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- Herausgeber: Quickie Classics
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Across six volumes, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire charts Rome from the Antonine zenith to the 1453 fall of Constantinople, integrating Byzantium and the early caliphates into a continuous narrative. Gibbon's urbane, ironic prose is paired with exacting citation and scintillating footnotes. In Enlightenment fashion, he probes institutional decay, military discipline, and religious conflict—Arianism, iconoclasm—balancing internal corrosion with barbarian incursions and administrative overreach. Edward Gibbon—erudite scholar, brief Catholic convert turned Protestant, and later MP—forged the project through disciplined self-education in Lausanne and lifelong classical study. The idea crystallized on Rome's Capitoline in 1764. Reading Tacitus, Ammianus, and Procopius, and influenced by Hume and Montesquieu, he coupled travel with skeptical scrutiny of ecclesiastical power and sources. Recommended to historians, classicists, and readers of political thought, this classic rewards those who value grand narrative joined to analytical rigor. Approach it for its architecture of argument and incomparable notes; read it alongside modern scholarship to test its biases, but above all for the exhilarating spectacle of a first-rate mind reckoning with empire. Quickie Classics summarizes timeless works with precision, preserving the author's voice and keeping the prose clear, fast, and readable—distilled, never diluted. Enriched Edition extras: Introduction · Synopsis · Historical Context · Author Biography · Brief Analysis · 4 Reflection Q&As · Editorial Footnotes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2026
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The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Summarized Edition)
Table of Contents
Introduction
In Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the spectacle of vast authority, intricate law, and cosmopolitan culture gradually fractures into dispersed polities and altered beliefs, posing the enduring question of how an order that mastered continents can be hollowed by frontier pressures and court intrigues, by shifting faiths, fiscal strain, and military transformation, by ambition, contingency, and policy, until the recognizable forms of empire persist in name while their animating energies migrate, mutate, and, across centuries, leave a mosaic of successors whose lingering splendor and indelible scars illuminate both the possibilities and limits of human governance.
First published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788, during the European Enlightenment, this work stands as a landmark of historical narrative and analysis. Its setting ranges from the high empire of the second century through the fall of Constantinople in 1453, following the western and eastern Roman worlds as they contend with internal realignment and external challenges. Gibbon, an English historian, writes with a learned confidence characteristic of his age, assembling a vast archive of classical and ecclesiastical sources to shape an account that is both expansive in scope and attentive to the mechanics of politics, culture, and war.
Readers encounter a voice at once urbane and exacting, a style famed for long, balanced sentences, careful transitions, and copious notes that open a second conversation beneath the main narrative. The pace alternates between panoramic surveys of institutions and concentrated studies of decisive episodes, with geography shifting from Rome to Constantinople, from frontiers and deserts to councils and courts. Without presuming prior expertise, the prose invites patient attention, rewarding it with clarity and synthesis. The tone is measured and often ironic, combining admiration for administrative achievement with a sober appraisal of vulnerability, contingency, and the unintended consequences of reform.
Across the volumes, the central concerns are power and its maintenance: the organization of armies and borders, the taxation and expenditure that sustain institutions, the recruitment of officials, and the crucial balance between centralization and local autonomy. Civic ideals, legal traditions, and urban life are set against the hard arithmetic of resources and the unpredictable movement of peoples. The narrative follows cultural and religious transformation as institutions evolve and new polities emerge, yet it continually emphasizes continuity and adaptation alongside loss. Rather than a single cause, Gibbon presents interlocking pressures that, over time, reshape empire into a more plural Mediterranean and Eurasian order.
Equally notable is the book’s method, which foregrounds the labor of history itself. Gibbon weighs testimonies, dates, and motives, setting classical accounts beside ecclesiastical chronicles and legal compilations, and signaling disagreements in the extensive notes. He writes from a distinctly eighteenth‑century perspective, committed to reasoned explanation and skeptical of uncorroborated claims, a stance that both sharpened his analysis and framed his limitations. For contemporary readers, the work models how narratives are assembled, how sources compete, and how interpretation requires both evidence and restraint, encouraging a disciplined curiosity about what can be known and where uncertainty, silence, or exaggeration persist.
The questions that animate this history remain strikingly current: how large states manage borders, integrate diverse communities, finance defense and welfare, and sustain legitimacy amid change. Readers will recognize debates over centralized command versus local initiative, over the trade‑offs of expansion and the costs of security, over cultural pluralism and shared civic norms. Gibbon’s long horizon clarifies how gradual policy choices accumulate, how crises accelerate existing trends, and how institutions adapt or ossify. By examining a complex past without reducing it to slogans, the work equips modern audiences to think more soberly about durability, reform, and the unintended consequences of power.
Approached sequentially or sampled in thematic stretches, the six volumes reward sustained attention with a rare combination of narrative momentum and reflective pause. The book asks readers to move slowly across centuries, to compare institutions across regions, and to separate immediate outcomes from long‑term effects, cultivating a habit of historical scale that few works provide. Its continuing vitality lies in this disciplined breadth and in the elegance with which inquiry becomes story. Read on its own terms and alongside modern scholarship, Gibbon’s achievement remains a demanding, exhilarating companion for anyone who wishes to understand how great systems change and endure.
Synopsis
Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in six volumes between 1776 and 1789, narrates the transformation of Rome from imperial zenith to the loss of Constantinople. Combining political, military, religious, and cultural history, Gibbon synthesizes classical and medieval sources with a critical method characteristic of the Enlightenment. The work proceeds chronologically while pausing for thematic analysis: institutions, law, finance, the army, and the church. It opens with the stable order of the Antonine age and tracks the shifting centers of power, evolving frontiers, and the interplay of internal governance and external pressures that shaped more than a millennium.
The early volumes depict the Roman Empire under the Antonines as administratively coherent, commercially vibrant, and militarily disciplined. Gibbon surveys provincial administration, citizenship, and the standing army, noting the delicate balance between centralized authority and local elites. He underscores a durable legal culture and an infrastructure that unified disparate peoples. Yet he also identifies vulnerabilities embedded in succession practices, dependence on frontier legions, and the burdens of taxation. The narrative introduces the question that drives the whole work: how such extensive order could erode, not abruptly but through cumulative shifts in leadership, morale, and institutions as the second century gave way to more turbulent times.
With the death of Marcus Aurelius and the accession of Commodus, the story turns to instability. Gibbon traces the rise of palace intrigue, the growing influence of the Praetorian Guard, and competing claimants elevated by provincial armies. The third century emerges as a crisis of legitimacy marked by rapid imperial turnover, invasions across the Rhine and Danube, and renewed conflict with a revitalized Persia. Fiscal stress, debasement, and demographic shocks complicate defense and administration. Gibbon presents these disruptions not as a single catastrophe but as reinforcing cycles, showing how military dependence on soldiers’ favor and fractured command eroded the coherence of imperial rule.
Reformers then take the stage. Diocletian reorganizes the empire through the Tetrarchy, seeking orderly succession, rationalized taxation, and more defensible frontiers. Gibbon details the administrative division between East and West and the enlargement of bureaucracy and army, alongside efforts to stabilize the economy. The narrative then follows Constantine, whose consolidation of power, support for Christianity, and foundation of Constantinople shift the empire’s ideological and geographic center. These chapters emphasize transformation: new court ceremonial, a Christianized imperial rhetoric, and altered legal frameworks. Gibbon treats these changes as both adaptive and contentious, setting up his sustained inquiry into the long-term effects of religious and institutional reconfiguration.
Having established Christianity’s legal status and patronage, Gibbon examines the church’s organization, doctrinal controversies, and councils as they intersect with imperial policy. He surveys episcopal authority, monastic movements, and theological disputes, foregrounding how ecclesiastical structures mirrored and influenced state power. Simultaneously, he returns to fiscal and military realities: the costs of defense, civic decline in some municipalities, and the social consequences of shifting tax regimes. The center of gravity continues moving eastward, where resources and cities anchor resilience. Gibbon’s account weighs the integrative potential of shared belief against new forms of conflict and complexity, showing how unity of faith did not automatically yield political cohesion.
The Western Empire faces mounting external and internal strains. Gibbon narrates the settlement of federate groups, the movement of Goths and other peoples across imperial borders, and attempts to manage them through diplomacy, subsidies, and service in Roman ranks. Catastrophes in battle, including a decisive defeat that exposes systemic weaknesses, punctuate gradual deterioration. Administrative fragmentation and the prominence of powerful generals complicate sovereignty. Rome itself suffers symbolic shocks, while provincial societies adapt to new overlords. Throughout, Gibbon is attentive to the continuity of law and local life amid upheaval, balancing episodes of devastation with evidence of accommodation between Romans and their new neighbors.
In the West, imperial authority contracts to a shadow of its former scope, culminating in the removal of the last western emperor and the ascendancy of Germanic kings who adopt Roman titles, laws, and administrative habits. Gibbon juxtaposes this termination of western imperial office with the Eastern Empire’s stamina. He gives special attention to Justinian’s ambitious program: codifying Roman law, reforming administration, and projecting power to reconquer territories. Brilliant commanders achieve striking successes, but plague, financial strain, and overstretch test the project’s durability. The narrative keeps asking whether restoration through force and legislation can reverse structural trends or merely postpone their consequences.
Subsequent volumes follow the Eastern Empire through centuries of adaptation. Gibbon describes renewed wars with Persia, the emergence and expansion of Islamic polities that seize core provinces, and administrative reinvention to meet new strategic realities. Debates over images and the authority of church and emperor expose tensions within Byzantine society. Periods of recovery and cultural vitality alternate with territorial contraction. Western interventions arrive with the Crusades, culminating in the capture of Constantinople by Latin forces and a fragmented restoration thereafter. Encircled by new powers and shifting trade routes, the empire navigates diplomacy, mercenary reliance, and dynastic change while its geopolitical options steadily narrow.
The work concludes with the Ottoman advance and the final siege of Constantinople, closing the long arc begun under the Antonines. Gibbon’s final reflections weigh the interaction of internal evolution and external challenge, inviting readers to consider how institutions, beliefs, economies, and armies shape imperial durability. Without reducing outcomes to a single cause, he underscores the cumulative nature of change and the fragility of complex orders. As a whole, the six volumes offer a model of source-based, comparative history and a meditation on endurance and decline. Their enduring significance lies in provoking debate about continuity, transformation, and the responsibilities of power.
Historical Context
Edward Gibbon composed The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire between 1776 and 1789, publishing the first volume in 1776, volumes II-III in 1781, and volumes IV-VI in 1788-1789. Writing as an English gentleman and member of Parliament, he worked largely in London and Lausanne, drawing on the republic of letters that connected Britain, France, and Switzerland. The Enlightenment expectation that history should be a philosophical inquiry, critical, secular, and evidence-based, shaped his project. He mined classical authors, ecclesiastical chronicles, antiquarian compilations, and state papers then newly accessible in printed editions. His cosmopolitan networks and multilingual reading integrated Latin, Greek, and early modern scholarship into a continuous narrative.
His story opens with the Roman Empire at its second-century height under the Antonines, a reference point he termed the most prosperous age. The empire’s institutions—professional legions, provincial administration, municipal councils, and codified law—supported long-distance commerce and urban life from Britain to Egypt. An imperial court tempered by senatorial prestige and adoptive succession had recently maintained stability. The fiscal system, road networks, and frontier defenses embodied centralized power. Gibbon’s use of Tacitus, the jurists, and epigraphic compilations framed these arrangements as foundations whose maintenance or erosion explains subsequent change. This starting point fixes the scale against which later military crises and administrative reforms are measured.
From the later second century into the third, civil wars, rapid imperial turnovers, and external pressures strained Rome. Invasions by Goths along the Danube and Sasanian Persia in the East coincided with debasement of coinage and regional separatism. Diocletian’s late-third-century reforms—new taxation, a more elaborate bureaucracy, and the Tetrarchy—sought recovery. Constantine’s victories reunited power and inaugurated new policies: imperial patronage of Christianity after 313, the Council of Nicaea in 325, and the founding of Constantinople as a second capital in 330. Gibbon treats these measures using panegyrics, legal codes, and narrative historians to show how institutional innovation altered imperial cohesion.
The legalization and eventual establishment of Nicene Christianity marked a structural transformation. After the Edict of Milan (313) and Theodosius I’s Edict of Thessalonica (380), bishops, councils, and imperial legislation redefined religious authority, while monastic movements expanded social influence. Doctrinal disputes—Arian, Donatist, and other controversies—intersected with politics and regional identities. Gibbon, drawing on ecclesiastical histories and patristic literature, assessed the church as a historical institution subject to human motives and power. His skeptical analysis of miracles and clerical policy, expressed in densely sourced notes, provoked immediate rebuttals from Anglican and Catholic writers. The debate situated his history within broader Enlightenment critiques of superstition and priestcraft.
In the fourth and fifth centuries, federate arrangements and frontier failures culminated in Western collapse. The Gothic victory at Adrianople (378) exposed vulnerabilities; subsequent settlements placed armed non-Roman groups inside imperial borders. Sacks of Rome in 410 and 455, and the deposition of the last western emperor in 476, marked political fragmentation in Italy and Gaul. Gibbon’s narrative, informed by Ammianus Marcellinus, Zosimus, Jordanes, and legal sources, emphasizes administrative strains, fiscal burdens, and the autonomy of military commanders. He tracks the emergence of successor kingdoms that retained Roman law and culture unevenly, framing their trajectories within the empire’s institutional retreat rather than abrupt cultural disappearance.
The Eastern Empire endured, reorganized its defenses, and under Justinian pursued reconquest while codifying Roman law into the Corpus Juris Civilis. Procopius supplies detail on war, construction, and the mid-sixth-century plague that weakened recovery. Over subsequent centuries, Byzantine society navigated theological controversies, administrative reconfiguration, and shifting frontiers. Encounters with Bulgars, Slavs, and later the Seljuk Turks reshaped the Balkans and Anatolia. Western crusaders established a Latin empire at Constantinople in 1204, an episode Gibbon treats as symptomatic of Latin-Greek antagonism. Ottoman expansion in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries completed a long arc, with 1453 concluding the imperial lineage that had preserved Roman state forms in the east.
Gibbon’s scope integrates Rome’s neighbors and successors to explain transformation across Eurasia. He analyzes Sasanian Persia’s rivalry, the Arab conquests that absorbed Syria, Egypt, and beyond, and the caliphates’ administrative practices known through Arabic-synthesized chronicles available in European translation. He treats nomadic confederations—the Huns’ fifth-century shock, and later Turkic and Mongol pressures—as structuring forces on borders and trade. For medieval chapters he relies on Greek chroniclers such as Theophanes and Anna Komnene, as well as antiquarians like Tillemont, Muratori, and Du Cange. This apparatus exemplifies Enlightenment erudition: cross-checking narratives, privileging documentary evidence, and organizing vast material into a causal, comparative account.
Appearing amid the American and French Revolutions, the six volumes spoke to contemporaries debating liberty, empire, and civic virtue. Reviewers praised Gibbon’s style and learning while contesting his treatment of Christianity; pamphlet exchanges followed immediately after volumes I-III. His footnotes, often in Latin or French, model transparent citation and critical distance, while his explanatory preference for institutions, economics, and morale reflects Enlightenment secularism. British readers encountered a long view on decline during their own imperial ascent. The work’s synthesis—skeptical, cosmopolitan, and archival—both mirrors and critiques its age, proposing that even powerful states depend on maintainable institutions, disciplined armies, and adaptable belief structures.
Author Biography
Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) was an English historian whose Enlightenment-era scholarship reshaped the writing of history. Best known for The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he combined wide reading, linguistic range, and a polished, ironic prose style to produce a monumental account of Roman antiquity and its long aftermath. His work, spanning classical high empire to the fall of Constantinople, sought to explain large-scale change through human motives, institutions, and ideas rather than providential design. Gibbon’s synthesis of narrative and critical footnotes established a benchmark for evidence-based history and remains a touchstone for debates about empire, religion, and historical causation.
Gibbon’s education mixed formal study with intense self-direction. After a brief period at Magdalen College, Oxford, he experienced a celebrated religious crisis, left England, and pursued rigorous studies in Lausanne under the guidance of a Protestant tutor. There he reconsolidated his command of classical languages, read widely in ancient historians, and absorbed currents of French thought. His early publication, Essai sur l’Étude de la Littérature (1761), written in French, defended classical learning against modern detractors and revealed a critical temperament shaped by Montesquieu and other philosophes. This blend of classical erudition and Enlightenment method would inform his mature history and its approach to sources, comparison, and explanation.
In the early 1760s Gibbon returned to England and served as an officer in the militia during the Seven Years’ War, an interval that delayed but did not diminish his scholarly ambitions. Travel on the Continent, especially in Italy, proved decisive for the conception of his Roman project. Reflecting among the ruins of Rome in the mid‑1760s, he formed the plan for a comprehensive history of imperial decline and transformation. Over the next decade he refined his languages, compiled notes, and tested his voice in shorter pieces, while steadily assembling the sources—Latin, Greek, and ecclesiastical—that would underpin his great narrative.
The first volume of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire appeared in 1776 to immediate attention for its learning and style. Two further volumes followed in 1781, and the final three in 1788–1789. The work traced political, military, religious, and cultural developments from the Antonines through Late Antiquity and Byzantium to 1453. Gibbon’s extensive footnotes, critical comparisons, and use of both classical and ecclesiastical sources were widely admired. At the same time, his treatment of early Christianity—especially in chapters 15 and 16—provoked controversy. He addressed critics in A Vindication (1779), defending his documentation and reasoning while reaffirming a rigorously secular mode of historical explanation.
Parallel to his scholarship, Gibbon pursued a political career. He entered the House of Commons in 1774 and sat, with a later shift of constituency, until the mid‑1780s. Though he rarely spoke, he served as a Commissioner of Trade and Plantations during the late 1770s and early 1780s. Political life offered him financial stability, administrative experience, and access to metropolitan intellectual circles, even as he continued the labor of drafting, revising, and verifying his historical chapters. His parliamentary years consolidated his reputation as a man of letters whose public role complemented, rather than displaced, his scholarly vocation.
Gibbon spent much of his later life in Lausanne, where the quieter rhythms of Swiss residence supported the completion of Decline and Fall’s final volumes. From there he observed the early phases of the French Revolution with caution befitting his historical sensibility. In the early 1790s he returned to Britain for health reasons. He died in London in 1794. His friend and literary executor later published Memoirs of My Life and Writings (1796), assembling autobiographical drafts that illuminate his methods, reading, and working habits, and that have become an important companion to interpreting both his intellectual formation and his monumental history.
Gibbon’s legacy endures in the craft of historical writing: the disciplined use of primary sources, the argumentative footnote, and a narrative capable of encompassing centuries without losing analytical sharpness. His conclusions—particularly regarding religion, Byzantium, and the dynamics of “decline”—have been debated and revised by later scholarship, yet the ambition and scope of his work continue to inspire historians. Read today for both substance and style, Gibbon remains a model of critical historiography, reminding readers that empires are sustained and undone by institutions, beliefs, and human choices, and that historical explanation demands clarity, evidence, and proportion.
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Summarized Edition)
Preface By The Editor.
Gibbon’s great work stands indispensable to every historian; nothing in European letters replaces The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Its subject rivets attention, and colossal toil, compressed learning, clear structure, general accuracy, and lofty though sometimes monotonous style keep the pages vigorous and pictorial. These virtues promise a permanent throne in historical literature, while the vast, unified design—decay of antiquity, birth of a new order—makes the theme unreachable for successors. M. Guizot[1] exclaims: “The slow collapse of the mightiest dominion, the rise of fresh states and new faiths, the sunset of one world, the dawn of another—‘Un grand destin commence, un grand destin s’achève.’”.
He first links antiquity to modernity by fixing Rome as his pivot, yet ranges across immeasurable space and tangled causes. Where Greek and Roman historians enjoyed natural unity, Gibbon confronts swirling nations that seem, like Milton’s “dark illimitable ocean,” pure anarchy. Order arises from his architecture: facts are massed by moral or political connexion, decay marked in lucid stages, parallel stories drawn toward the fading centre of Rome. Unlike Tillemont or Le Beau, he avoids wearying chronological jumps; campaigns, councils, and heresies advance like converging columns, each barbarian wave gauged by the shock it delivers to the tottering walls.
Such symmetry would matter little without trustworthy detail, and no historian has been tested more sternly. Theological wrath, scholarly rivalry, and petty envy have sifted his pages. Yet, Guizot notes, in England, France, and Germany Gibbon remains a constant authority. “Philosophers of finance, chronologists, theologians, jurists, Orientalists, crusade historians” scrutinize him, correct occasional lapses, dispute some views, but invariably take his research as starting point or proof. After consulting their diverse studies, Guizot still affirms the breadth and accuracy that let The Decline and Fall dominate the vast era it encompasses and preserve its commanding sway over historical inquiry.
“After a first rapid perusal” of Gibbon, the critic speeds through the lively and lucid narrative. A second, microscopic inspection follows, uncovering whole chapters scarred by negligence: grave errors, prejudiced coloring, truncated quotations, suspect omissions, a “misrepresentation” that seems to violate “the first law of history.” Harsh judgment hardens until the labor ends and time cools the mind. Returning for a fresh, unbroken reading, he still notes those same faults yet now beholds the vast research, multifarious knowledge, and “truly philosophical discrimination” that weighs past and present alike. Admitting exaggeration, he declares the book noble, its errors correctable without denying its rare historical mastery.
The editor traces Gibbon’s footsteps through innumerable sources, comparing text and authority, and delivers “the highest admiration” for overall accuracy. Apparent slips spring from relentless compression: a single sentence may swallow a rambling Byzantine page, a brief sketch may stand in place of detailed campaigns spanning years. Such artful selection, that play of light and shade, grants weight to what matters, though it can blur outlines. Arrangement, too, shifts facts between distant chapters, demanding balanced reading, yet contradictions are seldom found, the whole already harmonized in the author’s mind. Quotations, usually exact, are shortened for point, not deceit.
Facts rarely suffer willful omission; yet inference spurs dispute, especially on Christianity. Philosophical bias may magnify vices, belittle virtues, but the material for fair judgment remains, and Gibbon’s bigotry rivals earlier ecclesiastical heat. The great distortion lies in his estimate of the faith itself. By blending its apostolic dawn with later centuries, he obscures the divine impulse that sped its first flight and highlights the purely human forces that followed. “The theologian,” he writes, “may depict religion descending from heaven… the historian must expose the inevitable corruption.” Stripped of irony, the words suit a Christian chronicle, yet his shading lures theologians into skirmishes on ground.
Paley, with quick insight, grasped that ordinary controversy could not answer Gibbon; his pointed line, “Who can refute a sneer?” rings with truth, yet still falls short. In the vast, ornate Decline and Fall, every theme but Christianity glitters. When the rise of the faith appears, Gibbon’s imagination sleeps; he wraps it in jealous disparagement or painstaking exposure of later decay. Brief flashes of generosity break through, swelling into his usual fervor, yet they fade, and he reverts to icy impartiality, cataloguing Christian faults with biting sarcasm and admitting virtues only grudgingly, hedged with reservations.
This bias even shapes his composition. Alaric, Attila, Mahomet, Zengis, Tamerlane—each storms onto the stage with dramatic animation, their conquests told in full, glowing narrative; the triumph of Christianity alone is flattened into a chill, critical treatise. Barbarous energy summons all his colouring, while moral victories—quiet endurance, spotless purity, contempt of corrupt fame—shrink into meagre asceticism. Pagan sunsets and Islamic dawns blaze beneath his pen; Christian glory finds no echo in his heart. One longs for equal justice: facts stripped of legend, New-Testament miracles spared derision, genuine martyrs—Polycarp, the sufferers of Vienne—honoured with his usual splendour.
Yet if the early story of Christianity appears melancholy, faith should not lay every shadow on an unbelieving historian. Denying the swift departure from primitive simplicity, or the loss of universal love, would be idle and dishonest. An unflinching portrait, even from a hostile hand, may school later ages; today’s church must guard against repeating narrowness that will delight tomorrow’s foe. The present edition therefore adopts a double aim: to correct misstatements with candid notes that blunt unfair impressions, and to supplement the narrative with fresh evidence from sources unavailable to Gibbon, thereby restoring a fairer view.
The project began as pencilled references along the margins of a personal copy; these fragments soon promised wider service. Almost all the annotations of M. Guizot’s French version, now translated, appear here, signed “G”, even where disagreement persists, for the authority of a Protestant statesman may weigh more with some than that of an English clergyman. Wenck’s invaluable German notes, marked “W”, join them. Insights from Le Beau revised by Saint-Martin and Brosset, newly found classical fragments, and broad Oriental literature enrich later volumes. The editor’s remarks carry the letter “M”. Text and notes were carefully revised in 1845.
Preface Of The Author.
Without dwelling on the magnitude of my theme, I submit this first volume and sketch its bounds. Rome’s decline divides into three eras: from Trajan’s zenith to the Gothic fall of the West; from Justinian’s fleeting Eastern splendor through Lombards, Arab conquests, Roman revolt, and Charlemagne’s throne; and, longest, from that revival to Constantinople’s capture, a span entwined with Crusades and shadowed Rome. Having rashly printed an imperfect opening, I pledge a second volume to close the first era, while later parts depend on health and perseverance. In 1781 I finish the Western tale and, heartened, resolve in 1782 to reach 1453, treating centuries briefly.
Preface To The First Volume.
Diligence and accuracy are the sole honors an historian may claim, and, having fulfilled that duty, I can declare I have sifted every original source bearing on my theme. Should I one day finish the broad design sketched in the Preface, I might end with a critical survey of the writers I have used; though some could call it ostentatious, I believe such a catalogue would both amuse and instruct. For now I note only this: the late Imperial biographers—Aelius Spartianus, Julius Capitolinus, Aelius Lampridius, Vulcatius Gallicanus, Trebellius Pollio, Flavius Vopiscus—lie in manuscript chaos, so I cite them collectively as the Augustan History.
Preface To The Fourth Volume Of The Original Quarto Edition.
I now fulfill my pledge and finish the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, tracing events from Trajan to the capture of Constantinople, with Crusades and medieval Rome between. Twelve years of “health, leisure, and perseverance” separate this close from the first volume, and I gladly leave a long service, trusting the public’s continued favor. A full register of my authorities proved impracticable, yet I have always drunk at the fountain-head and marked each secondary witness. Soon I return to beloved Lausanne; still, as an Englishman, I would dedicate the work to Lord North, praised for steadfast friends and unclouded temper.
Readers may wonder whether this is a farewell; my scale between silence and action hangs. Six quartos may have drained indulgence, success risks loss, and age advances, yet health, leisure, and the quest for truth endure; idleness hurts more than toil. Liberty will be spent on curious excursions, then experience will show if study outweighs the discipline of a new design. “Caprice and accident may influence my choice; but the dexterity of self-love will applaud” either path. Downing, 1 May 1788. P.S. Geographical terms assume Rome or Constantinople; foreign names follow sound, yet custom keeps Mahomet, Aleppo, Cairo, Confucius, Moslem, while Zoroaster and Timour vary.
CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION.
In the second century Rome held the fairest lands and polished peoples. Ancient glory and drilled courage guarded the borders; equal laws and manners bound the provinces; wealth and luxury proved reward and snare. The senate wore a crown of freedom yet yielded power to the emperors, and for more than eighty years Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and the two Antonines ruled with virtue. Under the republic triumph followed triumph, but Augustus, seeing peril outweigh hope, checked expansion. By treaty he regained Crassus’s standards, abandoned scorching Ethiopia and Arabia, saw Germany revolt, and in his will set limits at ocean, Rhine, Danube, Euphrates, and desert.
Later Caesars, sunk in pleasure or tyranny, stayed from the legions and grudged their lieutenants any triumph, so generals guarded the line without chasing new laurels. Only Britain, close to Gaul and rumored rich in pearls, broke the rule. After forty years of obstinate war—begun by the dullest, continued by the most debauched, finished by the most timid emperor—the greater part of the island bowed. Brave yet divided tribes, Caractacus, Boadicea, and ardent Druids fell to steady discipline. Agricola smashed the Caledonians at the Grampians, circled the coast, planned to seize Ireland, and planted forts that became Antoninus’s wall, while the misty north remained free.
Trajan, soldier-emperor, shattered the long peace. He led legions across the Danube against Dacia, whose king Decebalus matched Roman craft. After five harsh years the barbarians bent; broad Dacia, bounded by Niester, Tibiscus, lower Danube, and Euxine, became Rome’s prize, its road still traceable toward Bender. Craving Alexander’s glory, Trajan then turned east. Parthians torn by civil strife fled; he sailed the Tigris from Armenia to the Persian Gulf, harried Arabian shores, and dreamed of India. Each day the senate heard of crowns yielded by Bosphorus, Iberia, Albania, Osrhoene, Median tribes, Armenia, Mesopotamia, Assyria—yet his death soon imperiled the glittering conquests.
At Rome's founding, only the boundary god Terminus[2] defied Jupiter, a stubborn omen that Rome’s borders would never shrink. For ages the augural boast held true, yet Terminus finally bowed to Hadrian. The new emperor surrendered Trajan’s eastern spoils, restored an independent Parthian throne, withdrew the garrisons from Armenia, Mesopotamia, Assyria, and, like Augustus, set the Euphrates as limit. Some called it envy, some prudence, but the act confessed Trajan’s larger spirit. Their temperaments could not differ more: Trajan fierce and aspiring, Hadrian energetic yet cautious; the former’s conquests vast, the latter’s curiosity endless and roving.
Hadrian trudged bare-headed through Caledonian snow and Upper-Egyptian heat, visiting every province on foot; Antoninus Pius, content in Italy, rarely ventured beyond his Lanuvian villa. Despite their contrary habits, both adopted Augustus’s plan: guard, not enlarge, the realm. They courted neighboring tribes with honor, boasting that Rome, lifted above greed, sought only order and justice. Forty-three tranquil years proved the boast; except for skirmishes, the world lay quiet. Savage chiefs asked the emperor to judge their quarrels, and some envoys were denied the privilege of becoming subjects. Yet armed preparedness upheld that peace, and Marcus later wielded it against Parthians and Germans with victories.
Conquest turned war from civic duty into trade; legions kept the citizen name, yet files were stocked with hardy northerners—smiths, carpenters, hunters—often coarse adventurers chosen for strength and height. Each recruit swore, under solemn rites, never to desert the standard, to obey, to die for emperor and empire. The golden eagle gleamed like a god; its loss meant infamy. Regular pay, donatives, and retirement land eased hardship, while blows or death punished cowardice. Constant drill—marching, swimming, wielding double-weight arms, dancing to flutes under winter sheds—hardened bodies and polished maneuvers; emperors joined the contests and kept the art, though centuries had reshaped the legion.
A Roman legion stood on ten cohorts led by tribunes and centurions. The privileged first cohort, guardian of the eagle, mustered 1,105 proven veterans; each of the next nine held 555, raising the heavy-armed infantry to 6,100. Every man wore open helm, mail, greaves, and the curved wooden shield four feet long, two and a half broad, faced with bull hide and brass. Beside a light spear he hurled the six-foot pilum whose steel head shattered armor and nerve at ten paces; then he drew the short Spanish blade, thrusting through gaps made by the eight-rank open order that outmaneuvered the clumsy phalanx.
The legion’s edge was perfected by horse and allies. Ten squadrons marched beside cohorts: the companion troop mirrored the first with 132 riders; each of the other nine held 66, totaling 726. Cappadocian or Spanish mounts bore troopers in helm, mail, oval shield, javelin, and broad-sword, scorning heavy plate yet borrowing barbarian lances and maces. Trajan and Hadrian raised this cavalry from the same provinces. Around them thronged auxiliaries—provincials, client tribes, captive warriors—almost equal in number, some hardened to Roman drill, others wielding bows, slings, darts, or nimble steeds. Each legion dragged ten great and fifty-five light engines that hurled stones or bolts with force.
Each evening the legion raised a fortress. A square seven hundred yards a side held twenty thousand men. Pioneers leveled ground, drew straight streets, planted the praetorium, stationed horse, foot, and auxiliaries, and left a two-hundred-foot glacis before the twelve-foot rampart and ditch. Blades and spades served the same hand. At the trumpet the camp vanished; burdened with kit, tools, and rations, troops covered twenty miles in six hours, then formed for battle: skirmishers, auxiliaries, legions, cavalry, engines. Hadrian kept thirty legions—about 375,000 men—three in Britain, sixteen on Rhine-Danube, eight on Euphrates, one each in Egypt, Africa, Spain, plus city cohorts and Praetorians in Italy.
The emperors kept a navy modest in numbers yet adequate for rule. Romans coveted land, shunned the mysterious ocean, and after Carthage fell their provinces encircled the Mediterranean. Augustus, intent on calm seas and safe trade, moored two permanent squadrons of nimble Liburnian galleys, one at Ravenna for the east, one at Misenum for the west, each with thousands of marines. Additional flotillas lay at Frejus, on the Euxine, between Gaul and Britain, and along the Rhine and Danube, raiding or blocking barbarians. Counting these crews with legions, auxiliaries and guards, the whole military establishment scarcely exceeded four-hundred-and-fifty thousand.
Under Hadrian and the Antonines, Spain—framed by Pyrenees, sea and Atlantic—held three provinces: rugged Lusitania, fertile Baetica, and vast Tarraconensis reaching northward. Celtiberians wielded power, Cantabrians and Asturians resisted longest. Ancient Gaul, larger than modern France, stretched from mountains to ocean; Augustus organized it into Narbonnese, Aquitaine, Celtic Lyonnese, Belgic, and the twin Germanies planted along the Rhine after German tribes had pressed west. Britain, annexed earlier, embraced England, Wales, and Lowland Scotland up to the friths, homeland of Belgae, Brigantes, Silures, and Iceni. These kindred western lands formed a single frontier from Hercules’ pillars to Antoninus’ wall.
North of the Apennine, Gaulish settlers once ruled Lombardy; Ligurians clung to Genoa’s crags, Venetians to eastern marshes, and Etruscans with Umbrians civilized the Tuscan heart. Southward lay Sabine, Latin and Volscian fields by the Tiber, opulent Campania round Naples, plus the martial Marsi, Samnites, Apulians and Lucanians, while Grecian colonies lined the coasts; Augustus later parceled Italy into eleven regions, adding Istria. The Rhine and Danube girded the northern provinces. Along the Danube the fighting belt of Illyricum stretched: Raetia, Noricum, Pannonia, Dalmatia, Dacia across the river, Maesia, Thrace, Macedonia, Greece—territories now claimed by Austrian, Venetian, or Ottoman lords.
Roumelia—Thrace, Macedonia, Greece—still echoes the Roman past. Under the Antonines the warlike lands from Haemus and Rhodope to the Bosphorus formed one province, and Constantine’s new Rome on that strait remained an imperial capital. Macedonia, steeled by two Philips, stretched with Epirus and Thessaly between Aegean and Ionian seas. Thebes, Argos, Sparta, Athens, once immortal republics, sank into Achaia. Eastward, Asia Minor lay between Euxine and Mediterranean: Rome’s exclusive “Asia” west of Taurus and Halys, Bithynia and Pontus along the Euxine, Cilicia confronting Syria, Cappadocia inland; beyond Trebizond posts watched Budzak, Crimea, Circassia, Mingrelia.
Syria, seat of the fallen Seleucids, became Rome’s eastern rampart, hemmed by Cappadocia, Egypt, and the Red Sea; Phoenicia and Palestine alternated within its jurisdiction. That slender coast and small upland, scarcely larger than Wales, spread letters and religion through the earth. Southward a barren desert sheltered free Arab nomads, whose few cultivable spots turned them into Roman vassals. Yet Galilee and the fields beyond Jordan were lush, yielding grain, vines, olives, honey, and the fragrant balm of Jericho. Egypt lies next: reached only through Asia, ruled by a prefect on the Ptolemies’ throne, its Nile flooding five hundred miles; Cyrene fades westward into desert.
From Cyrene to the ocean Rome’s African coast, seldom a hundred miles wide between Mediterranean and Sahara, passed from Libyan wilds to Carthaginian mart to today’s Tripoli and Tunis. Numidia dwindled; most became Mauritania—Caesariensis and Tingitana, now Algiers and Fez—while Salle signaled the empire’s limit. West of Atlas the boundary reached the strait where Gibraltar rises on the Pillar of Hercules. Rome held every Mediterranean shore and island: Baleares, Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, Crete, Cyprus, and Malta. In plain figures the realm stretched two thousand miles north-south, more than three thousand east-west, between latitudes twenty-four and fifty-six, and contained sixteen hundred thousand square miles of land.
Merab, once ruled by Belkis of Saba, vanished when its dam burst and floodwaters swept the city, though ruins still fringe spice-rich Adramout. Strabo lists two routes and makes Gallus fail before Marsuabae, not Mariaba; later critics doubt any Roman approach to the Sabaean capital. After the massacre of Varus and three legions, Augustus heard the news with shaken composure. Victorious commanders—Germanicus, Suetonius Paulinus, Agricola—were recalled, Corbulo executed; military glory remained dangerous. Caesar eyed Britain for pearls but found only dark, worthless gems. Claudius, Nero, and Domitian still dreamed of the misty island; Agricola’s advance and fortified lines provoked Caledonian pride, scorned by Irish chroniclers.
Hadrian traced a turf barrier from Newcastle to Carlisle; Antoninus pushed a new rampart between Edinburgh and Dumbarton; Severus later crowned the northern frontier with stone, yet Buchanan exults that Caledonia stayed free. Appian likens those tribes to Homer's heroes, and Ossian’s dreamy verses echo the same imagery. Pliny hails the empire’s ordered peace; under Domitian Rome boasted of taming Germany, though Herodotus long before pictured Scythians unchecked. Letters, panegyrics, and coins chart Trajan’s Danubian bridge and his measured resolve to hold, not overreach, in Dacia, while Eutropius still pretends the province of Vespasiana stretched far beyond the wall.
Hadrian’s court stamped every province on medals; during his tours Jewish revolt flamed in one, Moorish raiders and British Brigantes in others, yet Pius’s generals drove each enemy back. Appian begins his annals praising Rome’s boundless sway; Marcus Aurelius added Parthian trophies, spawning verbose chroniclers derided by Lucian. Recruitment once required forty pounds of property, but Marius opened the ranks to the poor, and Caesar’s Gallic Alauda earned citizenship for service. Vegetius lists the legion’s yearly oath, eagle shrine, twelve-aureus pay, harsh drill with sword, shield, pilum, supporting cavalry, and the iron discipline celebrated by Virgil, Arrian, Livy, and Pliny.
Hadrian corrects a flaw by fixing a tribune’s minimum age, turning promotion into earned rank. A noble youth begins in the praetorian cohort, sharing a tent with a senior officer as Caesar once did under Thermus and Servilius. Brutus, starved of Romans, calls every notable follower “tribune”; later Augustus gives the title to senators’ sons, Claudius to knights, Valerian to young Probus despite the edict. Agricola, already titled, learns as contubernalis beside Suetonius in Britain. Arrian drills, Batavian cohorts stand apart, Aurelius drafts Quadi and Marcomanni for Britain. Vegetius and Folard parade legions, order, engines replacing valor, yet the legion must haul its self-sufficient city.
Castrametation manuals from Polybius to Guichard mark the square camp; Cicero lauds hardy lodgings, Vegetius insists on hygiene, Guichard plots swift manoeuvres. Between Tiberius and Severus legion size varies; pious ritual masks fear; Antony’s floating towers creep on Nile; Vegetius ends with naval lore. Strabo lists Tarraconensis, yet a Pyrenean brook names Arragon. Notitia grants Gaul 115 cities, while Plutarch counts hundreds of tribes; D’Anville redraws the map, Whittaker studies Manchester. Veneti, Verona, and Italy split between Alpine sternness and Campanian grace, Augustus’ regions stand. Tournefort surveys Greece, Illyricum stretches to the Euxine; Fortis shows hills, the Save feeds Danube, Arrian charts the Black Sea.
An inflated comparison denounces Palestine’s fertility, resting only on Strabo and the land’s present ruin. Strabo limits barrenness to sixty stadia round Jerusalem, yet even he admits, “Near Jericho there is a grove of palms, and a country of a hundred stadia, full of springs, and well peopled.” He never saw the land; his German sketch is notorious. Other voices contradict him. Tacitus records, “The inhabitants are healthy and robust; the rains moderate; the soil fertile.” Ammianus adds, “The last of the Syrias is Palestine…abounding in well-cultivated land.” Josephus, Procopius, Saracen fears, and Roman medals beneath a palm tree echo the same abundance.
Modern desolation proves nothing: war, oppression, and indolence have stripped the fields, though Shaw, Maundrell, and La Rocque still describe thriving patches. Abbé Guenée rebukes Voltaire, while critics press Gibbon; Mr. Davis stays silent, half-pleased that Wales, his 7,011-mile homeland, rivals Gibbon’s 7,600-mile Palestine. To defend himself, Gibbon cites the jest imputed to Frederick II, “The God of the Jews would have despised his promised land if he had seen Sicily and Naples.” He concedes that the soil lacks the Nile’s prodigality: only the Jordan carries boats, the Dead Sea looms hideous, desert sands creep, mountains rise naked, and Jerusalem endures drought.
Ancient industry once overcame every hindrance: hills were terraced with rich soil, rain caught in vast cisterns, aqueducts laced the dry slopes, herds grazed the wastes, and each corner surrendered produce. “Pater ispe colendi…,” sings Virgil, praising toil’s divine spur. After this survey race memory unrolls: Phoenician letters reached Europe fifteen centuries before Christ and crossed to America fifteen after; geographers debate whether Suez or the Nile divides Asia from Africa; Cyrene’s story sprawls; Egypt, stirred by Mahommed Ali, eyes Ottoman weakness; Atlas stretches gently while Teneriffe pierces clouds; the Canaries elude Rome; Minorca, Corsica, and Malta change flags; Bergier maps roads, Templeman’s charts remain suspect.
CHAPTER II
Rome’s greatness lay not merely in swift conquest: nomads from Russia, Alexander in seven summers, and the Moguls had rivalled or outstripped her march, yet their empires vanished. Patient wisdom built the Roman edifice; Trajan’s and the Antonines’ provinces obeyed just laws and flourished in the arts. In religion the senate and emperors were aided by both enlightened reflection and habitual superstition. To the crowd every cult was true; to the philosopher, equally false; to the magistrate, equally useful, so toleration reigned. Polytheists eagerly multiplied protectors; local gods shared domains in peace, all ruled by a supreme, paternal Jupiter.
The soft spirit of antiquity blurred sectarian lines: Greek, Roman, and barbarian thought their differing rites mere variants of one faith shaped by Homeric myth. Philosophers probed divine nature, some blending reason with piety, others doubting or denying providence, yet all scoffed at poetical fables even while publicly serving the temples. Smiling at popular folly, they sacrificed and wore priestly robes, indifferent whether Jupiter hailed from Libya, Olympus, or the Capitol. Statesmen equally lacked zeal for persecution; themselves initiated in Athens’ schools, they prized religion’s civic usefulness. Except for Druids briefly suppressed under Tiberius and Claudius, universal indulgence prevailed.
Rome likewise extended civil honors. Where Athens and Sparta dwindled by guarding pure blood, Rome annexed virtue wherever it appeared. Servius Tullius counted eighty-three thousand citizens; before the Social War[3] the muster rose to four hundred sixty-three thousand despite colonies and campaigns. Allies once defiant were chastised, then folded into the republic, their admission hastening the end of freedom when assemblies grew unwieldy. Imperial rule removed that danger: conquerors remained the first order, yet vanquished subjects could ascend. Following Augustus, cautious princes preserved the Roman name’s lustre while bestowing citizenship with measured, ambitious, steady generosity.
Before citizenship spread across the empire, a sharp line separated Italy from the provinces. The peninsula, heart of the state, supplied emperors and senate, paid no taxes, and stood beyond provincial governors’ whim; its towns, modeled on Rome, enforced laws under the supreme eye. From Alps to Calabria every native was born Roman, their former tribal names fading into one nation bound by speech, customs, and civil forms. The commonwealth exulted in this largess: Mantua gave Virgil, Padua a historian of victories, Tusculum the stern Catos, tiny Arpinum both Marius—honored as a second founder—and Cicero, rival of Athenian eloquence.
Beyond that privileged core the conquered lands held no troops and no shield of law. Etruscan, Greek, and Gallic leagues were broken, puppet kings dismissed once they yoked their peoples, allied cities slipped from friendship to servitude. Yet Rome followed constant maxims: she planted colonies on good plains, settled veterans, and granted loyal provincials the civic wreath. Colonies copied their mother in law and custom; municipal towns soon matched their lustre, and the Latin right let yearly magistrates pass into full citizenship. Under Antonine bounty the title still brought marriage, wills, inheritance; grandsons of Gauls now led legions, ruled provinces, sat in the senate.
Language shaped character, so conquerors pressed Latin wherever the eagle flew. Italy’s dialects faded; in the west—Africa, Spain, Gaul, Britain, Pannonia—towns spoke it, with Punic or Celtic surviving only in highlands. The educated thought and dressed as Romans, eventually supplying Trajan, leader worthy of the Scipios. Greeks, already refined, clung to their tongue, snubbing victors yet admiring wisdom; that speech, spread by Macedonian courts, filled cities from Adriatic to Nile. Syria and Egypt kept ancient dialects, breeding apathy and suspicion; two centuries passed before one Egyptian sat in the senate. Rome relished Greek art but reserved Latin for law, and scholars everywhere mastered both.
It was through civic institutions that conquered nations quietly dissolved into the Roman name, yet at every provincial core stood slaves who bore society’s weight without its rewards. Drawn mostly from barbarian captives sold cheaply after ages of violence, they chafed under masters who, fearing revolt, enforced savage discipline. When warfare yielded fewer prisoners, owners turned to breeding: marriages were encouraged, affection and self-interest softening chains. Hadrian and the Antonines removed private power of life and death, closed underground dungeons, and let maltreated bondsmen sue for release. Hope remained: diligent service might win manumission, though law confined new citizens to humble rights.
But freedom was rationed. To guard the city’s honor, only those solemnly approved by magistrates gained it, and neither they nor their sons could sit in the senate until the fourth generation. A proposal to dress slaves in special garb was dropped lest they learn their own multitude. That multitude filled villas, workshops, and fields: clever youths trained in arts and sciences, artisans forged and painted, hosts fed pleasure. A single Roman palace held four hundred slaves; an obscure African widow bequeathed the same number; a ruined freedman died owning 4,116 and vast herds. Counting citizens, provincials, and bondsmen, the empire approached one-hundred-twenty million souls.
Such numbers obeyed willingly, unlike the uneasy satrapies of Asia. Blended nations no longer dreamed of independence; authority touched Thames, Nile, and Tiber alike, civil order seldom needing legions. Peace and wealth turned rulers and subjects to decoration. Though time has broken many structures, surviving ruins show their vast, graceful forms, built for public use, often with private funds. Emperors led: Augustus replaced brick with marble, Vespasian built by thrift, Trajan by genius, Hadrian as roving artist, the Antonines for public joy. Senators followed—Capua and Verona mimicked the Coliseum, Lusitanian towns bridged the Tagus, Bithynian cities competed, Herodes Atticus outshone princes.
Herod’s line traced to Cimon, Theseus, Jupiter, but his grandfather was executed and his father Julius Atticus was near ruin until he found a buried hoard under their last house. Aware the emperor could claim it, Atticus confessed; Nerva retorted, “Abuse it then, for it is your own.” Enriched further by marriage, Atticus poured money into public causes. He obtained the Asian prefecture for his son, and when Hadrian granted three-hundred myriads for Troas’s aqueduct, the cost doubled, so Atticus paid the excess. Tutors shaped young Herod into a noted, if academic, orator; he reached the consulship yet preferred villas around Athens, applauded by sophists.
While his speeches vanished, marble testified to Herod’s wealth: at Athens he raised a six-hundred-foot stadium of white stone in four years as president of the games; for Regilla he set up a cedar-lined theatre unequalled in the empire; he renewed Pericles’ Odeum, then spread gifts across Greece—Neptune’s Isthmian temple, a Corinthian theatre, a Delphic stadium, Thermopylae baths, even an aqueduct at Canusium. Such civic generosity echoed the older republican principle that private houses stay modest while public buildings proclaim common majesty. Nero’s golden palace fell, and in its place rose the Coliseum, baths, porticoes, and Peace and Roma temples.
Trajan’s forum, ringed by a quadrangular portico pierced by four triumphal arches, centered on a marble column one hundred and ten feet high that pictured the Dacian wars, letting veterans relive their marches and citizens share the glory. Similar vigor filled provinces with amphitheatres, temples, arches, baths, and the audacious aqueducts whose arches still stride over Spoleto, Metz, Segovia, or deserted African plains. The empire itself boasted myriad cities: Italy numbered twelve hundred; Gaul claimed twelve hundred more; Britain cleared woods for York, London, Bath; Spain once listed three hundred sixty; Africa three hundred; Asia five hundred; and Antioch or Alexandria outranked all save Rome.
Stone highways shot out from Rome’s Forum, crossed Italy, pierced mountains, bridged roaring rivers, and only stopped at the empire’s frontiers. Mile-stones marked every pace; the raised crown of sand, gravel, cement, and granite rode straight over land and property alike and still resists fifteen centuries of wear. Legions marched swiftly, and no land was deemed conquered until these arteries opened it to power. Relay stations stood five or six miles apart, each with forty fresh horses; dispatches flew a hundred miles a day. At sea, the engineered harbor of Ostia let ships reach Gibraltar in seven days and Alexandria in ten.
Peaceful roads and open seas spread more than troops; they carried flowers, vines, and olives from East and South into the raw West. Roman gardens filled with apricots, peaches, pomegranates, citrons, and oranges, each still called an apple with a foreign surname. Sicily’s wild vine became, after patient grafts, fourscore noble wines, two-thirds born in Italy and soon flowing through Narbonnese Gaul, Burgundy, and colder valleys once thought hopeless for grapes. The olive followed, then Egyptian flax that enriched Gaul, and Lucerne grass that fattened herds and fields. Mines, fisheries, and careful husbandry checked famines that once gnawed the infant republic.
Luxury surged along the same channels. Furs slipped from Scythian forests, amber rolled from Baltic sands, and Babylonian carpets glowed beside Roman couches. Each summer, one hundred twenty ships left Myos-Hormos[4] on the Red Sea, caught the monsoon, and in forty days touched Malabar or Ceylon; by winter their cargoes rode camels to the Nile, descended to Alexandria, and hurried on to Rome. Silk, dear as gold by weight, pearls rivaling diamonds, and clouds of incense fed altars and funerals. Silver paid the bill; senators grumbled that foreign trinkets drained the treasury, yet rising supplies from restless mines kept coffers heavy.
Romans and provincials alike felt and admitted the empire’s calm prosperity. “They acknowledged that the true principles of social life… were now firmly established by the power of Rome,” lauded united barbarians, swelling populations, glittering cities, a countryside tended like “an immense garden,” and a “long festival of peace.” Rhetoric aside, the description was real, yet the same peace dripped a secret poison. Minds leveled, genius cooled, soldiers’ ardor dulled. Spain, Gaul, Britain, Illyricum still bred hardy men, yet public courage faded; they obeyed imposed governors, trusted mercenary legions, chased court favor, and the provinces drifted into languid private life.
Peaceful refinement made letters fashionable. Hadrian and the Antonines, curious scholars, encouraged study from Scotland to the Danube; even northern Britons practiced rhetoric, and Homer and Virgil were copied beside frontier rivers, while prizes hunted the faintest sparkle of talent. Greek physicians and astronomers thrived—Ptolemy observed the heavens, Galen explored the body—yet, save for “the inimitable Lucian,” no fresh genius appeared. Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Epicurus still ruled blind classrooms; poets and orators inspired only chilly mimicry, and bold deviations strayed into folly. The title Poet vanished, Orator fell to sophists, and pedant clouds of critics smothered taste.
Longinus, keeping Athenian fire in a Syrian court, sighed: “In the same manner as some children remain pygmies… our tender minds, fettered by servile habits, cannot reach the greatness we admire in ancients who, living under a popular government, wrote with the same freedom as they acted.” Each generation shrank until northern giants burst in, renewed the breed, rekindled freedom, and after ten centuries fathered taste and science. Stones near Lahore mark Alexander’s farthest Indian river; histories of Huns, debates on polytheist tolerance, philosophical and legal notes, and the sad fate of Isis’s Roman temple flank this survey.
Images in Pompeii show an Isiac shrine; kindred relics lie in Gaul and at York. In 535 Rome, the senate orders the temples of Isis and Serapis levelled; workmen shrink back until Consul L. Paulus raises the first axe. A second razing comes 166 years later. Tertullian locates the cult’s spread in Flavian zeal. Livy, Macrobius, Minutius, Arnobius, and Tacitus trace other rites, citizenship grants, evocations, and provincial freedoms. Democrats hoard civic rights, monarchs enlarge them; Rome’s greatest accessions arrive under kings, patricians, and emperors. Herodotus guesses populations; Athenaeus, Boeckh, Clinton, Beaufort, and Niebuhr debate censuses embracing allied towns.
Appian and Velleius recount the Social War that forced the franchise outward. Maecenas urges Augustus, “proclaim every subject a citizen,” yet the emperor hesitates. Senators must keep a third, then a quarter, of their estates in Italy; even so, the peninsula sinks toward provincial rank. Italy’s cities guard ancient self-rule; Maffei surveys their councils, whose Greek names Pausanias finds restored when they cease to menace Rome. Caesar still hears Gallic assemblies; some privileges linger, revocable at imperial whim, so Athens survives as a formal ally. Seneca mourns exile; Memnon records eight thousand citizens butchered, others trebling the number.
Spain gains twenty-five colonies; Britain nine. Hadrian wonders why Utica, Gades, Italica chase the title “colony,” yet the fashion spreads. Latin right releases towns from a prefect, and Aristides hails an empire bound by one tongue. Pliny, Augustine, Strabo, Tacitus, Velleius, and stones chart Latin’s advance, though Celtic endures in Welsh hills and Apuleius scolds an African for clinging to Punic. Greek critics ignore Roman verse; Syriac and Coptic persist; Rome rings with speech. Severus permits Greek pleas; Claudius expels an officer ignorant of Latin. War floods slave stalls: Lucullus sells an ox for one drachma, a man for four; Jews cheaper; Sicilian revolts flare.
During L. Domitius’s praetorship in Sicily, a slave speared an enormous wild boar. Impressed, the magistrate summoned him, but on learning the man had dared use a javelin, he ordered immediate crucifixion, claiming, “the law forbids that weapon to slaves.” Cicero recounts the scene unmoved: “This may seem harsh; I offer no opinion.” Yet in the same speech he thunders, “To imprison a Roman is criminal, to scourge wicked, almost parricide to kill—what name suits crucifixion?” The anecdote opens Gibbon’s discussion of slavery, whose cool tone and eagerness to excuse “necessity” provoke Guizot’s charge of dishonest impartiality.
Guizot contends that Gibbon downplays horrors, lists petty alleviations, and ignores the force that finally broke the chains—Christianity. He cites Robertson: under empire domestic tyranny flourished, yet “the spirit of the Christian religion” with its mild temper and exalted view of humanity erased bondage. Hence, Guizot rejects Gibbon’s explanation that masters grew kind merely to preserve slave numbers through encouraged marriages and “habits of education”; property status stifled such feelings. Real change, he insists, sprang from a higher moral cause. Milman replies that emperors truly softened the yoke; Hadrian’s and Antonine edicts, Seneca, Pliny and Plutarch prove pre-Christian mercy.
Footnotes unroll a panorama of servitude: inscriptions from wives, children, stewards; treatises on freedmen; catalogues of bakers, physicians, readers, secretaries, gardeners. Seneca warns of danger “if our slaves began to count us.” Pliny and Athenaeus boast of Romans who kept ten or twenty thousand for display, while Paris now holds fewer than forty-three thousand domestics. Educated captives fetched fortunes; Atticus bred his slaves, and many doctors served in chains. After Pedanius Secundus’s murder, every household slave was executed, Cassius defending the verdict. Scholars spar over numbers—two or three slaves per freeman, say Robertson and Blair; Zumpt urges far fewer, blaming grand estates for misleading totals.
Voltaire tallies Europe at Antonine scale: twenty million in France, twenty-two in Germany, four in Hungary, ten in Italy, eight in Britain, eight in Iberia, up to twelve in Russia, six in Poland, six in Greece and Turkey, four in Sweden, three in Denmark-Norway, four in the Low Countries, giving barely one-hundred-seven million. Nineteenth-century tables raise the continent to 227,700,000, while the Almanach de Gotha assigns 32.9 to France, 56.1 to Germany-Hungary-Poland, 44.2 to Russia, 24 to Britain, 20.5 to Italy, fourteen to Spain-Portugal, nine and a half to Turkey, smaller sums elsewhere, total 219,344,116 inhabitants.
Scholars probe earlier figures. Dureau de la Malle restricts himself to Rome and Italy; Zumpt prefers the eve of the First Punic War, arguing that later Italy and Greece withered through foreign and civil slaughter, slave farming, failing marriages, and debauchery, yet rich Asia Minor and advancing Gaul, Spain, and Britain offset the loss. Gibbon admits his own guesswork. Agrippa’s famed speech praises an empire that rivals cannot resist. Augustus crowns that empire with the Forum of Mars the Avenger, Jupiter Tonans, Apollo’s library, porticos for Livia and Octavia, and the theatre of Marcellus, while Agrippa raises the Pantheon.
