Gibbon, the Muses, and the Decline of Rome: The great historian still has much to teach us

National Review ^ | 10/15/2014 | Michael Auslin

[SeekAndFind]

Rome — I am sitting on the steps of the Capitoline Hill, as close as I can approximate the spot where, exactly 250 years ago today, on October 15, 1764, the 27-year old Edward Gibbon was struck by the muses, leading to perhaps the greatest work of historical scholarship in the English language.

Though the anecdote in his biography recalling the moment has been called into question, it is both sufficiently famous and sufficiently inspiring to anyone with a historical bent to warrant retelling. Gibbon’s recollects the moment:

It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted 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.

That history would consume much of the rest of his life. The first volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was published in 1776, became an immediate best seller, and vaulted its author into the most exclusive ranks of British letters. The final volume appeared in 1788, and the sixth edition of the first volume appeared in 1789, just five years before Gibbon’s death. There remains a historical poignancy that Decline and Fall first appeared the same year that the American Declaration of Independence was expressing perhaps the loftiest sentiments of Enlightenment political philosophy, while its last installment came on the heels of the French Revolution, which guillotined the hopes of liberalism.

Much of Gibbon’s work has been superseded by subsequent discoveries, though its sweep and grandeur have never been surpassed. Only half of his work, that dealing with the Western Roman Empire, is any longer read and known.

[SeekAndFind]

EDWARD GIBBON

[Trapped Behind Enemy Lines]

The main reason why Rome fell:

The urban masses wanted gimmee gimmee gimmee.

There weren’t enough working people and taxpayers to subsidize them.

Sound familiar?

[Timber Rattler]

Don’t forget the influx of barbarians and the subversion and defeat of the Roman army too.

[Tax-chick]

I think Gibbon has more to teach us about English composition than he does about history.

[IronJack]

Plus the imperial overstretch accompanying the reality that Rome’s territory comprised much of the known world in a day when it took weeks to cross a country.