‘Uebrigens darf hier nicht mein Wille entscheiden, sondern der Ihrige’. La cooptazione di Giovanni Battista de Rossi al progetto del Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum

In August 1853, Theodor Mommsen wrote to Giovanni Battista de Rossi with the hope that he would agree to join him and Wilhelm Henzen in the enterprise of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (CIL). The officialization of the his participation to the work for the realization of the Corpus came then in January of the following year. However, the process that led to de Rossi’s co-option was much more complex than what we know and the role played by Henzen in the affair was decisive for achieving this goal. This paper will investigate the dynamics that led to the birth of the «triumvirato pacifico sempre e laborioso» and the start of work for the CIL through the analysis of a substantial number of sources, both published and not.