Bangers from Gibbon

I did an appearance on Shilo Brooks’s podcast about books, and picked Edward Gibbons’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as my favorite. I have a seven-volume copy of this work that I obtained several decades ago. When I recently pulled it off my shelf and started flipping through it, I discovered that during previous readings I had marked certain passages with book darts (metal clips that grip the edge of the page, as shown above) and dogeared other pages when book darts weren’t handy.

To save others the trouble of pointing it out, Gibbon wrote this thing 250 years ago. In the meantime ten generations of scholars have come and gone, devoting their careers to uncovering new sources and studying history from different angles — just to name one example, Kyle Harper’s The Fate of Rome, which re-interprets the decline and fall through the lens of the modern sciences of climatology and epidemiology. My edition of Gibbon dates to 1909; it was painstakingly annotated by one J. B. Bury, who added many footnotes pointing out bits that Gibbon had got wrong. So as a document about what actually, factually happened, Gibbon has to be read with care. But his best bits aren’t just recitations of historical data, as I hope the following selections will demonstrate.

Rome’s conquest of Britain

After a war of about forty years, undertaken by the most stupid, maintained by the most dissolute, and terminated by the most timid of all the emperors, the far greater part of the island submitted to the Roman yoke. The various tribes of Britons possessed valour without conduct, and the love of freedom without the spirit of union. They took up arms with savage fierceness, they laid them down, or turned them against each other, with wild inconstancy; and while they fought singly, they were successively subdued.

Religion

This one is probably the most quoted passage from Gibbon, but I’m including it anyway!

The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all con…