SOURCE: Benario, Herbert W. “Tacitus, Gustav Freytag, Mommsen.” Classical and Modern Literature, 20, no. 3 (spring 2000): 71-79.

In the following essay, Benario suggests that Freytag's novel of academic life, Die Verlorene Handschrift, was inspired by the author's relationship with the scholars Theodor Mommsen and Moriz Haupt.

A few years ago, Professor Géza Alföldy published a splendid article in which he reexamined an inscription from Rome and identified the honoree as the historian Tacitus. The title is cryptic; it is “Bricht der Schweigsame sein Schweigen? Eine Grabinschrift aus Rom.”¹ I did not understand the significance of the first part until it was pointed out to me that it invoked a novel by Gustav Freytag (1816-1895) entitled Die verlorene Handschrift.² It is a vast work; in the edition which I used it covers 826 pages,³ while a translation of the whole reaches 953!⁴ I find the story bloated and excessive,⁵ yet the...