A pudgy man with a big head, double chin, and pursing mouth, under five feet tall, foppishly overdressed, stilted in conversation, Edward Gibbon was easily the greatest English historian and quite possibly the greatest historian the world has known. How did this preposterous little man — a snob with often ludicrous opinions who was known as he grew older and fatter as Monsieur Pomme de Terre — produce The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a panoramic work of roughly a million and a half words with some 8,000 footnotes, covering 1,300 years of history? More than two centuries after Gibbon wrote it, the entertainment value of his history is as great as it was when it appeared in three volumes between 1776 and 1788, its standing as literature as firmly fixed.
Psychotic tyrants, savvy eunuchs, cunning courtesans; brutal barbarian tribal chiefs; battlefields bedewed with blood and strewn with the white bones of human corpses; Byzantine luxuriance; Saracen leaders “never seen to smile except on a day of battle”; ragtag Roman crusaders no less fanatical than the forces they were recruited to fight; Russians, Hungarians, Persians, Moors all engaging in tortures of a rare exquisivity — cutting off noses, ears, tongues, hands; putting out eyes with needles; poisoning husbands; the rope, the rack, the axe all finding full employment — in Gibbon’s pages it all goes whirring by, leaving one in a state of nearly perpetual dazzlement.
Through it all there are the emperors, the central figures of the history — and what a rogue’s gallery they are! Caracalla “was the common enemy of mankind,” a “monster whose life disgraced human nature”; Elagabalus was no “rational voluptuary,” also a transvestite; Maximin, “though a stranger to real wisdom…was not devoid of a selfish cunning”; the reigns of Valerian and his son Gallienus, provided a 15-year period that “was one uninterrupted series of confusion and calamity”; Maxentius was “a tyrant as contemptible as he was odious”; Valens “was rude without vigor, and feeble without mildness”; Theophilus was “a bold, bad man…whose hands were alternately polluted with gold, and blood.” Gibbon writes: “Such was the unhappy condition of the Roman emperor…almost every reign is closed by the same repetition of treason and murder.”
It is a spectacular book, agreed. Librivox has audio of “Decline…” (vol. 1 at least).
The link to the article seems not to work.
Odd, the link seems to have changed? Anyway, I’ve edited it now.
Thanks.
I promise you, the hours you spend reading or listening to “Decline and Fall” will be among the most enjoyable of your life. (I recommend both listening and reading — every so often taking a break from one to do the other.)