How civilisations fall, according to Gibbon

Edward Gibbon was his parents’ first born and, as it transpired, their only surviving offspring. He was born in 1737 in Putney, then more or less in the country rather than a suburb of South West London – the scene of the Putney-Leveller Debates of 1647 presided over by Oliver Cromwell. His family was very comfortably off, his father – also Edward – a ‘gentleman’, who could afford to send Edward junior to the private Westminster School where he received a sound Classical education. At only 15 he ‘went up’ to Magdalen College, Oxford, an experience he despised, and it was partly as an act of anti-parental rebellion that, aged 16, he abandoned his native Protestantism and had himself received into the Roman Catholic religion. His father at once had him dispatched not only from Oxford, but also from England – to the restorative air of Protestant Switzerland and the care of Calvinist pastor M. Daniel Pavillard.

The remedy worked, and in Lausanne in 1754 Gibbon was re-converted, but it seems only formally and inactively. Intellectually the mature Gibbon came nearest to being a deist: yes, there was a God, a Creator, but thereafter human history was a matter of human, not divine, agency. From a very early age, about eight, as he tells us in one of his several incomplete manuscript drafts of an autobiography, he knew he wanted to be a historian. The only question was – a historian of what? How Gibbon ‘came to Rome’, in the sense of becoming ‘the’ historian of the Roman Empire and its ‘decline’, is a long and convoluted story. Before finally deciding on his life-subject in the late 1760s and early 1770s, Gibbon revolved several other, often also very large, subjects – such as the history of the liberty of the Swiss. In the end, all those fell by the wayside.

A combination of his classical education (Gibbon was a formidable Latinist, somewhat less accomplished as a Hellenist), his personal experience of ‘Rome’ in the two-fold sense of both the ancient Roman Empire and the Roman Catholic faith, his supreme historiographical sensibility, and the fact that ‘the decline and fall of the Roman empire’ both was one of the truly big issues of not just western but global history and could be treated in the grand literary-rhetorical manner – all those factors conspired to result in the six-volume The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire or ‘Gibbon’s Rome’ for short – 2026 is the semiquincentennial anniversary of volume one.

A German ancient historian, Alexander Demandt, author of Der Fall Roms (1984), once compiled a list of over 200 proffered ‘causes’ of (or contributory variables supposedly helping account for or explain) the Roman Empire’s Decline and Fall. That suggests first that an entity such as the Roman Empire is massively complex and second that it’s a phenomenon not susceptible of ‘explanation’ by just a couple of (major) ‘causes’ such as the two proposed by Gibbon: barbarism and religion. Gibbon understood well that historians have interests and what we now call agendas. We shall explore Gibbon’s agendas later. Tom Holland’s Dominion – whatever his own personal religious faith/agenda (or none) might be – clearly takes a line of explanation opposite to that of Gibbon and likely has a personal as well as purely scientific agenda.

One brief comment of mine: neither historian privileges what I myself would, namely the underlying economic basis or bases of society without which there would be no possibility of any ideas existing whatsoever, let alone of their allegedly decisive historical agency. So much for ‘religion’. As for ‘barbarism’, it is both an idea, a concept, and a material phenomenon: the irruption of non-Romans, aliens, ‘barbarians’, from outside the frontiers of the Empire clearly did great damage to the fabric of the Late Roman Empire, e.g. at the Battle of Adrianople won by the Goths in AD 378. But that damage alone did not ‘cause’ the fall even of the Western Empire (usually set at AD 476), and the Eastern Empire continued without a complete break in the form of ‘Byzantium’ until the fall of the Byzantine capital Constantinople (originally Byzantion) to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 – as Gibbon’s own work demonstrated, however much he did not admire or approve of the Byzantine Greeks.

Gibbon had a considerable stake in the British Empire, of which the 13 American ‘colonies’ were – until the Revolution – a not inconsiderable part. His service in the Hampshire militia, trivial as it was in itself militarily, was a part of the really quite serious Seven Years’ War (1756-63), an imperial war between Britain and France. In 1774 he was ‘elected’ as a Member of Parliament for the ‘rotten borough’ of Liskeard in far southwest England. (He liked to tell the joke: why is a fat man like a Cornish voter? Because they both only rarely see their member.) In 1780 he stepped down from Liskeard and was re-elected for 1781-84 for Lymington in Hampshire. He sat altogether for eight parliamentary sessions under Tory Prime Minister Lord North, who also appointed him to a lucrative sinecure on the Board of Trade and commissioned him in 1779 to write – in French – a rejoinder to France’s support for the American rebels. As a keen reader of the ancient Greek historian of the Persian empire, Herodotus, Gibbon would have been aware of the tendency of empires to overstretch, their reach outstripping their grasp.

The Literature vs History problematic did not arise first with Gibbon, not by a long chalk. In a sense it was there from the very beginnings of historiography as such, since the reason ancient Greek and Roman historians were read and re-read was that they were copied and re-copied in manuscript form (on papyrus, then leather); and they were re-copied and re-read chiefly because of their literary quality rather than the acuity of their historical insight and analysis. With one famous exception: Thucydides. So there was nothing odd about Gibbon being extraordinarily and consciously readable: it went with the territory.

Where Gibbon was different, however, was in his combining literary fluency and facility with rigorous attention to the ‘nuts and bolts’ of the historian’s craft. There happens to be a work of Gibbon’s that perfectly exhibits this rigour, though it is not often read. It’s his 1779 Vindication – a defence of some passages in Chapters 15 and 16 of Volume One, to which pious Christian critics had taken extreme exception since, in their view, they demonstrated that Gibbon was actually an atheist. He retorted vigorously by cleverly sidestepping the theological issue and treating their attacks as directed not against his (religious) faith but against his (good) faith as a historian. We shall return to that.

A separate scholarly issue hangs over the question of what kind of a historian Gibbon was. Was he an 18th-century version of an essentially ancient type of historian – such as his own favourite, the Roman historian of empire and Julio-Claudian dynastic politics, Tacitus? That was the view of the very great Tacitean, the New Zealander Ronald Syme. Or was he one of the first of a new type of ‘modern’ historian, an Enlightenment historian, one who broke away from narrowly military-political-diplomatic history to embrace social, economic, intellectual and, above all, cultural history? That was the view of the eminently modern, cultural-intellectual historian, the Italian forced émigré Arnaldo Dante Momigliano. My own view coincides more with the latter than the former, but one can see how strongly personal agendas inevitably intervene in forming supposedly objective judgements of value.

As I’ve already in effect noted above, there was not a single Roman Empire but at least three. An empire, any empire (our word comes from a Latin word for ‘ultimate power’, imperium), needs a capital. Rome, the ‘eternal city’ (founded in the eighth century BC), was the capital of the empire that the Romans first acquired over most of Italy and then over most of the Mediterranean world and beyond as far as Britain in the West, and more briefly Parthia (Iran) in the East, between the fourth century BC and the first century AD. That empire was split in the fourth century AD into two: roughly a Latin-speaking West and a Greek-speaking East, the latter ruled from its new capital, the ‘new’ Rome that was Constantinople (re-named after the first – Catholic Orthodox – Christian emperor Constantine I). Then, as noted, the Western empire in effect ceased in 476. The last Western emperor, a mere boy, couldn’t have been more aptly named: Romulus (founder of Rome) Augustulus (little Augustus, the first Roman emperor).

But that was by no means the end of a (any) ‘Roman’ empire: the Byzantines (as we call them) proudly called themselves ‘Romans’ (Rhomaioi in Greek) and carried on at Constantinople under Justinian and Basil II the Bulgar-Slayer (r. 976-1025) among many others, even as their territory shrank more and more, until the final capitulation of Constantine XI Palaeologus to Mehmet II the Conqueror in 1453. So which ‘empire’ is it – or is it chiefly – whose decline and fall Gibbon set himself to explain? The Western – from the ‘Age of the Antonine emperors’ (96-180) to 476? But why then did he carry on his story and explanation of ‘the Roman empire’ for nearly another 1,000 years?

I’ll return to that – but first ‘immoderate greatness’, to which Gibbon attributed the fall of the empire. It’s a tendency of empires to want to expand, and the bigger the empires the more they do so immoderately until they reach a more or less defensible size. Except that in the case of Rome divine approval – Jupiter’s no less – had been given in advance for its imperial expansion to be ‘infinite’, literally without limit; and whenever the empire’s territory increased, so too did the size of the sacred perimeter of the city of Rome itself, the pomerium, increase.

That was the ideology. In practice, the Romans occupied what had been the heartland of the old Persian empire, Iran, only briefly, and they never extended their imperium as far west as the island of Hibernia, Ireland. And one of empire’s normal irritations, enemies just beyond the frontiers, was not absent, either. Which is why first Julius Caesar, tentatively, and then Emperor Claudius, definitively, ventured across the channel between Gallia and Britannia and conquered and occupied England, Wales and – up as far as the Antonine Wall – southern Scotland too. Was that ‘immoderate’? Certainly, after the huge increase under Augustus, who wisely advised his successor Tiberius not even to think about expanding the empire further, it proved eventually after some three centuries to be ungovernable as a single unit and split into two. But it still had a lot of dying left, and as the Later Roman and then the Byzantine Empire it struggled on until the mid-15th century of our era, virtually a ‘thousand-year Reich’.

AD 68/69 was ‘the Year of the Four Emperors’ – not a healthy sign for the future. But – following the stable interim age of the Antonines – the third century AD, the 200s, is often seen as the swing or pendulum century (we tend to divide the past up into century-long chunks) for the Western empire. A dreary, depressing series of less than overwhelming men fought – literally, militarily – their rivals for the top job, at tremendous cost to the empire as a whole. Until, that is, Diocletian acceded in 284, a man from what the Romans called Dalmatia, who built himself a palace not in or near Rome but in his home region adjoining the Adriatic at a place called Spalatum, now Split in Croatia. Indeed, ‘split’ was exactly what was happening to the governance of the Empire in the later third and early fourth century. Instead of a single Princeps, Rome now ‘enjoyed’ four joint rulers of differing status and power, hence their (Greek) name of the Tetrarchs.

Diocletian thought one good way to unify or reunify the Empire would be via religion, and he therefore launched a ‘Great Persecution’ of Christians, a sort of anti-crusade. But that backfired spectacularly, as the country- and village-based ‘pagans’ lost ground to the various kinds of Christian ‘cockneys’ of the towns and cities. Hence, eventually, the victory both military and spiritual of Constantine the Great (r. 312-337) and of his successors such as Theodosius I also ‘the Great’ (r. 379-395), who formally outlawed paganism. That was Gibbon’s ‘triumph of religion’. Not at all a good thing in his view, since it tended to promote fanaticism and intolerance, whereas Gibbon lamented the disappearance of the old pagan, polytheistic establishment. In an excoriating chapter on the rise of monasticism he memorably wrote that St Telemachus – a monk who had been slaughtered when trying to intervene to stop a gladiatorial show in Rome’s Colosseum arena – was the only monk to have died ‘in the cause of humanity’.

What of ‘barbarism’? Oddly in a way, Gibbon was less hostile to that. Or, to put it differently, he could see great virtue in at least some ‘barbarians’, such as Queen Zenobia of Palmyra in Syria, or – even – Mongol warlord Genghis Khan. And in the reflective essay with which he chose to conclude volume III, ‘General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West’, he observed that many of the barbarians irrupting into the empire from beyond the borders quite soon willingly settled down and became ‘Romanised’.

Gibbon did treat one outbreak of plague in the Roman empire as a seriously negative historical phenomenon, but that was the bubonic plague that broke out so damagingly between 541 and 549 in the reign (from Constantinople) of Justinian (527-565). The Antonine plague of smallpox that erupted in 165 and peaked a couple of decades later in the reign of Marcus Aurelius he more or less bypassed entirely, since to dwell on it would have undermined his contention – partly an intertextual literary flourish – that in the reigns of the Antonines the condition of the human race (or that part of it in which Gibbon was interested) was ‘most happy and prosperous’. More critically significant of ‘decline’ for Gibbon was indeed the internal decay of the imperial fabric due to the weakening of its civic and moral fibre caused not least by the officially promoted adoption of inhuman as well as inhumane Christian values.

I’ve already mentioned the chapter on the rise of monasticism, and how that equated in Gibbon’s view to (moral-spiritual) ‘decline’. Two other chapters, both external-facing but in very different ways, are especially memorable. Many of us Europeans might well agree that one of the ancient Romans’ greatest political and cultural achievements and legacies was their law, more precisely their civil law, that is the law as it affected cives, Roman citizens. Unlike Greek cities most of the time, the Romans were far more generous in extending their citizenship to aliens, both to those who came to settle within the ever-expanding city of Rome (over a million inhabitants by the early years of the first millennium CE) and to people who remained living in their native lands but were enfolded within the great Roman ‘family’ by citizenship grants for, for example, military or political service. It was one of Rome’s greatest peculiarities that a large proportion of the capital city’s resident citizens were ex-slaves, freedmen and women, and their descendants.

In the sixth century AD Emperor Justinian commissioned lawyer Tribonian to systematise and to hierarchise, in a historical way, the entire Roman civil law code. The result, in Latin, was the Corpus Iuris Civilis, the ‘Body of Civil Law’, discussion of which formed the substance of Gibbon’s 44th chapter. But was it entirely admirable? In Gibbon’s view it was a mere compilation, and Tribonian was but a servile flatterer of his imperial master. Above all, did that burst of law-codification do anything much to stem the decline of the Byzantine Roman empire? That question is rhetorical.

Quite different was chapter 50. Gibbon, having decided to move on from 476, knew that as a completist he would have to end his work with the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks, successors to the Seljuk Turks and – in the grand scheme of things – successors to the original Caliphate of the seventh century established immediately after the death of the Prophet. He therefore had to account for the rise of the world’s third universal religion after Judaism and Christianity – Islam – and to tackle head-on the age-old historiographical conundrum of the role of individuals in ‘making’ history. Chapter 50 was therefore focused on the life and career of Prophet Muhammad (c.570-632) and on a part of the world, Arabia, only a part of which had ever fallen under Roman or Byzantine sway. Gibbon’s judgement was nuanced but in the end on balance negative: Muhammad was for him a religious fanatic, if not something of an impostor. The material effect of the rise of Islam on the Byzantine empire and its consequent diminution was, however, undeniable.

There is a quotation from chapter three where he says – somewhat tongue-in-cheek surely – that history is ‘little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind’. That was an echo of Voltaire, for whose enlightenment philosophy he had great respect but for whose historiography he had a low regard. And Gibbon’s historiographical horizons were emphatically Herodotean – not Thucydidean – embracing science, economics, demography and, above all, literary scholarship as well as war and politics. Apart from his beloved ancient historian sources from Herodotus and Tacitus on, there was a veritable host of medieval and later scholarship on which he drew, works of the érudits whom Voltaire affected to despise, among them Mabillon, Tillemont, Muratori, and the Centuriators of Magdeburg. But a special place in terms of its influence on Gibbon must be accorded to the Abbé de la Bléterie’s 1735 life of the (apostate) emperor Julian. Gibbon’s attitude to Julian was ambivalent, something that a more recent passionate student of Gibbon, Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, was able to make great play with.

What lessons does Gibbon hold for readers today? How far does the loss of virtue among elites as a possible, and possibly significant, contributory variable matter? It’s reasonably easy to identify who are the creative elites of any culture, society or civilisation today. Far harder to decide is what are to be counted as their most important virtues – whether intellectual, moral, social, or (purely) technological. In our world, or much of it today, STEM subjects and above all computer-driven digital technology seem to rule the roost, way over and above ethical-moral judgements of social-political value, such as belief in the positive value of actively participatory forms of democracy. This seems to me not only a grave category mistake but also a guaranteed recipe for – yes – civilisational decline and eventually fall.