The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

"I think it is regarded as a heavy read simply because it is physically heavy. The most accessible version is the Penguin one which comes in three large volumes. But the truth is that it remains incredibly readable. As I said before, it takes Tacitus as its model, who was famous for his waspish style, and a careful balancing and modulating of the sentences so that irony would be generated. This is what Gibbon does as well, and it means that not only is it an incredible work of scholarship but it is also compulsively entertaining. I really think that anyone who is prepared to give it a chance will find themselves smiling at the very least throughout it. Yes, and what is interesting about Gibbon is that his work is not only a masterpiece of 18th-century prose but it shapes the terms of historical debate now. One of the ways in which he does that is because, for Gibbon, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire doesn’t end with the collapse of the empire in the West, that being the end of the Roman Empire in the fifth century. Instead it continues right the way up until the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and even beyond. The corollary of that is that in Gibbon’s history we don’t just get a history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire; we also get a history of the rise of the Muslim caliphate and of the Barbarian kingdoms of the West. What that does is to give us a sense of how when civilisations fall they are inevitably clearing the decks for other civilisations to rise. That is the sort of understanding that has taken historians quite a long time to catch on to and it means that Gibbon is now coming back into focus as someone who really has something to teach."

"Gibbon is terribly different from Bede. Bede is such a devout and enthusiastic servant of the church (he’s a monk). Edward Gibbon was a very self-absorbed 18th-century Englishman, and yet also a citizen of the world. He felt that the enlightened, sceptical outlook that he held was the way people ought to be. He left us a wonderful account of his life – a rather solemn and not terribly humourous autobiography – in which you get a picture of a snobby, rather prissy, self-important man who likes everything just so. Such people don’t always have an easy time with the rest of the human race, and, like a lot of people who devote their time to writing, he was very selfish: very few other people ever got in the way of Edward Gibbon and his building a life to suit himself. I think he once fell in love, but it didn’t really work out. Otherwise, he was a single man who devoted his time to writing this immense book. I’m just looking at my own copy, which is a lovely, nicely bound copy from 1813. It’s in 12 volumes, which gives you a sense of the scale he was writing on. It’s a formidable task to read it, but it’s very readable, because although Gibbon was humourless about himself, he has a tremendous sense of humour about the rest of the world. All the time there is a wonderful, slight edge to what he is writing. It’s a distancing thing, but it does also incorporate human sympathy for the past. I think he may have enjoyed the past more than the present. No. For a start, the book is called ‘The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’, but it covers 1500 years, from Augustus to the capture of Constantinople by the Turks. It’s absurd to call that a story of ‘decline and fall’ – it’s far too long. What modern historians would say is that this is a story of transformations, and one of those transformations was the alliance between emperors and Christianity, which made the Empire very different. Far from the Empire falling after Christianity, it lasted another 1000 years, in the form of Byzantine Christianity in Constantinople. So that idea doesn’t really work. But what you do see in Gibbon is a very exhilarating rejection of priestcraft, the claims of the Church to absolute authority, and the attempts of the Church to boss people around in their lives. It’s an attitude which seems to me to be hugely important at the present day. I would love to hear Gibbon’s comments on fundamentalism in the United States, or in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. He would be searing in what he said. In his day, the big enemy was the Roman Catholic Church, but all the same things applied. He was not an atheist, he was not anti-religious, but he was anti-clerical, he distrusted clergy – and that seems to me a very healthy instinct. Oh, by no means. He tells us that great story about going to Rome and standing in the ruins of the forum as the friars chanted in the background. He was gripped by this great civilisation which was in ruin in his day. The end of the 12 volumes is a wonderful portrait of a ruinous Rome in the 15th century, and then it moves to his own time, and he says, ‘Look! This city is small compared to what it was.’ There is a real fascination with pre-Christian Rome and I think it’s because felt that Rome, once it had allied with Christianity, was not a patch on what it had been. Yes. What I have done so far is to give you two of the great classics of Christian history. The other books I’ve chosen are wonderful forays into particular bits of history, and illustrate the way that history ought to be written at the present day."