indeed become very popular. "Their success was immediate." Here "a professional scholar" presented his readers with a prose that was of "such vigor and life, such grasp of detail combined with such vision, such self-confident mastery of a vast field of learning." Especially in Mommsen's third volume, as the narrative told of how the political crisis in the Roman Republic came to its final climax, "he wrote with a fire of imagination and emotion almost unknown in a professional history. Here was scientific learning with the stylistic vigor of a novel." These first three volumes of the Römische Geschichte retained their popularity in Germany, with eight editions being published in Mommsen's lifetime. Following his death in 1903, an additional eight German editions have issued. Later volumes A planned fourth volume covering Roman history under the Empire was delayed pending Mommsen's completion of a then 15-volume work on Roman inscriptions. This task required his services as researcher, writer, and editor, which occupied Mommsen for many years. After repeated delays the projected fourth volume was eventually abandoned, or at least not published; an early manuscript may have been lost in a fire. Despite lacking a "fourth volume", in 1885 Mommsen had ready another volume on ancient Roman history; it described the imperial provinces. In Germany this work was published as volume five of his Römische Geschichte. In thirteen chapters Mommsen discusses the different provinces of the Roman Empire, each as a stand-alone subject. Here there was no running narrative of political events, often dramatic, as was the case in Mommsen's popular, chronological telling of the Roman Republic in his first three volumes. The English translation was entitled The Provinces of the Roman Empire from Caesar to Diocletion. In 1992 a 'reconstructed' edition of what would-have-been Mommsen's missing "fourth volume" on the Empire was issued. It was based on newly discovered lecture notes by two of Mommsen's students: Sebastian Hensel (father) and Paul Hensel (son). The two Hensels took notes of lectures on the politics of the Roman Empire delivered by Prof. Mommsen at the University of Berlin from 1882 to 1886. Alexander Demandt discovered them in 1980 at a used bookshop in Nuremberg. As edited by Barbara Demandt and Alexander Demandt, the notes yielded the 'reconstructed' German text, Römische Kaisergeschichte. In English The contemporary English translations were the work of William Purdie Dickson, then the Professor of Divinity at the University of