The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

• 1. Introduction

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  The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire arrived in the world in February 1776, the same year the American colonies declared independence from Britain. Edward Gibbon, an English historian, had originally set out to write something far more modest: a history of the decline and fall of the city of Rome. What he ended up producing was six volumes spanning nearly fifteen centuries of civilization, from the peak of Roman power in 98 CE to the ruins of Byzantium in 1590. How does a writer's ambition expand so dramatically? And how does a book published in the eighteenth century still shape how we think about empire, religion, and collapse today? Those are the questions that follow.

• 2. A Life's Work

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  Gibbon compared the publication of each succeeding volume to a newborn child. That image says something about how completely the work consumed him. His 1796 autobiography, Memoirs of My Life and Writings, is devoted largely to his reflections on how the book virtually became his life. Although he published other books, this project claimed the great majority of his working years, with Volume I appearing in 1776, Volumes II and III in 1781, and the final three volumes together in 1788.

  His original plan was narrow. He wanted to chronicle the fall of a single city. Only later did he expand his scope to take in the entire Roman Empire and all the forces that shaped its long unraveling. To build that argument, he drew on sources from scholars he admired: Montesquieu's Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline, published in 1734; Voltaire's Essay on Universal History, from 1756; and Bossuet's Discourse on Universal History, dating to 1681. He did not simply borrow their conclusions. He built on their frameworks while insisting, wherever possible, on returning to primary sources rather than the accumulated tradition of Church writing.

• 3. The Central Argument

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  Gibbon placed civic virtue at the heart of his explanation. His case was that the Roman Empire fell to barbarian invasions in large part because its citizens had gradually lost the sense of shared obligation that once held the state together. Christianity, in his view, was a major driver of that erosion. He argued that large sums of wealth were transferred from secular affairs toward promoting the activities of the Church, that many Christians of wealth renounced their lifestyles to enter monasteries, and that Christianity's emphasis on peace reduced the number of people willing to serve in the military.

  Scholars since have found each of these specific claims harder to sustain than Gibbon made them appear. The pre-Christian empire, critics pointed out, also spent heavily on religion, so the shift in expenditure was not as stark as Gibbon suggested. The number who became monastics, while real, was small compared to those who staffed the imperial bureaucracy. And the military decline from Christian pacifism was, by most later assessments, negligible for the army's overall effectiveness. Historian S. P. Foster summarized Gibbon's posture bluntly: he "blamed the otherworldly preoccupations of Christianity for the decline of the Roman empire, heaped scorn and abuse on the church, and sneered at the entirety of monasticism as a dreary, superstition-ridden enterprise."

• 4. Controversy and Defense

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  The first two volumes were well-received and widely praised. Volume 3 changed the climate. Critics attacked Gibbon as a "paganist" for arguing that Christianity, or at least the abuse of it by some clergy and followers, had hastened Rome's fall. Numerous tracts appeared condemning his work. Voltaire was seen by many as the intellectual source behind Gibbon's anti-Christian reading, and Gibbon's attitudes were visibly shaped by the anti-clericalism and secularisation of the Enlightenment.

  Gibbon answered his critics directly. In 1779, he published A Vindication of Some Passages in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Chapters of the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Historian Hugh Trevor-Roper assessed the outcome without ambiguity: "The success of Gibbon's Vindication was immediate and complete. It had been one of the decisive battles of literary history." Gibbon had also challenged the Church on more specific grounds, estimating far smaller numbers of Christian martyrs than tradition had accepted, and treating modern Church writings as secondary sources to be set aside in favour of primary ones. That methodology, as much as any particular conclusion, was what unsettled his opponents.

• 5. A Contested Legacy

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  John Julius Norwich admired what Gibbon did for historical methodology but considered his hostile treatment of Byzantium flawed. Norwich went further, blaming Gibbon for the lack of scholarly interest in the Byzantine Empire throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Gibbon himself acknowledged this in later editions, noting that Byzantium was simply not his focus. The Yugoslavian historian George Ostrogorsky offered a more measured verdict: "Gibbon and Lebeau were genuine historians, and Gibbon a very great one, and their works, in spite of factual inadequacy, rank high for their presentation of their material."

  The book even crossed into outright censorship in the early nineteenth century. In the Kingdom of Brazil, the royal censor José da Silva Lisboa had it forbidden on the grounds that it contained dangerous ideas for the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves. A second censor, Francisco de Borja Garção Stockler, later reversed that judgment, permitting the book as one of "the few products that are most admirable for the human spirit."

• 6. Echoes in Culture

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  Piers Brendon, who wrote The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997, argued that Gibbon's work "became the essential guide for Britons anxious to plot their own imperial trajectory. They found the key to understanding the British Empire in the ruins of Rome." That sentence captures the extraordinary reach of a title and a framework. Jefferson Davis took it directly when he called his memoir The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. William Shirer named his account of Nazi Germany The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Even David Bowie borrowed the structure for The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

  Poets circled the book too. Noel Coward's "I Went to a Marvellous Party" placed "Gibbon's divine Decline and Fall" in the mouth of a satirical speaker, calling it "pretty flimsy, no more than a whimsy." Isaac Asimov was more candid about the debt: in his poem "The Foundation of S.F. Success" he admitted his Foundation series, about the fall and rebuilding of a galactic empire, was written "with a tiny bit of cribbin' from the works of Edward Gibbon." In 1995, the journal Classics Ireland published punk musician Iggy Pop's reflections on the book in a short article called Caesar Lives, in which he wrote: "America is Rome. Of course, why shouldn't it be? We are all Roman children, for better or worse."