THIS, I think, is a very reasonable passage of English prose: ‘In the second century of the Christian Era, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilised portion of mankind. The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valour. The gentle, but powerful, influence of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces. Their peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury. The image of a free constitution was preserved with decent reverence. The Roman senate appeared to possess the sovereign authority, and devolved on the emperors all the executive powers of government. During a happy period of more than fourscore years, the public administration was conducted by the virtue and abilities of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and the two Antonines.’
And so on for the space of, in my edition, 1,300 closely printed double-columned pages (printed in 1840: what remarkable eyesight those early Victorians had). This is, of course, the opening of Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It is Augustan English of the kind that makes the Declaration of Independence both moving and authoritative. Note the balance of the phrases, the exactitude of the language, the sly ‘abused,’ which is like a deliberate flaw in the marble of eulogy. It is the prose style of an age secure in its convictions, the style of a Jefferson but not of an Eisenhower, Nixon or Reagan. It addresses a cultivated readership and it never deviates into the colloquial, which all too easily degenerates into the loose and imprecise. It is not the kind of English we associate with word processors. It is an English of very black ink, sharp quills and fine handmade power.
As for its author, we are as I write poised between two of his anniversaries. He was born in 1737 and he completed his massive history in 1788, eliciting the response from King George III, ‘Another damned big black book, Mr Gibbon. Scribble, scribble, scribble – eh, Mr Gibbon?’ In 1788 it was actually a number of damned big black books. He had published the first volume in 1776, to applause but some murmurs, for he seemed cynical about the growth of Christianity in the later Roman Empire. The second and third volumes appeared in 1781, to a response of moderate warmth. ‘Prolix,’ everybody said, and Gibbon agreed, blaming ‘superfluous diligence’ for his wordiness. With the end of his task, Gibbon felt that ambiguous elation known to all authors who have completed a weighty work – a sense of freedom but also a ‘sober melancholy’ at taking ‘an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion’.
A huge history of the decay of one of the greatest empires the world had seen was enough for any man’s lifetime. But Gibbon also wrote an autobiography, published posthumously as Memoirs, which frankly displays a personality apparently more indolent than illustrious, a typical product of a monied family of the age of Enlightenment. He was born in Putney, a suburb of London, was a sickly child and the victim of a somewhat irregular education. He went to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he spent an ‘idle and unprofitable time’ in an atmosphere ‘narrow, lazy and oppressive’. He became a Roman Catholic at the age of 16, to his father’s intense horror, and was sent to Lausanne to be reconverted to Protestantism.
Out of the inner conflict between the claims of the opposite faiths, Gibbon emerged as a rationalist, an anticlerical sceptic. Five years in Switzerland taught him the pleasures of reading – what else was there to do except gaze at the lake and the Alps? – and the madness of love. He fell heavily for Suzanne Curchod, later the wife of the French financier and statesman Jacques Necker and the mother of Napoleon’s bête noire Mme de Staël. His father, who had broken one attachment for him, now shattered the other by ordering him home. From 1759 he served as a captain in the Hampshire Militia, but he was back on the Continent in 1763. It was in Italy that he first felt his lifework stirring:
‘It was at Rome, on the 15th of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefoot friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.’
‘The first of earthly blessings, independence’, Gibbon wrote in those same Memoirs, and it was independence that he lacked when his father died after a life of improvidence, leaving no comfortable patrimony as a cushioned seat for the undertaking of the huge work. Gibbon went into Parliament in 1774, and was made a commissioner of trade and plantations. The secure greatness of the British colonial system was already being challenged in America, and the publication of the first volume of a work which, in effect, warned that all empires must someday fall came opportunely in 1776. From 1776 on, the Decline and Fall did not permit of a life much worth recording. He was back in Lausanne in 1783 and died in England in 1794, at the early age of 57. His life is no great example to today’s young and ambitious. His portrait shows a man run unhealthily to fat, and anecdotes about him tell of his distaste for exercise. His sexual life is nowhere mentioned. Gibbon is no more than the pen that pushed through reams of paper to execute the greatest work of historical research in the entire world canon.
It is a work which, though two centuries old, does not have to be excused on the grounds of primitive methods of research, the lack of brisk card-indexing, the absence of a cybernetic retrieval system and a manly independence of scurrying research assistants. In an age when Dr Samuel Johnson could produce a dictionary single-handed, the notion of collective labour on a work which today would absorb a whole synod of historians had not yet come to birth. The astonishing thing about the Decline and Fall is that it has not had to be revised in the light of fresh discoveries. Gibbon used no secondary sources, for these did not exist: he went back to all he had – the primary documents, all duly footnoted. Some of these primary documents detailed the Roman decay with a frankness of particularity not agreeable to an age that preferred blanket generalisation. ‘My English text is chaste,’ says Gibbon, ‘and all licentious passages are left in the decent obscurity of a learned language.’
It is the style that enchants. Writing on Antoninus Pius, Gibbon says: ‘His reign is marked by the rare advantage of furnishing very few materials for history; which is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.’ Of religion he writes: ‘The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false’; and the rhetorical balance of phrases, the lack of tentativeness in the Gibbonian conclusions seem to point to a man of the world, not to a slippered recluse. Gibbon said: ‘The captain of the Hampshire grenadiers… has not been useless to the historian of the Roman empire.’ His knowledge of the military life, in other words, illuminated his vision of an empire sustained by a great army. As a politician he knew what he was saying when he declared, ‘All taxes must, at last, fall upon agriculture,’ and described corruption as ‘the most infallible symptom of constitutional liberty.’ His statement that ‘the principles of a free constitution are irrecoverably lost, when the legislative power is nominated by the executive’ has more relevance to the present age than to Gibbon’s own. Gibbon was not merely writing about the irrecoverable past.
What, in fact, was he writing about? In his own words, the ‘vicissitudes of fortune, which spares neither man nor the proudest of his works, which buries empires and cities in a common grave.’ But there is more than the blind goddess who seems to rule over history: there is human strength and human weakness, and the principle that ‘all that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.’ The Roman Empire did not advance, any more than did the Napoleonic Empire waiting to be born a few years after Gibbon’s death. Any empire reaches a plateau of achievement with which it is well content. It has brought certain barbarians into the circle of civilised rule, and it considers that the uncivilisable barbarians outside constitute no menace. Complacency is the sin, and it enervates the protective armed forces. A civilised people will deign to use some of the uncivilised barbarians as a mercenary instrument for quelling unrest on its colonial borders. It thinks that the barbaric energy can be controlled and, when not controlled, ignored. France in 1940 was astonished to find that the barbaric Nazis who had never read Voltaire and André Gide could capture the capital, the city of light, through ingenious energy alone. America was astonished that it could not conquer a barbaric enemy in Vietnam. Britain was astonished when the Japanese threatened India.
Gibbon is at his most readable when he is dealing with the threat of Attila and his Huns to the Christian empire that was so big and unwieldy it had to split itself in two. Rome had become the merely nominal capital of a Western empire whose rulers were mostly in Ravenna. The Eastern empire had its very nearly impregnable centre in Constantinople. Aetius, a great general sometimes called the last of the Romans, had used the Huns, as he had the Goths and the Visigoths, as a mercenary force. The Huns, seeing what they were paid to protect, disdained being a mere instrument of civilised order and, under a great and implacable leader, sought to capture what they had been hired to defend. Attila failed to take Italy, but not because of Roman strength. The legend that Pope Leo turned him back is probably a less acceptable reason than the fact of dysentery and malaria in Attila’s hordes, as well as the logistic problem of carting loot back to the Danube. Attila did not make the Roman Empire fall, but it was barbaric energy, not yet civilised into luxurious complacency, that forced the gates of Rome. Gibbon (in Chapter 31) is worth quoting very nearly in full on the arrival of Alaric and his Goths:
‘The last resource of the Romans was in the clemency, or at least in the moderation, of the king of the Goths. The senate, who in this emergency assumed the supreme powers of government, appointed two ambassadors to negotiate with the enemy. This important trust was delegated to Basilius, a senator, of Spanish extraction, and already conspicuous in the administration of provinces: and to John, the first tribune of the notaries, who was peculiarly qualified by his dexterity in business as well as by his former intimacy with the Gothic prince. When they were introduced into his presence, they declared, perhaps in a more lofty style than became their abject condition, that the Romans were resolved to maintain their dignity, either in peace or war; and that, if Alaric refused them a fair and honourable capitulation, he might sound his trumpets, and prepare to give battle to an innumerable people, exercised in arms and animated by despair. ‘The thicker the hay, the easier it is mowed,’ was the concise reply of the Barbarian; and this rustic metaphor was accompanied by a loud and insulting laugh, expressive of his contempt for the menaces of an unwarlike populace, enervated by luxury before they were emaciated by famine.’
Alaric demanded all the wealth of the city ‘and all the slaves who could prove their title to the name of Barbarians. The ministers of the senate presumed to ask, in a modest and suppliant tone, “If such, O king! are your demands, what do you intend to leave us?” “YOUR LIVES,” replied the haughty conqueror.’
This was some decades before Attila’s attempt on the Roman Empire, and Gibbon’s record, both vivacious and depressing, is of the dismantling, by rough people of non-Italic blood, of a gorgeous apparatus of rule and civilisation in search for loot. Meanwhile a new and nonsecular empire was preparing itself in the ruins of a dying Rome – the Church of Christ, first admitted by the superstitious Constantine, and not much regarded by a rationalistic Gibbon.
Gibbon, adept at the plain historic record, is not above the occasional speculation. It is with no hint of pious outrage that he imagines the later conquests of the Sons of the Prophet:
‘A victorious line of march had been prolonged above a thousand miles from the rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire; the repetition of an equal space would have carried the Saracens to the confines of Poland and the Highlands of Scotland: the Rhine is no more impassable than the Nile or Euphrates, and the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pupils might demonstrate to the circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mohamet.’
He might well have liked the prospect of Islamising ‘the monks of Magdalen’ – ‘decent easy men, who supinely enjoyed the gifts of the founder’, whose ‘dull and deep potations excused the brisk intemperance of youth’. Gibbon, physically indolent himself, seems to relish the energy of the barbarian and the infidel. His speculation of the prevailing of Islamic energy is no longer as fantastic as it must have seemed in his time, or even in the early years of this century, when G.K. Chesterton made England Islamic in The Flying Inn. The point is, I think, that Gibbon is always relevant to whatever age it is that reads him.
Was there, in Gibbon’s view, ever a time when men were happy? Yes, he says: ‘If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.’ But it is in the very nature of such felicity not to endure: it is an interlude in the long chronicle of decay – entropy, we say nowadays. ‘All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.’ And by ‘advance’ he does not, I think, mean solely the technological innovation that might have saved Napoleon’s empire; he means the development of both a moral and a historical cycle in which achievement leads to decay and decay to resumption of strength (Vico’s ricorso), the consciousness that man is a unity bound by a single law of survival and no empire may speak of peoples ‘beyond the pale’.
Gibbon, naturally, has his detractors. Some of these maintain the sad outrage of the critics of his own day, who deplored his unenthusiastic treatment of the rise of Christianity. Evelyn Waugh, whose Augustan style appears to owe something to Gibbon, seemed angry that Gibbon should regard the legend of Helena and the finding of the True Cross as a piece of nonsense drawn up ‘in the darkness of monasteries’. In his novel Helena, which follows the legend and ignores history, he places Gibbon as a literal gibbon, gibbering at the end of its leash. It is too easy a gibe.
Gibbon has the faults of his age – a too ready appeal to reason, a statuesque prose which one sometimes longs to see deliquesce into the demotic, and apparent lack of human concern in his recording of the antics of the emperors (where are the slaves? where are the ordinary honest craftsmen?) and a loftiness of perspective all too appropriate to an England which thought highly of itself. We have to look at the Memoirs to find the imperfect and suffering man (‘I saw and loved… I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son’), conscious of transience. I must quote in full, as a reasonable peroration, what I have only picked at:
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 fate of my History, the life of the historian must be short and precarious.
In his instance, all too short. But long enough for the creation of one of the most astonishing works of all time.
New York Times, 28 February 1988