The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Overview

The Decline and Fall is around three thousand six hundred pages in six volumes, published between 1776 and 1789, and it covers thirteen centuries: from the Antonines in the second century to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, with a coda on the ruins of Rome in the fifteenth. Gibbon said the idea came to him sitting among those ruins in 1764, listening to friars singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter.

Nobody should feel obliged to read all of it. Volumes one to three, ending with the fall of the Western empire, are what most courses mean, and a good abridgement gets you the argument and the best prose in four hundred pages.

The style is the reason it survives. Gibbon writes in long balanced periods with the weight falling at the end, and his characteristic device is irony so dry that readers argue about whether it is there. He will describe a miracle in the language of piety and place one word at the end of the sentence that dissolves it. The footnotes, which are numerous and often in Latin, are where he says what the text merely implies, and they contain most of the jokes.

He is not a neutral guide. Gibbon is an eighteenth-century sceptic who admires civic virtue, distrusts enthusiasm of every kind, and regards the medieval world as a long interruption. That outlook shapes every judgement, and the book is more interesting when you can see it working.

What happens

Volume I, the age of the Antonines. The opening chapters describe the empire at its height under Trajan, Hadrian and the Antonines, which Gibbon famously calls the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous. He then sets out why it could not last: an absolute government with no rule of succession, an army increasingly recruited from the provinces and loyal to its generals, and a citizenry that had stopped defending itself.

Then the third century, the emperors made and killed by the troops, Commodus, Caracalla, the Severans, and the long crisis. Diocletian’s reorganisation and Constantine’s conversion follow.

Chapters 15 and 16. These are the ones that caused the scandal and they still repay reading. Gibbon asks a historian’s question: why did Christianity spread so rapidly? And he answers with five secondary causes, meaning causes other than the divine one, which he formally sets aside as being beyond his province. The zeal of the early Christians, inherited from Judaism. The doctrine of a future life. The miraculous powers attributed to the church. The strictness of Christian morals. And the union and discipline of the Christian republic, which made it a state within a state.

Chapter 16 then examines the persecutions and argues, with a great deal of close work on the sources, that the number of martyrs was far smaller than tradition held, and that Christians had killed more Christians over doctrine than the pagan emperors ever killed in total. The clergy of three countries attacked him. Gibbon’s reply, A Vindication, is a masterclass in cold-blooded scholarly demolition.

Volumes II and III, the fall of the West. Julian the Apostate, whom Gibbon plainly likes. The Germanic peoples, treated at length and with respect. Alaric and the sack of Rome in 410. Attila. The last Western emperors and the deposition of Romulus Augustulus in 476. Interleaved are the great church quarrels, Arianism, the councils, the monks, the growth of the papacy, all described in a register that ranges from clinical to openly contemptuous.

The General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West, a short essay at the end of volume three, is the nearest Gibbon comes to stating his thesis plainly: the decline was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness, prosperity ripened the principle of decay, and the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest.

Volumes IV to VI, the East. Justinian and Belisarius, the Corpus Juris Civilis, the rise of Islam with a long and comparatively fair-minded account of Muhammad, the Crusades, which come off badly, the Mongols, and the Turkish conquest of Constantinople. These volumes are less read and contain some of the best narrative in the work.

How to read it

Read the first three chapters, then chapters 15 and 16, and then decide. Those five chapters contain the prose, the thesis and the controversy, and they will tell you whether you want the rest.

Read the footnotes. Not some of them, all of them on any page you care about. Gibbon uses them for source criticism, for asides he could not put in the text, and for jokes, and reading the book without them is reading half of it.

Get an edition that keeps them in English where possible and does not expurgate. Victorian editions sometimes cut the franker notes, which Gibbon had written in Latin precisely because he expected them to be left alone.

Do not read it for current scholarship. A great deal has changed: late antiquity is no longer treated simply as decline, the Germanic settlements look more like negotiated accommodation than invasion, and the role of Christianity is contested in every direction. Gibbon is read now for the argument, the judgement and the prose, and it is more rewarding to argue with him than to fact-check him.

Watch his own position. When he praises the tolerance of pagan Rome, where all worships were equally true to the people, equally false to the philosopher and equally useful to the magistrate, he is describing the eighteenth century’s ideal and holding the church to it.

Questions it raises

• Did Rome fall, or change? Gibbon assumes the first. What does the question look like if you assume the second?
• He treats Christianity’s success as having ordinary historical causes while formally setting the divine one aside. Is that neutrality, or the argument in disguise?
• The Antonine age is called the happiest in human history. Happiest for whom, in a society resting on slavery?
• Gibbon’s explanation is immoderate greatness, decay ripening with prosperity. Is that a historical claim or a moral one?
• The footnotes often contradict the tone of the text above them. What is he doing by splitting his voice in two?
• If a history’s value outlasts its accuracy, what exactly is it that lasts?