The concept of decline and fall, of course, was not Gibbon’s invention; it was also prominent within ancient literature, in many cases representing the same biases towards contemporary concepts of'civilisation’ and the lives of the elite. The Greek poet Hesiod, writing around 700 b. c., describes in his Opera et Dies four races of people, each descending in quality, until the fourth, which was a race of iron; the Greeks saw a process of decline from earlier times. The concept of a Golden Age as an opposite to a decline to 'iron and rust’ is also represented elsewhere: Cassius Dio, at the end of his description of the reign of Marcus Aurelius, wrote that his work 'now descends from a kingdom of gold to one of iron and rust, as affairs did for the Romans of that day’ (LXXII.36.4). For Gibbon, as well, the 'golden age of Trajan and the Antonines had been preceded by an age of iron’ (DF I: 104), indicating his view that what preceded and followed this period of the Empire was inferior.
Also influential on Gibbon were the writings of Tacitus, whose Historiae narrated the early greatness of the Empire and that allowed Gibbon, drawing on authors such as Cassius Dio, to begin his description of decline; he puts this at the end of the Antonine period with the death of Commodus in a. d. 192 (Pocock 2003: 17). The first-century b. c. work by Lucretius, De rerum natura, also explores the idea of decline and decay: 'the walls of the mighty world... shall be stormed all around, and shall collapse into crumbling ruin’ (II.1144-6); the decay of the state is compared with the decay of the natural world. Cicero’s De republica (published between 54 and 51 b. c.) contains similar sentiments, whilst Virgil’s Georgies (published in 29 b. c.), drawing on Hesiod and Lucretius, describes an agricultural golden age that can then lead to decline (Johnston 1980). These written works projected a Roman elite viewpoint centred on Rome and are unlikely to represent the complexity of viewpoints across the Empire.
These ancient texts influenced the Renaissance humanist writers such as the fifteenth-century Leonardo Bruni, who described the decline of Rome beginning from the moment that the Republic ended, with the loss of liberty and virtue, and Flavio Biondo, who wrote of the moral decline of Rome (Pocock 2003: 166-78). Gibbon held these works in his library and would have read them in preparation for his writing (Figure 2.1; also see Keynes 1950).14 Another work in his collection was by Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), entitled Leviathan (1651; reprinted in 1946), which was a book on the natural condition of mankind. In times of war or insecurity, 'everyman is enemy to everyman’ because of the fear of violent death (1946: 82); there is no place for culture or industry and the life of man is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’ (ibid.). These views are also reminescent of Gibbon’s writings on life in the Roman Empire in the later Roman period.
Gibbon’s concept of decline was largely an elitist cultural creation reflecting his own attitudes and concepts of civilisation, which matched and developed those of society at the time. Gibbon and his contemporaries were reinventing Rome in a period of British
Expansion and colonialism (cf. Hingley 20oo: 29). Gibbon also owned a copy of the speeches of Aristides (Keynes 1950), an orator who spoke of the wonders of the Roman Empire in the age of the Antonines (Schiavone 2000).7 Aristides’ attitudes about cities and Roman life are reflected in Gibbon’s writing, as is Strabo’s view of agriculture versus the barbarity of pastoralism preceding urbanism (which mirrors the British aristocratic notion of farming and land ownership):8 'The spirit of improvement had passed the Alps’ (DF I: 74) and '[the Romans] subdued and civilised so considerable a part of mankind’ (DF III: 20o). The influence of these views and Gibbon’s text can also be seen in later works such as that by Francis Haverfield, who wrote on the 'romanisation’ of Britain (e. g., Haverfield 1912), in a work which was also highly influential later (e. g., Frere 1967; Millett 1990).
The word 'civilisation’ itself originated in the eighteenth century amongst political economists and was used to describe the progress of the enlightened society that could make things ‘civil’ (Burrow 1985: 81; Furet 1976:209; see also discussions in Foucault, e. g., 1970).9 By the 1800s it was seen as both a process and an achieved condition associated with social order, as well as refined manners and behaviour (Patterson 1997:42). The idea of civilisation played a major part in the rise of the states of modern Western Europe and was also linked with colonial expansion (ibid.: 27, 30). Modern society was considered superior to previous states of human existence, and changes within the modern age were compared with, and projected back to, the Roman period. This, paradoxically, meant that the Roman period was being understood within the context of a society that was now very different. Gibbon’s journey to Italy on his Grand Tour consisted, apart from his visit to Rome itself, not of travels to sites of Roman remains, but of a journey through the Renaissance and Baroque landscape and through the cities, palaces, and museums of art, fashion, and collections of Roman antiquities. Gibbon was ‘voyaging through the history of taste’ (Pocock 1999a: 276-9), seeing and constructing Rome through modern eyes. His The Decline and Fall represented ‘Gibbon’s Roman Empire’ rather than that of the Roman period itself (Jordan 1971).
The Roman Empire described in The Decline and Fall was seen through Gibbon’s eyes, but Gibbon did not create the social and intellectual milieu of his day single-handedly. Gibbon has been described as an historian of the Enlightenment and he was also in regular contact with a number of contemporary British historians, including David Hume, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, and Adam Smith (Pocock 1999a). The Enlightenment was rooted in the belief in reason and commerce against religion (Collingwood 1946: 76; Pocock 1999b: 371). His ‘dear friend Hume’ (Gibbon 1966: 156) read and commented on parts of the Decline and Fall, and Gibbon, after reading Adam Smith’s work, was increasingly aware of, and influenced by, economic and social factors; in Chapter two, for example, Gibbon defends luxury from an economic standpoint (DF I: 80; Burke 1976: 149). This emphasis on economics has also influenced intepretations within archaeology 15 16 17
FiGURE 2.i. Photograph of Bentinck Street, London; the site of Edward Gibbon’s house and library is on the far right with the plaque on the wall (photograph by A. C. Rogers).
And has had an impact on the way in which change in the later Roman period has been conceived.
World History
