Edward Gibbon, Part I

When I was a boy, back in the fifties, the Sunday papers were still a big deal. The Sunday paper, a full-color, four-color marvel in a black and white world, was a sensation when it emerged around 1900, bringing hours of entertainment for everyone in the family, and fifty years later the institution was still going strong. The comics, though seriously undercut by the movies, were still huge, and readership for strips like Li’l Abner, Steve Canyon, and Peanuts ran in the tens of millions.¹

Sunday papers in those days came with nationally distributed “supplements” like Parade (still going) and the American Weekly, which my mother disapproved of because it was a Hearst publication. The supplements sometimes carried surprisingly sophisticated material. I can remember reading, and barely understanding, a thorough discussion of modern jazz, with background on after-hours jam sessions at Minton’s and other esoterica. At that time, television had yet to cut into what was still a very large audience for light fiction. The supplements did not carry fiction themselves, but they did carry numerous ads for book clubs. You could order a complete set of the once-legendary Zane Grey’s westerns—a genre that scarcely exists any more—or Earle Stanley Gardener’s Perry Mason series—over 80 books, all of them best-sellers—now remembered only through TV.

For whatever reason, I was fascinated by these ads and read them over and over every week. In addition to the single-author clubs were ones that offered a variety of titles. I don’t remember their names, but I do remember that, over and over again, they would offer, absolutely free, to new members, a complete edition of Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I particularly remember one set that adorned the spine of each of the six volumes with a pair of Roman columns, the height and state of repair of each pair declining with each volume.

For whatever reason, I never got around to reading Gibbons’ monumental classic until my mid-thirties, but when I did so I remembered those old ads, and I wondered what readers who had passed up Riders of the Purple Sage or The Case of the Sunbather’s Diary must have thought when they encountered the following:

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.

Many readers, I suspect, did not get much farther, but I did, pushing through the first three volumes, which take you to the end of the Empire in the west, 1303 pages² of the chillest Augustan marble extant. Since this always struck me as the “fall” of the Roman Empire, I stopped reading, though I have since sampled the final three volumes in some detail. More than that, I have, through one of my many strange compulsions, read at least half a dozen books about Gibbon and his history, which examine its many aspects in fascinating detail (fascinating to me, at least), but in none of them is there the least mention of why it might once have been considered an effective “come on”. But there is one: by 1950s standards, Gibbons was a very dirty writer. In fact, even today, there are few authors who will go where Gibbons takes you, and not just in a Latin footnote.

In Norman F. Cantor’s The Civilization of the Middle Ages (1993, revised edition), we learn that Charlemagne “mistreated his daughters”. Gibbon is a little more explicit: “Of his moral virtues, chastity is not the most conspicuous: but the public happiness could not be materially injured by his nine wives or concubines, the various indulgence of meaner or more transient amours, the multitude of his bastards whom he bestowed on the church, and the long celibacy and licentious manners of his daughters, whom the father was suspected of loving with too fond a passion.”³ In a footnote, Gibbon tells us “The vision of Weltin, composed by a monk, eleven years after the death of Charlemagne, shows him in purgatory, with a vulture, who is perpetually gnawing the guilty member, while the rest of his body, the emblem of his virtues, is sound and perfect”.

For many contemporary historians, it is only issues that affect the “public happiness” that are important. Therefore, there is no need to go scurrying down private rat holes. Gibbon, though more fastidious in style than any modern, is less so in substance. The public has a right to know everything. How else are we to judge? Besides, if we are shocked by the truth, what hope is there for us?

Gibbon hits particularly fine stride with “Mahomet”. He was, of course, always happy to show religious figures in the round. With Christians, there is often a sort of compulsive sniping. Gibbon clearly has an ax to grind, and all his fine wit—all his very fine wit—merely advertises rather than conceals his animus. But with Mahomet his depiction of the Prophet’s pursuit of happiness—the naïve eagerness with which he blends the spiritual and the earthly realms—is more accepting:

In his adventures with Zeineb, the wife of Zeid, and with Mary, an Egyptian captive, the amorous prophet forgot the interest of his reputation. At the house of Zeid, his freedman and adopted son, he beheld, in a loose undress, the beauty of Zeineb, and burst forth into an ejaculation of devotion and desire. The servile, or grateful, freedman understood the hint, and yielded without hesitation to the love of his benefactor. But as the filial relation had excited some doubt and scandal, the angel Gabriel descended from heaven to ratify the deed, to annul the adoption, and gently to reprove the apostle for distrusting the indulgence of his God. One of his wives, Hafna, the daughter of Omar, surprised him on her own bed, in the embraces of his Egyptian captive: she promised secrecy and forgiveness, he swore that he would renounce the possession of Mary. Both parties forgot their engagements; and Gabriel again descended with a chapter of the Koran, to absolve him from his oath, and to exhort him freely to enjoy his captives and concubines, without listening to the clamours of his wives. In a solitary retreat of thirty days, he labored, alone with Mary, to fulfil the commands of the angel. When his love and revenge were satiated, he summoned to his presence his eleven wives, reproached their disobedience and indiscretion, and threatened them with a sentence of divorce, both in this world and in the next; a dreadful sentence, since those who had ascended the bed of the prophet were forever excluded from the hope of a second marriage.

In his discussion of the relative humanity of the Koran on sexual matters, Gibbon points out that a husband could convict his wife of adultery only on the basis of four witnesses, and then goes on to add in (of course) another footnote “in a memorable case, the Caliph Omar decided that all presumptive evidence was of no avail; and that all the four witnesses must have actually seen stylum in pyxide—“stylum in pyxide” being standard medical Latin for “penis in vagina”. There is an additional joke, for the patient, in that “pyxis” can mean “jewelry box “ or “perfume jar,” but is also the source of “pyx,” a small carrying case specifically designed and consecrated by the Catholic Church for bearing holy wafers out of a church.

The only historical character who seems to have defeated Gibbon is, not too surprisingly, the Byzantine Empress Theodora, wife of Justinian, and one of the most powerful women of the ancient world:

Her features were delicate and regular; her complexion, though somewhat pale, was tinged with a natural color; every sensation was instantly expressed by the vivacity of her eyes; her easy motions displayed the graces of a small but elegant figure; and either love or adulation might proclaim, that painting and poetry were incapable of delineating the matchless excellence of her form. But this form was degraded by the facility with which it was exposed to the public eye, and prostituted to licentious desire. Her venal charms were abandoned to a promiscuous crowd of citizens and strangers of every rank, and of every profession: the fortunate lover who had been promised a night of enjoyment, was often driven from her bed by a stronger or more wealthy favorite; and when she passed through the streets, her presence was avoided by all who wished to escape either the scandal or the temptation. The satirical historian has not blushed to describe the naked scenes which Theodora was not ashamed to exhibit in the theatre. After exhausting the arts of sensual pleasure, she most ungratefully murmured against the parsimony of Nature; but her murmurs, her pleasures, and her arts, must be veiled in the obscurity of a learned language.

The “satirical historian” was Procopius, a scholar attached to Justinian’s court, who, in his infamous “Secret History,” unloaded on both Justinian and Theodora. The “naked scenes,” which Gibbon does not share, even in a footnote and even in Latin, involved Theodora stripping naked, lying down on a stage and having her vagina sprinkled with ground meal, which would then be nibbled and eaten by a flock of “trained geese.” The “murmurs” regarding “the parsimony of Nature” refer to her alleged complaint that the gods had only given her three portals of desire and her wish that she could also be entered through her nipples. Too much for Gibbon, and, probably, too much for the fifties as well.

EDWARD GIBBON PART II