'Pure Farce Covers a Far Greater Field of History'

In a 1951 letter to Bernard Berenson collected in Letters from Oxford (2006), the English historian Hugh Trevor-Roper writes: 

“I, unlike you, prefer my books to be long (though this may be a sign of laziness: it spares one the mental effort of repeated choice); and I am now re-reading, for the nth time, that greatest of all historians, as I continually find myself declaring,--Gibbon. 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!”

 

A friend is reading The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-89) for the first time. He’s gifted with a vigorous sense of humor, curiosity and brains, and is having a grand time. Gibbon’s footnotes are virtually a genre apart, often quoted and appreciated for their humor or snark. He was famously critical of religion and in a footnote he writes of St. Augustine and The City of God:

 

“Augustin composed the two-and-twenty books of de Civitate Dei in the space of thirteen years, A. D. 413-426 . . . . His learning is too often borrowed, and his arguments are too often his own, but the whole work claims the merit of a magnificent design, vigorously, and not unskillfully, executed."

 

Probably the best known of Gibbon’s footnotes is this, of Emperor Gordian the Younger:

 

“Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes, attested the variety of his inclinations, and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that the former as well as the latter were designed for use rather than ostentation.

“By each of his concubines, the younger Gordian left three or four children. His literary productions, though less numerous, were by no means contemptible.”

I suppose no one reads Gibbon’s six volumes for a crash course in Roman history, though an inspired editor might easily excerpt a book-length assortment of Plutarch-style character studies. He’s simply compulsively readable. Trevor-Roper continues in his letter to Berenson:

 

“I took a volume of Gibbon to Greece and read it on Mount Hymettus and the island of Crete; I read it furtively even at I Tatti, where 40,000 other volumes clamoured insistently around me to be read: and I cannot stop reading him even now.”

 

In a letter to Berenson written four months earlier, Trevor-Roper proves himself as wise as he is well-read:

 

“I used to think that historical events always had deep economic causes: I now believe that pure farce covers a far greater field of history, and that Gibbon is a more reliable guide to that subject than Marx.”

Trevor-Roper died on this date, January 26, in 2003 at age eighty-nine.