'To Him Thucydides and Livius Bow'

I’ve stumbled on a nice New Year trifecta of allusions to Edward Gibbon, not the trendiest of literary figures. For the first time in forty years I watched Stevie, the wonderful 1978 film with Glenda Jackson as the poet Stevie Smith, directed by Robert Enders. Smith/Jackson tells us Gibbon is among her favorite writers. It’s always reassuring when a writer one admires is admired by another writer one admires. 

While looking for something else I happened on a book recommendation by Walter Goodman in the December 1977 issue of The American Spectator: “The books I’d give--or keep--need no advertisement. But they may have some incidental uses today. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall provides insulation against those tendentious comparisons of Rome 1700 or so years ago and the United States in our own time.” In the same issue you’ll note Robert Conquest suggests the same book,  remark I wrote about here. I’ve been reading Walter Savage Landor’s poems again and found “Distribution of Honours for Literature”:

 

“The grandest writer of late ages

Who wrapt Rome up in golden pages,

Whom scarcely Livius equal’d, Gibbon,

Died without star or cross or ribbon.”

 

And this, untitled, with another comparison to Livy:

  

“Gibbon has planted laurels long to bloom

Above the ruins of sepulchral Rome.

He sang no dirge, but mused upon the land

Where Freedom took his solitary stand.

To him Thucydides and Livius bow,

And Superstition veils her wrinkled brow.”