The Moonspeaker:
Where Some Ideas Are Stranger Than Others...

HISTORICAL GIBBON

INTRODUCTION

Among the many lists of "great books" focussed on non-fiction, many of them include an entry for Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Included it may be, yet it also seems that this massive work by a member of the english minor gentry of the eighteenth century is barely read today. Perhaps this shouldn't be surprising, since it was published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788, coming to over 4000 pages in its earlier editions. The edition I eventually worked my way through was published in two volumes of fine print, coming to approximately 2700 pages. As Maciej Ceglowski observed of Fyodor Dostoyevsky composing his great novels, Gibbon wrote all of this with either quill or early wood and metal dip pens – by hand. In addition, because Gibbon traced the roman empire all the way to its end, he had to deal with its second era when it was based in "the east" at the great city of byzantium, now better known as istanbul. For that place and period, the sources available to him were poor, and he had no means to counter what now is recognized as grave distortions due to orientalism. That Gibbon's work remains interesting to scholars is partly historical, and partly topical. Literary scholar David Womersley noted that Gibbon emphasized human agency while admitting that "fortune" also played a role in the events he covers. In his history of the footnote, Anthony Grafton details how Gibbon applied this still new method of citation, rendering his work accessible to critical examination and debate. Gibbon's history originally garnered attention because of his infamous analysis of the role of the development of early christianity in the fall of roman empire, and so he remains to this day of special interest to people who question religion and its social and political uses. Certainly his analysis of an empire in social and military collapse holds attention in any period where conditions that seem similar are observed. While Gibbon himself was very a much a political and social conservative, whatever his intentions, his history will regularly be read as a critique of the present.

Not many people read the whole of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, (from now on HDFRE) and for good reason, considering its sheer length and mass of detail. My first encounter with it was in an abridged version that came to around 750 pages, and I collapsed at the end of the section covering the reign of Diocletian and his co-regents, Maximan, Galerius, and Constantinus. In my experience abridgements of multi-volume projects are frustrating to read, and this one was no exception. Worse yet, there was no introduction to explain what the person who did the abridging had decided to leave out or why. Often this makes no difference to the general reader, but in the case of Gibbon's work it was baffling because I had heard that his whole argument was that the only thing that brought the roman empire down was christianity, and he had critiqued the religion in a controversial way. Yet there was no sign of the controversial pair of chapters on christianity, and really, the text came across as disjointed and boring. Nevertheless, enough of Gibbon's text was there to confirm what else I had heard about him: that he was a notable prose stylist. It was much later I encountered people talking about and psychoanalysing his footnotes, which provide a striking parallel text to the main narrative. Overall I concluded my impression of Gibbon's account of the fall of the roman empire couldn't be remotely accurate, and to have a fairer sense of it I would have to read the whole thing, not expecting to do it. Reading multi-volume fantasy novels is one thing, an over two year old history of the roman empire something else. Then, for all too much ill, the COVID-19 pandemic struck. And so, my social life as sharply truncated as everyone else's, when done work for the day I began to read my way through many of the items on my "maybe I'll read that someday" book list, including Gibbon.

The apparently three volume edition I read was published by random house, probably between 1927 and 1950. I can't be quite certain because the first volume had to be rebound because of heavy use, losing its copyright page, and as it turned out it was originally a two volume edition. The original second half of volume one and volume two were almost pristine in comparison, with no pencil or pen marks, no irate comments jammed into the margins, not even around Gibbon's account of the origins and early development of islam. Also missing from this edition, apparently by design, are Gibbon's prefaces. Added to this edition is a smattering of newer footnotes, but it is not clear who this later annotator is. Otherwise it did not appear to be bowdlerized or otherwise altered, so I decided to stick with it and figure out the different editions of it later. As it was, I selected the one I did primarily because it was not abridged, it was apparently printed in three volumes rather than six or seven, and all three volumes were available. The other editions in more volumes were all incomplete, one edition missing two of six volumes, another four, all with different font sizes making for incommensurate page numbers so that they couldn't be combined to put together a full set of all seventy-one of Gibbon's chapters. Having taken all this trouble because I can't abide reading such a dense text on-screen, I finally brought the three selected volumes home from the library and began finishing a chapter or so each evening. Imagine my surprise on discovering that no, Gibbon did not argue that christianity alone caused the decline and fall of the roman empire, and that he considered it to have begun the process of decline and fall from the moment it was founded. As the text went on, I found myself also learning that the potential power and indeed danger of Gibbon's political content is often lost due to the infamy of his critique of christianity. While I often found him frustrating, as a man of his time and place must inevitably be to a person reading him today, I also began to appreciate his savvy in managing the potential reception of his grand project.

After all, the first volume of HDFRE hit the bookshops during the early industrial revolution and the reign of the (in)famous english king George III. The english constitutional monarchy was in difficulty, and the absolute monarchy in france was in serious trouble, serious enough that it fell before Gibbon's death barely six years after he completed the last volume of HDFRE. The british public were debating questions of empire, citizenship, and religion, and these were just as critical to the development and history of the roman empire as the british one. Therefore Gibbon's book came out in the right time and place, catching the zeitgeist plus early improvements in the capacity of industrialized printing and binding. Not only could his multi-volume work be produced relatively easily, when it became a best seller, the printers could keep up with demand. The controversy inspired by the first volume generated plenty of useful publicity and a flurry of counter and supporting publications. According to Gibbon's autobiographies, edited together into a composite record by John Murray and published in 1894, he did not read many languages apart from english, french, ancient greek, and latin. This put him at a second disadvantage when writing about the byzantine era of the roman empire, and his critics made sure to take him to task over this. Yet he evidently overcame a great deal of this disadvantage via the aspects of his practice as a writer and historian that differed from his contemporaries. Womersley describes the differences as including Gibbon's use of many ancient and modern references rather than just one or two translations of a given historian. He described and compared what his sources had to say, then provided his own interpretations.

But before it is possible to engage with Gibbon's work more specifically, it is still necessary to provide a little more context. First, I will give a brief and opinionated basic timeline of the history of the roman empire, then with the assistance of premiere Gibbon scholar David Womersley, an outline of the publication chronology of the first edition of HDFRE. Both of these will be presented as lightly annotated lists. Second, I will outline the afterlife of HDFRE via three subsequent editions, H.H. Milman's in four volumes, J.B. Bury's published in seven volumes, and the most recent three-volume opus by David Womersley. Milman and Bury were unusual scholars in their own right, putting their own prominent spins on the interpretation and presentation of Gibbon's work. Readers who opt to read the Milman or Bury editions may find this part of the background information especially useful, as their versions were published in multiple hardcopy formats.

Let us begin then, with the two timelines necessary to appreciate the sheer scale of time Gibbon had to cover for HDFRE, and then how much time he needed to make this happen. Starting with a basic and opinionated timeline of the roman empire:

• 212 BCE – the romans begin systematically pillaging other italian cities, which leads eventually to the social wars usually dated to circa 90 – 88 BCE
• 44 BCE – Julius Caesar assassinated in attempt to keep political power in the senate and reform debt relations
• 27 BCE – Octavian gulls the roman senate into naming him emperor after claiming to be Julius Caesar's adopted nephew for better credibility
• 100 CE – approximately when Gibbon's history begins, after the death of Domitian
• 476 CE – official end of rome as the political and military centre of the roman empire
• 530 CE – Constantine is driven out of italy, retreats to byzantium and establishes it as the new political and military centre of the roman empire
• 1054 CE – the eastern orthodox church breaks from the roman pontificate
• 1299 CE – the commonly accepted foundation year of the ottoman empire
• 1453 CE – end of the roman empire, and much to the frustration of european-based colonial powers, the year byzantium-constantinople became the capital of the ottoman empire
• 1590 CE – death of pope Sixtus V, who undertook a massive construction program in rome and sought to re-establish the papal states as a major political and military power controlling western europe

Now for the basic timeline of Gibbon's six volume history, interspersed with some key social and political events that would have affected him in the course of this work:

• 1737 CE – birth of Edward Gibbon in putney, england
• 1745 CE – jacobite uprising meant to return a catholic Stuart to the english throne begins
• 1754 CE – Gibbon's father sends him to lausanne, switzerland in order to force him to reconvert from catholicism and restart his formal education
• 1756 CE – seven years' war begins
• 1758 CE – Gibbon returns to england
• 1760 CE – George II's reign ends; George III's reign begins
• 1763 CE – seven years' war ends
• 1765 – 1769 CE – period in which Gibbon began working consciously on HDFRE
• 1775 CE – Gibbon's original intended publication year for Volume I of HDFRE
• 1776 CE – Volume I of HDFRE published; 13 of the british colonies in north america rebel
• 1780 CE – Gibbon's original intended publication year for Volumes II and III of HDFRE
• 1781 CE – Volumes II and and III of HDFRE published
• 1787 CE – Gibbon's original intended publication year for Volumes IV, V and VI of HDFRE
• 1788 CE – Volumes IV, V, and VI of HDFRE published; Gibbon leaves for switzerland
• 1789 CE – the french revolution overthrowing the absolute monarchy begins; having inherited a house in lausanne, Gibbon remains in switzerland
• 1793 CE – last full year Gibbon lives in lausanne
• 1794 CE – death of Edward Gibbon in sheffield, england
• 1799 CE – end of the french revolution removing the Bourbons from absolute power in france

Gibbon's life and work also fall within that famous period in europe of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the enlightenment. In this period many absolute monarchies were curtailed by the advent of constitutional governance, outright overthrow, or loss of coercive power due to managing to utterly impoverish their societies by incessant warfare. This is also the period when the catholic pope's pretensions to earthly power were under effective attack by the kingdom of italy, to the point that in 1870 the pope lost control of the former papal states, reducing his authority to today's vatican city.

Inevitably, given the popularity of HDFRE and how tragically soon after its completion Gibbon died, there began a minor industry of what can be called "annotated editions." A "critical edition" that seeks to establish a "best text" seems to have taken until Womersley's close studies of Gibbon's language and use of sources to produce a three volume set in 1993. The most frequently reproduced posthumous editions are from the mid and late nineteenth century, the first by a cleric trying to somehow neutralize Gibbon's critique of the christian church. Annotated by by H.H. Milman, this edition began as a four-volume work with added maps as well as Milman's commentary. On reprinting it began to expand as various publishers produced more and more luxurious editions, so that four volumes plus an index volume grew to six, then seven, then twelve elaborately illustrated books. Milman was quite a controversial man in his own right, writing plays and The History of the Jews From the Earliest Period Down to Modern Times in three volumes, published in 1829. He did not include his authorities in the original published version, and Milman's critics took after him accordingly.

By contrast, J.B. Bury's annotated edition strove to give a sense of impartiality and technical analysis, at least in his introduction. He briefly compared different editions Gibbon oversaw and how his edits changed the text, often for style and readability. Then Bury tries to identify "out of date" parts of Gibbon's text, preparatory to "correcting" them with his own annotations. Notable is Bury's volume 7, which includes a nine page discussion of Gibbon's authorities, a seventeen page bibliography, maps, and an index. By the end of the nineteenth century, many readers would no longer be as familiar with the authorities or the geography of the roman empire compared to those who could afford Gibbon's books a hundred to a hundred-fifty years before. Bury was not a cleric but a "scientific historian," who also wrote a 1913 book, A History of Freedom of Thought. Nevertheless, earlier in his career when he worked on his edition of Gibbon, according to university of miami english professor Frank Palmeri, "Bury's supplemental notes to the Decline and Fall also aim to make Gibbon's history acceptable to Christians, a project Bury shares with a series of nineteenth century editors who abandoned the early direct attacks on Gibbon's history and instead attempted to appropriate the Decline and Fall for orthodox religious opinion." (Top)

READING REFLECTIONS

Going into reading Gibbon, the understanding I had was that he declared it the fault of christianity, so in all honesty my expectation was to give up after 50 pages or so and leave it at that. Who wants to read at least hundreds (out of thousands) of pages telling how awful christianity is, whether or not the reader is inclined to agree? Well, within those 50 pages I learned that this "single factor" description is an atrocious misrepresentation, and I am inclined to gently disagree with Womersley, who seems to suggest in his 1988 book that Gibbon really was primarily blaming christianity in the first volume of HDFRE. Then Womersley goes on to argue that Gibbon changed his mind as he read and analysed more sources. My agreement is gentle in major part because Womersley undertakes a detailed rhetorical analysis of the text that digs into the reception and understanding of the book in Gibbon's time. Womersley is sticking very scrupulously to that, as opposed to what is inevitably impression of the late twentieth to early twenty-first century reception of Gibbon I have from researching online, in my local libraries, and observing the state of the copies of HDFRE in those libraries. The tomes containing Gibbon's Volumes I and II are almost always missing or heavily worn, with patches of annotation, usually, sure enough, at the sections where Gibbon discusses "primitive christianity" and christians. This also suggests there are aspects of Gibbon's critique that still sting to this day, and that is very interesting. But I am not going to delve into that yet, because it takes quite some time before christianity comes into the picture, a full fifteen chapters, which in the original edition comes to over 600 pages.

The complex, multifactorial causes of the roman empire, according to Gibbon, come into play right at the start. The rot was started by none other than the first emperor himself, Octavian. Indeed, a careful reader can see how the problems Gibbon identifies begin even earlier, and that the capacity for the roman governance system to minimize or stop them was destroyed in at least the early republic. However, Gibbon had to choose his areas to critique carefully, because he could not challenge the notion of "aristocratic rule" too sharply, and in truth he was in favour of aristocratic rule in a constitutional monarchy. He didn't leave england as permanent residence to protest the government of his day, but because he was in difficult financial straits, and like many in britain of his time he found it easier to pay the bills on the mainland, and best of all he had inherited a house. Being a supporter of constitutional monarchy, Gibbon decried Octavian's success in reducing the roman senate to his servant and maintaining his direct control of the army. In effect, Octavian did not have real controls on his power from the plebians or the aristocrats, and he had created a system in which an emperor needed to maintain the loyalty of the army as backstop to his authority. The new roman monarchy, which was never officially called one because according to roman political folklore, they refused to have a king, did nothing to curb the problem of increasing social inequality. In fact, the new system exacerbated it. To keep the army happy, and the aristocrats rich, ultimately the roman empire had to keep expanding. When the army couldn't pay itself with plunder, then the roman treasury had to make up the difference, and in that day and age this really did mean raised taxes in coin and in some areas in kind. The drain of the refurbished ruling class and the roman imperial family soon led to a cycle of trying to tamp down social unrest with a bread dole to stave off starvation and ready access to spectacles and spectator sports. Hence the infamous "bread and circuses."

Gibbon notes the creation of the praetorian guard, originally a republican body meant to serve as bodyguard for a general sent abroad to make war on another city, was another serious problem. With Octavian, it became the permanent bodyguard of the emperor, and developed rapidly into a sort of army within the army. They became a dissolute pack of kingmakers whom only a charismatic and successful warring emperor who led the fighting could control. Such an emperor had the best chances of keeping their confidence and ensuring they were always paid. An emperor without either charisma or military ability soon found themselves struggling in the toils of a protection racket as they tried to keep the praetorian guard onside, even to the point of needing to use the praetorian guard to protect himself from factions of his own family. Octavian was a war lord, and to this day there are still a collection of statues to his ego, his own account of his deeds, and his paid poet Virgil's attempt to better Homer in the Aeneid to show for it. He was a startling high point that today thanks to access to more records and archaeological data we now understand was also a product of his sense in marrying the eventual empress Livia.

The next emperor who was also a successful general was Septimus Severus, who won a bloody civil war nearly two hundred years after Octavian. The praetorian guards set up the civil war by literally auctioning off the throne to a man with what today certainly sounds like an unfortunate name, Didius Julianus. Severus ruled the roman empire as if he were in the middle of a warzone, which in truth he often was, but this did not lead him to fix the root causes of the situation. Gibbon explains how Severus destroyed byzantium, which was in many ways a successor to the fabled city of troy, punching a key hole in the imperial defences both in military and trade terms. Likely in hopes of improving his ability to keep the praetorian guard in particular and the army in general in check, Severus embedded an exemption from all civil laws for the emperors into the roman governance system. The result was an even worse hyperdependence on arbitrary military force and bribery rather than the rule of law or civil government. Gibbon steadily hammers on this point about arbitrary power through the first two volumes. I should note also that Gibbon does provide a digest of what is going on with the surrounding major military powers. He describes the monarchies in the area today known as iran and iraq, and traces the "germanic tribes" among whom we understand now were more celtic and caucasian (as in from the caucasus region) elements than historians could see in the eighteenth century.

Another corrosive factor in a terrible brew for the roman empire was the issue of roman citizenship, and Gibbon is very concerned about this, because it also ties into questions of culture, religion, and service. Some of his most powerful writing is dedicated to this topic, and also some of his most racist and ridiculous. In fact, Gibbon's own critical reading and discussion leads him almost to break free from the tropes Edward Said would later so famously discuss in his book Orientalism. In his first two volumes Gibbon already seems to struggle at times with serious cognitive dissonance as the uncomfortable parallels between what he talks about as due to an influx of foreign riches and culture, yet he has already shown how the rot started from inside the roman empire, not outside. Roman citizenship was originally an exclusive thing, later expanded so that the inhabitants of formerly independent cities in italy could have it, then to any soldiers who finished service in the roman army and took over stolen land as colonists. Later still, citizenship could be purchased. Gibbon can't resist suggesting the inclusion of "lesser peoples" contributed to the ruin of the roman empire. But his more detailed and documented argument notes how citizenship had to be expanded in order to expand the tax base. The tax base had to expand to fund the army, which had to expand to expand the empire, which then had to expand to pay the veterans with land so they could make money by farming and the like and therefore pay taxes... you can fill in the rest of the loop. There is another one for the obscene expenses of the imperial court. This exacerbated the separation between the military, praetorian guard, the emperor, the imperial court, and the general population. Soon a minority of actual roman citizens fought to expand and hold the empire, leaving the job mainly to mercenaries. Contempt for the skills necessary to govern, from accounting to public speaking, meant that these activities were relegated more and more often not just to ambitious plebeians, but even to slaves. Regardless, the majority of roman citizens in italy, let alone rome itself, were not so enamoured of the empire that they wanted to fight for it because they were ground down by taxes, poverty, and lawlessness. The roman authorities were less and less law-abiding all the time, shaking down the people within their jurisdiction for protection money or simply leaving them to fend for themselves. Gibbon makes clear that it was not a constant nightmare though. Some regions were better off than others depending on the time period, and could do very well indeed.

All the same, by the time the reader reaches the infamous Chapters XV and XVI of Volume I of HDFRE, the sense of nightmarishness is predominant. Therefore when Gibbon begins his discussion of the "primitive christians" and the early development of the religion, I suspect it would take a hard heart indeed not to share Gibbon's sympathy with them. And it is I think, a real sympathy on Gibbon's part. The early christians were struggling to cope with terrible conditions, including the severe social inequality. Of course, this is just where he began to raise the ire of the critics who wrote broadsides against him. Whatever comes next, the simple piety of the primitive christians is going to put the behaviour of their successors in the shade. Furthermore, Gibbon juxtaposes the later christians who have established a formalized hierarchy and begun creating communities of monks with his discussion of what he refers to repeatedly as "effeminate practices" brought from "the east" by the roman nobles. Yes, here is an exemplar of the "effeminate asians" and their culture trope, which for Gibbon seems to centre on the introduction of eunuchs. These male castrates are a common feature of extremely patriarchal societies, especially within aristocratic families fearful for their bloodlines. A eunuch, unable to get himself into the succession, was supposed to be an exceptional support for the family he was bound to. So eunuchs could be, but they could and did rapidly develop into another source of kingmakers analogous to the praetorian guard. Gibbon speaks about eunuchs with a level of revulsion that is at times quite startling. It is hard to say how much of this is about what was done to these men, and how much about their capacity to influence royal children even to the point of becoming their social fathers, if not taking power directly themselves. Early christian interpretations of scripture as encouragement to men to castrate themselves, and the phenomenon of officially celibate and powerful monks and ascetics echo some of the logic behind the creation of a literal eunuch class of men.

I didn't really appreciate this juxtaposition and just what it suggests until I had read far deeper into HDFRE, when Gibbon begins following the roman empire after it is recentred on byzantium. There are now various studies of eunuchs and their social power in byzantium, china, and the different major centres of the islamic caliphates available for the curious to study, but I have not yet managed to find my way to what must be a fascinating range of books and articles on Gibbon's analysis. That his examination has reached especially dangerous waters became truly clear to me at the beginning of Volume IV, but in Gibbon's day the reading public was bound to be way ahead of any present-day reader. In the eighteenth century the questions of dogma and what if anything justified a split between different branches of christianity were a part of everyday life and debate. The reverberations of the sixteenth century protestant reformation were still affecting politics in western europe, including the more recent and england-specific echoes of the jacobite uprising. Therefore I imagine my four-point summary after reading Volumes IV-V below would have made Gibbon and his contemporaries roll their eyes, it was so evident to them.

1. Gibbon inveighs again against the introduction of eunuchs without looking too far into how they got their power; he is satisfied with putting it down ultimately to the "pusillanimity of the nobles."
2. Then he starts talking about the proliferation of church officials and the utter ruin of "primitive christianity."
3. He never overtly acknowledges that maybe Constantine's interest in the church was as a divisive power to help him keep power, though he emphasizes Constantine's divide and control ethos.
4. Instead Gibbon emphasizes the presence of all those ostensibly celibate officials who expect to live off their "congregations."

"Constantine" is the roman emperor who effectively refounded byzantium as a major roman city, and then recentred the empire on it. The "eastern emperors" later spend insane amounts of money and lives trying to permanently retake rome itself and reunify the eastern and western halves of the empire.

Gibbon is profoundly unimpressed by monastic orders, and he connects the growth of monasticism with the corruption of christianity. He tries to claim that the "forces" encouraging monasticism were especially influential on women and children, striving to equate it with "effeminacy." But he does seem to be talking out of both sides of his mouth on the point, because the evidence he presents soon demonstrates that monasticism appealed most to men because it was an easy route to political power. He summarizes the "origins, progress, and effects of the monastic life" in Chapter XXXVII, the second last chapter of Volume III, just where it will stand out. Gibbon deems monasticism a form of slavery and cowardly escape indulged in most often by hypocrites, a means by which men avoid military service and paying taxes. Yet he also discusses the blind obedience expected of both monks and soldiers, stating that "the monks were more expensive and numerous than the soldiers of the East," in Chapter XLII, near the beginning of Volume IV. That statement doesn't seem credible, but it all depends on whether he is making a literal or a rhetorical point. If notably high-placed monks have a baleful influence on the government, and that was his point, then it is certainly a rhetorical one. In either case, reading along with Gibbon as he sets out his narrative, it can be a strange and bewildering experience to read about "heresies" before there is an established centralized church, and his descriptions of obscure, but profoundly dangerous conflicts over doctrine sometimes left me none the wiser. Religious studies majors and well-read christians will certainly get far more from those chapters, including XLVII and XLIX.

For me what began to stand out was Gibbon's serious concern about the development of parallel, competing governments. He chronicles how politically ambitious men took advantage of and fomented christian fanaticism in order to become an alternate government. They strove to replace the denuded praetorian guard and the regular army as kingmakers, and although they did not quite succeed, for several centuries at least they came very close. At the very end of Chapter XXVII Gibbon remarks, "The loss of armies, the destruction of cities, and the dishonour of the Roman name, ineffectually solicited the successors of Gratian to restore the helmets and cuirasses of the infantry. The enervated soldiers abandoned their own and the public defence; and their pusillanimous indolence may be considered as the immediate cause of the downfall of the empire." In the next chapter he will declare the supposed death of paganism, and the curious timing of the introduction of saints and relics into christian worship practices. To Gibbon, this is another powerful turning point, when money and equipment can't be found for the military, while there is a growing frenzy of investment in new churches and their decoration and equipment. This is quite a stinging indictment of the elites of the time, who refused to do what was necessary to improve the lives of the people in general, including new christian converts. Rather than invest in restoring civil order and either maintenance of the empire or an ordered retreat into narrower confines, they cynically took advantage of the new religion to further enrich themselves and increase their political power. For all the older and newer commenters declaring Gibbon vicious and a misrepresenter of the christian church, it seems to me that he was neither of these things. His tone does suggest that he considers monasticism rather than christianity effeminate, and that christianity and naïve converts were used and abused for self-interested ends. Just because there seemed to be similar use and abuse of christianity and naïve christians in his own time does not make him wrong. (Top)

CONCLUSION

While I would not claim that HDFRE is anything remotely like light reading, it was and is certainly eye-opening to read it, in whole or in part, so long as "in part" is a well-done abridged edition or perhaps annotated section excerpt. Gibbon is famous for the flack he caught for the infamous last two chapters of his first volume, but it may well be that his political analysis caused the greater discomfort. He basically says that the roman empire was a mistake made possible by a senate too cowardly to resist Octavian, and generally power and luxury-obsessed elite men who wanted those things without paying any personal price for them. The last thing they wanted was to put themselves or their immediate cohort at risk to expand or hold the empire by fighting, diplomacy, and administration. Gibbon was probably never going to bluntly state that the paranoia-driven choices of absolute rulers unrestricted by a parliament or any civil law wreak havoc by either slaughtering anyone competent enough to make them feel threatened or selecting multiple heirs to split the empire between. To my eye, Gibbon is at his best when he is analysing the structural changes of the administration and military control of the empire. To achieve this, he defines the roman empire as literally one centred on rome and then its various successor warlord states in "the west," then "the east," until at last it all peters out in the dangerous embarrassment of the "holy roman empire." An inexperienced reader might wonder how he could have kept going on when "the roman empire" is fundamentally over by the end of the first volume. Perhaps if Gibbon had realized how big his project would turn out to be, he might have sought a title that evoked what he traced more specifically: the ongoing political, social, and military impacts of the roman empire. More likely he would have run away screaming, so it is as well he had no idea he would work at least twenty years and compose what would come to thousands of printed pages.

An at once amusing and annoying discovery I made in Gibbon's pages is that he seems to be one of the earliest writers to refer to "navel gazing" as a self-indulgent religious practice in english. Roughly halfway into Volume VI, in Chapter LXIII, Gibbon spends some time on mystic practices in the eastern orthodox church.

The fakirs of India, and the monks of the Oriental church, were alike persuaded, that, in total abstraction of the faculties of the mind and body, the purer spirit may ascend to the enjoyment and vision of the Deity. The opinion and practice of the monasteries of mount Athos will be best represented in the words of an abbot, who flourished in the eleventh century. "When thou art alone in thy cell," says the ascetic teacher, "shut thy door, and seat thyself in a corner; raise thy mind above all things vain and transitory; recline thy beard and chin to thy breast; turn they eyes and thy thought towards the middle of the belly, the region of the navel; and search the place of the heart, the seat of the soul. At first, all will be dark and comfortless; but if you persevere day and night, you will feel an ineffable joy; and no sooner has the soul discovered the place of the heart, than it is involved in a mystic and etherial light." This light, the production of a distempered fancy, the creature of an empty stomach and an empty brain, was adored by the Quietists as the pure and perfect essence of God himself; and as long as the folly was confined to mount Athos, the simple solitaries were not inquisitive how the divine essence could be a material substance, or how an immaterial substance could be perceived by the eyes of the body.

This is funny for revealing a key origin of the commonly garbled understanding of meditation practices learned from buddhist and hindu monks, including the unfortunate label of "navel gazing." It is frustrating for its ethnocentrism, and what does seem like a bit of protesting too much due to his early flirtation with catholicism. But of course, that is simply speculation. On the flip side, this led me to a fascinating book by Anita Strezova, who explained what this practice is called and consists of in the eastern orthodox church.

Parallel to humanism, an enigmatic movement known as hesychasm reappeared in Byzantine consciousness at the end of the 13th century. The central tenet of this mystical spirituality was the development of hesychia, a term denoting tranquility and stillness, and a psychosomatic technique (consisting of repetition of the Jesus Prayer) to achieve knowledge and experience of the divine. The art of hesychia existed since the beginning of Orthodox monasticism in the 3rd century, and the monastic elders commonly transmitted this tradition to their spiritual children.

Nowadays even most thoughtful atheists and agnostics would not use the tone Gibbon does in his commentary on meditation practice at mount athos, and it seems to me it seriously takes away from his narrative when he gets caught up in discussing spiritual practices and religious differences. I suppose any of us should be so lucky, should we have a mass of writing survive over two hundred years after us, to manage to sound only so obnoxious in the parts we wrote on things we were most partisan about. (Top)

TWO OPTIONAL EXTRAS

Depending on the edition of an abridged or full HDFRE a person may borrow or buy, including electronic versions, Gibbon's prefaces may be left out. This is unfortunate, because they are short but revealing and worth ten minutes or so to look at them. I have appended them in a fold out section below, which will expand on scroll over and retract again on moving the mouse outside of its border.

Many editions include Gibbon's annotated table of contents, but sometimes they don't, or seem to be missing parts, especially in secondhand hard copies. More recent editions add date ranges to the chapter annotations in the table of contents and the marginal notes, but that again is not always the case. Worse yet, many newer editions do not indicate the volume divisions. Where Gibbon divided his volumes matters a great deal, and I think it does a disservice to both him and the reader to leave these out. I have added a composite reference version of the table of contents in a second fold out section below. (Top)

1. Womersley, David P. "Introduction," The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London: Penguin Classics, 1994), xi-cvi.
2. Grafton, Anthony. The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge (u.s.): Harvard University Press, 1997), 101-103
3. For example see this humanist society biography: Humanist Heritage - Edward Gibbon (1737–1794).
4. I agree that this is an exceptionally ugly acronym. However, referring constantly to "Gibbon's Decline and Fall," which tends to make it sound like the discussion is about him personally or as "Decline and Fall" as if no other empire or society ever did such a thing struck me as worse.
5. I am deliberately not identifying the specific abridgement beyond giving the detail that it had no introduction. Any well-done abridgement will have one, including the 2001 penguin classics version abridged by David P. Womersley.
6. Seriously. It all seems to have started with an apparently real statement by historian Philip Guedalla to the effect that Gibbon "lived out his sex life in his footnotes" as paraphrased in a 1997 stanford review article, The Decline and Fall of Footnotes. I have my doubts about the claim, and it does strike me as a mean-spirited indirect reference to his later health issues, which are widely believed to include scrotal swelling that forced him into social isolation and a lengthy struggle to manage the condition before his death. The wikipedia biography is remarkably subtle in its coverage of Gibbon's later life ill-health.
7. This edition was more substantially rebound than I originally appreciated. It is titled The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, from The Modern Library, which is now an imprint of Random House. Based on my further research, this was originally a two volume edition, which can be viewed in the internet archive at Volume 1 and Volume 2. I still can't find an identification for the person with the initials "O.S." who added their annotations among Gibbon's footnotes.
8. Gibbon, Edward. John Murray, editor. The Autobiographies of Edward Gibbon. London: William Clowes and Sons Limited, 1896. (Online edition). He describes his acquisition of latin on page 44; greek, 53; latin, greek, and french 133-134.
9. Womersley, "Introduction."
10. As evidenced by his publications and ongoing research including: The Transformation of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1988 cambridge university press), the already mentioned critical and abridged editions of HTDFRE, and ongoing study of Gibbon's writing style such as that mentioned in University of Oxford News and Events: Gibbon's "Earliest Use of Irony" Revealed by Manuscript, 21 august 2012. Very interested readers may want to follow up further details from Womersley's oxford university faculty biography.
11. Original edition (1777-1782) online: Volume One (1776) | Volume Two (1781) | Volume Three (1781) | Volume Four (1788) | Volume Five (1788) | Volume Six (1788) | A Vindication of Some Passages of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Chapters of the History of the the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1779).
12. H.H. Milman edition (1836-1838): Volume One | Volume Two | Volume Three | Volume Four | Volume Five.
13. J.B. Bury's edition (1896-1900): Volume One | Volume Two | Volume Three | Volume Four | Volume Five | Volume Six | Volume Seven.
14. Womersley, "Introduction."
15. The debt relationship issue is not my opinion, it reports in extremely high level and simplified terms a part of Michael Hudson's research on lending and debt relations in the ancient world. See his website and his book ...and Forgive Them Their Debts and his upcoming The Collapse of Antiquity.
16. Womersley, David P. The Transformation of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1988), 41-43; also see the publication dates on the copyright pages of the scans of the first edition.
17. Besides Gibbon's autobiographies, his wikipedia page also assisted with identifying important dates for the man himself. The other dates are widely known, and may be checked against the OED and of course, wikipedia. For more on england's eighteenth century history, there is a six volume account by William E.H. Lecky which includes excellent and detailed table of contents for each volume. Just reading over those 6-8 pages at the start of each one will provide a solid overview. A History of England in the Eighteenth Century: Volume 1 | Volume 2 | Volume 3 | Volume 4 | Volume 5 | Volume 6
18. Complementary course materials posted for the manuscript studies program at the university of alberta defines a critical edition as "an attempt to establish a "best text" (closest to the author's "ur-text") through comparison of various versions (study of "variants"); the editor chooses a "copy text" (usually that of the most authoritative manuscript) and "corrects" it using the variants from other manuscripts." See Manuscript Studies Medieval and Early Modern V.iii. Textual Bibliography: Kinds of Edition from Manuscript Studies Medieval and Early Modern Course Notes by Stephen Reimer, last revised may 2015. To study Reimer's excellent notes and bibliography, he provides an excellent overview page and site map.
19. See Milman's wikipedia page for a basic account of his life and writing. For those interested in another example of an early modern history wrestling with how to handle footnotes, citations, and whether to reproduce documents and lengthy quotes, it is worth checking out his The History of the Jews From the Earliest Period Down to Modern Times.
20. The discussion of authorities and bibliography are well worth examining.
21. Today this is even more true, regardless of whether a person could literally afford a copy of the books. An anonymous person opted to put together a wordpress site of Decline and Fall Resources to address this issue. Unfortunately most of the links go to files hosted in googledocs.
22. Wikipedia: J.B. Bury. A History of Freedom of Thought (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1913).
23. University of Miami College of Arts and Sciences: Emeritus Faculty.
24. Palmeri, Frank. "The Satiric Footnotes of Swift and Gibbon," The Eighteenth Century, 31(3), 1990: 245-262. Page 259.
25. The best short introduction to the Octavian's efforts to control the record of his reign is in Richard Miles' 2000 article, "Communicating Culture, Identity, and Power," pages 29-62 in Experiencing Rome: Culture, Identity, and Power in the Roman Empire, edited by Janet Huskinson (London: Routledge).
26. The historical city of troy was originally near the coast of modern-day turkey, in an excellent position to manage access to the black sea and beyond. It was sacked multiple times in its long history, but in the end it was probably the receding sea that ended the trade and military power that could be exerted from the site.
27. The number of nations bordering on the roman empire of course varied depending its extent at the time. The quickest online access point for learning about these is the Roman History section of the World History Encyclopedia.
28. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon books, 1978.
29. Yes, I am using the name "italy" anachronistically here.
30. For example, see Almut Hofert, Matthew M. Mesley and Serena Tolino (Editors), Celibate and Childless Men in Power: Ruling Eunuchs and Bishops in the Pre-Modern. New York: Routledge, 2018.
31. I would need to re-read much more closely and do considerably more research to make a serious argument on this point, though.
32. HDFRE, Volume Six (1788), 278-279.
33. According to my OED, "a Renaissance cultural movement that turned away from medieval scholasticism and revived interest in ancient Greek and Roman thought."
34. Strezova,Anita. Hesychasm and Art: The Appearance of New Iconographic Trends in Byzantine and Slavic Lands in the 14th and 15th Centuries. Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2014. 1-2.