Yet Gibbon admired military valor, just as he admired civic virtue, freedom (“the first step to curiosity and knowledge”), honor, and rationality. The decline of Rome in his pages is marked by the falling away from these virtues through avarice, indulgent luxury, laxity, tyranny, barbarity, and religious intolerance. His otherwise dark history is relieved only occasionally by such admirable figures as Boethius (480–524 ce), author of The Consolation of Philosophy and “the last of the Romans whom Cato or Tully could have acknowledged as their countryman,” or the Emperor Majorian, who ascended to the eastern emperorship in 457 ce and “who presents the welcome discovery of a great and heroic character, such as sometimes arise in a degenerate age, to vindicate the honor of the human species.”
In his essay, “Gibbon’s Historical Imagination,” Glen Bowersock notes that Gibbon “treated the raw materials of ancient and medieval history much as a novelist treated the plot line.” Gibbon was a regular reader of novels. His admiration for Henry Fielding was unbounded. In Memoirs of My Life he refers to “the romance of Tom Jones, that exquisite picture of human manners [that] will outlive the palace of the Escurial and the imperial eagle of the house of Austria.” Gibbon never thought of writing fiction himself, yet, as Bowersock notes, he “shaped his truth as if it were fiction, preserving thereby the animation of human history and the art of the novelist.” As Simon Leys noted: “The novelist is the historian of the present and the historian the novelist of the past.”
The loss of Roman literature was in itself for Gibbon one of the signs of the degradation of Rome. After the 42-year reign of the Antonine emperors in the second century ce, he writes:
The name of Poet was almost forgotten; that of Orator was usurped by the sophists. A cloud of critics, of compilers, of commentators, darkened the face of learning, and the decline of genius was soon followed by the corruption of taste.
There is one towering exception in the almost unending horror of the imperial stream that followed, and that is Julian the Apostate, who lived for 32 years (331–363 ce) and ruled for eight (355–363 ce). Educated in Greece, philosophic by training and temperament, Julian
had an inflexible regard for justice, tempered by a disposition to clemency; [and possessed] the knowledge of the general principles of equity and evidence, and the faculty of patiently investigating the most intricate and tedious questions which could be posed for discussion.
Courageous in battle yet “prudent in his intrepidity,” he led and won decisive battles against the relentlessly encroaching barbarians. Quite as impressive as a governor, he ruled with “a tender regard for the peace and happiness of his subjects,” and staved off corruption whenever he discovered it. Gibbon quotes Julian on his own virtue as a ruler: “Was it possible for a disciple of Plato and Aristotle to act otherwise than I have done?” Julian could not stay the fall of Rome, though Gibbon applauds him for delaying it, however briefly.
Julian’s actual apostasy was not, for Gibbon, the least of his virtues. This apostasy was of course from Christianity, which, along with the unending onslaught of barbarians from both the east and west and the internecine quarrels among the Romans themselves, was, in Gibbons’s view, the chief force that brought the Roman Empire to ruin. As the historiographer Arnaldo Momigliano notes, Gibbon’s great distinction resides in his setting center stage the central truth that “late antiquity meant the replacement of paganism by Christianity,” which was not something he celebrated.
Owing to the infamous 15th and 16th chapters of his first volume, Gibbon became notorious for his anti-religious views. These chapters describe the conversion to Christianity of the Emperor Constantine (272– 337 ce) and all that followed from it. Constantine began by tolerating the Roman Empire’s oppressed Christians and ended, through his own conversion, by bringing the religion to the seat of the Roman Empire itself. As to the kind of Christian Constantine was, Gibbon notes that his conversion hadn’t the least effect on his cruel conduct; on matters of religious doctrine, “his incapacity and his ignorance were equal to his presumption.”
Christianity per se was not Gibbon’s problem. Religious faith that brought intolerance or empty asceticism among its adherents was. Gibbon’s artful malice was set aflame by what he took to be ignorant superstition. The polytheism of pagan Rome, tolerant of other religions, was more to his taste, though he mocked this, too. The oracles at Delphi, he concluded, were wiser about lining their pockets than about the future. He was no more merciful on the subject of the Jews: “That singular people seems to have yielded stronger and more ready assent to the traditions of their remote ancestors, than to the evidence of their own senses.” He argued that Jews did not proselytize because they,
the descendants of Abraham, were flattered by the opinion, that they alone were the heirs of the covenant, and they were apprehensive of diminishing their inheritance, by sharing it too easily with the strangers of the earth.
Religious rites were to him merely comic: “Many a sober Christian would rather admit that a wafer is God, than that God is a cruel and capricious tyrant.” Priests and monks above all were to be distrusted. To a philosophic eye, Gibbon wrote, “the vices of the clergy are far less dangerous than their virtues.”
Gibbon mocked “those minds which nature or grace had disposed for the easy reception of religious truth.” He satirized that truth as it was set forth in “the science, or rather the language, of Metaphysics” in its Christian version regarding the immortality of the soul. The intolerance of the Christians, once in power, an intolerance of others and of deviationists among their own ranks, aroused his ire: “In the course of their intestine dissensions, [Christians] have inflicted far greater severities on each other, than they experienced from the zeal of the infidels.”
The obscurity of arcane Christian doctrine and the hypocrisy of popes and priests stimulated Gibbon’s irony, an irony he claimed to have learned from Pascal’s Provincial Letters. He mentions the monk Antiochus, “whose one hundred and twenty homilies are still extant if what no one reads may be said to be extant.” Of the trial of John XXIII (1370–1419 ce), the so-called anti-pope, Gibbon writes: “The most scandalous charges were suppressed; the Vicar of Christ was only accused of piracy, murder, rape, sodomy, and incest.” He attributes to Pope Innocent III “the two most signal triumphs over sense and humanity, the establishment of transubstantiation, and the origin of the inquisition.” G. M. Young, the 20th-century historian of Victorianism, claimed for Gibbon a victory over religion—for after Gibbon’s eviscerations, “no institution could ever again profess to be outside the empire of history and not subject to its laws.”
Odd though it might seem to say of a book running to more than 3,000 pages, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is a work of great economy. Gibbon’s work is the reverse of that of the medieval historian Gregory of Tours, about whom he wrote: “In a prolix work (the last five books contain ten years) he has omitted almost everything that posterity desires to learn.” Gibbon notes that, to avoid tedium, which will result in neither amusement nor instruction, he is going to pass over discussion of documents (the “Eighteen Creeds,” for example) or years of uneventful rule (“later Turkish dynasties may sleep in oblivion since they have no relation to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire”). Remarking in a footnote on the tedious negotiations that succeeded the synod of Ephesus, he writes: “The most patient reader will thank me for compressing so much nonsense and falsehood in a few lines.” His method is to highlight only the significant. “When any extraordinary scene presents itself,” he writes, “we shall spare no pains nor paper to open it at large to our reader but if whole years should pass without producing anything worthy of his notice we shall not be afraid of a chasm in our history but shall hasten on to matters of consequence and leave such periods of time totally unobserved.” The book’s only longueurs are found in those pages given to descriptions of ecclesiastical controversy over Christian doctrine.
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“In human life,” Gibbon announces, “the most important scenes will depend on the character of a single actor.” Perhaps the best thing in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire are Gibbon’s “characters,” or short biographies—ranging from a single sentence to a lengthy paragraph to three or four pages—of the great figures who pass through his pages. Augustus, Constantine, Justinian, John Chrysostom, Attila, Belisarius, Athanasius, Procopius, Theodora, Mohamet, Tamberlane, Charlemagne, Saladin, Petrarch, comprise but a small portion of an enormous roster of the most significant actors in history upon whom Gibbon descants. He produced such biographies through his erudition but did so concisely through his unparalleled powers of formulation. Pope Boniface VIII “entered [his holy office] like a fox, reigned like a lion, and died like a dog.” Of the Emperor Hadrian, he writes:
The ruling passions of his soul were curiosity and vanity. As they prevailed, and as they were attracted by different objects, Hadrian was, by turns, an excellent prince, a ridiculous sophist, and a jealous tyrant.
Above all, there is the pleasure of Gibbon’s prose. As a stylist, he was unsurpassed in all of 18th-century English literature. Striking off sentences of high formality, often structured round powerful parallelisms, laced with innuendo-like irony—Byron called Gibbon “the lord of irony”—he composed with an easy mastery of epithet and a pungent sense of the dramatic. No one had a finer feeling for the architecture of a sentence. Set out in confident cadences, many of these sentences end on a high note of drama, others in comical surprise. Consider the following:
Julian was convinced that he had seen the menacing countenance of war; the council which he summoned, of Tuscan Haruspices, unanimously pronounced that he should abstain from action; but on this occasion, necessity and reason were more prevalent than superstition; and the trumpets sounded at the break of day.
Or this, of the Emperor Gordian the younger:
Twenty-two concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes, attested the variety of his inclinations; and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that the latter as well as the former were designed for use rather than for ostentation.
Gibbon is said to have composed while walking about his study, limning a full paragraph in his mind before sitting down to write it out. This is all the more remarkable considering that some of these paragraphs run 600 or 700 words or more. His diction was flawless and often charming; the music of his paragraphs came from his alternation of long and short sentences. Where he paraphrased others—Herodotus, St. Augustine—he often improved them by adding the luster of his own polished prose. A work of the length and breadth of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire would not be thinkable—or readable—if less handsomely written.
“Some fame, some profit, and the assurance of daily amusement” are the motives Gibbon gave for writing his history. He received £4,000 for the first three volumes of his history (about $750,000 in today’s money), and the same sum for the last three. He spent five drab years in Parliament, where he spoke rarely and never with distinction. He returned to Lausanne in 1783, where he completed his last two volumes. The history’s final sentence reads:
It was among the ruins of the Capitol that I first conceived the idea of a work which has amused and exercised near twenty years of my life, and which, however inadequate to my own wishes, I finally deliver to the curiosity and candour of the Public.
Upon inscribing that splendid sentence, which he did on the night of June 27, 1787, between the hours of 11 and 12, Gibbon, after laying down his pen,
took several turns in a berceau, or covered walk of acacias, which commands a prospect of the country, the lake, and the mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was serene, the silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waves, and all nature was silent.
He was 47 years old. His immense satisfaction in the accomplishment is beyond imagining.
Although he received enough criticism for his chapters on religion to feel the need to publish a Vindication, or defense, of his methods and position, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was quickly recognized as a masterpiece, and Gibbon’s reputation was permanently established. His contemporary Horace Walpole wrote to a friend:
Lo, there is just appeared a truly classic work: a history, not majestic like Livy, nor compressed like Tacitus; not stamped with character like Clarendon; perhaps not so deep as Robertson’s Scotland, but a thousand degrees above his Charles; not pointed like Voltaire, but as accurate as he is inexact; modest as he is tranchant and sly as Montesquieu without being so recherché. The style is smooth as a Flemish picture, and the muscles are concealed and only for natural uses, not exaggerated like Michelangelo’s to show the painter’s skill in anatomy; nor composed of the limbs of clowns of different nations, like Dr. Johnson’s heterogeneous monsters. The book is Mr. Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Even better was a letter to Gibbon from David Hume, one of his intellectual heroes, who would not live to read the last five volumes:
Whether I consider the dignity of your style, the depth of your matter, or the extensiveness of your learning, I must regard the work as equally the object of esteem, and I own that if I had not previously had the happiness of your personal acquaintance, such a performance from an Englishman in our age would have given me some surprise.
Gibbon’s response to the reaction of the Duke of Gloucester—“Another d-mn’d thick, square book! Always, scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Gibbon?”—is not known.
Gibbon next worked on his autobiography, which he never completed to satisfaction (and which was posthumously stitched together by his friend Lord Sheffield). With the aid of a younger historian named John Pinkerton, Gibbon had also planned to publish a chronicle of England from the fifth century to the beginning of the House of Tudor. But his health gave way. He had long suffered from gout in both legs, and he had an embarrassingly large hydrocele, or sac of serous fluid around the testicle, that badly disfigured him. He had three operations on it, and the third put him out of the game. He died in the winter of 1794, at the age of 57.
Thomas Carlyle, who published his history of the French Revolution in 1837, an even hundred years after the birth of Edward Gibbon, wrote of his predecessor: “Gibbon is a kind of bridge that connects the antique with the modern ages. And how gorgeously does it swing across that gloomy and tumultuous chasm of those barbarous centuries.” Through 20 years of solitary labor, this chubby little man also proved that the first, if not the sole, criterion for a great historian is to be a great writer.
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† Suzanne Cuchord went on to marry Jacques Necker, the chief financial minister of Louis XVI; and later, pleased by her husband’s wealth and position, lightly lorded it over Gibbon, who had earlier rejected her for want of her money and the ultimate courage of his ardor. If asked, Gibbon would doubtless have considered it a fair exchange: She found a rich husband who, until the French Revolution, wielded great power; he, Gibbon, ended up composing a masterwork. With Necker, Suzanne also gave birth to a daughter, Germaine, later Madame de Stael, the famous bellettrist.
‡ It was in fact in the Temple of Juno, an odd mistake for a historian to make.
Herodotus
(2014)
Herodotus, the first Greek and thereby the first Western historian, had bad press long before there was anything resembling a press. Aristotle referred to him as a “story-teller,” which was no honorific. What he meant was that Herodotus made things up, another word for which is “liar.” Thucydides had little good to say about Herodotus and thought his attempt to recapture the long-gone past foolhardy. History, for Thucydides, meant contemporary, or near-contemporary, history, with an emphasis on politics and warfare. In his Histories, Herodotus went well outside these bounds, writing about Egypt, Scythia, Persia, and other countries; he took up th
e study of customs and moeurs among them, as might a modern anthropologist.
More than 400 years later, the attacks on Herodotus’s reputation continued. In an essay titled “The Malice of Herodotus,” Plutarch criticized him for undue sympathy for the Persians and other barbarians, a want of respect for facts coupled with a lack of balanced judgment, and a partiality for Athens. Worse attacks were to come from other commentators over the succeeding centuries, some of whom held that Herodotus relied too heavily on oral evidence, others that he was plain dishonest.
Herodotus (ca. 484–425 BCE) was a Carian, born in Halicarnassus in Asia Minor, in what would now be western Turkey. He was, in other words, from the periphery of the Greek world, and his book is the result of a sort of intellectual tourism. He traveled, collected stories, consulted documents where they existed, and wrote down his findings. No one knows for certain whether he visited all the countries he wrote about or how he came into his extensive knowledge. In the opening sentence of the Histories, he states his purpose:
Herodotus, from Halicarnassus, here displays his enquiries, that human achievement may be spared the ravages of time, and that everything great and astounding, and all the glory of those exploits which served to display Greeks and barbarians alike to such effect, be kept alive—and additionally, and most importantly, to give the reason they went to war.
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