Escape from Rome! Would that thou couldst! A number of months ago, I stumbled across Walter Scheidel’s Escape From Rome, which I thought was just the bestest book on Rome ever—the bestest I had ever read, at least—arguing that Rome “fell” in very large part because its creation was an anomaly. Unlike the other “classic” sites of empire—in China, India, Persia/Iran, and the Middle East (and, I guess, “Meso-America”)—the European world was not really “suited” to serve as the location for a great, unified empire. The Romans beat the odds, for centuries, but eventually the odds caught up with them. The dominance they achieved was never achieved again, and instead the diversity of modern Europe emerged, diversity which eventually led to the “progress” we now enjoy.
Well, shortly after that, I stumbled across another “big think” Rome book, Kyle Harper’s The Fate of Rome, emphasizing, not geography and economics but climate and plagues, arguing that Rome, during the first two centuries of the “common era”, benefited from unusually clement weather over most of the Mediterranean region, but then was hit with a double whammy—bad weather and the “Antonine Plague”, which raged from 165 to 180 AD,1 weakening the empire and making it vulnerable to further random shocks. According to Harper, “normal” weather patterns (that is, patterns not especially favorable to the Mediterranean economy) continued, and new pandemics emerged, probably linked with the famous movements of barbarian peoples into the west and into conflict with the Romans. Harper places particular emphasis of the worst pre-Black Death plague of all, the plague of Justinian, emperor from 527-565, caused by a bacterium known as Yersinia pestis, also the source of the Black Plague.
Justinian, based in the Eastern Empire, had re-conquered most of the western empire, but after the plague struck, things fell apart. Whether the western empire had already been so devastated by the barbarian conquests that it was no longer worth re-conquering, or whether Justinian’s wars of conquest were so costly and so destructive that Justinian effectively destroyed the empire himself, or whether climatic changes made whole “mare nostrum” economy no longer workable, or whether the rise of Islam in the 600s, over the weakened Sasanian and Roman empires (weakened both by plague and by constant warfare with one another) precluded Rome’s revival, or whether it was a little of everything, is a matter for debate.
So, yeah, lots to ponder, and in my pondering I somehow decided that I wanted to know more about not my favorite historian of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon, about whom I vented in a seven (VII!) part series starting here some five years ago. The “Cambridge Companion” series, which I generally find to be excellent2 came out with a new volume on Eddie only a few years ago, and I had to take a look. This is the fourth or fifth book I’ve read about an author I don’t like very much (don’t ask me why) and all of the essays were enjoyable, although I did finally give up on the one describing, in some detail, the contents of Ed’s library.
What struck me, this time around, in thinking about Gibbon, is the extent to which he thinks about Rome’s decline and fall in moral terms: the Romans who founded the empire were fearless warriors, dedicated to the glory of their country, who would endure any hardship in Rome’s service. Their descendants were soft and luxury-loving, hiring others to fight their battles for them. This notion of societies being sustained by their particular “virtue” had been given enormous credibility by Montesquieu in his famous book The Spirit of the Laws, published in 1748, several decades before Gibbon began his famous work.3 The more modern books take a “bottom up” rather than “top down” view of things, bolstered, of course, by the fantastic expansion of scientific evidence. Montesquieu had his own, famous view of the effects of climate on civilization—naturally choosing that of France as ideal—but his notion was still “top down”—how climate affected man’s “spirit”—and of course he had little understanding of how climate could change over the years, and no understanding of why.
So, uh, what does all, or any, of this have to do with my predictably—yet mysteriously—snarky head? Well, Ed had some snark of his own—a lot of it, really—and in his history he took a number of shots at Justinian, including this one, demeaning poor old Justinian for the “crime” of building what just happens to be one of the greatest architectural monuments of all time!
A magnificent temple is a laudable monument of national taste and religion, and the enthusiast who entered the dome of St. Sophia, might be tempted to suppose that it was the residence, or even the workmanship of the Deity. Yet how dull is the artifice, how insignificant is the labour, if it be compared with the formation of the vilest insect that crawls upon the surface of the temple!
Fred Parker, in his essay “Gibbon’s Style in the Decline and Fall”—which is where I found this quote, of course—discusses Gibbon’s “choices” here in some detail, but, well, I have my own exegesis to supply, thank you very much, so if you want to hear what Fred thought you’ll have to buy the book, because this is all about what I think.
First of all, I’m picking a fight with Ed’s choice of “vile” to describe an insect. Here he seems to be taking the old-fashioned notion that there are qualitative ranks in the natural world—some things are “noble”—like a lion, for instance—and some things are “vile”, like an insect. Yet he also avails himself of modern, scientific knowledge to argue that the sophistication of even the smallest—the “meanest”, to use the word in a quantitative rather than qualitative sense—living creature beggars even the greatest of human works, dwarfing the supposed triumphs of the supposedly “mighty” emperor! But in that case, an insect isn’t “vile”, unless you think “vile” means “small”, and it doesn’t.
Furthermore, I wonder if Gibbon would make the same comparison about an insect crawling across a copy of Homer’s Iliad, or the histories of Tacitus, or the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, or any other work of “letters” that he considered helped define the human spirit at its highest and finest and really did separate our species from all the others that crawl the earth. I think he took it for granted that “letters”, far more than the visual arts, created civilization, the polite civilization of gentlemen which I believe he thought was the one thing of eternal value.
And I furthermore wonder if he were not led to make this comparison in large part not merely from his disdain at mere material objects—even grand ones like the Hagia Sophia—but from his disdain for its creator, Justinian. In my original rap on Gibbon I said he seemed to have a particular dislike for two “great emperors”, Constantine and Justinian, suspecting that the real source of his dislike was that they were both Christian, and it galled him to have to admit that a “great” Roman emperor could also be a Christian. And so he has to demean the Hagia Sophia—which, sadly, we can never see in its “true” glory (because the conquering Turks stripped it of all interior decoration)—merely to indulge his anti-Christian prejudice! For shame!
1. Harper argues pretty strongly that it was the Antonine plague (apparently either small pox or measles) that “made” Christianity, convincing people that, basically, life on earth is Hell. If there is any hope at all, it’s got to exist on the other side of the grave, because on this side there just ain’t nothin’ good goin’ down.
2. Definite fave rave is the Cambridge Companion to the Renaissance, focusing entirely on the impact of the Renaissance on “letters”—no painting, architecture, etc.
3. In 1734, Montesquieu had published his own take on the Romans, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline.
