Friedrich Münzer, b. 1868, Oppeln,
Silesia, d. 20 October 1942, Theresienstadt, Germany.
In the constellation of great Roman
historians, Münzer's star burns bright. Though his life ended terribly,
his work made possible some of the greatest achievements of twentieth-century
Roman historical study.
Life and death.
Münzer studied with the important
Berlin professor Otto Hirschfeld, producing his doctoral thesis De
gente Valeria, "On the Valerian clan", in 1893. In the small biography
normally attached to dissertations, he frankly acknowledged his Jewish origins,
which would have repercussions later, even though he soon converted to Evangelical
Lutheranism--perhaps, as Ernst Badian suggested, because he wished to marry
the gentile Clara Engels and this would have eased things. Having left Berlin
(where we might expect a young Berlin Ph.D. to have sought work) he accepted
an appointment at the University of Basel, in Switzerland, where he served
from 1896 to 1912--here, too, being a Lutheran might have helped. Badian rightly
points out that his conversion caused no ripples and did not interrupt his parents'
support (to the tune of 5,000 SF per year), so his religious background
seems not to have been strong (he does appear to have been a devout Lutheran,
In 1912 he returned to Germany to
teach at Königsberg, and simultaneously received an appointment as a
member of the Prussian civil service (this went with the university position).
This appointment would later be of significance, for when the Nazis began
purging the civil service they set their sights initially only on those civil
servants hired after August 1, 1914, and Münzer was grandfathered in with
this modest protection. Münzer did not serve in the army during World
War I (he was 46, and 'unfit for military service'),
but was, Ridley tells us, awarded a "modest decoration for his assistance
during the war." This was not a happy period of his life, and to cap it
off, his first wife died in the flu epidemics that appeared towards
the end of the war, in 1918.
In 1921 Münzer left Königsberg
for the University of Münster, where he spent the rest of his academic
life. In 1933, with the rise of National Socialist government,
the train of humiliating events which would lead to Münzer's (and so many others') death was quickly set in motion. Protected at first by
his Lutheranism, his Aryan second wife Clara, and the
date of his civil service appointment, he was finally forceably retired in 1935
at the age of 68. Badian notes the irony that the retirement was accompanied
by a letter signed by Hitler; but only a few months later he
was deprived of the protection of his wife by her death, and
was soon thereafter officially classified as Jewish.
This is not the place to rewrite
the history of the holocaust: Ridley offers a full account of the ugly details
as they pertain to Münzer. Increasingly isolated and unproductive, he was
deported in 1942 to the concentration camp at Theresienstadt, where a mixture
of old age, despondency, and enteritis ended his life after only a bit more
than two months.
But we must not let the awful end
of his life distract us from recognizing his vast services to the study, above
all, of the Roman republic. And fittingly, for E2 readers, his most fundamental
contribution was as an encyclopedist! One of the monuments of German scholarship
was and is A. Pauly's and G. Wissowa's vast Real-Encyclopädie der klassischen
Wissenschaft, a compendium of the facts concerning everything
imaginable about the ancient world. Beginning in 1893, Münzer was given
the task of writing the biographies of Roman persons starting with the letter
C. The task ran to about 5,000 individual articles, some small, some long, with
major figures like Julius Caesar deliberately left by Münzer for others
It was this corpus of encyclopedia
articles, painstakingly worked out from many, many fragmented and often obscure
original literary, epigraphical (inscribed), numismatic and other
sources, that was Münzer's great achievement. Where scholars had tended
to focus on the great movers and shakers who loom largest in the ancient authors'
works, Münzer looked with a microscope at the thousands of lesser, even
petty, aristocrats who appeared in the sidelines or in passing. He laboriously
worked out family relationships, patterns of
office holding, marriage patterns, naming practices, and a host of related matters: this branch of historical
research is called prosopography.
From this data bank historians
such as Matthias Gelzer in his Die römische Nobilität (The
Roman Nobility) of 1912 and Münzer himself in his fundamental Römische
Adelsparteien und Adelsfamilien (Roman Aristocratic Parties and Families)
of 1920 were able to construct a new, more accurate picture of how the Roman
republic had actually functioned socially and politically. This led to the progressive
abandonment of a widely-held picture of republican government modelled on the
struggle between liberal and tory political parties of the Victorian age,
and between Gelzer's Nobilität and Münzer's Adelsparteien
a revolutionary new picture of the complex and elegant dance of Roman aristocrats
(characterized by personal influence and shifting
alliances) grew which still holds today.
The greatest work to build on Münzer's
is Ronald Syme's The Roman Revolution (1939), which uses prosopographical
methods to develop a persuasive picture of the revolutionary change in just
who was at the top of Roman government in the last years of the Roman republic
and the first years of the Augustan principate. Some elements of
the picture stemming from Münzer's and Gelzer's work are under attack,
particularly those elements which presuppose mechanical manipulation of the
popular vote through personal influence. Fergus Millar is a notable spokesman
for this adjustment to the emphasis on aristocrats (see his
The Crowd in Rome in the Late Republic, 1998).
Münzer is the great patron
saint of classical prosopographers. Like any historical method, prosopography can be (and
occasionally was) carried to extremes, but if practiced while remaining sober
and skeptical, it offers valuable insights into a society (provided you have
adequate surviving sources). Prosopography is a living sphere of research in
some historical periods, but thanks to the finitude of sources on republican
Rome, Münzer's area is pretty well mined out (though occasional surprising
tidbits still come to light, especially since Roman inscriptions are always
On Münzer's life (my summary
comes entirely from these three works):
Badian, E. Review of Kneppe and Wiesehöfer (next entry). Gnomon
61 (1989) 600-605.
Kneppe, A., and Wiesehöfer, J. Friedrich Münzer. Ein Althistoriker
zwischen Kaiserreich und Nationalsozialismus. 1983.
Ridley, T. "The Fate of a Historian." xix-lvii of Münzer-Ridley
Münzer's work and an evaluative
Münzer, F. Römische Adelsparteien und Adelsfamilien (1920).
Münzer, F. Roman Aristocratic Parties and Families, translated
by Thérèse Ridley (1999).
Ridley, R. "Friedrich Münzer's Roman Aristocratic Parties and
Families." xix-xxxviii of Münzer-Ridley (1999: above).