It might seem dangerous, faced with so artful and ironic an author as Gibbon, to begin by recounting what he himself says. I shall attempt later to isolate some features of his irony and its analytical import. It seems worth emphasizing, nevertheless, that Gibbon identifies three causes of the empire’s decline and excuses two more. The two factors absolved are the barbarians and Christianity. In both cases, Gibbon addresses an audience that expects him to argue the contrary, namely, that the barbarian invasions caused the collapse of Roman government in the west, and that conversion to Christianity corrupted the culture and weakened the discipline of the Roman state. In both cases he effects his absolution by arguing that the agency and efficacy of one party of historical actors depended upon the actions and condition of others. So, for example, he believed that barbarians outside the empire were able to surmount its defenses and wreak havoc upon its interior only when they ‘‘discovered [its] decline’’ already far advanced (DF i. 212). At other times, stability within the empire allowed the emperor to project strength without. Such had been the case during the first two centuries of the imperial era, when ‘‘the enemies of Rome were in her bosom’’ (DF i. 213); and it was a significant index of Diocletian’s achievement that such was the case again under the Tetrarchy (DFi. 368).
I list Gibbon’s causes separately at the risk of diminishing or effacing the complex relations between them. First, the Romanization of provincial populations, particularly those in the west, failed at precisely the time when the population of Italy was itself ceasing to be Roman. Second, the ‘‘nice frame of civil policy instituted by Augustus’’ was subverted by Severus, and its dissolution ushered in a period of political anarchy that brought enormous social and economic devastation (DFi. 147; see 267, 290, and 312). Third, each successive governing class of the early and high empire experienced a failure of nerve, a loss of virtue, and so abdicated to successive groups of non-Romans the role of defending Rome.
In relation to those causes, I shall explore, first, some of the historiographic and literary devices that Gibbon deployed - both those he inherited and those he invented - in order to elaborate the causes individually while binding them together in a single argument; second, the effect Gibbon assigns to changes in Roman political culture of the early and high empire - namely, a loss of liberty entailed by the acquisition of empire itself; and third, the place Gibbon assigns to Christianity, within his narrative and within the history of decline and fall.
A historical process that unfolded over 1,500 years can scarcely have been visible to contemporaries and must pose multiple challenges to the historian, at the level of argument, analysis, and narrative. Gibbon acknowledges this difficulty most explicitly in describing eras that will have seemed to contemporaries ones of stability and strength. For example, the ‘‘long peace and uniform government of the Romans’’ under the Antonines - precisely that era, Gibbon famously suggests, that another would identify without hesitation as the period during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous (DF i. 103) - introduced ‘‘a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire,’’ but it ‘‘was scarcely possible that the eyes of contemporaries should discover in the public felicity the latent causes of decay and corruption’’ (DF i. 83). Likewise, after describing how ‘‘the arduous work of rescuing the distressed empire from tyrants and barbarians had... been completely achieved’’ by that group of emperors whom he calls ‘‘a succession of Illyrian peasants,’’ Gibbon undertook to explain why a portrait of ‘‘the complicated system of policy introduced by Diocletian, improved by Constantine, and completed by his immediate successors, [will] not only amuse the fancy by [providing a] singular picture of a great empire, but will [also] tend to illustrate the secret and internal causes of its rapid decay’’ (DFi. 384; see also 386-7 and 602-3).
The existence of ‘‘latent’’ and ‘‘secret’’ causes presents the historian with several hurdles, of which I single out three: first, the need to describe social change, when the evidence provided by contemporaries largely fails to address it; second, the need to relate the actions of individuals who experienced but did not perceive that change; and third, the need to situate analysis of unperceived change within narrative. What events constituted the change at issue, and how and when to tell its story, and the story of its causes and effects?
Gibbon surmounted the first of these hurdles, that of describing social change using contemporary evidence, in part by recourse to a classical trope, namely the vocalizing, through collective speakers, of sentiments both opportune, in that they seem apposite to the situation, and anachronistic, in providing an analysis useful to posterity, with its different awareness and interests. For example, during the early centuries of the Roman Empire, people within its borders had been distinguished according to juridical rank; but ideally, provincials might become more Roman even as the Romans maintained their status and their virtue. The ideal, however, was not realized, for reasons I shall shortly attempt to untangle. The consequences of that failure Gibbon describes thus:
But when the last enclosure of the Roman constitution was trampled down by Caracalla, the separation of professions gradually succeeded to the distinction of ranks. The more polished citizens of the internal provinces were alone qualified to act as lawyers and magistrates. The rougher trade of arms was abandoned to the peasants and barbarians of the frontiers, who knew no country but their camp, no science but that of war, no civil laws, and scarcely those of military discipline. (DF i. 186)
That long-term change then impinged upon the world of politics when the army, and in particular the Praetorian Guard, discovered its power to select and impose an emperor:
The advocates of the guards endeavoured to justify by arguments the power which they asserted by arms; and to maintain that, according to the purest principles of the constitution, their consent was essentially necessary in the appointment of an emperor. The election of consuls, of generals, and of magistrates, however it had been recently usurped by the senate, was the ancient and undoubted right of the Roman people. But where was the Roman people to be found? Not surely amongst the mixed multitude of slaves and strangers that filled the streets of Rome; a servile populace, as devoid of spirit as destitute of property. The defenders of the state, selected from the flower of the Italian youth, and trained in the exercise of arms and virtue, were the genuine representatives of the people, and the best entitled to elect the military chief of the republic. (DF i. 129)
As Gibbon tells it, ‘‘the advocates of the guards’’ staked their claim in the terms later used by Augustine, rewriting Cicero: ‘‘What was a city, except its people?’’ But however ancient the question, it highlights here the distance that separates this moment from any time when the Roman people might meaningfully have been identified either with its army or with an electorate.
Gibbon understood the violence of that contrast to exist in two distinct arenas: first, as a function of the language through which contemporaries both perceived and endlessly reconstituted their political reality and, second, as a tool by which later readers might assess those ancient illusions. As regards the first, Gibbon was no less sensible than Augustus ‘‘that mankind is governed by names’’; nor, in Gibbon’s view, was that prince ‘‘deceived in his expectation, that the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom’’ (DF i. 96). The ancients’ use of language and ideas that they failed to recognize as anachronistic constitutes an important category of action that Gibbon needed to narrate; and that was the second of the hurdles set in place by his appeal to ‘‘latent’’ and ‘‘secret’’ causes. Perhaps the most conspicuous early example of such action is Decius’ attempt to revive the office of censor. That effort followed upon an ‘‘investigat[ion of] the more general causes, that, since the age of the Antonines, had so impetuously urged the decline of the Roman greatness. [Decius] soon discovered that it was impossible to replace that greatness on a permanent basis, without restoring public virtue, ancient principles and manners, and the oppressed majesty of the laws’’ (DFi. 262).
Though Gibbon allowed that the censorship, ‘‘as long as it had subsisted in its pristine integrity, had so much contributed to the perpetuity of the state,’’ and though he commended Decius for his goodwill (DF i. 262, 263), he condemned the office as obsolete and the project as impracticable:
A censor may maintain, he can never restore, the morals of a state. It is impossible for such a magistrate to exert his authority with benefit, or even with effect, unless he is supported by a quick sense of honour and virtue in the minds of the people, by a decent reverence for the public opinion, and by a train of useful prejudices combating on the side of national manners. In a period when these principles are annihilated, the censorial jurisdiction must either sink into empty pageantry, or be converted into a partial instrument of vexatious oppression. It was easier to vanquish the Goths than to eradicate the public vices; yet even in the first of these enterprises, Decius lost his army and his life. (DFi. 264)
Gibbon’s evaluation of Decius’ abortive revival of the censorship operates in three distinct registers of his text. First, it accords with his sense that the laws and policies of government can direct, but not contradict, the state of manners in society more generally, a principle that receives further illustration in the reigns of Tacitus and Jovian. The former’s attempt ‘‘to heal the wounds’’ inflicted on the state in the course of the third century and ‘‘to restore, at least, the image of the ancient Republic,’’ is labeled an impossibility (DFi. 331-2); the latter had ‘‘the good fortune to embrace the religious opinions which were supported by the spirit of the times,’’ illustrating thereby that the ‘‘slightest force, when it is applied to assist and guide the natural descent of its object, operates with irresistible weight’’ (DF i. 961; see also 439).
The second register evoked by the reforms of Decius is one of theme, that of belatedness. Decius failed, according to Gibbon, for two related reasons: he was attempting to impose upon his modern world a classical solution or, perhaps, to recreate some classical reality in a context in which it could not but be incoherent (compare DF ii. 799, where Gibbon assesses Justinian’s revival of classical Roman law); and he failed to apprehend correctly his present situation and what was possible within it. Such failures of apprehension on the part of historical agents are often wedded to a confidence on their part that they do, in fact, perceive and can, in fact, control the evolution of manners. Gibbon expresses the gap between such confidence and its outcomes by the use of irony, which constitutes his third register. Indeed, irony serves throughout the History as a device both rhetorical and analytic. It is one Gibbon wields with surprising sympathy, and rarely with condescension.
Operating beyond the awareness of the actors on his stage, Gibbon’s ‘‘secret and internal causes’’ also lay outside his narrative. That is to say, insofar as his narrative pursued the thought and action of ancients, it could not accommodate analysis of causation and change outside their awareness, except through some structural departure from narrative itself. So, for example, he introduced his ‘‘distinct view of the complicated system of policy’’ implemented by Diocletian, Constantine, and his successors, with a set of programmatic remarks on the proper balance to be maintained between the history of law and society on the one hand, and of those individuals who wrote the laws on the other:
In the pursuit of any remarkable institution, we may be frequently led into the more early or the more recent times of the Roman history; but the proper limits of this inquiry will be included within a period of about one hundred and thirty years, from the accession of Constantine to the publication of the Theodosian Code... This variety of objects will suspend, for some time, the course of the narrative; but the interruption will be censured only by those readers who are insensible to the importance of laws and manners, while they peruse, with eager curiosity, the transient intrigues of a court, or the accidental event of a battle. (DFi. 602-3)
This disdain for political narrative, and the corresponding privileging of social-historical analysis, are constantly reflected not only in Gibbon’s occasional and ostentatious withholding of detail but also in his multiple systems for interrupting, exploding, and collapsing the insistent logic of chronology. It is not, of course, that rulers of great empires could not deeply affect the lives oftheir subjects: it was precisely their power to do so, through the ‘‘artificial powers of government,’’ that aroused Gibbon’s horror at monarchy as a political system (DFi. 120). But there were limits to the apprehension as also the agency even of despots, and so, in Gibbon’s view, ‘‘to illustrate the obscure monuments of the life and death of each individual, would prove a laborious task, alike barren of instruction and of amusement’’ (DF i. 288; cf. 303). He similarly eschewed the compiling of biographical details when he drew to a close his account of the Severan dynasty and turned his attention to the effects of the Constitutio Antoniniana:
The dissolute tyranny of Commodus, the civil wars occasioned by his death, and the new maxims of policy introduced by the house of Severus, had all contributed to increase the dangerous power of the army, and to obliterate the faint image of laws and liberty that was still impressed on the minds of the Romans. The internal change, which undermined the foundations of the empire, we have endeavoured to explain with some degree of order and perspicuity. The personal characters of the emperors, their victories, laws, follies, and fortunes, can interest us no farther than as they are connected with the general history of the Decline and Fall of the monarchy. (DF i. 178)
Gibbon likewise deplored the impossibility of narrating the chaotic movements of barbarian peoples and the instability of their internal arrangements (DF i. 252). His solution was to ‘‘consult order and perspicuity, by pursuing, not so much the doubtful arrangement of dates, as the more natural distribution of subjects’’ (DF i. 268; cf. 988-9), a device to which he had recourse also when confronting the ‘‘very doubtful chronology’’ of Diocletian’s reign (DF i. 362-3), or the ‘‘number and variety’’ of important events in the reign of Constantine, ‘‘by which the historian must be oppressed... unless he diligently separates from each other the scenes which are connected only by the order of time’’ (DF i. 585).
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