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 first of six treating “Everything Else”
My encounter with the first three volumes of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was a 1,303-page exercise in cognitive dissonance on a multitude of levels. First, and perhaps most importantly, as an American the Roman Empire is simply not that important to me. Long ago, and far away, right? We Americans see no Roman ruins, ride on no Roman roads, and, unlike continental Europe, do not live under Roman laws. For Gibbon, particularly as an eighteenth century Briton, the case was far, far different. His famous first paragraph, which I also quoted in Part I, sets the stage:
“In the second century of the Christian era, the Empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilised portion of mankind. The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valour. The gentle but powerful influence of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces. Their peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury. The image of a free constitution was preserved with decent reverence: the Roman senate appeared to possess the sovereign authority, and devolved on the emperors all the executive powers of government. During a happy period (A.D. 98-180) of more than fourscore years, the public administration was conducted by the virtue and abilities of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and the two Antonines. It is the design of this, and of the two succeeding chapters, to describe the prosperous condition of their empire; and afterwards, from the death of Marcus Antoninus, to deduce the most important circumstances of its decline and fall; a revolution which will ever be remembered, and is still felt by the nations of the earth.”
In the late eighteenth century, the Kingdom of Great Britain occupied about 90,000 square miles, with a population of perhaps 10 million. France, generally regarded as the largest country in Europe (and, thus, the “world”), was about three times larger. Russia somehow didn’t count, and neither did the empires of the East.1 In contrast, the Roman Empire, at its height, occupied about 1.5 million square miles, with a population of about 125 million, virtually all of modern Europe, with all of the Middle East and all of Mediterranean Africa thrown in as well.2 It held the entire “orbis terrarum”—the circle of lands around the Mediterranean—a feat accomplished by no power before and none after. As for the Mediterranean itself, well, it was “mare nostrum”—our sea. No wonder that Gibbon and his contemporaries—and even his successors—could do little more than look on such a colossus and despair.
But when I was growing up the continental U.S., sans Alaska, was about 3 million square miles, with a population of around 175 million. And Russia, China, and India were all larger still. So what’s the big deal? How could the millennium-old disappearance of such a middling state be “still felt by the nations of the earth”? I scarcely noticed, and I was unusually well-informed.
Gibbon admired the greatness of the Empire, but he venerated its letters. Though he remarks, on more than one occasion, the clear superiority of “modern times” to the Age of Rome, he more frequently suggests that, without the Roman authors, life simply would not be worth living. The histories of Livy and Tacitus, the verse of Vergil and Horace, the orations of Cicero (or “Tully,” as the Augustans called him), these are only the supreme peaks of the serried ranges of classical learning, those vast highlands of the soul, where one can breathe the cool, free air of free men, above and beyond both the vulgar world of mere appetite and the suffocating corruption of Christian guilt. Here at last the terrors of life may be put in order and, in some manner, even overcome.3 Gibbon’s enthusiasm for the classics was only an extreme example of the general attitude across educated Europe, an attitude that scarcely weakened until after World War I, when Christian guilt finally lost a lot of its bite.
- The British also ignored the vast Spanish Empire, which by the year 1600 literally spanned the globe, an achievement that the Romans could not have even imagined, much less executed. But the Spanish managed to position themselves on the “wrong side” of European history, contributing almost nothing to the Enlightenment. By 1700 they almost disappear from history, emerging only when Napoleon is so foolish as to invade them, after which they shut the door even more firmly than before. ↩︎
- The French fascination with Africa, which continues to this day, reflects, I think, a lingering desire to be somehow “like Rome.” After World War II, France proclaimed that Algeria was part of “metropolitan France” (Algerians elected deputies to the French National Assembly), so that, briefly, the French Nation spanned the Mediterranean, just as the Romans did. ↩︎
- Although Gibbon frequently states that “modern times” are superior in many ways to the Roman past and acknowledges the triumphs of modern science, I doubt if he regarded Newton’s Principia as anything more than a specialist’s guide to the heavens, useful for nothing more than eclipses and the tides. If you want to know about “life”—how to live and how to die—the Romans, and only the Romans, can teach you that, and by example as well as precept. ↩︎
