In Part I of this near-random collection of jottings, I remarked that Edward Gibbon, despite his near-obsessive concern with politeness and polish, tells you more about the sex lives of historical figures than virtually any modern historian. I also remarked that his modern-day fans, despite their frequently amazing levels of erudition and enthusiasm, studiously avoid the slightest mention of this aspect of his great work. Having done “Gibbon on Sex,” I decided to do “Gibbon on Everything Else” as well, which, for whatever reason, turned out to be more demanding than I expected. Today’s piece is the fifth of seven installments. As Part IV, concluded, I was expressing my discontents with Gibbon’s “gentlemanly” view of life.
But there is much more to Gibbon’s outlook than mere snobbery, though snobbery’s ugly head rarely fails to protrude. Gibbon was proud of being a gentleman, but he was also proud of being a philosopher, in the 18th century use of the term, when philosophers were as much gentlemen as philosophers—that is, they were as intent on entertaining their readers as they were on enlightening them. Because who can be enlightened by a bore?
Gibbon often cites, and often corrects, Voltaire, the greatest of the philosophes, though scarcely the greatest of philosophers. Both men believed in reason, both despised superstition, but Voltaire believed in progress in a way that Gibbon did not. Voltaire felt himself living in an age of reason—living in the age of reason—an age unlike any before. Gibbon acknowledged the ingenuity of the present, but was much less impressed by it. The great triumphs of western science, which went far beyond anything any previous society had ever achieved, meant nothing to Gibbon. He looked to the past for his inspiration rather than the present, and his heroes were the philosophers of the past, men who were nobles of the spirit, and who stood apart from the common herd. “It was indifferent to them what shape the folly of the multitude might choose to assume; and they approached, with the same inward contempt, and the same external reverence, the altars of the Libyan, the Olympian, or the Capitoline Jupiter.”
Gibbon had plenty of inward contempt, directed as much at the multitude as at their folly. The basely born were base, and could scarcely be otherwise, and nor could their beliefs. Gibbon’s irony was not only a method to expose error and folly but an appropriately elegant method for a gentleman to avenge himself on the many-headed. Irony, of course, was the chosen method of the French philosophes for ridiculing a Church that it was still not safe to attack directly. But the irony of Voltaire is, for the most part, open and direct and optimistic, reflecting a not entirely naïve belief that the world might be significantly better than it is, in part because it is now better than it once was.
Gibbon is more malicious and pessimistic. He wants to sting, and to exalt himself over, those he cannot hope to conquer. Though he chronicles in 10,000 particulars the endless failings and corruptions of the Empire, until “the Roman world was indeed peopled by a race of pygmies,” though he says elsewhere that the Empire could not help but fall, merely of its own weight, he also believed deeply that, at its height, the Empire dwarfed every other human society: “If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus. The vast extent of the Roman empire was governed by absolute power, under the guidance of virtue and wisdom.”
For Gibbon, it was not merely the collapse of “all this”, but the manner of its collapse, that constituted the supreme irony of human history and even human existence, for “It was in Rome, on the fifteenth of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefoot friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.”1 That the inheritance of the greatest, richest, wisest, most powerful, most polished, most philosophical, most noble city the world had ever known should pass into the hands of a few base, ignorant, impoverished, superstitious fools—this was an irony that it would take volumes to expound.
Gibbon is not without sympathy for the sufferings of the multitude, so often sacrificed to the hunger for glory among the great, but his suspicion and fear frequently outrun his sympathy. It’s usually better, and always safer, for “absolute power” to rule, even if it isn’t guided by “virtue and wisdom.” Gibbon frequently expressed admiration for the heroes of the Roman Republic, but never for the Republic itself. After the defeat of Hannibal in the Second Punic War (201 BC), the Republic, though it expanded mightily, was constantly shaken by revolt, intrigue, and civil war. Gibbon mourned the loss of Roman freedom, mightily, but somehow the notion of “absolute power” charmed rather than repelled him, despite the centuries of its abuse that his history recorded. Goethe said that he preferred injustice to disorder. Gibbon would probably wonder why so obvious a truth ever need be uttered.2
It was one of the marks of the philosophes to downplay the pursuit of military glory, and Gibbon, surveying the ruin wrought by a thousand misbegotten wars, could scarcely disagree. Speaking in connection with the emperor Trajan, he wrote “Trajan was ambitious of fame; and as long as mankind shall continue to bestow more liberal applause on their destroyers than on their benefactors, the thirst of military glory will ever be the vice of the most exalted characters.” Yet, like a true Roman, he found it hard to resist the glamour of a conqueror. “On that celebrated ground [the environs of Rome] the first consuls deserved triumphs; their successors adorned villas, and their posterity have erected convents.” From heroes to hysterics! Sic transit gloria mundi! He clearly regarded Julius Caesar as one of the very greatest men who ever lived and regarded his assassination as a tragedy not merely for Rome, but for civilization itself, regretting, among other things, that Caesar had not lived to reform Rome’s laws as he intended, a task ultimately accomplished by Justinian, whom Gibbon regarded with suspicion, in part, I think, because he was reluctant to believe that a Christian could be a great emperor. He seems to have similar qualms about Constantine.
- Even Gibbon’s fondest critics acknowledge that this is a very polished version of the truth, but it certainly reflects Gibbon’s attitudes towards both Rome and Christianity. ↩︎
- Gibbon praises the emperor Julian—“Julian the Apostate,” who sought to revive the pagan gods after Constantine had made Christianity the preferred religion of the empire—for his lack of compassion when acting as a judge: “The decrees of Julian were almost always founded on the principles of justice, and he had the firmness to resist the two most dangerous temptations which assault the tribunal of a sovereign under the specious forms of compassion and equity. He decided the merits of the cause without weighing the circumstances of the parties; and the poor, whom he wished to relieve, were condemned to satisfy the just demands of a noble and wealthy adversary.” ↩︎
