Niebuhr, BARTHOLD GEORG, one of the most distinguished of modern historians, was born August 27, 1776, at Copenhagen, the son of the famous traveller, Karsten Niebuhr. From his infancy he showed unusual promise, and he was carefully educated under his father's eye. After his studies at Kiel he became private secretary to Count Schimmelmann in Copenhagen, and devoted himself to the study of the natural sciences at London and Edinburgh (1798-99). In 1800 he married and entered the Danish state-service, and held various appointments, which he resigned in 1806 to enter the Prussian civil service on the invitation of Stein. During the next three years, the darkest in the history of Prussia, Niebuhr was actively employed in public business and in various secret financial missions. But his scholar's temperament was but ill adapted for political intrigue, and the opening of the university of Berlin in 1810 proved a new era in his life. He gave (1810-12) a course of lectures on Roman history which, by making known the results of the new and critical theory that he had applied to the elucidation of obscure historical evidence, established his position as one of the most original and philosophical of modern historians. His appointment, in 1816, to the post of Prussian ambassador at the papal court, where he remained till 1823, gave him an opportunity of testing on the spot the accuracy of his conjectures in regard to many questions of local and social bearing. On his return from Rome Niebuhr took up his residence at Bonn, where his admirable lectures gave a powerful impetus to classical and archaeological learning. He was thus employed when the revolution of 1830 roused him from the calm of his literary pursuits. His sensitive nature, unstrung by physical weakness, led him to take an exaggerated view of the consequences of this movement, and to anticipate a recurrence of all the horrors of the former French revolution, and the result was to bring about a state of mental depression and bodily prostration, which ended in his death, 2d January 1831.
Niebuhr's attainments were of extraordinary range, and his genius strikingly original in cast. He had mastered twenty languages before the age of thirty, and his tenacious memory retained everything he read; while he possessed in a remarkable degree the gift of intuitive sagacity that enabled him to sift true from false historic evidence, and often to supply by felicitous conjecture the link wanting in some imperfect chain of evidence. It is not to be denied, however, that his scepticism as to the credibility of early history goes too far, and that he is often arbitrary and unhistorical in his conjectures; indeed, the stricter sort of sceptical critics, like the late Sir George Cornewall Lewis, go so far as to regard his effort to construct a continuous Roman history out of such legendary materials as we possess as, on the whole, a failure. Niebuhr's theory of the construction of the earlier Roman history from still earlier ballads is not now accepted by scholars; but the fact remains that the bulk of his contribution to history still stands substantially unshaken, and it would be difficult to overestimate the strength of the impetus he gave to its study on a really scientific method.
Of his Römische Geschichte (vols. i. and ii, 1811-12; 2d ed. 1827-28; vol. iii., coming down to end of first Punic war, edited from his papers by Classen, 1832) the first two volumes were translated by Julius Harc and Connop Thirlwall, and the third by Dr W. Smith and Dr L. Schmitz; other works translated by Schmitz into English are Lectures on the Hist. of Rome, to Fall of Western Empire (2d ed. 3 vols. 1850), Lectures on Ancient Hist. (3 vols. 1852), and Lectures on Ancient Ethnography and Geog. (2 vols. 1853). Other works are Griech. Heroengeschichte (1842), written for his son Marcus; Kleine historischen und philologischen Schriften (2 vols. 1828-43); besides numerous other essays on philological, historical, and archaeological questions. Niebuhr co-operated with Bekker and others in re-editing Scriptores Historice Byzantinæ; he also discovered hitherto unprinted fragments of classical authors, as of Cicero's Orations and portions of Gaius; published the Inscriptiones Nubienses (Rome, 1821); and was a constant contributor to the literary journals of Germany. See Madame Hensler's Lebensnachrichten (1838; Eng. trans. by Miss Winkworth, 3 vols. 1852), and the studies by Classen (1876) and Eyssenhardt (1886).