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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The Collected Works of Edward Gibbon is a monumental compilation that encapsulates the intellectual brilliance and historical insights of one of the 18th century's foremost historians. Best known for his seminal work, 'The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,' Gibbon showcases a narrative style that marries eloquence with critical analysis, weaving a rich tapestry of political, cultural, and social dimensions of history. His works are embedded in the Enlightenment tradition, reflecting a profound skepticism towards organized religion and a deep appreciation for classical antiquity, which provides readers with a nuanced understanding of the interplay between history and civilization's moral evolution. Edward Gibbon, born in 1737, was not just an acclaimed historian but also an astute observer of contemporary society. His extensive travels across Europe and his scholarly engagements fostered his critical outlook on the complexities of empire, particularly how moral decay can precipitate downfall. Gibbon's own struggles with religious beliefs and societal norms heavily influenced his writing, allowing him to approach historical narratives with both passion and a sense of duty to elucidate the lessons of the past. For readers seeking to grasp the intricate dynamics of power, culture, and decline, Gibbon's collected works offer an indispensable repository of knowledge. This compendium not only enriches our understanding of Roman history but also serves as a timeless reflection on the cyclical nature of civilizations, making it a pivotal addition to any thoughtful reader's library. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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The Collected Works of Edward Gibbon
Table of Contents
Introduction
This collection presents a comprehensive portrait of Edward Gibbon, assembling his most influential historical achievement alongside his autobiographical reflections, private correspondence, and a concise external study. It unites The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire with Memoirs of My Life and Writings, Private Letters of Edward Gibbon, and J. C. Morison’s biographical Gibbon. Together these works reveal the public historian and the private man, and frame his achievement within later critical assessment. The purpose is not only to gather texts but to offer a coherent view of Gibbon’s intellectual life, his methods, and the continuing resonance of his approach to history and prose.
At the core stands The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788. It traces, with vast chronological range, the transformation of the Roman world from the era of the Antonines to the fall of Constantinople. Gibbon combines narrative with analysis, describing institutions, warfare, religion, culture, and law within a single, architectonic design. He writes as a historian of the Enlightenment, attentive to evidence and skeptical of legend. The result is a monumental synthesis whose scale and ambition have made it a cornerstone of historical literature and a touchstone for later scholarship.
Gibbon’s method in the History is marked by rigorous engagement with sources and a distinctive prose that balances gravity with a controlled irony. He draws on ancient and medieval authors and on the modern learning available in his time, annotating copiously to foreground evidence and dispute. His footnotes are integral to the work’s design, forming a parallel discourse of criticism, citation, and aside. The narrative proceeds with clarity of structure and rhythm of cadence, yet it remains grounded in documentation. This blend of erudition and style, of sweeping design and textual scrutiny, has defined the work’s standing for readers and historians alike.
Memoirs of My Life and Writings, published posthumously in 1796 and arranged from several drafts by his literary executor, Lord Sheffield, reveals Gibbon’s self-portrait. It recounts his formation as a reader and historian, his experiences on the Continent, and the long labor that culminated in the History. The Memoirs also outline the publication of the volumes and the reception that followed. While shaped by editorial decisions, the work remains a privileged guide to Gibbon’s priorities: disciplined study, orderly composition, and measured judgment. It adds texture to the public career by situating it within a life of sustained intellectual commitment.
Private Letters of Edward Gibbon offers a complementary record of the historian in conversation with friends, family, and correspondents. Much of Gibbon’s correspondence first appeared after his death in volumes edited by Lord Sheffield, and subsequent selections have made this private voice widely accessible. The letters show his habits of reading, his views on contemporary affairs, and the practicalities of authorship. They display a more informal cadence than his published prose while retaining the precision and wit associated with his name. Read alongside the Memoirs, the letters illuminate the daily context and personal relationships that informed both the composition and reception of the History.
J. C. Morison’s Gibbon, a volume in the English Men of Letters series, supplies a succinct nineteenth-century appraisal of the historian’s life and work. Drawing on the Memoirs and letters as well as the published History, Morison situates Gibbon within English prose and European historiography, clarifying his literary manner, intellectual commitments, and achievement. The biography condenses a large subject into a readable compass and provides a vantage from which later readers may gauge the reputation of Gibbon in the decades after his death. As an external portrait, it adds perspective, placing Gibbon’s work within the evolving tradition of critical evaluation.
The collection spans multiple genres and text types. It includes a grand historical narrative, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; an autobiographical account, Memoirs of My Life and Writings; a body of personal correspondence in Private Letters of Edward Gibbon; and a literary-biographical study in J. C. Morison’s Gibbon. Together these forms encompass narrative history, memoir, letters, and biography. They offer, respectively, public argument, self-explanation, intimate exchange, and critical synthesis. The variety is not accidental: each form reveals a different register of Gibbon’s thought, enabling readers to see how method, temperament, and context interlock across his work.
Unifying these works are themes characteristic of the Enlightenment mind: respect for evidence, skepticism toward received narratives, and a cosmopolitan engagement with the classical past. The History exhibits sustained inquiry into causes and consequences over long duration; the Memoirs reflects on the discipline required for such inquiry; the letters show a working life of reading, drafting, and debate; and Morison’s biography analyzes how these elements cohere. Throughout runs an interest in civil and religious institutions, in the fortunes of law and culture, and in the interplay of character with circumstance. The result is a composite portrait of historical thinking in practice.
Stylistically, Gibbon is renowned for a controlled periodic sentence, a polished cadence, and an irony that sharpens rather than obscures judgment. His notes converse with his narrative, inviting the reader to weigh authorities and arguments. The Memoirs and letters display a more relaxed register, yet they maintain exactness of phrase and a preference for proportion and order. Morison’s biography, while of a later period, recognizes these hallmarks and measures their effect. Across genres, one finds consistency of tone and method: an insistence on clarity, a commitment to documentation, and a literary art that advances rather than distracts from historical understanding.
The significance of this body of work lies in its shaping of modern historical practice and in its enduring readability. The History set a standard for integrating scholarship with narrative design, influencing subsequent historians across languages and traditions. The Memoirs and letters help explain how such a standard was conceived and maintained, recording the habits and choices that produced it. Morison’s biography testifies to the durability of Gibbon’s reputation and frames subsequent debate. Together, these texts show why Gibbon remains central: he exemplifies disciplined inquiry joined to literary art, and he models how to think with evidence across vast historical scales.
Publication contexts sharpen appreciation of what is read here. The History appeared in stages, enabling Gibbon to refine his design while engaging readers and critics. The Memoirs and much of the correspondence were published posthumously under Lord Sheffield’s editorship, a fact that guides responsible interpretation of tone and emphasis. Morison’s biography represents a later, independent vantage, formed within a distinct critical climate. Awareness of these contexts does not diminish the works; it enriches them, reminding readers that texts emerge from editorial as well as authorial choices, and that reception, selection, and framing are part of the history of ideas.
Taken together, these volumes furnish an integrated approach to Gibbon. One may begin with the History for its commanding narrative, consult the Memoirs for the making of that narrative, turn to the letters for the day-to-day movement of thought, and use Morison’s biography to triangulate a contemporary assessment. The collection’s purpose is to make that dialogue available in one place, so that public edifice, private workshop, and informed appraisal may be read in concert. In doing so, it presents not only a master historian’s achievement, but also a model of how serious reading, method, and style can form a lasting whole.
Author Biography
Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) was an English historian and parliamentarian, best known for The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a six‑volume masterpiece published over the later eighteenth century. Writing in the Enlightenment, he combined skeptical inquiry, philological rigor, and a commanding narrative style to reinterpret the transformation of the classical world. His history became a touchstone for debates about empire, religion, and the uses of evidence, and it reshaped the ambitions of historical writing in English. Beyond its erudition, the work’s irony and clarity secured Gibbon’s place as one of the most influential prose stylists of his age.
Born in Putney, near London, Gibbon grew up a precocious and often ailing reader whose education was irregular until he entered Magdalen College, Oxford, as a teenager. Disappointed by the teaching he found there, and caught up in a youthful conversion to Roman Catholicism, he left England and studied in Lausanne under a Calvinist tutor, where he returned to Protestantism. In Switzerland he attained disciplined habits of study, mastering Latin and Greek and absorbing the historical outlook of the French Enlightenment. Engagement with classical authors and with thinkers such as Montesquieu helped shape his comparative approach to institutions, manners, and the dynamics of social change.
During the Seven Years’ War he served in a county militia, an experience that gave him administrative routine, camaraderie, and time to read. His first substantial publication, written in French, was the Essai sur l’étude de la littérature, which reflected his cosmopolitan education and argued for broad, comparative scholarship. After the war he undertook extended travel on the Continent, including a formative stay in Italy. Amid the ruins and museums of Rome in the mid‑1760s, he conceived the project that would define his career: a comprehensive, source‑based account of the long decline and transformation of the Roman Empire from the Antonines to Byzantium.
Gibbon spent the next decades amassing and interrogating sources—chronicles, legal codes, inscriptions, coinage, ecclesiastical histories—while planning a work both panoramic and minutely annotated. The first volume of Decline and Fall appeared in 1776 to immediate acclaim for its learning and style, paired with controversy over chapters explaining the rise of Christianity. He continued publishing the subsequent volumes, completing the six‑volume sequence between 1776 and 1788. The work traced administrative overextension, military pressures, internal fragmentation, and religious change, without reducing events to a single cause. Its sweeping scope and analytic footnotes became exemplary for historians seeking to unite narrative with critique.
In parallel with authorship, Gibbon pursued a public career. He sat in the House of Commons in the late 1770s and early 1780s and held a place on the Board of Trade, aligning with government on imperial and financial questions. The routine of office coexisted with a rigorous writing practice that prized verification and multilingual scholarship. He compared Greek and Latin texts, weighed contradictory testimonies, and documented claims in expansive notes that often carry a second, ironic commentary. Aware that his interpretation of Christian antiquity provoked rebuttals, he issued a formal defense of his argument, clarifying method rather than retreating from conclusions.
After his government post ended, Gibbon resettled for extended periods in Lausanne, where the quiet of Swiss life suited the finishing of later volumes and subsequent revisions. He maintained a circle of learned friends, corresponded widely, and continued to refine his sources. In his final years, declining health drew him back to London for medical care; he died in 1794. He left behind drafts of an autobiographical memoir and miscellaneous essays, which were edited and published after his death and have become central documents for understanding his methods, reading habits, and self‑conception as a historian of the Enlightenment.
The legacy of Decline and Fall is unusually durable. Scholars have challenged particular judgments—especially on religion and causation—yet continue to depend on Gibbon’s apparatus, periodization, and sweeping geographic frame. His prose has been admired for balance, irony, and cadence, influencing later historians and essayists. The work remains in print, translated, and taught, a fixture of courses on Roman, Byzantine, and historiographical studies. Modern editors annotate and occasionally revise his references, but the central achievement endures: a demonstration that literary art, skeptical inquiry, and exhaustive documentation can coexist in a single history, expanding how readers imagine the fate of empires.
Historical Context
Edward Gibbon’s collected works emerge from the long eighteenth century, a period marked by the Enlightenment, widening empires, and the consolidation of print culture in London and across Europe. Born in 1737 at Putney, Surrey, and dying in 1794 in London, Gibbon’s life intersects with the Seven Years’ War, the American Revolution, and the early convulsions of the French Revolution. The writings gathered under his name, together with later editorial and biographical labors, reflect an intellectual world that prized erudition, travel, and correspondence. Across narrative history, memoir, and letters, Gibbon’s oeuvre registers the cosmopolitan habits, political debates, and scholarly methods that defined his age.
Gibbon’s formative years were divided between England and the Swiss city of Lausanne. After a brief and unsatisfactory residence at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1752–1753, he converted to Roman Catholicism, provoking his father to send him to Lausanne for Protestant instruction under Daniel Pavillard. There he reverted to Protestantism and gained fluent French, continental friends, and access to francophone scholarship. His association with Suzanne Curchod, later Madame Necker, placed him proximate to financial and salon networks that would shape European opinion. These early transnational experiences informed the polyglot learning, comparative perspectives, and epistolary habits evident across his history, memoir, and private letters.
The Swiss and French intellectual milieu of the 1750s and 1760s exposed Gibbon to the writings of Montesquieu and the historical schools of Huguenot erudition, Benedictine scholarship, and the republic of letters. Lausanne’s ties to Geneva, Paris, and Ferney connected him indirectly to Voltaire’s historical polemics and to debates over toleration and ecclesiastical authority. Gibbon’s first publication, the French-language Essai sur l’Étude de la Littérature (1761), situated him within continental discourses on classical taste and critical method. The habits of annotation, comparison of sources, and secular explanation he learned there would later permeate his historical narrative, autobiographical reflections, and a lifetime of correspondence.
Britain’s wartime mobilization during the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) touched Gibbon directly through service in the South Hampshire Militia from 1760 to 1762. The militia camps, the rhythms of recruitment, and the logistics of provincial defense sharpened his sense of institutions, discipline, and civic obligation. They also acquainted him with the bureaucratic procedures of a modern state at war. This experience, framed by the rise of a global British Empire and its fiscal-military apparatus, fed his attention to military organization, civil administration, and the fragile equilibrium of power—concerns that recur in his historical judgments and echo in the public and private record of his life.
Gibbon’s Grand Tour of 1763–1764 culminated in Rome, where on 15 October 1764, seated amid the ruins of the Capitol, he conceived the project that would define his career. The tour coincided with a surge of antiquarian discovery, including the excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii, and with a neoclassical revival that framed antiquity as both exemplar and caution. These currents encouraged rigorous engagement with material remains, inscriptions, and topography. Gibbon carried home not merely impressions of ruins, but a disciplined sense of how monuments, coins, and texts could be integrated—a method later visible in the architecture of his scholarship and the texture of his letters.
Returning to London, Gibbon entered a world of clubs, publishers, and parliamentary intrigue. He cultivated ties with printers and booksellers such as William Strahan and Thomas Cadell, mastering the economics and etiquette of the metropolitan book trade. Elected to Parliament in 1774, and again in 1781, he supported Lord North’s ministry and served as a Commissioner of Trade and Plantations from 1779 to 1782. These roles embedded him in the bureaucratic and political life of the capital, yielding perspectives on commerce, colonial administration, and party discipline. They also anchored him in circles where conversation, criticism, and patronage routinely shaped literary and historical production.
The American Revolutionary crisis, from Lexington in 1775 to the Treaty of Paris in 1783, formed the backdrop to Gibbon’s mature publishing years. Parliamentary debates over taxation, representation, and imperial sovereignty sharpened arguments about liberty, order, and the fate of states. The Gordon Riots of 1780 dramatized religious anxieties within Britain, even as pamphleteers contested the moral standing of empire. Gibbon’s public stances, private misgivings, and analytical habits were forged in this crucible of political scrutiny. His letters trace the rhythms of committee rooms and debates; his memoir reflects on the demands of office; his historical meditations weigh the fragility of expansive polities.
Gibbon’s scholarship was nourished by an extraordinary apparatus of learned sources. He read Louis-Sébastien de Tillemont’s Mémoires, the Benedictine Jean Mabillon on diplomatics, Ludovico Antonio Muratori on Italian chronicles, and Charles du Fresne du Cange on medieval philology. He absorbed philosophical history from Montesquieu and Scottish contemporaries such as David Hume and William Robertson. Institutional resources anchored this reading: the British Museum library, the Bodleian at Oxford, and the Bibliothèque du Roi in Paris. Elected Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries (1768) and of the Royal Society (1774), he moved within networks that prized precise citation, textual criticism, and the sober accumulation of evidence.
The London book market of the 1770s and 1780s rewarded comprehensive works issued in handsome quarto volumes. Gibbon’s first major publication in this mode appeared in 1776; subsequent installments followed in 1781 and 1788. He cultivated European readers through translations, continental correspondents, and a style that appealed to philosophes and Anglican divines alike. Subscription lists, journal reviews, and salon notice in Paris, Lausanne, and Edinburgh amplified his reach. The apparatus of footnotes—ironic, learned, sometimes combative—became part of the performance of scholarship. Across narrative, memoir, and letter, he wrote for an international audience trained to weigh authorities and relish debate.
Religious controversy accompanied his fame. The account of Christian origins and ecclesiastical power drew swift replies from clergy and lay apologists, among them Richard Watson of Cambridge, James Chelsum, and Henry Edward Davis. Pamphlet wars and sermons sharpened public attention to historical method, dogma, and evidence. Gibbon responded with a Vindication in 1779, defending both sources and inferences. This disputatious context mattered beyond a single work: it influenced his self-presentation in autobiographical drafts, his cautious formulations in letters, and the editorial strategies adopted by friends and executors. The period’s contested toleration left its mark on how he wrote and how he was read.
After leaving office following the fall of Lord North in 1782, Gibbon settled again at Lausanne in 1783, in the household and company of his friend Jacques Georges Deyverdun. There he completed his labors, surrounded by the calm of Lake Geneva and the social world of Vaud. Swiss neutrality, republican traditions, and a cultivated society offered both detachment and conversation. From 1789, the French Revolution intensified anxieties across the region; Gibbon’s letters register both curiosity and disquiet as events in Paris reverberated through Geneva and Bern. In this setting—half exile, half home—he refined reflections on change, stability, and the contingencies of history.
Gibbon’s later years were shadowed by chronic ill health and the deaths of friends, including Deyverdun in 1789. The conditions of life in a provincial yet cosmopolitan town shaped his routines of study, correspondence, and sociability. He traveled to Paris in the early phase of the Revolution, observing its spectacle with a wary eye, and returned to England in 1793 for medical attention. He died on 16 January 1794 in London, at the house of his friend and literary executor, John Baker Holroyd, later Lord Sheffield. Buried at Fletching in Sussex, Gibbon left manuscripts, letters, and drafts that would be shaped for posterity.
Eighteenth-century epistolary culture bound together the worlds Gibbon inhabited. Reliable postal routes linked Putney, Oxford, London, Lausanne, Paris, and Rome, enabling exchanges of books, news, and opinion. His letters to Holroyd, to Lausanne friends, and to continental scholars track the circulation of ideas and the logistics of scholarship: requests for editions, complaints about printers’ delays, the shipment of quartos across borders. These same habits of written self-scrutiny informed his autobiographical drafts. The private letter, the memorandum of reading, and the published preface formed a continuum, through which he narrated his own career and commented on the social and intellectual tempers of his time.
The management of Gibbon’s literary remains illuminates late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editorial practice. In 1796, Lord Sheffield arranged the Miscellaneous Works from multiple drafts and notebooks, including the Memoirs of My Life and Writings and selections from correspondence. The editorial aim balanced piety, discretion, and readability, an approach characteristic of family-controlled literary estates. Later Victorian editors, including Rowland E. Prothero in 1896 for the Private Letters, sought fuller texts and stricter transcription, reflecting archival ideals then ascendant. Across these stages, the construction of Gibbon’s posthumous image became an interpretive act, shaping how readers connected the scholar, the public man, and the individual.
Victorian reception reframed Gibbon within a canon of English prose and historical method. J. Cotter Morison’s short biography, published in 1878 in the English Men of Letters series, measured him against contemporary ideals of scientific history associated with Leopold von Ranke, and against the rhetorical standard of Macaulay. Morison’s portrait emphasized Gibbon’s disciplined reading, ironic style, and secular analysis, while acknowledging enduring controversies over his treatment of religion. This phase of reception coincided with new annotated editions and scholarly apparatus, culminating later in J. B. Bury’s editorial labors. Such reappraisal integrated Gibbon into a professional historiography taking shape across British universities.
Gibbon’s works circulated through a vast infrastructure of learning: academies in Edinburgh and Geneva, coffeehouses and clubs in London, salons in Paris and Lausanne, and libraries public and private. The British Museum, founded in 1753, and societies of learning provided readers, critics, and correspondents. Printed indexes, catalogues, and travel guides oriented him to archives and monuments. This environment fostered collaborative scholarship, even when polemical. It also sustained the habits—footnoting, cross-referencing, checking variants—that mark his pages. Through memoir and letters, one sees the backstage labor: the negotiation with editors, the pursuit of scarce folios, the corrections sent across the Channel despite war and revolution.
Read together, the history, autobiographical papers, letters, and later biography set Gibbon within the intertwined histories of Enlightenment erudition, British politics, and European sociability. They trace a life from Putney to Lausanne, Oxford to Rome, Parliament to the lake shore, and back to London for its end. Dates and places—1753 at Lausanne with Pavillard, 1764 on the Capitol, 1774 in the House of Commons, 1783 resettled by Lake Geneva, 1794 in St. James’s—anchor a career of remarkable consistency in method and ambition. The collection records a scholar’s craft, a gentleman’s world, and the ways posterity constructs, edits, and debates both.
Synopsis (Selection)
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
A panoramic history tracing the Roman world from the Antonines through the fall of the Western Empire to the 1453 capture of Constantinople, with extended treatment of Byzantium and the rise of Islam. Gibbon argues that cumulative internal weaknesses and external pressures—administrative overreach, fiscal and military strain, invasions, and religious transformation—gradually eroded imperial cohesion.
Memoirs of My Life and Writings
Gibbon’s autobiographical account of his upbringing, education, travels, and intellectual formation. It outlines the conception and composition of Decline and Fall, his working methods, and the personal circumstances that shaped his career.
Private Letters of Edward Gibbon
A selection of correspondence revealing Gibbon’s private voice on daily life, travel, friendships, and politics. The letters chronicle the progress of his historical project and offer candid commentary on contemporary society and scholarship.
Gibbon – Biography by J. C. Morison
A concise critical life of Gibbon that situates him within his eighteenth-century context. Morison surveys Gibbon’s career, assesses his style and historical method, and considers the reception and influence of Decline and Fall.
The Collected Works of Edward Gibbon
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Preface By The Editor.
The great work of Gibbon is indispensable to the student of history. The literature of Europe offers no substitute for “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” It has obtained undisputed possession, as rightful occupant, of the vast period which it comprehends. However some subjects, which it embraces, may have undergone more complete investigation, on the general view of the whole period, this history is the sole undisputed authority to which all defer, and from which few appeal to the original writers, or to more modern compilers. The inherent interest of the subject, the inexhaustible labor employed upon it; the immense condensation of matter; the luminous arrangement; the general accuracy; the style, which, however monotonous from its uniform stateliness, and sometimes wearisome from its elaborate ar., is throughout vigorous, animated, often picturesque always commands attention, always conveys its meaning with emphatic energy, describes with singular breadth and fidelity, and generalizes with unrivalled felicity of expression; all these high qualifications have secured, and seem likely to secure, its permanent place in historic literature.
This vast design of Gibbon, the magnificent whole into which he has cast the decay and ruin of the ancient civilization, the formation and birth of the new order of things, will of itself, independent of the laborious execution of his immense plan, render “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” an unapproachable subject to the future historian: * in the eloquent language of his recent French editor, M. Guizot:—
“The gradual decline of the most extraordinary dominion which has ever invaded and oppressed the world; the fall of that immense empire, erected on the ruins of so many kingdoms, republics, and states both barbarous and civilized; and forming in its turn, by its dismemberment, a multitude of states, republics, and kingdoms; the annihilation of the religion of Greece and Rome; the birth and the progress of the two new religions which have shared the most beautiful regions of the earth; the decrepitude of the ancient world, the spectacle of its expiring glory and degenerate manners; the infancy of the modern world, the picture of its first progress, of the new direction given to the mind and character of man — such a subject must necessarily fix the attention and excite the interest of men, who cannot behold with indifference those memorable epochs, during which, in the fine language of Corneille —
‘Un grand destin commence, un grand destin s’acheve.’”
This extent and harmony of design is unquestionably that which distinguishes the work of Gibbon from all other great historical compositions. He has first bridged the abyss between ancient and modern times, and connected together the two great worlds of history. The great advantage which the classical historians possess over those of modern times is in unity of plan, of course greatly facilitated by the narrower sphere to which their researches were confined. Except Herodotus, the great historians of Greece — we exclude the more modern compilers, like Diodorus Siculus — limited themselves to a single period, or at least to the contracted sphere of Grecian affairs. As far as the Barbarians trespassed within the Grecian boundary, or were necessarily mingled up with Grecian politics, they were admitted into the pale of Grecian history; but to Thucydides and to Xenophon, excepting in the Persian inroad of the latter, Greece was the world. Natural unity confined their narrative almost to chronological order, the episodes were of rare occurrence and extremely brief. To the Roman historians the course was equally clear and defined. Rome was their centre of unity; and the uniformity with which the circle of the Roman dominion spread around, the regularity with which their civil polity expanded, forced, as it were, upon the Roman historian that plan which Polybius announces as the subject of his history, the means and the manner by which the whole world became subject to the Roman sway. How different the complicated politics of the European kingdoms! Every national history, to be complete, must, in a certain sense, be the history of Europe; there is no knowing to how remote a quarter it may be necessary to trace our most domestic events; from a country, how apparently disconnected, may originate the impulse which gives its direction to the whole course of affairs.
In imitation of his classical models, Gibbon places Rome as the cardinal point from which his inquiries diverge, and to which they bear constant reference; yet how immeasurable the space over which those inquiries range; how complicated, how confused, how apparently inextricable the causes which tend to the decline of the Roman empire! how countless the nations which swarm forth, in mingling and indistinct hordes, constantly changing the geographical limits — incessantly confounding the natural boundaries! At first sight, the whole period, the whole state of the world, seems to offer no more secure footing to an historical adventurer than the chaos of Milton — to be in a state of irreclaimable disorder, best described in the language of the poet:—
“A darkIllimitable ocean, without bound,Without dimension, where length, breadth, and height,And time, and place, are lost: where eldest NightAnd Chaos, ancestors of Nature, holdEternal anarchy, amidst the noiseOf endless wars, and by confusion stand.”
We feel that the unity and harmony of narrative, which shall comprehend this period of social disorganization, must be ascribed entirely to the skill and luminous disposition of the historian. It is in this sublime Gothic architecture of his work, in which the boundless range, the infinite variety, the, at first sight, incongruous gorgeousness of the separate parts, nevertheless are all subordinate to one main and predominant idea, that Gibbon is unrivalled. We cannot but admire the manner in which he masses his materials, and arranges his facts in successive groups, not according to chronological order, but to their moral or political connection; the distinctness with which he marks his periods of gradually increasing decay; and the skill with which, though advancing on separate parallels of history, he shows the common tendency of the slower or more rapid religious or civil innovations. However these principles of composition may demand more than ordinary attention on the part of the reader, they can alone impress upon the memory the real course, and the relative importance of the events. Whoever would justly appreciate the superiority of Gibbon’s lucid arrangement, should attempt to make his way through the regular but wearisome annals of Tillemont, or even the less ponderous volumes of Le Beau. Both these writers adhere, almost entirely, to chronological order; the consequence is, that we are twenty times called upon to break off, and resume the thread of six or eight wars in different parts of the empire; to suspend the operations of a military expedition for a court intrigue; to hurry away from a siege to a council; and the same page places us in the middle of a campaign against the barbarians, and in the depths of the Monophysite controversy. In Gibbon it is not always easy to bear in mind the exact dates but the course of events is ever clear and distinct; like a skilful general, though his troops advance from the most remote and opposite quarters, they are constantly bearing down and concentrating themselves on one point — that which is still occupied by the name, and by the waning power of Rome. Whether he traces the progress of hostile religions, or leads from the shores of the Baltic, or the verge of the Chinese empire, the successive hosts of barbarians — though one wave has hardly burst and discharged itself, before another swells up and approaches — all is made to flow in the same direction, and the impression which each makes upon the tottering fabric of the Roman greatness, connects their distant movements, and measures the relative importance assigned to them in the panoramic history. The more peaceful and didactic episodes on the development of the Roman law, or even on the details of ecclesiastical history, interpose themselves as resting-places or divisions between the periods of barbaric invasion. In short, though distracted first by the two capitals, and afterwards by the formal partition of the empire, the extraordinary felicity of arrangement maintains an order and a regular progression. As our horizon expands to reveal to us the gathering tempests which are forming far beyond the boundaries of the civilized world — as we follow their successive approach to the trembling frontier — the compressed and receding line is still distinctly visible; though gradually dismembered and the broken fragments assuming the form of regular states and kingdoms, the real relation of those kingdoms to the empire is maintained and defined; and even when the Roman dominion has shrunk into little more than the province of Thrace — when the name of Rome, confined, in Italy, to the walls of the city — yet it is still the memory, the shade of the Roman greatness, which extends over the wide sphere into which the historian expands his later narrative; the whole blends into the unity, and is manifestly essential to the double catastrophe of his tragic drama.
But the amplitude, the magnificence, or the harmony of design, are, though imposing, yet unworthy claims on our admiration, unless the details are filled up with correctness and accuracy. No writer has been more severely tried on this point than Gibbon. He has undergone the triple scrutiny of theological zeal quickened by just resentment, of literary emulation, and of that mean and invidious vanity which delights in detecting errors in writers of established fame. On the result of the trial, we may be permitted to summon competent witnesses before we deliver our own judgment.
M. Guizot, in his preface, after stating that in France and Germany, as well as in England, in the most enlightened countries of Europe, Gibbon is constantly cited as an authority, thus proceeds:—
“I have had occasion, during my labors, to consult the writings of philosophers, who have treated on the finances of the Roman empire; of scholars, who have investigated the chronology; of theologians, who have searched the depths of ecclesiastical history; of writers on law, who have studied with care the Roman jurisprudence; of Orientalists, who have occupied themselves with the Arabians and the Koran; of modern historians, who have entered upon extensive researches touching the crusades and their influence; each of these writers has remarked and pointed out, in the ‘History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,’ some negligences, some false or imperfect views some omissions, which it is impossible not to suppose voluntary; they have rectified some facts combated with advantage some assertions; but in general they have taken the researches and the ideas of Gibbon, as points of departure, or as proofs of the researches or of the new opinions which they have advanced.”
M. Guizot goes on to state his own impressions on reading Gibbon’s history, and no authority will have greater weight with those to whom the extent and accuracy of his historical researches are known:—
“After a first rapid perusal, which allowed me to feel nothing but the interest of a narrative, always animated, and, notwithstanding its extent and the variety of objects which it makes to pass before the view, always perspicuous, I entered upon a minute examination of the details of which it was composed; and the opinion which I then formed was, I confess, singularly severe. I discovered, in certain chapters, errors which appeared to me sufficiently important and numerous to make me believe that they had been written with extreme negligence; in others, I was struck with a certain tinge of partiality and prejudice, which imparted to the exposition of the facts that want of truth and justice, which the English express by their happy term misrepresentation. Some imperfect (tronquees) quotations; some passages, omitted unintentionally or designedly cast a suspicion on the honesty (bonne foi) of the author; and his violation of the first law of history — increased to my eye by the prolonged attention with which I occupied myself with every phrase, every note, every reflection — caused me to form upon the whole work, a judgment far too rigorous. After having finished my labors, I allowed some time to elapse before I reviewed the whole. A second attentive and regular perusal of the entire work, of the notes of the author, and of those which I had thought it right to subjoin, showed me how much I had exaggerated the importance of the reproaches which Gibbon really deserved; I was struck with the same errors, the same partiality on certain subjects; but I had been far from doing adequate justice to the immensity of his researches, the variety of his knowledge, and above all, to that truly philosophical discrimination (justesse d’esprit) which judges the past as it would judge the present; which does not permit itself to be blinded by the clouds which time gathers around the dead, and which prevent us from seeing that, under the toga, as under the modern dress, in the senate as in our councils, men were what they still are, and that events took place eighteen centuries ago, as they take place in our days. I then felt that his book, in spite of its faults, will always be a noble work — and that we may correct his errors and combat his prejudices, without ceasing to admit that few men have combined, if we are not to say in so high a degree, at least in a manner so complete, and so well regulated, the necessary qualifications for a writer of history.”
The present editor has followed the track of Gibbon through many parts of his work; he has read his authorities with constant reference to his pages, and must pronounce his deliberate judgment, in terms of the highest admiration as to his general accuracy. Many of his seeming errors are almost inevitable from the close condensation of his matter. From the immense range of his history, it was sometimes necessary to compress into a single sentence, a whole vague and diffuse page of a Byzantine chronicler. Perhaps something of importance may have thus escaped, and his expressions may not quite contain the whole substance of the passage from which they are taken. His limits, at times, compel him to sketch; where that is the case, it is not fair to expect the full details of the finished picture. At times he can only deal with important results; and in his account of a war, it sometimes requires great attention to discover that the events which seem to be comprehended in a single campaign, occupy several years. But this admirable skill in selecting and giving prominence to the points which are of real weight and importance — this distribution of light and shade — though perhaps it may occasionally betray him into vague and imperfect statements, is one of the highest excellencies of Gibbon’s historic manner. It is the more striking, when we pass from the works of his chief authorities, where, after laboring through long, minute, and wearisome descriptions of the accessary and subordinate circumstances, a single unmarked and undistinguished sentence, which we may overlook from the inattention of fatigue, contains the great moral and political result.
Gibbon’s method of arrangement, though on the whole most favorable to the clear comprehension of the events, leads likewise to apparent inaccuracy. That which we expect to find in one part is reserved for another. The estimate which we are to form, depends on the accurate balance of statements in remote parts of the work; and we have sometimes to correct and modify opinions, formed from one chapter by those of another. Yet, on the other hand, it is astonishing how rarely we detect contradiction; the mind of the author has already harmonized the whole result to truth and probability; the general impression is almost invariably the same. The quotations of Gibbon have likewise been called in question; — I have, in general, been more inclined to admire their exactitude, than to complain of their indistinctness, or incompleteness. Where they are imperfect, it is commonly from the study of brevity, and rather from the desire of compressing the substance of his notes into pointed and emphatic sentences, than from dishonesty, or uncandid suppression of truth.
These observations apply more particularly to the accuracy and fidelity of the historian as to his facts; his inferences, of course, are more liable to exception. It is almost impossible to trace the line between unfairness and unfaithfulness; between intentional misrepresentation and undesigned false coloring. The relative magnitude and importance of events must, in some respect, depend upon the mind before which they are presented; the estimate of character, on the habits and feelings of the reader. Christians, like M. Guizot and ourselves, will see some things, and some persons, in a different light from the historian of the Decline and Fall. We may deplore the bias of his mind; we may ourselves be on our guard against the danger of being misled, and be anxious to warn less wary readers against the same perils; but we must not confound this secret and unconscious departure from truth, with the deliberate violation of that veracity which is the only title of an historian to our confidence. Gibbon, it may be fearlessly asserted, is rarely chargeable even with the suppression of any material fact, which bears upon individual character; he may, with apparently invidious hostility, enhance the errors and crimes, and disparage the virtues of certain persons; yet, in general, he leaves us the materials for forming a fairer judgment; and if he is not exempt from his own prejudices, perhaps we might write passions, yet it must be candidly acknowledged, that his philosophical bigotry is not more unjust than the theological partialities of those ecclesiastical writers who were before in undisputed possession of this province of history.
We are thus naturally led to that great misrepresentation which pervades his history — his false estimate of the nature and influence of Christianity.
But on this subject some preliminary caution is necessary, lest that should be expected from a new edition, which it is impossible that it should completely accomplish. We must first be prepared with the only sound preservative against the false impression likely to be produced by the perusal of Gibbon; and we must see clearly the real cause of that false impression. The former of these cautions will be briefly suggested in its proper place, but it may be as well to state it, here, somewhat more at length. The art of Gibbon, or at least the unfair impression produced by his two memorable chapters, consists in his confounding together, in one indistinguishable mass, the origin and apostolic propagation of the new religion, with its later progress. No argument for the divine authority of Christianity has been urged with greater force, or traced with higher eloquence, than that deduced from its primary development, explicable on no other hypothesis than a heavenly origin, and from its rapid extension through great part of the Roman empire. But this argument — one, when confined within reasonable limits, of unanswerable force — becomes more feeble and disputable in proportion as it recedes from the birthplace, as it were, of the religion. The further Christianity advanced, the more causes purely human were enlisted in its favor; nor can it be doubted that those developed with such artful exclusiveness by Gibbon did concur most essentially to its establishment. It is in the Christian dispensation, as in the material world. In both it is as the great First Cause, that the Deity is most undeniably manifest. When once launched in regular motion upon the bosom of space, and endowed with all their properties and relations of weight and mutual attraction, the heavenly bodies appear to pursue their courses according to secondary laws, which account for all their sublime regularity. So Christianity proclaims its Divine Author chiefly in its first origin and development. When it had once received its impulse from above — when it had once been infused into the minds of its first teachers — when it had gained full possession of the reason and affections of the favored few — it might be — and to the Protestant, the rationa Christian, it is impossible to define when it really was — left to make its way by its native force, under the ordinary secret agencies of all-ruling Providence. The main question, the divine origin of the religion, was dexterously eluded, or speciously conceded by Gibbon; his plan enabled him to commence his account, in most parts, below the apostolic times; and it was only by the strength of the dark coloring with which he brought out the failings and the follies of the succeeding ages, that a shadow of doubt and suspicion was thrown back upon the primitive period of Christianity.
“The theologian,” says Gibbon, “may indulge the pleasing task of describing religion as she descended from heaven, arrayed in her native purity; a more melancholy duty is imposed upon the historian:— he must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she contracted in a long residence upon earth among a weak and degenerate race of beings.” Divest this passage of the latent sarcasm betrayed by the subsequent tone of the whole disquisition, and it might commence a Christian history written in the most Christian spirit of candor. But as the historian, by seeming to respect, yet by dexterously confounding the limits of the sacred land, contrived to insinuate that it was an Utopia which had no existence but in the imagination of the theologian — as he suggested rather than affirmed that the days of Christian purity were a kind of poetic golden age; — so the theologian, by venturing too far into the domain of the historian, has been perpetually obliged to contest points on which he had little chance of victory — to deny facts established on unshaken evidence — and thence, to retire, if not with the shame of defeat, yet with but doubtful and imperfect success.
Paley, with his intuitive sagacity, saw through the difficulty of answering Gibbon by the ordinary arts of controversy; his emphatic sentence, “Who can refute a sneer?” contains as much truth as point. But full and pregnant as this phrase is, it is not quite the whole truth; it is the tone in which the progress of Christianity is traced, in comparison with the rest of the splendid and prodigally ornamented work, which is the radical defect in the “Decline and Fall.” Christianity alone receives no embellishment from the magic of Gibbon’s language; his imagination is dead to its moral dignity; it is kept down by a general zone of jealous disparagement, or neutralized by a painfully elaborate exposition of its darker and degenerate periods. There are occasions, indeed, when its pure and exalted humanity, when its manifestly beneficial influence, can compel even him, as it were, to fairness, and kindle his unguarded eloquence to its usual fervor; but, in general, he soon relapses into a frigid apathy; affects an ostentatiously severe impartiality; notes all the faults of Christians in every age with bitter and almost malignant sarcasm; reluctantly, and with exception and reservation, admits their claim to admiration. This inextricable bias appears even to influence his manner of composition. While all the other assailants of the Roman empire, whether warlike or religious, the Goth, the Hun, the Arab, the Tartar, Alaric and Attila, Mahomet, and Zengis, and Tamerlane, are each introduced upon the scene almost with dramatic animation — their progress related in a full, complete, and unbroken narrative — the triumph of Christianity alone takes the form of a cold and critical disquisition. The successes of barbarous energy and brute force call forth all the consummate skill of composition; while the moral triumphs of Christian benevolence — the tranquil heroism of endurance, the blameless purity, the contempt of guilty fame and of honors destructive to the human race, which, had they assumed the proud name of philosophy, would have been blazoned in his brightest words, because they own religion as their principle — sink into narrow asceticism. The glories of Christianity, in short, touch on no chord in the heart of the writer; his imagination remains unkindled; his words, though they maintain their stately and measured march, have become cool, argumentative, and inanimate. Who would obscure one hue of that gorgeous coloring in which Gibbon has invested the dying forms of Paganism, or darken one paragraph in his splendid view of the rise and progress of Mahometanism? But who would not have wished that the same equal justice had been done to Christianity; that its real character and deeply penetrating influence had been traced with the same philosophical sagacity, and represented with more sober, as would become its quiet course, and perhaps less picturesque, but still with lively and attractive, descriptiveness? He might have thrown aside, with the same scorn, the mass of ecclesiastical fiction which envelops the early history of the church, stripped off the legendary romance, and brought out the facts in their primitive nakedness and simplicity — if he had but allowed those facts the benefit of the glowing eloquence which he denied to them alone. He might have annihilated the whole fabric of post-apostolic miracles, if he had left uninjured by sarcastic insinuation those of the New Testament; he might have cashiered, with Dodwell, the whole host of martyrs, which owe their existence to the prodigal invention of later days, had he but bestowed fair room, and dwelt with his ordinary energy on the sufferings of the genuine witnesses to the truth of Christianity, the Polycarps, or the martyrs of Vienne.
And indeed, if, after all, the view of the early progress of Christianity be melancholy and humiliating we must beware lest we charge the whole of this on the infidelity of the historian. It is idle, it is disingenuous, to deny or to dissemble the early depravations of Christianity, its gradual but rapid departure from its primitive simplicity and purity, still more, from its spirit of universal love. It may be no unsalutary lesson to the Christian world, that this silent, this unavoidable, perhaps, yet fatal change shall have been drawn by an impartial, or even an hostile hand. The Christianity of every age may take warning, lest by its own narrow views, its want of wisdom, and its want of charity, it give the same advantage to the future unfriendly historian, and disparage the cause of true religion.
The design of the present edition is partly corrective, partly supplementary: corrective, by notes, which point out (it is hoped, in a perfectly candid and dispassionate spirit with no desire but to establish the truth) such inaccuracies or misstatements as may have been detected, particularly with regard to Christianity; and which thus, with the previous caution, may counteract to a considerable extent the unfair and unfavorable impression created against rational religion: supplementary, by adding such additional information as the editor’s reading may have been able to furnish, from original documents or books, not accessible at the time when Gibbon wrote.
The work originated in the editor’s habit of noting on the margin of his copy of Gibbon references to such authors as had discovered errors, or thrown new light on the subjects treated by Gibbon. These had grown to some extent, and seemed to him likely to be of use to others. The annotations of M. Guizot also appeared to him worthy of being better known to the English public than they were likely to be, as appended to the French translation.
The chief works from which the editor has derived his materials are:
I. The French translation, with notes by M. Guizot; 2d edition, Paris, 1828. The editor has translated almost all the notes of M. Guizot. Where he has not altogether agreed with him, his respect for the learning and judgment of that writer has, in general, induced him to retain the statement from which he has ventured to differ, with the grounds on which he formed his own opinion. In the notes on Christianity, he has retained all those of M. Guizot, with his own, from the conviction, that on such a subject, to many, the authority of a French statesman, a Protestant, and a rational and sincere Christian, would appear more independent and unbiassed, and therefore be more commanding, than that of an English clergyman.
The editor has not scrupled to transfer the notes of M. Guizot to the present work. The well-known zeal for knowledge, displayed in all the writings of that distinguished historian, has led to the natural inference, that he would not be displeased at the attempt to make them of use to the English readers of Gibbon. The notes of M. Guizot are signed with the letter G.
II. The German translation, with the notes of Wenck. Unfortunately this learned translator died, after having completed only the first volume; the rest of the work was executed by a very inferior hand.
The notes of Wenck are extremely valuable; many of them have been adopted by M. Guizot; they are distinguished by the letter W. 1
III. The new edition of Le Beau’s “Histoire du Bas Empire, with notes by M. St. Martin, and M. Brosset.” That distinguished Armenian scholar, M. St. Martin (now, unhappily, deceased) had added much information from Oriental writers, particularly from those of Armenia, as well as from more general sources. Many of his observations have been found as applicable to the work of Gibbon as to that of Le Beau.
IV. The editor has consulted the various answers made to Gibbon on the first appearance of his work; he must confess, with little profit. They were, in general, hastily compiled by inferior and now forgotten writers, with the exception of Bishop Watson, whose able apology is rather a general argument, than an examination of misstatements. The name of Milner stands higher with a certain class of readers, but will not carry much weight with the severe investigator of history.
V. Some few classical works and fragments have come to light, since the appearance of Gibbon’s History, and have been noticed in their respective places; and much use has been made, in the latter volumes particularly, of the increase to our stores of Oriental literature. The editor cannot, indeed, pretend to have followed his author, in these gleanings, over the whole vast field of his inquiries; he may have overlooked or may not have been able to command some works, which might have thrown still further light on these subjects; but he trusts that what he has adduced will be of use to the student of historic truth.
The editor would further observe, that with regard to some other objectionable passages, which do not involve misstatement or inaccuracy, he has intentionally abstained from directing particular attention towards them by any special protest.
The editor’s notes are marked M.
A considerable part of the quotations (some of which in the later editions had fallen into great confusion) have been verified, and have been corrected by the latest and best editions of the authors.
June, 1845.
In this new edition, the text and the notes have been carefully revised, the latter by the editor.
Some additional notes have been subjoined, distinguished by the signature M. 1845.
1 The editor regrets that he has not been able to find the Italian translation, mentioned by Gibbon himself with some respect. It is not in our great libraries, the Museum or the Bodleian; and he has never found any bookseller in London who has seen it.]
Preface Of The Author.
It is not my intention to detain the reader by expatiating on the variety or the importance of the subject, which I have undertaken to treat; since the merit of the choice would serve to render the weakness of the execution still more apparent, and still less excusable. But as I have presumed to lay before the public a first volume only 1 of the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, it will, perhaps, be expected that I should explain, in a few words, the nature and limits of my general plan.
The memorable series of revolutions, which in the course of about thirteen centuries gradually undermined, and at length destroyed, the solid fabric of human greatness, may, with some propriety, be divided into the three following periods:
I. The first of these periods may be traced from the age of Trajan and the Antonines, when the Roman monarchy, having attained its full strength and maturity, began to verge towards its decline; and will extend to the subversion of the Western Empire, by the barbarians of Germany and Scythia, the rude ancestors of the most polished nations of modern Europe. This extraordinary revolution, which subjected Rome to the power of a Gothic conqueror, was completed about the beginning of the sixth century.
II. The second period of the Decline and Fall of Rome may be supposed to commence with the reign of Justinian, who, by his laws, as well as by his victories, restored a transient splendor to the Eastern Empire. It will comprehend the invasion of Italy by the Lombards; the conquest of the Asiatic and African provinces by the Arabs, who embraced the religion of Mahomet; the revolt of the Roman people against the feeble princes of Constantinople; and the elevation of Charlemagne, who, in the year eight hundred, established the second, or German Empire of the West
III. The last and longest of these periods includes about six centuries and a half; from the revival of the Western Empire, till the taking of Constantinople by the Turks, and the extinction of a degenerate race of princes, who continued to assume the titles of Caesar and Augustus, after their dominions were contracted to the limits of a single city; in which the language, as well as manners, of the ancient Romans, had been long since forgotten. The writer who should undertake to relate the events of this period, would find himself obliged to enter into the general history of the Crusades, as far as they contributed to the ruin of the Greek Empire; and he would scarcely be able to restrain his curiosity from making some inquiry into the state of the city of Rome, during the darkness and confusion of the middle ages.
As I have ventured, perhaps too hastily, to commit to the press a work which in every sense of the word, deserves the epithet of imperfect. I consider myself as contracting an engagement to finish, most probably in a second volume, 2
