“I am now re-reading, for the nth time, that greatest of historians, as I continually find myself declaring – Gibbon,” wrote eminent English historian Hugh Trevor-Roper to Renaissance art expert Bernard Berenson. “What a splendid writer he is! If only historians could write like him now! How has the art of footnotes altogether perished and the gift of irony disappeared!”Edward Gibbon’s work was the end result, as we shall see, of several important factors: an innate knack for felicitous style and the telling detail, thorough scholarship, his early removal from staid academia in London, his belief that the course of history is influenced by many factors, and his distrust of all isms, including Catholicism.Weak and sickly from infancy, Gibbon had had the good fortune to be born in a well-to-do family and was educated at home. When his mother died in 1747, he was sent to live with his aunt, Catherine Porten, whom he always later called “the mother of my mind.” While he was too sick to attend school regularly, his intellectual development was well served by reading the books in his aunt and uncle’s well-stocked library, in other libraries, and by being instructed by private tutors. He wrote in his Memoirs that at the age of 12 he had already decided that history would be his field, and by 14 his self-discipline and perseverance were evident. The keynote of these early years of study was self-sufficiency.In April 1752, just before his 15th birthday, he was admitted at Magdalen College, Oxford, arriving there “with a stock of eruditions that might have puzzled a doctor.” He was at Oxford only fourteen months before he converted to Catholicism and was baptized into the Church in 1753. This led to his expulsion, since the university did not educate Roman Catholics, and he became ineligible for all public service offices. He was glad to go, since he thought attendance at Oxford had been a waste of time.His father, who could not understand what had happened to the good Anglican boy who had left his home, was appalled and threatened disinheritance and banishment. He then acted quickly and sought to remedy the situation by arranging for Edward to move to Lausanne, Switzerland, to board and be re-educated religiously by Daniel Pavillard, a Calvinist minister. His father must have had little knowledge of either Pavillard or the Lausanne area cultural ferment; Gibbon's five years stay there, while “curing” him of Catholicism, enflamed his latent religious skepticism and made him an agnostic.The change in Edward’s life was total: he had to learn French to be able to communicate, Paillard and his wife led a very frugal life, he had no money of his own apart from what Paillard gave him, he had to obtain prior permission and account for his forays from the house. Yet Pavillard was kind and patient, and slowly Gibbon found his stride in the new environment. He acquired regular study habits, read and mastered the ancient classics and became proficient in logic and mathematics. He became familiar with French literature and learned to write with style. Such was the proficiency he had reached in French that his first book, Essai sur l’Etude de la Littérature (1761) was written in that language.At Christmas 1754, he abjured Catholicism and returned to Protestantism. His reconversion was not limpidly clear, as he wrote, “I suspended my religious enquiries, acquiescing with implicit belief to the tenets and mysteries which are adopted by the general consent of Catholics and Protestants.” Yet in his letters home, particularly to his aunt, he sang a more decided tune, claiming that he was fully converted to Protestantism.Gibbon returned to England in 1758 and resumed his independent historical studies, interrupting them between December 1760 and December 1762. Both Gibbons, father and son, served in the Hampshire militia for two years, the father as a major and the son as a captain of the Grenadiers, although this latter is hard to envision, since the younger Gibbon was short and already showing something of the corpulence that would characterize his later life.England was then at war. Many were called to the English colors, with the nobles and the upper classes furnishing the officers. Gibbon, while he could not relate to most of the fellow soldiers and complained that he was “tired of companions who had neither the knowledge of scholars nor the manners of gentlemen,” performed his duties well and continued his studies in his spare time. At the end of 1762 he was out of uniform and his father provided him with funds to undertake an extended trip of continental Europe.On January 25, 1763 he left England and headed for Paris. He visited Lausanne again, crossed the Alps into Italy, stopped at Turin, met the King of Sardinia, stopped in Milan, Genoa, Bologna, Modena, and Florence, where he visited the Uffizi 14 times. He moved on to Pistoia, Lucca, Pisa, and Siena, finally arriving in Rome in October of 1764. Later in life, he recalled his first impression of this city that would change the course of his life:
“My temper is not very susceptible of enthusiasm; and the enthusiasm which I'd not feel, I have ever scorned to affect. But, at the distance of twenty-five years, I can neither forget nor express the strong emotions which agitated my mind as I first approached and entered the eternal city ...”
It was in Rome, famously, that everything changed:
It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol while the bare-footed 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.
After two weeks in Paris, he returned to London, where he arrived on June 25, 1765.From 1765 to 1770, he spent time on several secondary writing projects, including a draft of a History of the Swiss Republic, which he wrote in French. Philosopher and historian David Hume, to whom he had shown a draft, exhorted him to do it in English, as his style in French was too flowery and figurative for history. His friend from Lausanne George Deyverdun had also returned to London and helped him in his historical researches. Meantime, needing to supplement the allowance his father was giving him, he got a job as a clerk in the Secretary of State office, in which David Hume was the undersecretary.When Gibbon’s father died in November 1770, Edward inherited a sizable fortune and in October 1772 was able to move into a house in London, set up his extensive library, organized his notes, and started to work on the first volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.In 1775, he was also elected to Parliament, and although he served for nine years, never made a speech, writing, “It is more tremendous that I imagined; the great speakers fill me with despair, the bad ones with terror.”After having been rejected for membership in the prestigious Literary Club in 1774, he was voted in the following year. Fellows of the club got together regularly for meals, drinking, and interesting talk. The club, founded by literary savant Samuel Johnson, included among others, such luminaries as painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, politician and author Edmund Burke, politician Charles James Fox, actor David Garrick, playwright and politician Richard Sheridan, political economist Adam Smith, and biographer James Boswell.Gibbon's best friend in the club was Adam Smith; his worst enemy James Boswell, who wrote of him, “Gibbon is an ugly, affected, disgusting fellow, and poisons our literary club to me.” Gibbon never responded to slights from Boswell and repaid him, perhaps exasperating him even more, with silence.Boswell may have been correct in some respects. Gibbon was cool in his relationships, sough-after in society for his brilliant conversation but not especially well-liked. At his house, he planned the conversation during meals, assigning topics to his guests, and ensuring that he had a memorable anecdote to close each one of the arguments being discussed.On the negative side, he was vain and dressed like a peacock; a person meeting him recalled that the great man was dressed “in a suit of flowered velvet, with a bag and sword” continuing with muted criticism that the apparel was “a little overcharged, perhaps, if his person be considered.” His penchant for foppishness is exemplified by shopping receipts of 1780-81 listing four new frock coats of various colors, an orange waistcoat with gold and silver trimmings, and tailor alterations to other clothes of violet and green velvet and silk.Given his shortness of stature, tendency to corpulence, and gentlemanly affectations, he cut an awkward and often ridiculous figure. His sometime-friend Horace Walpole made fun of this “sartorial spectacle,” writing, “I well know his vanity, even his ridiculous face and person, but thought he had too much sense to avow it so palpably.”From 1772 on, Gibbon spent most of his time on his work on the Roman empire, originally intending to conclude it with the fall of the western Empire in 476 A.D. He aimed to write not only a history but also a literary masterpiece, and he kept revising. He says: “Many experiments were made before I could hit the middle tone between a dull chronicle and a rhetorical declamation. Three times did I compose the first chapter, and twice the second and third, before I was tolerably satisfied with their effect.”The first volume was published in an edition of 1000 copies in February 1776, the same year Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, and the American colonies declared their independence. Despite the high price, it sold in a little over a month. A second edition of 1,500 copies sold in three days, and Gibbon was on his way, deservedly, as a serious historian and prose stylist, whose way with words has since then been imitated by many, including Winston Churchill. The stately pace and noble grandeur of his achievement is evident right from the opening paragraph:
In the second century of the Christian era, the Empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized 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.
Historian William Robertson, David Hume, and Horace Walpole praised the book, although it was also criticized and accused of inaccuracies, unfairness, and a cynical attitude toward Christianity.Gibbon, who was a Deist more than a traditional believer, was convinced that Christianity had played a major role in the weakening and fall of the Roman Empire, but tread a fine line in his narrative since open criticism of Christianity was still considered a crime in England. Thus, he made sure that he set apart his role as an historian from that of a believer:
The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she contracted in a long residence upon Earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings.
Once he made the distinction clear, he then proceeded with his argument:
…life is the great object of religion, we may hear without surprise or scandal that the introduction, or least the abuse, of Christianity had some influence on the decline and fall of the Roman empire. The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of military spirit were buried in the cloister. A large portion of public and private wealth were consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion, and the soldiers' pay was lavished on the useless multitudes of both sexes who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity. Faith, zeal, curiosity, and more earthly passions of malice and ambition kindled the flame of theological factions, whose conflicts were sometimes bloody and always implacable; the attention of the emperors was diverted from camps to synods; the Roman world was oppressed by a new species of tyranny, and the persecuted sects became the secret enemies of the country.
He contrasted his view of Christianity's effect on the empire with the previous situation in the Roman world: “The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher; as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful…Toleration produced not only a mutual indulgence, but even religious concord.”In addition to the advent of Christianity and the barbarians invasions, he also introduced another variable into the causes of Rome’s fall and wrote:
The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principles of decay, the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest, and as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial support, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight.
At least in public, Gibbon took criticism of his book in stride, and with the money the book had made embarked on a European vacation. He stayed in Paris from May to November 1777, visiting often with Susan and Jacques Necker. The Neckers' 11-year-old daughter, Germaine, the future Madame de Stael, found him attractive and told him they should get married!Volume II and III of the History, bringing the story forward to the fall of the Western Empire in 476 A.D., were published in March 1781. These were not as acclaimed as the first volume and Horace Walpole, who had received advance copies, complained that the detailed recounting of the various doctrinal disputes and heresies in the Christian church did not make for easy reading. Thus he told Gibbon, “…there is so much of the Arians and Eunomians and semi-Pelagians…that though you have written the story as well as it could be written, I fear few will have the patience to read it.”A story, probably apocryphal, says that Gibbon also presented a copy of the second volume to Prince William, Duke of Gloucester and brother of King George III. On receiving it, the duke is supposed to have said: “Another damned thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh, Mr. Gibbon?”Despite his literary success, Gibbon was still in need of funds and in 1777 was able to secure a government sinecure with few demands, a place as a member of the Board of Trade and Plantations, which paid him £ 750 a year. In 1782, due to a change of government precipitated, in part, by the debacle of losing the American colonies, Gibbon lost his government sinecure and, despite his substantial income, found himself unable to maintain the luxurious tenor of life to which he had become accustomed.What to do? He decided to move abroad and return to Lausanne, where the cost of living was half of that in London. He resigned from Parliament, sold most of his effects, except his two thousand books, and on September 15,1783, left London for Switzerland.In Lausanne, he shared a large, comfortable house with his old friend Georges Deyverdun, and started to work on the remaining volumes of his History.While at the beginning of the project he had wanted to write only about the western empire, he had extended his timeline expanded by a thousand years to encompass the history of Eastern Empire to its conquest by the Turks in 1453. Thus, in his remaining three volumes, he covered the Byzantine Empire, the rise of the Arab civilization, the Crusades, and other events around the Mediterranean basin. He summarized the completion of his work in 1787 in a famous sentence: “I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion.”The end of his labor, after 20 years of work, was bittersweet. As he described it:
It was on the… night of the 27th of June 1787, between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last lines of the last page, in a summer house in my garden… I will not dissemble the emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and, perhaps, the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind, by the idea that I had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that whatever might be the future of my History, the life of the historian must be short and precarious.
In August 1777, Gibbon returned to London to see the publication of Volumes IV to VI, which were brought out in May of the following year. His pay for them was £ 4,000, an enormous sum at the time. The following month, while in the visitor’s gallery at Westminster Hall observed the proceedings in the trial of Warren Hastings, the first British Governor General of India, who had been impeached for corruption, Gibbon had the pleasure of hearing Irish poet, playwright and MP Richard Sheridan in one of his most famous speeches refer to “the luminous pages of Gibbon”, although a story has it that Sheridan had not said ‘luminous’ but ‘voluminous’.During the summer of 1788 Gibbon returned to Lausanne and continued to live a life of leisure in the house that his now-deceased friend Deyverdun had left him. In May 1793, he returned to London to comfort his friend Lord Sheffield, whose wife had just passed away. Sheffield, busy with politics, had taken his wife death in stride, but Gibbon, who was sick himself, was to die in less than a year.Since his early adulthood, Gibbon had suffered from a condition now known as hydrocele testis. This painful condition causes the testicles to fill with fluid and swell considerably. From time to time, Gibbon had undergone procedures removing the fluid but his condition worsened over the years, becoming both very painful and embarrassing in an age of close-fitting breeches.In London, Gibbon’s hydrocele grew “almost as big as a small child” and he was reduced to crawling around “with much labor and some indecency.” His doctor drew four quarts of watery liquid from the diseased testicle, followed by another three quarts not long after. A third tapping in early January 1794 made the testicle septic and Gibbon died of complications on January 16 at the age of 56.The very immensity of Gibbon's work, 71 chapters, 2136 paragraphs, about 1.5 million words, and nearly 8,000 footnotes, make it a virtual encyclopedia of the political and religious life of the 1300 years it covers. It is virtually a time machine - travelogue, ranging widely in its asides as far as China, Mongolia, the New World, and indeed as far as New Zealand.Gibbon's prose, influenced and molded by his classical readings and his French studies, has dignity, harmony, grandeur, majesty, vigor, and wit, eschewing easy pomposity. He used words like a mason uses bricks and mortar to build his intellectual edifice and balanced sentences, clauses, and paragraphs with the skill of a juggler keeping all the balls aloft simultaneously. The prose reads in places like poetry, very different from the dry language favored by academia at the time. Gibbon was concerned with the effect of his words on the reader and before he wrote, as he says, “cast a long paragraph in a single mould, to try it on my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of the pen ‘tilI had given the last polish to my work.”The work is also a marvel of organization and proportion, accuracy to the facts as then known, balancing the precise telling of historical events with an engagingly intricate literary elegance; according to British cultural historian Peter Ackroyd, Gibbon’s style was a precursor of Romanticism and “the harbinger of the Gothic and the ‘sensational’ in literary fashion.” To be sure, that style had its detractors: Samuel Taylor Coleridge considered it “detestable”, and others have bellyached about it being predictable, pompous, and even overly ornamented, a rococo` creation in words. Readers remain divided on these questions today.Gibbon’s work is also famous for his close to 8,000 footnotes, about one fourth of the text, which he made into a unique art form. The notes are used not only to identify sources, but also to bring additional knowledge to the fore without cluttering the text with interesting but incidental facts, or to comment with a mordant ironical wit on the sources themselves. An example of this quality is the footnote on the Benedictine vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity: “I have somewhere heard or read the confession of a Benedictine abbot: ‘My vow of poverty has given me a hundred crowns a year; my vow of obedience has raised me to the rank of a sovereign prince.’ I forgot the consequences of his vow of chastity.”Philosophically, if not stylistically, Gibbon was also much influenced by Neapolitan historian Pietro Giannone, whose Civil History of the Kingdom of Naples and other writings got it him in trouble with the Catholic Church because he espoused the primacy of civil authority over the Church. As improbable as it appears, Giannone’s work was translated into English and disseminated widely by clergyman, antiquarian, and book collector Richard Rawlinson, and by one-time Jesuit and bon-vivant Scottish historian Archibald Bower. Giannone’s ideas played a part in the Scottish Enlightenment and inspired not only Gibbon’s thought but also David Hume’s. Montesquieu’s L’Esprit des Lois, which advanced the thesis that history results from the sum of the social life, culture, and institutions and their interdependence and connectiviness, and that neither government institutions nor the church hold a paramount perch in historic developments, also played a significant role in Gibbon’s philosophy of history. Historian Hugh Trevor-Roper has written:
What was the lesson which Gibbon learned from Montesquieu? Briefly, it was that human history is …a process, and a process governed, in its detail, not by a divine plan…but by a complex of social forces which a 'philosophic historian,' that is, a historian who looked behind mere events for fundamental ideas, causes and connexions… could isolate and describe.
Gibbon draws multiple and contradictory conclusion from his tale. In places, he subscribes to the theory, then espoused by most of the French philosophes, that progress is cumulative and, “that every age in the world has increased and still increases the real wealth, the happiness, the knowledge- and perhaps the virtue, of the human race.”Hugh Trevor-Roper commented on Gibbon’s hopeful message and put a new spin on the real causes for the collapse of the Roman Empire “To Gibbon,” he wrote, “progress is intimately linked to urban freedom and self-government. It was the free cities of Europe, he insists, not the empire of Rome, or any other empire, which transmitted civilization through the Dark Ages…It was the empire itself, which in its blind, and ultimately defensive, bureaucratic centralization had caused the organs of progress to become atrophied so that, in the end, 'the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight.' "Gibbon had contemporary examples that sudden fall from the heights of power and dominion was possible and that progress was not always linear. Fear of the excesses of the French Revolution had convinced him to abandon the pleasant life of Lausanne for London, and by 1781, England had lost the war against the rebelling American colonies. The growing self-confidence and power of the English had been shaken by the surrender of Lord Cornwallis to George Washington at Yorktown, with a British military band playing The World Turned Upside Down.One of the reasons Gibbon has remained popular is the fact that he did not look to explain the facts he marshaled with a grand theory, eschewing dogmatism. Daniel J. Boorstin in his 1992 book The Creators makes the reasons for Gibbon’s continued appeal to a wide readership clear: “If he had been more vulnerable to the glittering abstractions of his age he might have become an English Montesquieu, writing for scholars of political thought. If he had sought historical laws or cycles or found some single cause, he might have been bedside reading no more than Vico or Marx.”Gibbon took no shortcuts in aiming for accuracy. As he said, “Diligence and accuracy are the only merits which an historical writer may ascribe to himself; if any merit indeed can be assumed from the performance of an indispensable duty, I may therefore be allowed to say, that I have carefully examined all the original materials that could illustrate the subject which I had undertaken to treat.”His fellow historians recognized this and William Robertson, one of the other best known 18th Century English historians, commented, “I have traced Mr. Gibbon in many of his quotations (for experience has taught me to suspect the accuracy of my brother penmen), and I find that he refers to no passage but what he has seen with his own eyes.” In a similar vein, David Hume wrote to Gibbon about “the depth of your matter [and] the extensiveness of your learning.” John B. Bury, the great English historian, philologist, and classical scholar who edited the best-known edition of Gibbon's Decline and Fall, commented in the introductory remarks to his edition, “If we take into account the vast range of his work, his accuracy is amazing”; another great historian of Rome, Barthold Niebuhr commented succinctly that, “Gibbon’s work will never be excelled.”____Luciano Mangiafico is a retired U.S. diplomat who served, among many postings abroad, as consul in Milan and Consul General in Palermo.
