“Ich komme schwerlich wieder”. Theodor Mommsen und das Deutsche Archäologische Institut

A scholarship from the Danish crown enabled Theodor Mommsen to travel to Italy from 1844 to 1847. There he laid the foundations for a comprehensive collection of Latin inscriptions, the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, and established close relations to the Istituto di correspondenza archeologica, which had been founded in Rome in 1829. The Institute was a prominent place where Mommsen set a new course in classical scholarship: all surviving sources of the Ancient world were to be collected, arranged and edited. The methodological, organisational and institutional transformation of classical studies relied on international cooperation, but was also meant to preserve the hegemony of German Altertumswissenschaft. The Institute, however, published its announcements in Italian, French and Latin