In the debate among educators over what has been variously described as the “great books,” the “core curriculum,” or simply the “canon,” there is at least one duly stamped Great Book that has gone unnoticed, useful neither as a brickbat for the reformers nor as a buckler for the defenders of tradition, its wide seat on the library shelf granted with nothing more than a yawn from anyone. Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire enjoys its unique security for the simple reason that no one any longer reads it. Indeed, it’s unlikely that many people have ever read Gibbon’s monumental treatment of the Roman empire’s protracted expiration: with 2,400 pages, 8,342 footnotes, and over 1.5 million words arranged according to the most exacting standards of 18th-century literary elegance, The Decline and Fall was never calculated to excite a stampede of buyers. “Another damn thick square book!” was the Duke of Gloucester’s response upon receiving the author’s latest volume. “Always scribble scribble scribble, eh, Mr Gibbon?”
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Should you have the good fortune to break a leg, however, or find yourself beached on the cultural wasteland of Cancun, or simply grow weary of the historical ignorance displayed by most contemporary politicians and writers, you might find yourself more than pleasantly surprised upon opening The Decline and Fall. Only a few pages are required to realize that Edward Gibbon is a wonderfully gifted storyteller and his tale a matter of unique importance: nothing less than the destruction of the pagan world and its gradual reconstitution as the Christian nation states of modern Europe and the Islamic Mideast. Gibbon presents The Decline and Fall as a single sustained narrative of nearly miraculous complexity and scope, stitched together of innumerable smaller stories each with its own cast of characters, setting, and dramatic resolution. From Rome’s zenith under the “five good emperors” of the second century to its final collapse in 1453 at Constantinople, Gibbon offers a judicious mixture of broadly painted background and vivid, usually violent narrative, never letting his reader bog down in detail or lack for substantive analysis. Without fail, just as the well-intentioned reader begins to tire of Gibbon’s massive erudition (lavished upon topics as diverse as the Arian controversy, drinking habits among the Visigoths, the relative battle values of elephants and battering rams), the author turns to yet another episode in the frankly incredible history of Rome’s emperors, soldiers, monks, courtesans, eunuchs, philosophers, and saints, all of them struggling with whatever means they had for the wealth and power of the Roman world. In other words, imagine something more like an 18th-century novel than what we normally consider history, authored together with Cecil B. De Mille or Thomas Hobbes, perhaps, and you will get a sense of the texture of The Decline and Fall. It was once remarked that Gibbon “lived out his sex life in the footnotes”; if that is true it says more about the passion of those notes than about any failing in the author.
Alas, they did not find the edifying story they anticipated. The Decline and Fall is rich in everything but simple lessons, moral or otherwise; Gibbon was a man constitutionally incapable of monocular vision, and his prose maintains a studied irony and ambivalence that today’s posteverything reader will find congenial. Gibbon does not so much construct sentences as trace labyrinths of possible understanding: “The policy of the emperors and the Senate, as far as it concerned religion, was happily seconded by the reflections of the enlightened, and by the habits of the superstitious, part of their subjects. 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 by the magistrate as equally useful. And thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord.”
