Edward Gibbon, Part III

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 third of a series of seven on Gibbons. Part II is here.

Beyond the power and the wealth of Rome—which Gibbon exaggerated by focusing on a relative handful of enormous fortunes, not realizing that, in many ways, the middle-class Great Britain of his day was more prosperous than slave-ridden Rome—and beyond even its literature was the city itself, the city of the Caesars. Even in ruin, the great monuments of the Empire—the Coliseum, the baths of Caraculla, Trajan’s column, the Pantheon—all spoke of a civilization where life was lived on a more than human scale. And on top of those ancient triumphs were more recent ones, equally colossal—the High Renaissance creations of Michelangelo and Raphael and the Baroque offerings of Bernini and Borromini.¹ For Gibbon, London and Paris were mere striplings in comparison.

I have never been to Rome, or London, or Paris, but due to a pair of curious accidents in both geography and history, I was surprisingly well-placed to understand Gibbon’s enthusiasm for the Latin classics; yet I found it an entire mystery. I was attending junior-high school in Virginia when the Soviets launched their first satellite. Virginia, like virtually every state, responded by boosting science and mathematics education. Since the state at that time was still firmly in the grip of Virginia gentlemen, in eighth grade I took classes, not only in algebra and “ninth-grade science,” but Latin as well. Thanks largely to inertia, I ended up taking four years of Latin, studying Caesar, Cicero, and Vergil in a fair amount of depth, and learning almost nothing in the process.

I was entirely deaf to the intellectual charms of learning a second language. I was incapable of understanding that Latin constituted an intellectual edifice the equal, if not the superior (as Gibbon and so many other classical enthusiasts conceived it), of English. I saw Latin as mere artifice, not quite so confusing as algebra (I never could have survived four years of algebra), but almost. For me, the English language was language, the only possible language. That was nonsense, of course. I knew that the vast majority of humankind spoke a language other than English. How they did that, though, was an entire mystery to me,

I was always puzzled by the endless praise I encountered, long before I ever picked up Gibbon, for the legendary “polish” of the great Roman authors, that seemed to dazzle commentators down through the ages, from St. Augustine to Gibbon himself, two men who rarely agreed on anything. Aesthetically I was an instinctive puritan at the time, as I surely still am. I wanted meaning, not to mention “truth”, and despised nothing more than a concern for elegance.² Translating the extended periods of Cicero—which dazzled readers for two millennia—was for me as lifeless and mechanical an act as balancing a check book.

I supplemented my first-hand knowledge of the Roman classics with translations of other authors—notably Lucretius, Livy, and Tacitus (one of Gibbon’s particular heroes) and found them all second-rate as well. The Greeks, on the other hand, I admired almost as Gibbon did the Romans, while Gibbon, like the rest of the eighteenth century, never showed much enthusiasm for the Greeks. The Greeks did it first, but the Romans did it right.

My reaction was precisely the opposite. I never found a Roman author who was better than second-rate. But the Greeks were, and, are amazing. As Santayana and others have said, they were lucky; they didn’t know they could make mistakes. The Greeks pick up reality itself as though it were nothing, while the Romans either chatter, like Ovid, or labor, like Vergil, beneath the immense weight of Rome’s greatness, a greatness that I could never perceive.³

All of this predisposed me to dislike Gibbon on the basis of both substance and style, for surely few English authors have had a style so affected—so “different”—as Gibbon. Yet, unlike other, lesser authors, who certainly deserve to be called affected, Gibbon, I think, was not. His style was, I believe, entirely a product of his determination to write “correctly” and “elegantly,” which he surely saw as the same thing. It’s just that Gibbon’s notions of correctness and elegance were derived from Latin and French, as though there were an abstract “polish” extrinsic to any language yet applicable to all. One of the most interesting things I ever read about Gibbon (somewhere) was that he was raised by a French nurse for the first one or two years of his life, so that English was not quite his native language.⁴ As a young man he lived for years in French-speaking Switzerland (to teach him not to be a Catholic), with the result that he was, if anything, more at home in French than English. He also had an enormous knowledge of, and enthusiasm for, both the Latin language and Latin authors, though I wonder if he was any more influenced by Latin literature than two other distinguished English authors, John Milton and Samuel Johnson.⁵

EDWARD GIBBON, PART IV