immediately clad themselves in all of the paraphernalia of an elite cult. The theoreticians place "ism" at the end of words, are prolix at using such prefixes as pre- and post- or cyber. They use Latinate versions whenever possible, nouns instead of verbs, intransitive instead of transitive uses, and love to wave around quote marks like confetti, supposedly as a sign of irony. Words like "foreground", which has perfectly good ordinary English synonyms, are used to achieve a spurious sense of high intellectual activity.