Edward gibbon fall of the roman empire pdf

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Back Submit Reproduction Request. Your request has been sent! Email Address. Send Cancel. This makes it an inherently precarious achievement: an insight Gibbon shared with those historians, from Tacitus to David Hume, whom he most admired.

Gibbon draws attention to three aspects of his biography which, in retrospect, were necessary preconditions for his immortalization as the historian of Rome. The Decline and Fall, displaying a mastery of the literary productions and material remnants of previous ages, along with the philosophical judgment to impose order and meaning upon them, could only have been conceived in the felicitous conditions modern Europe afforded.

Whilst Gibbon was proud of his status as a gentleman of independent wealth, until his final years he was constrained to proportion his expenditure to his means.

Gibbon ii. Gibbon was a sickly child, who suffered from innumerable physical ailments until the age of sixteen. Yet Gibbon observed that public schools such as Westminster which he attended briefly imposed a uniform stamp on the minds of English gentlemen He was again left unsupervised, not least in theological matters. In the Memoirs, Gibbon is largely unrepentant.

It also resulted in him being cast out of English society, metaphorically and literally: his father hastily exiled him to reassuringly Protestant Lausanne for four years. Under the care of M. This statement obscures more than it reveals: rival Christian sects, as Gibbon would emphasize throughout his history, were generally incapable of agreeing on anything.

Aside from theology, Gibbon studied logic and epistemology Locke and modern natural law Grotius and Pufendorf ; but his interests lay overwhelmingly in ancient literature and history 4—7. Gibbon also acquired fluency in French, thereby gaining access to the most advanced works of erudition and philosophy of his day Shackleton The keen sense of causality, underpinned by recent empiricist work on the natural world as well as human nature, was an undeniable achievement of modern philosophy.

For Gibbon as for many contemporaries, only history, imbued with all of its classical dignity, could satisfy this ambition Hicks Gibbon was well read in modern Italian historiography Machiavelli, Sarpi, Giannone , which was steeped in the struggles between civil and ecclesiastical power cf. Gibbon contemplated various biographical subjects, including a study of Sir Walter Raleigh 30 , but feared that this historical seam had already been mined by others, including Hume.

Besides, Gibbon worried that this work would speak only to an English, not a European readership. He was more attracted to two other possibilities — one narrating the emergence of liberty in the Swiss republic , the other its decline in the Florentine, under the Medici Yet this project, too, was abandoned. He travelled through Paris before spending almost a year in Lausanne, renewing old friendships and engaging in concerted preparatory study for his much-anticipated visit to Rome Gibbon ; Gibbon The years between his return to England in and the death of his father in were characterized by frustration and anxiety, both financial and intellectual Jordan 1— Few historians have been so generous in acknowledging debts to their predecessors, including those with whom they disagree on matters of interpretation Chadwick — He also endeavoured take a measure of what non-European peoples knew of their pasts, and to use these rival historiographies to illuminate the various perceptions, and consequences, of the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of the great monotheistic religions Fowden With the greater specialization of the historical profession in the nineteenth century, and the attendant proliferation of available source material, such a mastery of the existing scholarship would prove beyond the reach of any one individual.

Gibbon worked alone, believing that all historical productions of genius were necessarily the issue of an individual mind ; cf. He nonetheless saw his work as a collaborative enterprise, conversing with past historians as if they were friends and colleagues. Particularly in his later volumes, Gibbon insistently reminds the reader that history is a creative activity: two people might work from the same sources and be equally committed to factual accuracy, and yet produce radically divergent narratives.

To acknowledge this was not, for Gibbon, to succumb to the over- easy temptation of historical relativism. Philologists and antiquarians too frequently assumed that the facts might speak for themselves, whilst Gibbon was suspicious of the tendency of philosophers such as Voltaire — and even Hume, Robertson, or Montesquieu — to marginalize facts, and to ridicule past commentators, whenever they proved inconvenient to their preferred lines of interpretation.

Both parties were guilty of a moral, not merely an intellectual failure: they owed it to themselves, to the dignity of history, and to the edification of their readers to confront human life in all its bewildering complexity. Surprising though it may seem given his mellifluous classical prose, historical narration did not come naturally to Gibbon. The study of the past was imbued with an ethical purpose, for Gibbon no less than for other philosophic historians, for what it could reveal about the human condition and predicament.

For Gibbon history is the story of our faltering attempts to construct civilized societies that answer to our shared needs, and enable us to cultivate those unique human faculties — language, judgment, memory, and consciousness — that allow us to exercise meaningful agency in the world. The character of political and social institutions is determined by the quality of our social relations, even as they shape those relations in turn. Salber- Phillips Theatrical representation runs as a leitmotif throughout the Decline and Fall, especially in its exploration of the degeneration of civilization — encompassing institutions, manners, the arts and sciences, and language — in both Rome and the new capital established by Constantine in the East.

Gibbon gives his readers front-row seats at a play that is for the most part a tragicomedy: they, unlike the characters in the play, know how the story ends — the decline of the Empire into unregenerate despotism, its citizens into subjects, and its destruction by unlettered barbarians.

Augustus occupies a central place throughout the Decline and Fall, because he was the first emperor to grasp clearly what had nonetheless been evident to Tacitus: the gulf that had opened up between the republican self-image of the Romans and the language consensual, liberal, legalistic they used to describe their empire, and the despotic, coercive reality.

He also recognized that the Roman people secretly desired the servitude for which they expressed such principled abhorrence: freedom was no longer a burden that they were willing, or able, to bear.

The unified personality of the Roman citizen, zealous in defense of the patria on the battlefield and in the Senate or Forum, had been divided: a favorite theme of civic humanist discourse from Livy and Sallust to Machiavelli, Harrington and Montesquieu Pocock The ideals of citizenship, liberty, and virtue are given frequent expression, but this is a grotesque charade; an inherited language has been evacuated of the meaning that once gave it agency and purchase cf.

MacIntyre Yet metaphors, like masks, tend to ossify: appearance and reality, dissimulation and self-delusion, become near-indistinguishable. The rise of Christianity, the historical causes of which Gibbon surveyed in the explosive final two chapters XV—XVI of his first volume, was only possible in a world in which language as a medium of representation, and the social bonds it helped to forge, had corroded beyond repair.

A similar degeneration, Gibbon argued, overtook Christianity as it overspread the Empire. Christian ecclesiology was originally republican in form, and the claims to authority of its early votaries were predicated on their pious commitment to live according to the moral precepts of the Gospel.

Yet the Christian republic, like the Roman, insensibly acquired an oligarchic, and finally a monarchical and despotic form. Its leaders similarly spoke a language — of mutual forbearance and charity, of contempt for worldly power and glory — that was completely at odds with their actions and the motives that animated them.

The increasingly worldly pretensions of Christianity, Gibbon maintained, obliged him to narrate its development alongside the civil history of the Empire: something which previous commentators, notably Tillemont and Montesquieu, had avoided. The history of the early Church might be interpreted either as one of decline from its Gospel purity , or alternatively of progress as the Word was disseminated throughout the nations of the world i. Either way, this history could not be narrated in a providential key; nor was it the preserve of theologians.

Whether the origins of Christianity were divine or human — whether Moses was a prophet, legislator, or imposter; whether Christ was divine in substance, in mission only, or not at all — its worldly success was the achievement of human individuals operating in specific historical contexts. Their actions and motives — including their claims to divine inspiration, attested by their supposed performance of miracles and prophecies — were legitimately subject to the same stringent standards of historical criticism as those of any other historical actor.

Clerical critics accused him of sneering at Christianity, of depicting its early leaders as power-hungry hypocrites and their followers as fanatical dupes Womersley Gibbon drew an unfavorable contrast between the tolerant polytheistic Roman religion and Christianity Stuart-Buttle The former embraced even as it appropriated the gods of other faiths and reinforced the social bond, whereas the latter was characterized by intolerance and systematically undermined the claims of the political community over the individual.

Gibbon left open the possibility, explored in subsequent volumes, that Christianity might yet become the guardian, rather than the enemy, of a European civilization founded upon a shared consciousness of the richness of its classical pre-Christian inheritance — an inheritance the vitality of which had dissipated to such an extent that by the second century AD the Romans themselves were ignorant or careless of their own history.

Modern European civilization, in sum, was as much the product of its Christian, as of its classical past. The eastward turn taken by Gibbon from the start of Volume IV surprised contemporary readers, as it has puzzled many scholars since: if Byzantium were such barren terrain, why not remain in the West, to focus on the rise of the Merovingians, Carolingians, and Popes?

Taking Constantinople as his base enabled Gibbon to pursue a history of the fall of the Roman Empire and its longer-term implications that was truly Eurasian in scope: bringing the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates, and the Seljuk, Mongol, and Ottoman Empires within his orbit Fowden Gibbon suggests that, at its height, Rome was like the sun, illuminating distant parts of the globe that lacked their own source of energy and bringing them into history; but, as the Empire contracted territorially, so like a dying star its light ebbed, and the map of history was illuminated by other, more youthful and vital nations.

This emphasis on contingency is accompanied by increased attention to the complexity of historical causality. The same pattern repeats once the Empire has fragmented. Tides of emigration bring peoples with different customs and languages into contact, and each seems terrifyingly alien to the other. In an important sense, the Europeans no less than the Greeks or Arabs are savages, because they are unable to recognize their shared humanity, and incapable of meaningful communication.

He could not admit that difference can be generative: of dialogue, emulation, and moral progress. Voltaire worked assiduously to exculpate the Ottoman despots of their heinous crimes, and to demonise their Christian victims. The worst sorts of ecclesiastical history employed an identical tactic: they just reversed the blame. Whether Roman or Hun, Turk or Christian: history teaches us that all are human beings, neither gods nor devils; all are capable of almost unimaginable inhumanity, and of surprising acts of kindness and charity.

The historian, Gibbon shows through practice as well as precept, must exhibit the latter qualities by identifying, and celebrating, the human spirit wherever, and in whomever, it can be found cf. When relating inhumane acts — as Gibbon regrets, he often must — we are called to remember that their perpetrators partook of our human nature: we, too, might in unfavourable conditions behave similarly. To exalt some people to a seat alongside the gods, and to reduce others to the level of beasts, is to strip history of its interest and moral urgency.

It is from meaningful and sympathetic encounters with alterity — of peoples throughout history, and our encounter with them as mediated by Gibbon — that we stand to learn something valuable.

They decentre the perspective, engaging closely with non-European historiographies. In so doing they suggest that we are all in some sense the legatees of Greece and Rome — even as, reviewing his volumes in c. We are all, it follows, potential beneficiaries of those works of ancient literature which extol human nature, and express the most generous sentiments of liberty and humanity.

Yet Gibbon refuses to rule out the possibility that far-off lands might take up the torch of civilization should Europe again fall into darkness. Latin historiography provided a model that modern historians, writing the histories of their own nations increasingly in the vernacular , endeavoured to imitate Hicks One of its central assumptions, that history was best written by those who had either participated in it as statesmen , or were its direct inheritors and continuators as the modern Italians were the descendants of the Romans , persisted until well into the eighteenth century.

Gibbon was certain that the Roman historians, above all Tacitus, offered a model for the moderns. He considered his activities in Parliament and the militia to burnish his credentials as an historian Such reverence for previous authors is potentially suffocating: one might imitate, but could not dare to hope to emulate their achievements. All productions of genius bear the stamp of the distinctive critical intellect of their creator. The question, then, was whether one dared not merely to write neoclassical history, but to write the history of events that had already been narrated by admired predecessors.

If Gibbon was accused by his critics of sneering at primitive Christianity in Chapters XV—XVI, this was in part because he viewed the early Christians through the aristocratic, sceptical eyes of Roman historians such as Tacitus and Ammianus Marcellinus. His approach, in short, was more genuinely historical, and more consistent with his own precepts as to how history ought to be written. Meanwhile, as his attention shifted east in his later volumes, and from thence roamed over Asia and Africa, so Gibbon engaged with multiple historiographies Byzantine, Hungarian, Arabic, Chinese , seeing the events he related from numerous divergent perspectives.

If we admire his intellectual ambition in painting on such an expansive canvas, for Gibbon it offered a form of liberation. Gibbon was on his own atop Mount Parnassus: from that vantage point, no one historiographic perspective, taken in isolation, was adequate.

Geographically, the Huns appeared on neither Chinese nor Western maps of the world — they fell between the gaps; and their own history remained unknown to them no less than to the other nations i. To be sure, eighteenth-century philosophers were increasingly confident in their ability to understand the past better than those living at the time.

The historical labours of critics like Joseph Scaliger — similarly enabled the modern historian to harmonise the conflicting chronologies bequeathed by the nations of antiquity. Laws and manners, like language, evolve gradually in ways that are only apparent in hindsight. General disquisitions frequently interrupt the narrative, on subjects that were central to eighteenth-century moral and political philosophy: whether the relationship between hereditary succession and the principles of the imagination i.

The historian privileges the particular over the general; and as he engages with multiple historiographies, his approach becomes more phenomenological, giving the reader a sense of how contemporary observers experienced and tried to understand events. Their incorporation into the main narrative nonetheless pushes the reader to recognize how differently others have experienced the world and attempted to impose meaning on it.

Despite frequent criticisms to the contrary, Gibbon was closely attentive to how our beliefs about the world, whether reasonable or absurd, determine how we act within it, and need to be taken seriously. Throughout his life, he read romances and histories indiscriminately; and if in the Decline and Fall he never mistakes the one for the other, he reminds us that for most of human history the boundary between them has been porous.

The complexity of historical causality, and ultimately of the human condition, ensures that history is more likely to challenge, than to satiate, what Adam Smith described as the natural attraction of the mind to harmonious explanation. Gibbon is nonetheless willing to indulge, if not satisfy, his reader.

Yet just as history proves that it is necessity, not virtue that led Christians to embrace an ascetic lifestyle, so too the seeming innocence of savages and barbarians is the result of deprivation and ignorance. They are scarcely human at all: they lack even the most rudimentary kind of historical consciousness, which enables us to exercise foresight and judgment in the present by reflecting on the consequences of our past actions.

More advanced forms of political association, and greater material prosperity, encourage the cultivation of these faculties; yet barbarians might be found at the heart of what appear to be the most flourishing of nations. Once history becomes fable, and flatters rather than challenges our presuppositions and prejudices, all is lost.

This elides any distinction between prophecy and history, and between divine and human agency i.