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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2014
It has long been a critical obligation for commentators on the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to remark on Edward Gibbon's failure to explain the reasons for that fall. Historians in particular have been bothered by this: both J. B. Black and D. M. Low have fretted over Gibbon's refusal — or inability — to deal with the ultimate meaning of the events he describes or, in the last three volumes, to “propound and answer questions explicitly.” Readers of the History, on the other hand, may feel that the historian belabors too often the “causes” of events, those “connections in a sequence.” Regularly, Gibbon reminds us that he is dealing with a process of degeneration involving successive stages of decay; and both within individual sections and at the close of units, he carefully recapitulates that the policies of Augustus or Septimius Severus, the strengthening of the Pretorian Guard, the spread of Christianity, the weakening of senatorial authority, monetary and land policies, the invasions of the Goths and Huns were all “causes” for the decline of the Roman Empire.
The contradiction between the reactions of critic and casual reader is merely apparent. His commentators grant that Gibbon assayed explanations for the events he recounted; but, they say, his purported “causes” are not primary or even secondary ones. They claim, in fact, that the explanations seldom account for the single chains of events he describes, much less for the long, intricate process that Gibbon sees as steady and unmitigated decline.
1. Black, J. B., The Art of History (New York, 1926), p. 158Google Scholar; Low, D. M., Edward Gibbon, 1737-1794 (London, 1937), p. 326Google Scholar.
2. Black, , Art of History, p. 168Google Scholar; Low, , Edward Gibbon, p. 322Google Scholar.
3. Haywood, Richard M., The Myth of Rome's Fall (New York, 1958), pp. 3–4Google Scholar.
4. Fuglum, Per, Edward Gibbon, His View of Life and Conception of History (Oslo, 1953), pp. 147–48Google Scholar.
5. Gibbon, Edward, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (New York, 1946), II, 1225Google Scholar. Hereafter referred to as History. I cite the Heritage Edition because it combines the J. B. Bury text with illustrations by Piranesi that graphically substantiate my thesis in this essay.
6. Fuglum, , Edward Gibbon, p. 159Google Scholar.
7. Cf. Johnson, J. W., “Swift's Historical Outlook,” Journal of British Studies, IV (1965), pp. 52–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8. Fuglum, , Edward Gibbon, p. 161Google Scholar. Fuglum conceives of Gibbon's basic outlook as cyclic, using the metaphors of seasonal succession and aging to embody it; pp. 160-61. In his Hertz Annual Lecture on a Master Mind, however, Christopher Dawson denies Gibbon's organicism; Dawson, Christopher, Edward Gibbon, Proceedings of the British Academy (London, 1934), p. 177Google Scholar.
9. Gibbon, Edward “Essay on the Study of Literature”, in McSpadden, J. W. (ed.), The Works of Edward Gibbon (New York, 1907), XIII, xxxivGoogle Scholar.
10. Ibid., p. xlvi.
11. Ibid., pp. xlviii-lxxix et passim.
12. Gibbon, , History, II, 1219–1220Google Scholar.
13. Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (3rd ed.; Oxford, 1965), I. 665bGoogle Scholar.
14. Evelyn, John, Publick Employment and an Active Life (London, 1667), p. 102Google Scholar.
15. Johnson, Samuel, Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (London, 1759), p. xxxGoogle Scholar.
16. Goldsmith, Oliver, Roman History (London, 1769), II, 483Google Scholar.
17. Fuglum, , Edward Gibbon, p. 43Google Scholar.
18. Gibbon, Edward, The Autobiography of Edward Gibbon, ed. Saunders, Dero (New York, 1961), pp. 149–50Google Scholar.
19. Gibbon, Edward, Miscellaneous Works, ed. Sheffield, John Lord (London, 1837), p. 476Google Scholar.
20. Ibid., pp. 482-83.
21. Gibbon, , Autobiography, p. 154Google Scholar.
22. Low, , Edward Gibbon, p. 181Google Scholar.
23. Ibid.
24. Gibbon, , Autobiography, pp. 152–54 et passimGoogle Scholar.
25. Gibbon, , History, I, xlv–xlviiGoogle Scholar.
26. Gibbon, , Autobiography, pp. 153–54Google Scholar.
27. For Gibbon's holdings, see Keynes, Geoffrey, The Library of Edward Gibbon. A Catalogue of His Books (London, 1940), et passimGoogle Scholar.
28. Gibbon, remarks on this process in the History, III, 2440–2441Google Scholar.
29. Gibbon, , Autobiography, p. 152Google Scholar.
30. See Keynes, Library of Edward Gibbon.
31. Gibbon, , Autobiography, pp. 169 ffGoogle Scholar.
32. Gibbon, Edward, Letters, ed. Norton, J. E. (New York, 1956), III, 59Google Scholar.
33. Gibbon, , History, I, 22Google Scholar; I, 253; II, 923; II, 1099; II, 1219. These are only a few of the many overt and covert uses of architectural comparisons in the History.
34. Cf. Gibbon's, “Essay,” in Works, XIII, p. lxxxGoogle Scholar: “A sanguinary tyrant, suspected of cowardice, the greatest of crimes in a party leader, he [Augustus] attains to the throne and makes republicans forget that they have ever been free. The state of opinion among these republicans somewhat lessens our surprise. Equally incapable of liberty under Sylla and under Augustus, they ignored this truth under the former, while under the latter, civil war, and proscriptions more cruel than war, had taught them that the republic, sinking as it were beneath the weight of its greatness and its corruption, could no longer subsist without a master.”
35. Dawson, , Edward Gibbon, p. 177Google Scholar; see note 10 above.
36. See Gibbon, , Autobiography, pp. 195, 206–07Google Scholar: “But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind, by the idea … that whatever might be the agreeable fate of my History, the life of the historian must be short and precarious.” “The present is but a fleeting moment; the past is no more; and our prospect of futurity is dark and doubtful.”
37. E.g., Gibbon, , History, I, 186Google Scholar; II, 1347; III, 2340-55.
38. E.g., Gibbon, , History, I, 195Google Scholar; II, 1303; III, 2340-55.
39. E.g., Gibbon, , History, III, 2441Google Scholar.
40. Gibbon, , History, III, 2428–30Google Scholar. The eighteenth-century emphasis on “Balanced Government” with tension between three constitutional elements—monarch, nobles, and people—also implicitly used an architectural premise; cf. History, I, 46Google Scholar.
41. Gibbon, , History, III, 2442Google Scholar. Gibbon's concluding sentence reads: “It was among the ruins of the Capitol that I first conceived the idea of a work which has amused and exercised nearly twenty years of my life, and which, however inadequate to my own wishes, I finally deliver to the curiosity and candour of the public.”
42. Gibbon, , History, III, 2426Google Scholar.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid., p. 2428.
45. Ibid., p. 2429.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid., pp. 2430-32.
48. For Gibbon on the decline of genius, see his History, I, 43–44Google Scholar. Cf. his comments on the Jews and Peruvians for the relationship between a race and its “monuments”: Miscellaneous Works, p. 200; History, I, 172Google Scholar, n. 13. Cf. Fuglum, , Edward Gibbon, pp. 136–37Google Scholar.
49. See Gibbon, , History, I, 43–45Google Scholar.
50. Gibbon, , History, III, 2432Google Scholar.
51. Ibid., III, 2434-35. Gibbon had already spelled out these causes and their effects in his account of the treatment of Roman buildings in the reign of the Emperor Majorian; History, II, 1118 ff.Google Scholar; cf. II, 890 ff.
52. Ibid., III, 2435-41.
53. When he was a Commissioner on the Board of Trade, Gibbon wrote to Georges Deyverdun: “Let it suffice you to know that the Decline of the Two Empires, the Roman and the British, advances with equal steps. I have contributed, however, much more effectively to the former.” Quoted in Cecil, Algernon, Six Oxford Thinkers (London, 1909), p. 21Google Scholar.
54. See Black, , Art of History, pp. 168–69Google Scholar; Fuglum, , Edward Gibbon, pp. 34-37, 52, 139, 148Google Scholar; Low, , Edward Gibbon, p. 322Google Scholar.
55. Bond, Harold L., The Literary Art of Edward Gibbon (Oxford, 1960), p. 162Google Scholar.
56. Cf. Swift, Jonathan, “A Project for the Advancement of Religion,” in Works, ed. Davis, Herbert (Oxford, 1939), II, 63Google Scholar: “the Nature of Things is such, that if Abuses be not remedied, they will certainly encrease, nor ever stop till they end in the Subversion of a Common-Wealth. As there must always of Necessity be some Corruptions; so in a well-instituted State, the executive Power will be always contending against them … never letting Abuses grow inveterate, or multiply so far that it will be hard to find Remedies, and perhaps impossible to apply them. As he that would keep his House in Repair, must attend to every little Breach or Flaw, and supply it immediately, else Time alone will bring all to Ruin; how much more the common Accidents of Storm and Rain? He must live in perpetual Danger of his House falling about his Ears; and will find it cheaper to throw it quite down, and build it again from the Ground, perhaps upon a new Foundation, or at least in a new Form, which may neither be so safe nor so convenient as the old.”
57. Quoted in Norton, J. E. (ed.), A Bibliography of the Works of Edward Gibbon (Oxford, 1940), p. 82Google Scholar. Cf. William Hayley's praise of Gibbon's attack on Bishop Warburton's Divine Legation of Moses, quoted in the Autobiography, p. 163: “At length, a superior, but anonymous, critic … completely overturned this ill-founded edifice, and exposed the arrogance and futility of its assuming architect.”
58. Bond, , Literary Art, p. 162Google Scholar.
59. Black, , Art of History, p. 160Google Scholar.
60. E.g., Johnson, J. W., The Formation of English Neo-Classical Thought (Princeton, 1967), p. 192CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
61. Low, , Edward Gibbon, p. 326Google Scholar, Cf. ibid., p. 328: “For Gibbon's style was based on the Latin orators; but both the architecture and the decoration of his History owe much to Herodotus.”
