'Something for the General Reader'

It was one of those books I waited too long to read, intimidated by its bulk and my sketchy knowledge of ancient Rome. I dabbled, read excerpts, traced allusions, put off the inevitable. Most of the right people seemed to like Gibbon. Guy Davenport strongly suggested I read it and made fun of my procrastination. I got serious in 2000, the year I turned forty-eight, and devoted much of it to reading The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in the three-volume set edited and introduced by David Womersley. 

I was spurred, in part, to finally read Gibbon by “And Now for the News,” a brief essay by Robert F. Kaplan published in the March 1997 issue of The Atlantic. Kaplan recounts his reading of Decline and Fall for a second time – always a pleasingly educational experience, especially when returning to a book that first moved us when young:

 

“As when I had read the Decline and Fall previously, I was deliciously overwhelmed. If I could have one voice in my ear as I traveled through the Third World, with its innumerable rebellions and migrations; through Europe, as nationalism impedes unification; or through the United States, it tries to reconstitute itself for a transnational age, the voice would be Gibbon’s, with its sly wit, biting irony and fearless realism about an event that ‘is still felt by the nations of the earth.’”

 

My purpose in reading the literature of the past is not primarily to understand the world of today, but there are lessons to learn. Human nature hasn’t changed in two millennia or two and a half centuries. The essence of Gibbon’s clear-eyed view of history comes in the context of his praise for Antoninus, one of the “Five Good Emperors”:

 

“Antoninus diffused order and tranquility over the greatest part of the earth. His reign is marked by the rare advantage of furnishing very few materials for history; which is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.”

 

Gibbon’s subsequent sentences express a rare approval for an emperor:

 

“In private life, he was an amiable, as well as a good man. The native simplicity of his virtue was a stranger to vanity or affectation. He enjoyed, with moderation, the conveniencies of his fortune, and the innocent pleasures of society; and the benevolence of his soul displayed itself in a cheerful serenity of temper.”

 

Kaplan again: “The Decline and Fall instructs that human nature never changes, and that mankind’s predilection for faction, augmented by environmental and cultural differences, is what determines history. In this Gibbon was influenced by the Baron de Montesquieu, who saw history not as mere politics and ideas but as a complex of cultural, social, and climatic forces.”

 

It’s important to stress for skeptical readers that Gibbon at the sentence-by-sentence level is a pleasure to read. His prose is sumptuous and he is reliably funny, most often in his footnotes. Kaplan closes with a pep talk addressed to us, the common readers: 

 

“[N]othing on the shelves today will give readers as awe-inspiring a sense of spectacle as the Decline and Fall: of how onrushing events almost everywhere -- Europe, Africa, the Near East, Asia -- so seamlessly weave together. At a time of sound bites on one hand and 500-page yawns about a single issue on the other, here, blessedly, is something for the general reader.”

 

Gibbon was born on this date, May 8, in 1737.