Today, January 16, is one of the more resonant dates on the calendar: on January 16, 26 BCE Octavius Caesar was given the title ‘Augustus’ by a cowed and obedient Senate; it is as good a date as any to mark the end of the Roman Republic and the permanent establishment on its ruins of the Empire. On the same date in 1794, Edward Gibbon died; Gibbon was one of the greatest English historians and prose stylists of all time; his masterwork recounts the decline and fall of the empire Augustus set up.
Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is one of those books that every educated English-speaking person should read, at least the first two volumes which focuses on the two centuries of decline which followed the reigns of the “Five Good Emperors” and ends at the point which the Emperor Theodosius makes a peace treaty with the powerful Goths who have invaded the Eastern Empire. Rome has not yet been sacked, the western empire has not fallen, the Huns have not yet appeared on the European stage.
Gibbon’s book is long and not everybody likes it. The Duke of Gloucester greeted the publication of one of the six volumes of Decline and Fall by saying, “Another damned fat book, Mr. Gibbon. Scribble, scribble, scribble, eh Mr. Gibbon?”
A just criticism, and not many of the indefatigable scribbler’s readers follow him all the way to the bitter end of his narrative, but the decline of empires can be a slow and long drawn-out business. The western Roman empire perished in its original form in 476, but the next century saw the Eastern Roman Empire re-establish imperial authority in the peninsula; the Emperor Justinian not only brought large chunks of the old western empire back under imperial authority; his codification of Roman law became standard throughout the old empire and, as the basis for church canon law and Napoleon’s civil code of 1806, still today serves as the basis for both civil and ecclesiastical law in the Europe of the Caesars.
The Emperor Diocletian divided the Roman Empire into western and eastern halves in 286; the eastern half survived through 1452, when the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II conquered the eastern capital of Constantinople (known often as the “second Rome”). Mehmet, however, considered himself less the destroyer of Rome than its renewer; he built his palace close to the old palace of the Byzantine Emperoros and the old Cathedral of the emperors, born again as a mosque, became the major religious shrine in his Sultanate of Rum.
The empire refused to die in the west as well; on Christmas Day in 800 AD Pope Leo III crowned Charles the Great (better known by the French version of his name, Charlemagne) Emperor of Rome; this “Holy Roman Empire” would survive as one of Europe’s largest and often most powerful states until Napoleon put it out of its misery in 1896. Napoleon also however, had a papal coronation to establish and, he hoped, legitimize his new empire. Not only did he recodify Justinian’s statues but his son was recognized as the King of Rome, the title that heirs to the Holy Roman Empire were given – in the way that today the heirs to the British throne are the Prince (or Princess) of Wales. Napoleon had eagles made according to the old Roman pattern and ordered his troops to swear to defend their imperial eagles to the death — just as the Roman legionnaires had once done. Napoleon I abdicated in 1815 after the Battle of Waterloo, but the imperial idea survived in France. Napoleon’s great-nephew Louis Napoleon followed the family trade by assuming the leadership of the French republic and then overthrowing the republic to establish an empire. Napoleon III (the King of Rome was considered the second emperor in the series; recognized only as the Duke of Reichstadt the young Napoleon II – a Hapsburg on his mother’s side – had died in 1832) reigned until he too was forced to abdicate following another French defeat, this time at the hands of the Prussians. That was not quite the end; Napoleon III’s son, known as the Prince Imperial, hoped for a restoration. After graduating from the British military academy at Sandhurst the Prince Imperial joined the British Army and went to South Africa to see combat, taking with him the sword Napoleon I had worn at his famous victory at Austerliz. In 1879 he was killed there in a skirmish with assegai-wielding Zulu warriors; there were 18 spear wounds in his body when it was recovered.
The death of the Prince Imperial was not the end of Rome. Sophia Paleologue was the niece of the Eastern Roman Emperor who perished in the final Ottoman assault on Constantinople; she married Ivan III, Grand Duke of Moscow. The Russians soon came to see themselves as “the third Rome,” and the rulers of Russia took the title of tsar – the Russian form of the word ‘Caesar.’ The last of the tsars ruled until 1917, when the February Revolution gave Russia the first of its brief democratic interludes in the twentieth century.
Not even the fall of the Romanov dynasty in Moscow or the overthrow of the last Ottoman sultan at the end of World War One drove the last nail in the coffin of imperial Rome. The Second Rome might be under the Turks and the Third under Bolshevik rule, but the First Rome was under the authority of the popes, and they had long claimed a right to rule that came directly from the old empire. When imperial civil authority collapsed in the western empire, the bishops of Rome assumed the leadership of the Eternal City; control of Rome itself led to the development of what were known as the Papal States: a group of mostly Italian territories along with a few outlying fiefs that were under the direct rule of the Pope in his capacity as a sovereign ruler. For much of the Middle Ages, papal rule was justified by a document known as the Donation of Constantine. (A zealous monk had forged a document purporting to be a letter from the first Christian Roman emperor giving the rule of the west and especially of Rome to the Popes.) Secular
princes as well as a spiritual leaders, for more than a thousand years popes raised armies, collected taxes and exercised civil as well as ecclesiastical jurisdiction within the ever-shifting boundaries of the Papal States.
The Papal States had to go if modern Italy was to rise; King Victor Emmanuel II and Garibaldi defeated the forces of Pope Pius IX at the siege of Ancona in 1860, but the prestige of the papacy – and Napoleon III’s dispatch of French troops to the city over which Napoleon II had once been proclaimed king – kept the Italians at bay until the French troops were recalled following Napoleon’s defeat; on September 21 1870 the Italians breached the walls around the Pope’s last stronghold in Rome. The Pope locked himself up in his Vatican palace, declared himself a ‘prisoner in the Vatican’ and excommunicated anybody who worked with the Italian government. On the Capitoline Hill itself, the ancient center of Roman power, the Italian government erected a garish monument to its unifying King Victor Emmanuel II directly in the Pope’s line of sight from his bedroom windows in the barricaded Vatican.
This, it might seem, was the end of the Roman Empire once and for all, but no. Successive Popes locked themselves in the Vatican and denounced the Italian state; finally Mussolini, anxious to consolidate his power by achieving an alliance with the Church, signed an agreement with Pope Pius XI that recognized the Vatican City, an area of 110 acres including the Vatican palace, St. Peter’s Cathedral, the Vatican Museum and some related buildings and gardens, as an independent and soverign state in 1929. Currently the Vatican is recognized as a sovereign state by the 177 counties with which it maintains diplomatic relations; it has chosen not to join the United Nations, but has observer status at that body.
The United States, with a long tradition of anti-popery and its constitutional stress on the separation of church and state, long refused to open diplomatic relations with the Vatican. President Harry Truman hoped to do it as a way of strengthening America’s position in the Cold War, but an indignant Congress refused. It was not until Ronald Reagan’s administration in 1984 that the United States Senate confirmed the appointment of an American Ambassador to the Holy See and the United States opened diplomatic relations with what, arguably, is the last surviving fragment of the Empire of Rome.
The decline and fall of Edward Gibbon is easier to trace. The future historian was born into a family of the English country gentry in 1737; much of the family fortune had been with the bursting of the South Sea Bubble in 1720. Enough however was left to enable the Gibons to live on a modest but respectable scale, although Gibbon’s father further undermined the family position by bad management and overspending. Gibbon invested much time and energy into managing the estate and paying off his father’s debts, but looking back he was reasonably content.
“Yet I may believe and even assert that in circumstances more indigent or more wealthy, I should never have accomplished the task or acquired the fame of an historian; that my spirit would have been broken by poverty and contempt; and that my industry might have been replaced in the labour and luxury of a superfluous fortune. Few works of merit and importance have been executed in either a garret or a palace.”
Words worth remembering by anybody with literary ambitions: poverty and wealth are often though not always the enemies of serious literary work.
Placed in parliament through the interest of a powerful friend, the historian was a loyal supporter of Lord North’s effort to bring the rebellious American colonies to heel. “I took my seat at the beginning of the memorable contest between Great Britain and America,” Gibbon wrote, “and supported with many a sincere and silent vote the rights, though not, perhaps, the interest of the mother country.” Not a very active or vocal MP, Gibbon’s most notable contribution to the British cause in that war was his Mémoire Justificatif, a defense of the British position that was composed in French and, after being approved by the British Cabinet, was distributed to the courts of Europe as a state power to answer French attacks on Britain’s stance in the war.
In later life, Gibbon seemed to be a steady and even tempered character. The publication of the first volume of Decline and Fall produced a huge sensation and established him as one of Britain’s leading lights; Gibbon describes his success like a Roman: glad of good fortune but not permitting it to affect him too greatly:
“I am at a loss how to describe the success of the work, without betraying the vanity of the writer. The first impression [printing] was exhausted in a few days; a second and a third edition were scarcely adequate to the demand… My book was on every table, and almost on every toilette; the historian was crowned by the taste or fashion of the day; nor was the general voice disturbed by the barking of any profane critic.”
Yet he immediately qualifies this momentary approach to exuberance with a rational reflection: “The favour of mankind is most freely bestowed on a new acquaintance of any original merit; and the mutual surprise of the public and their favourite is productive of those warm sensibilities, which, at a second meeting, can no longer be rekindled.” It is still true that writers who have succeeded with a first book often encounter colder receptions to their later efforts; few authors meet this fate with Gibbon’s equanimity. The second volume, with his famously insidious attack on Christianity, was much more controversial; the fierce denunciations of the clergy gave Gibbon pause until he realized that for all their rage and fury, there was nothing they could do.
Gibbon was not born stoic; he seems to have steeled himself to it after passions both religious and romantic had scorched him badly in youth. His mother was not very loving; an aunt was the source of such maternal care as he remembered. With a strict father and a distracted mother, the young Gibbon rushed into religious devotion. His grandfather had brought William Law into the household as his father’s tutor. Law, one of the most gifted British theologians of the age, was an important influence on the founders of Methodism, John and Charles Wesley. George Whitfield, the preacher who electrified the American colonies at the time of the Great Awakening, was another of Law’s students; Samuel Johnson attributed his own strong faith to the influence of Law’s best-known book, A Serious Call to A Devout and Holy Life; Gibbon’s aunts feature prominently in the work.
As a fifteen year-old student at Oxford, Gibbon was largely neglected by his tutors and professors. Of one particularly neglectful don he writes that “Dr. Winchester well remembered that he had a salary to receive, and only forgot that he had a duty to perform.” Left to his own devices, Gibbon was drawn to religious controversy and, getting hold of some volumes by the great French Catholic writer Bossuet, became convinced that the Roman Catholics were right. At the age of 16 he was received into the Catholic Church by a priest in London.
This was a serious matter; technically, conversion to Catholicism at that time was an act of high treason under British law. Converts lost their claim to inherited property and labored under many other professional and political disabilities. Gibbon’s father, horrified and alarmed, sent the errant youth packing to board and study with a safely Protestant Swiss pastor in Lausanne. Under the watchful eye of M. Pavailliard, Gibbon gradually abandoned his Catholic convictions, but his heart would be broken once again in Lausanne.
This time it was a girl: Suzanne Curchod. She was the daughter of a Swiss pastor; well read, witty, beautiful. Gibbon hoped to marry her; his father would hear nothing of it. The young man had no income or prospects without his father’s support; Gibbon gave her up. “I sighed as a lover,” he famously wrote; “I obeyed as a son.” Suzanne would eventually marry a Swiss banker; M. Necker, her husband, went on to become perhaps the most famous and popular minister of Louis XVI.
With this second failure, Gibbon resigned himself to the paternal yoke and poured his passions into study. (Suzanne left a mark; for the rest of his life, his closest women friends seem to have been intellectuals.) He had been bookish as a boy; for the rest of his life he was one of the most hardworking scholars in Europe. While still in Lausanne he worked on developing his prose style by translating celebrated Latin passages into French, then retranslating them into Latin to compare his style with the original. (Winston Churchill always credited his English style with his own failure as a student of classical languages; instead of Cicero he grew up reading Macaulay and Gibbon. Gibbon, an unequalled English stylist, spent the formative years of his intellectual life reading and writing in Latin, while speaking and thinking in French.)
The middle period of the eighteenth century saw the literary and critical scholarship of the preceding two hundred years reach a culmination. The invention of printing had made it possible for larger editions to be made of manuscript copies of ancient and medieval works. Many errors had crept into these hand copied manuscripts over the centuries; from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, European intellectuals reveled in the wealth of texts that were suddenly available and laboriously compared and corrected the surviving texts to produce definitive versions of the surviving works of the classical past. This required a detailed knowledge of the minutiae of classical grammar, vocabulary and usage; an exquisite literary judgment and taste was required to, as Gibbon did on one occasion, introduce a new and generally accepted reading to an author as well known as Livy.
Gibbon was a master, perhaps the master, of this purely literary historical culture. He had greater access to better editions of the original sources for Roman and Byzantine history than any previous scholar; he had the leisure and the drive to assemble this mass of material — the bulk of the cultural heritage that survived the Middle Ages — into the first truly comprehensive and systematic history of the empire that shaped all subsequent European history. More than that, the immersion in theological history and disputation that accompanied his trajectory in and out of the Roman Catholic Church equipped him to integrate ecclesiastical and political history more thoroughly than any previous writer.
All this makes Decline and Fall an important landmark in western intellectual history; what gives it enduring impact is its overwhelming and monumental prose. At times stately and sedate, at others swift and sly, Gibbon wields the English language with ease and style. He turned out magnificent sentences and paragraphs the way brick makers make bricks: one after the other, day after day. At times one grows weary of the unending procession of balancing clauses, and at times the disparity between the grandeur of the medium with the insignificance of the actors and actions described is disturbing. Nevertheless over the grand sweep of six volumes Gibbon sustains a tone and a narrative voice that has never been surpassed.
“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,” Gibbon writes, describing how even at its height, the Roman Empire was subtly moving toward decay. “The sublime Longinus, who in a somewhat later period, and in the court of a Syrian queen, preserved the spirit of ancient Athens, observes and laments this degeneracy of his contemporries, which debased their sentiments, enervated their courage, and depressed their talents.”
The cause of this degeneracy, Gibbon believes, was the loss of freedom under the Empire. Even benevolent emperors reduced citizens to the level of subjects and servants. “Their personal valour remained,” Gibbon wrote of the Romans of the imperial period, “but they no longer possessed that public courage which is nourished by the love of independence, the sense of national honour, the presence of danger, and the habit of command.”
Gibbon was a great writer and a great scholar who believed that both genius and virtue could only develop in freedom. While much of his historical scholarship has been superseded by two hundred years of additional research and reflection, his voice is as vital and important as it ever was. If you are seriously interested in world history, and even more if you are an aspiring writer, Edward Gibbon is someone you must meet.