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 sixth of seven installments. Part V is here.
Because his spirit moved him so completely in the direction of restraint and “polish” as an end in itself if not the very purpose of life, Gibbon had both a fascination and a horror of the “primitive”—a trait that just about all of us civilized folks share. Imagine not wearing a wig! Imagine not wearing a shirt! It is rare indeed for Gibbon to suggest that there is a “design” to history, but on at least one occasion he does: “This diminutive stature of mankind, if we pursue the metaphor, was daily sinking below the old standard, and the Roman world was indeed peopled by a race of pygmies; when the fierce giants of the north broke in, and mended the puny breed. They restored a manly spirit of freedom; and after the revolution of ten centuries, freedom became the happy parent of taste and science.”
But Gibbon found it difficult to admire the great unwashed from a distance of less than ten centuries. The dominant tone of the Delcline and Fall is, of course, irony and, for my taste, Gibbon’s irony is all too often the irony of snobbery and contempt, self-regarding in its elegance, predictable in its targets, and wearying in its effect. Like T.S. Eliot, who chose a different cure, the ancient Epicurean writers that Gibbon so admired, and Gibbon himself, were seeking an escape from emotion and appetite. In his poem On the Nature of Things, the Roman poet Lucretius explained the pleasures that one enjoys from having found the true path:
’Tis sweet, when, down the mighty main, the winds
Roll up its waste of waters, from the land
To watch another’s labouring anguish far,
Not that we joyously delight that man
Should thus be smitten, but because ’tis sweet
To mark what evils we ourselves be spared.
’Tis sweet, again, to view the mighty strife
Of armies embattled yonder o'er the plains,
Ourselves no sharers in the peril; but naught
There is more goodly than to hold the high
Serene plateaus, well fortressed by the wise,
Whence thou may’st look below on other men
And see them ev’rywhere wand'ring, all dispersed
In their lone seeking for the road of life;
Rivals in genius, or emulous in rank,
Pressing through days and nights with hugest toil
For summits of power and mastery of the world.
O wretched minds of men! O blinded hearts!1I read On the Nature of Things after reading Santayana’s little book Three Philosophical Poets and it was one of the driest, most tedious documents I have ever read, thousands of didactic lines recounting in earnest detail a materialist view of the world that is, of course, entirely wrong in every particular. The fact that men like Gibbon and Santayana actually found solace and even pleasure in such a work testifies, I suppose, to their inner turmoil and distress. As a young man of 16, Gibbon converted to Catholicism, unconverting several years later. At this distance, it’s probably impossible to determine what “really” happened—whether both the conversion and reversion cut emotionally deep or whether the conversion was more of a momentary adolescent effusion—but Gibbon, if he did not delight in the sight of Christians tormented by fears of eternal damnation or glowing with expectation of eternal salvation, certainly had no sympathy or grasp of the religious spirit. His “religion” was a deism of the chilliest, most lofty, and most rational sort. And his contempt for the other extreme was without limit.
Still, there is no denying that the history of Christianity from the death of Christ through the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West (and well beyond) gave prodigious food for both Gibbon’s contempt and his wit. After the “heroic” era—once the early centers of Christianity in such cities as Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria came into close contact with one another, and, particularly, after these individual churches became subsumed in the one great church of the Empire—the frenzied theological wars began, wars that Gibbon chronicles in ruthless detail. And why indeed should he show mercy, when the Christians themselves showed none? And, so often, the Christians played for blood, while Gibbon is simply and for the most part honestly keeping score.
Although Gibbon prides himself on his skepticism, his careful weighing of evidence and sources, he frequently shows himself eager for the superlative and the dramatic. I’ve already noted that he’s somehow willing to believe that one could determine that Muhammad was (or was not) “educated in the bosom of the noblest race, in the use of the purest dialect of Arabia.” In a passage describing the exploits of the Emperor Commodus, who took a turn in the Roman amphitheatre slaying wild beasts, Gibbon seems to be reproducing an imperial press release: “Whether he aimed at the head or heart of the animal, the wound was alike certain and mortal. With arrows, whose point was shaped into the form of a crescent, Commodus often intercepted the rapid career, and cut asunder the long bony neck of the ostrich. A panther was let loose; and the archer waited till he had leaped upon a trembling malefactor. In the same instant the shaft flew, the beast dropped dead, and the man remained unhurt. The dens of the amphitheatre disgorged at once a hundred lions; a hundred darts from the unerring hand of Commodus laid them dead as they ran raging around the Arena. Neither the huge bulk of the elephant, nor the scaly hide of the rhinoceros, could defend them from his stroke.” The Romans really did bring a hundred lions to the slaughter in a single day, but it’s hard to imagine that a single arrow, however well placed, would be sufficient to kill one. (Also, a rhinoceros has a thick hide but not a scaly one, but since Gibbon scarcely had the opportunity to see one, I think we can let that pass.)
- This translation, by William Ellery Leonard, an American poet who was once quite well known, dates from 1916. If there’s a “contemporary” translation available on the web, I couldn’t find it ↩