Gerlach’s Cicero versus Mommsen’s Cicero in 19th-Century Basel

Author: Benvenuti, Francesca
Title: Gerlach’s Cicero versus Mommsen’s Cicero in 19th-Century Basel
Review/Collection: In : Scheidegger Laemmle, Cédric (ed.), Cicero in Basel, Locating Classical Reception in a Humanist City, De Gruyter, 2024, 374 p.
Place edition: Berlin, Boston
Editor: De Gruyter
Year edition: 2024
Pages: 303-320
Keywords: Héritage - Fortuna - Legacy
Description: Francesca Benvenuti reviews the position Cicero and his writings held in the educational landscape as she discusses the German scholar Franz Dorotheus Gerlach who came to play a dominant role at the interface between Basel’s Pädagogium, the upper-level Gymnasium, and the University, which he headed as Rector and whose library collections he oversaw as Oberbibliothekar. Gerlach’s life-long engagement with Cicero eventually crystallised in the publication of a richly supplemented academic lecture Marcus Tullius Cicero. Redner, Staatsmann, Schriftsteller (1864) in which Gerlach pointedly reacted to the negative view of Cicero that dominated German academia in the wake of the publication of Theodor Mommsen’s Römische Geschichte. While Mommsen scathingly criticised Cicero as an ineffective politician without true vision, in stark contrast with his view of Caesar, Gerlach’s portrait sought to integrate the different facets of Cicero’s life and works, firmly placing Cicero’s political activities alongside his literary and philosophical achievements. As Benvenuti shows, Gerlach’s neo-humanist vindication of Cicero is part and parcel of his vigorous advocacy of the role of Classical education in civic society. Benvenuti’s investigation of Gerlach, himself one of the founders of the Philological Seminar at Basel, thus also sheds light on the formation of Altertumswissenschaften against the socio-political dynamics of an urban society in the ‘long 19th century’ [Scheidegger Laemmle 2024,16].
Link: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111454641-016/pdf
Author initials: Benvenuti 2024