There are many reasons to admire Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Since it was first published in several volumes between 1776 and 1788, few books of history have been so widely or so indiscriminately praised. His twentieth-century editor, historian J. B. Bury, calls him “one of those few writers who hold as high a place in the history of literature as in the roll of great historians.” Most students of history and of literature would agree.
Praise of Gibbon (1737–1794) has become especially fashionable with the rise of liberal and Marxist prejudices against religion. And, as pessimism has become increasingly fashionable about the future of our Western civilization, the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire has become a handy guide to the sources of decay in other empires and civilizations. I will not enter the debate over the adequacy of Gibbon’s explanations of the fall of Rome. Nor will I explore the easy—or uneasy—analogies between the career of the ancient Roman Empire and that of our modern Western civilization.
My interest in Gibbon’s work is quite different. I will not assess it as a “great” book. Rather I will consider it as an “intimate” book. By this I mean a book that has something personal to say to us today. I am aware that it may seem odd to characterize a man of Gibbon’s grandiloquence of phrase and a multivolume work on such a grandiose subject as “intimate.”
For me personally Gibbon’s book has an especially intimate significance. It was the first extensive work of English literature (or of history) which I read and reread. It occupied much of my thought during my university years as an undergraduate. And the engraving of Gibbon’s rotund face, made by Chapman in 1807, a dozen years after his death, hangs on the wall of my study. Gibbon’s face has been with me ever since I first made his acquaintance.
Gibbon’s work can have an intimate, personal significance for all history readers and history writers in our age. He may help us discover some of the peculiar weaknesses and strengths of our way of looking at the past. To discover this intimacy we must try to see Gibbon not simply as a spokesman for the Enlightenment, nor his work as an effort to perfect one genre in the social sciences. Rather, let us think of him as an original, giving his own form to a large chunk of the past.
Toward this end it will help us at the outset to recognize a distinctive, if not entirely unique, feature of his place in the roll of great Western historians. Despite the wide popularity and continuity of Gibbon’s audience, he seems not to have founded a “Gibbonian” school of historical interpretation. For example, the authoritative International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, which includes extensive articles on such lesser figures as Bryce, Burckhardt, Huizinga, Maitland, Ranke, Savigny, and Spengler, gives no such attention to Gibbon. Serious scholars do not doubt the originality or the significance of Gibbon’s work. Still, he has not become the founder of a “school.” He has not taken a place as the originator of any large new conceptual framework, or any novel way of pigeonholing the human past. I will suggest that this is a clue to the intimacy of his message about that past, and what he can tell each of us about the role of people in the grand chronicle of empires and civilizations.
The historical profession, with all its paraphernalia of learned societies and prestigious academic specialties, has grown up only since Gibbon’s day. Not until the early nineteenth century did professional historians reach beyond the techniques of classical scholarship and textual criticism, to draw on the new disciplines of archaeology and philology, anthropology, sociology, and economics, to create new vocations of searchers for facts and movements and forces.
It is doubtful if there is another example in the social sciences of a work of similar longevity, respectability, and popularity, which has had so small a dogmatic or doctrinaire ingredient. The comprehensive historical works of recent years—those which are taken seriously by students of the social sciences—are heavily laced with dogma. I am thinking of the potent works, for example, of Macaulay, Carlyle, Marx, Pareto, Tawney, and Toynbee. These seem to owe much of their fame and their influence to the special charm of some new formulas to explain or contain historical experience.
How, then, can we explain the power and longevity and appeal of Gibbon, despite his lack of substantial original conceptual content?
In the first place, we must remember that Gibbon had the advantage of being an amateur. Unlike some other great interpreters of the past, many of whom were also amateurs, he was not enticed or driven to his subject by the urgencies of his time, or by a revolutionary, a religious, or a patriotic passion. In the original sense of the word “amateur,” he was simply a lover of his subject. And in a famous passage in his memoirs he recalls the precise moment when, as he sat in the Colosseum in Rome, he first felt that passion. In another, less famous passage, he recalled his mixed emotions as that exacting love affair came to an end:
It was on the night of June 27, 1787, between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last lines of the last page, in a Summerhouse garden.… I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and perhaps, the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind, by the idea that I had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that whatsoever might be the future date of my History, the life of the historian must be short and precarious.
Like other great amateurs—and other lovers—he had taken his plunge without really being ready for it. He was not equipped by formal training for his work as a historian of the Roman Empire. His fourteen “unprofitable months” at Magdalen College, in an Oxford which, according to him, was “steeped in port and prejudice,” did not give him the academic tools he needed. He lamented that his desultory training in Greek left him without the “scrupulous ear of the well-flogged critic.” His work as an ancient historian was never part of the perfunctory duties of an academic post.
Except for this one passion, he was not a man of passionate commitment. At the age of sixteen he did commit himself to the Roman Catholic Church, but when he was sent to Lausanne by his father, his tutor there quickly brought him back to Protestantism. Despite his skepticism of established Christianity, he found it natural to be a Tory. He had the advantage of some political experience—as a member of Parliament and a commissioner of trade and plantations. His politics were prudent and pragmatic. He was a friend and admirer of Lord North, for whom he wrote a state paper against France in the years before the Revolution. When the American colonies protested the power of Parliament and began a civil war to break away, he believed that they were wrong. But, after the Battle of Saratoga made it plain that the ocean and independent enthusiasms had already separated the American colonies, he confessed that Lord North’s costly efforts to subject the Americans were hopeless.
In an age that was filled with sycophants and that rewarded sycophancy, he did not dedicate his work to anyone—a fact for which he has not received the credit that is his due. He helps us understand why, and incidentally helps us share his vision of the significance of people in the vicissitudes of empire. He wrote these words in the preface to his fourth and final volume, published soon after Lord North had fallen from power:
Were I ambitious of any other Patron than the Public, I would inscribe this work to a Statesman, who in a long, a stormy, and at length an unfortunate administration, had many political opponents, almost without a personal enemy: who has retained, in his fall from power, many faithful and disinterested friends; and who, under the pressure of severe infirmity, enjoys the lively vigour of his mind, and the felicity of his incomparable temper. Lord North will permit me to express the feelings of friendship in the language of truth: but even truth and friendship should be silent, if he still dispensed the favours of the crown.
Gibbon remained uncommitted to any but his own opinions. The shrewd observer Horace Walpole, as he greeted the first volume of Gibbon’s history with surprise as “a truly classic work,” also noted that in Parliament Gibbon had been called “a whimsical because he votes variously as his opinion leads him. I … never suspected the extent of his talents, he is perfectly modest.”
Gibbon’s amorous commitments also were dominated by prudence and propriety. As a young man of twenty in Lausanne (1757) he became infatuated by the beautiful and witty Suzanne Curchod (1739–1794), then only eighteen. But when Gibbon’s father objected, he broke off the engagement. Later she married Jacques Necker, the French financier and statesman, and established one of the celebrated salons of modern Paris. (Their daughter, incidentally, was the saloniste and prolific author, Madame de Staël!) Gibbon’s broken engagement took place seven years before he conceived the Decline and Fall. What might Gibbon have done with his talents if, instead of listening to his father, he had shared his life with the charming Suzanne?
Gibbon once modestly declared that “diligence and accuracy are the only merits which an historical writer may ascribe to himself; if any merit indeed can be assumed from the performance of an indispensable duty.” Yet the product of his twenty years’ passion showed that a historical masterpiece required much more. Not least was his inexhaustible sense of wonder and his tolerant curiosity about the foibles of the human race. The cast of an eye, the excess of an appetite, the perversity of tastes, the beauty or deformity of stature—he witnessed all these with delight.
He managed with deceptive ease to translate the catastrophes of nature into parables of human nature. The earthquakes which shook the eastern Mediterranean on A.D. July 21, 365, led him to observe:
… their affrighted imagination enlarged the real extent of a momentary evil.… And their fearful vanity was disposed to confound the symptoms of a declining empire and a sinking world. It was the fashion of the times to attribute every remarkable event to the particular will of the Deity; the alterations of nature were connected, by an invisible chain, with the moral and metaphysical opinions of the human mind; and the most sagacious divines could distinguish, according to the colour of their respective prejudices, that the establishment of heresy tended to produce an earthquake, or that a deluge was the inevitable consequence of the progress of sin and error. Without presuming to discuss the truth or propriety of these lofty speculations, the historian may content himself with the observation, which seems to be justified by experience, that man has much more to fear from the passions of his fellow-creatures than from the convulsions of the elements.
The daily habits of remote and unfamiliar peoples help us understand their life-and-death commitments. Of the Scythians or Tartars he noted “with some reluctance” that “the pastoral manners which have been adorned with the fairest attributes of peace and innocence are much better adapted to the fierce and cruel habits of a military life.” Their diet (not corn, but freshly slaughtered meat) and their light and easily moved tents both help us grasp that it was easy for them to behave as they did. “The exploits of the hunters of Scythia are not confined to the destruction of timid or innoxious beasts; they boldly encounter the angry wild boar, when he turns against his pursuers, excite the sluggish courage of the bear, and provoke the fury of the tiger, as he slumbers in the thicket.” And so the nuances of human nature are newly revealed to us “on the immense plains of Scythia or Tartary.”
Gibbon was fortunate to be born into an age when men of letters were expected to provide “amusement and instruction.” The world of science—despite our clichés of an Age of Reason—was newly liberated from the medieval demand for meaning. In the Royal Society and other “invisible colleges” scientists, virtuosi, and amateurs were expanding the world with tiny increments of knowledge. Of course there were a few dazzlers, like Sir Isaac Newton. But the most important shift in attitude toward knowledge was from the interest in the cosmos to the interest in facts. Now it seemed possible for every man to become his own scientist. The telescope, the “flea glass” (microscope), the thermometer, and scores of other measuring devices were transforming experience into experiment. This new incremental approach to the physical world—spawning a wonderful newgrown wilderness of facts and contraptions—was also Gibbon’s approach to the world of human nature. The time had not yet come when scientific quest for meaning threatened to transform the social world into another cosmos of dogmatic simplicities. Gibbon gives us incremental history on a grand scale.
For Gibbon, while human nature is anything but unintelligible, it remains only partly explicable. For him the menace to understanding was not so much ignorance as the illusion of knowledge. His explanations of rise and fall, of prosperity and decline are always lists. What he recounts is “the triumph of barbarism and religion.” He recounts the quirks and quibbles of theologians, the rivalries of Eastern monarchs, their wives and mistresses and sons and daughters, not simply because they are amusing, but also because they are instructive. Without such trivia we cannot understand what the Eastern Empire was or what it became.
It is more accurate to insist that for Gibbon there are no trivia. Human habits, utterances, exclamations, and emotions are the very essence of his history—not mere raw material for distilling “forces” and “movements.” The more vividly we see them, the better we know our subject. Inevitably, then, he must remain a skeptic about our capacity finally to grasp the whole story.
But despite—perhaps because of—this recognition, he is not a pessimist. The spectacle which he has unfolded of “the greatest, perhaps, and the most awful scene in the history of mankind” rewards us. He sees the whole planet as a stage for more grand spectacles, which will also be a stage for renewal. “If a savage conqueror should issue from the deserts of Tartary, he must repeatedly vanquish the robust peasants of Russia, the numerous armies of Germany, the gallant nobles of France, and the intrepid freemen of Britain; who, perhaps, might confederate for their common defence. Should the victorious Barbarians carry slavery and desolation as far as the Atlantic Ocean, ten thousand vessels would transport beyond their pursuit the remains of civilized society; and Europe would revive and flourish in the American world which is already filled with her colonies and institutions.”
In his optimism Gibbon seems a spokesman for the Age of the Enlightenment. He seems, sometimes, to speak for a faith, burgeoning in his lifetime, that man’s uninhibited critical faculties can grasp the world. I once thought of Gibbon in precisely that way. He spoke to me from and for aperiod of history. But in the years since Gibbon first spoke to me, he has come to say something more. He has become a more personal historian and hence more intimate, both in what he said and in what I hear.
Some eloquent outspoken prophets of the Age of Reason make it easy for historians to confine the epoch in that epithet. Among historians the great systematizers include such authors as Montesquieu (1689–1755) and Vico (1668–1744) and Voltaire (1694–1778). Of course these men—who are copiously treated in encyclopedias of the social sciences—still interest their fellow systematizers. Among the writers of narrative history in his epoch, Voltaire still speaks vividly to some of us. But his most popular contemporary competitors in narrative history—David Hume and William Robertson—have become historiographical antiques. Gibbon still can and does speak to all of us.
What he saw and what he accomplished was possible, he gladly acknowledged, only because of the peculiar opportunities of his place and time. “I shall ever glory in the name and character of an Englishman,” he observed gratefully at the conclusion of his work, “I am proud of my birth in a free and enlightened country; and the approbation of that country is the best and most honourable reward for my labours.” If he had not exploited the new opportunities and shared the new vistas of his age, he could not have given us his history. Yet his greatness, the intimate ingredient in his work, is his peculiar talent at transcending the characteristic enthusiasms of his age. Nowadays John Dryden and Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, and even Laurence Sterne and Henry Fielding, seem to have a certain quaintness. It is doubly remarkable that Edward Gibbon, whose style was at least as idiosyncratic as theirs, somehow manages to talk to us in our own idiom.
This is what I mean by the intimacy of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. Gibbon succeeds in this intimacy precisely because he does not offer us obsolescing parables of science or the social sciences. Nor is he stultified by the etiquette of a particular genre of literature. The chronological lopsidedness of his work—which gives more space to the first few centuries than to the last millennium of his thirteen-century tale—is itself a witness to his determination to shape the story, not by the a priori dimensions of centuries, but by his own concerns. He has the courage to juxtapose his lists of large causes with the minutiae of persons and places. He reminds us of our ties to the cosmos without pretending to unlock its secrets. He remains a modest man, refusing to carve neat channels where the course of history must flow. He lacks the conceit of the system builder, whose naïveté is revealed only with the centuries.
No historian has seen more vividly how nettlesome is the texture of the human past. Yet few have been bolder or more successful at grasping the nettle. He helps us share his pleasure at touching the random prickliness of experience. All this he does because he does not overestimate the dogmatic capacities of his own “enlightened age” nor does he underestimate the mystery of what remains untold and untellable.
At the end of his twenty years’ voyage into the Roman Empire, he asks himself whether he should try another such voyage. With characteristic prudence he concludes that “in the repetition of similar attempts a successful Author has much more to lose, than he can hope to gain.” Yet he insists that “the annals of ancient and modern times may afford many rich and interesting subjects.… To an active mind, indolence is more painful than labor.” So he cheers us on, both readers and writers of history. For he, as much as any other writer in our language, reminds us that, even across the centuries and the oceans, people can talk to people about people. Just as Gibbon was not imprisoned in the jargon and special conceits of his age, so perhaps we need not be imprisoned in ours.