Barthold Georg Niebuhr

Barthold Georg Niebuhr (27 August 1776 – 2 January 1831) was a Danish-German statesman, banker, and historian who became Germany's leading historian of Ancient Rome and a founding father of modern scholarly historiography. Classical Rome (rather than Greece) caught the admiration of German thinkers. By 1810 Niebuhr was inspiring German patriotism in students at the University of Berlin by his analysis of Roman economy and government. Niebuhr was a leader of the Romantic Era and symbol of German national spirit that emerged after the defeat at Jena. But he was also deeply rooted in the classical spirit of the Age of Enlightenment in his intellectual presuppositions, his use of philologic analysis, and his emphasis on both general and particular phenomena in history.

Niebuhr was born in Copenhagen, the son of Carsten Niebuhr, a prominent German geographer resident in the city. His father provided his early education. The precocious young Niebuhr by 1794 was already an accomplished classical scholar and who read several languages. That year he entered the University of Kiel, where he studied law and philosophy. There he formed an important friendship of his life, that with Madame Hensler, the widowed daughter-in-law of one of the professors, six years older than himself. He also made the acquaintance of her sister, Amelie Behrens, whom he subsequently married. In 1796, he left Kiel to become private secretary to the Danish finance minister, Count Schimmelmann. But in 1798 he gave up this appointment and traveled in Great Britain, spending a year at Edinburgh studying agriculture and physics. Of his stay in Great Britain, he said “my early residence in England gave me one important key to Roman history. It is necessary to know civil life by personal observation in order to understand such states as those of antiquity. I never could have understood a number of things in the history of Rome without having observed England.”

In 1799 he returned to Denmark, where he entered the state service; in 1800 he married Amalie Behrens (1773-1815) and settled at Copenhagen. In 1804 he became chief director of the national bank. After the death of his first wife in 1816 Niebuhr married Margarete Henslen (1787-1831), with whom he had one son, Marcus, and three daughters, Amalie, Lucia and Cornelia.

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