Roman Monument
Anthony Grafton remembers Theodor Mommsen, the great German historian of the Roman republic and literary giant of his day.
In the spring of 1892, Mark Twain described Berlin for the readers of the Chicago Tribune. He admired the city’s beauty, the cleanliness of its streets, and the energy of its inhabitants, but it was the bustling Berliners’ reverence for science and scholarship that impressed him most deeply. He described how, at a banquet held in honour of two great scientists, the pathologist Rudolf Virchow and the physicist Hermann von Helmholtz, a thousand students sang their corps songs, drew their swords in unison, and toasted the eminent men.
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