Gibbon and the Eternal Crisis of Rome

250 years after its publication, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire remains the supreme meditation on the mortality of civilisations.

Edward Gibbon (1737-1794)

In the 1980s, German historian Alexander Demandt attempted to catalogue every explanation ever proposed for the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE. In ‘Der Fall Roms’ (1984), Demandt detailed more than two hundred causes that led to Rome’s collapse, from the eminently plausible to the positively whimsical. These included, among others, military overstretch, Christianity, lead poisoning, race mixture, taxation, plague, inflation, declining birth-rates, climate change and simple bad luck.

The point of Demandt’s eccentric catalogue was that Rome has never stopped falling because historians have never stopped arguing about why it did. And no work in the Western historical canon has shaped that argument more profoundly than Edward Gibbon’s sublime and magisterial ‘The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,’ whose first volume appeared in 1776, exactly 250 years ago.

Even today, Gibbon’s magnum opus still towers above the vast literature it inspired. While subsequent historians have proposed new causes, revised old explanations, and challenged many of Gibbon’s conclusions, none, however, has displaced him from the centre of the debate.

Antiquarian Puzzle

But why were eighteenth-century thinkers so fascinated by the fall of Rome? Their preoccupation arose naturally from the Enlightenment itself, the great European intellectual movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that championed reason, science and human progress. The new philosophy of progress encouraged Europeans to look critically upon the past, especially upon classical antiquity and the early Church.

Human society, it was increasingly believed, advanced through reason, commerce and science. Progress seemed not only possible but almost inevitable. Yet, the more thoughtful wondered how secure was that progress? Might not a Roman philosopher living during the apogee of Empire have entertained similar assumptions?

Who, in the second century CE, could have imagined that the civilisation of classical antiquity would one day be overrun by ‘barbarians,’ its cities diminished and Europe plunged into centuries that later generations would call the ‘Dark Ages’? And yet, it had happened. If civilization had declined once, it could decline again.

This unsettling possibility transformed the fall of Rome into one of the central questions of Enlightenment thought. To understand the future, one first had to re-examine the course and analyse how the greatest empire the world had known had yielded to decay and collapse.

The origins of Gibbon’s monumental work have themselves entered literary mythology. On October 15 1764, while visiting Rome, Gibbon sat “musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter.” In that instant, he later recalled, “the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.”

But ‘Decline and Fall’ did not emerge merely from a romantic reverie among Roman ruins. It was the product of one of the great intellectual revolutions of Europe. For centuries, history had largely been written under the shadow of theology. Christian chroniclers and churchmen explained away the rise and fall of kingdoms as expressions of God’s will.

Empires prospered because Providence favoured them; they declined because Providence judged them. The task of the historian was less to investigate causes than to discern divine purpose.

Christian historians from Eusebius of Caesarea in the fourth century to Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet in the seventeenth treated empires as instruments of divine purpose. Eusebius’s ‘Ecclesiastical History’ and Augustine’s ‘City of God’ established the providential model in late antiquity: Rome rose because God permitted it and fell because God judged it.

But this theological view of history was increasingly challenged by Renaissance and early modern thinkers. Instead of asking what God intended, they began asking what human beings actually did. They looked for political, economic, military and social causes behind historical events rather than divine intervention.

Yet, by the 17^th century, the pendulum had swung too far in the opposite direction. By then, radical sceptics, especially the ‘Pyrrhonists’ led by writers like Pierre Bayle, subjected historical evidence to relentless criticism.

Bayle’s monumental ‘Historical and Critical Dictionary’ (1697) was a veritable demolition chamber for received truths wherein he exposed forged documents, pious inventions and inherited myths.

While their criticism was often valuable, it raised the unsettling question that if every source could be doubted, could history explain anything with certainty at all?

Philosophical History

Gibbon sought a path between these extremes. While he rejected the notion that history was merely the unfolding of a divine plan, he also refused to believe that the past was unknowable.

Instead, he embraced ‘philosophic history’ approach - the search for human causes behind historical events. Why do empires rise? Why do they decline? How do religion, institutions, commerce, ideas and political power shape the fate of civilisations? These were the questions that would animate Decline and Fall.

The Sack of Rome in 410 by the Barbarians by Joseph-Noël Sylvestre, 1890

The intellectual genealogy of Decline and Fall can be traced to Niccolò Machiavelli, who was among the first modern thinkers to treat history not as the record of God’s purposes but as the consequence of human actions and political institutions.

It was Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy (published posthumously in 1531) which marked one of the first decisive breaks with medieval providential history.

For Machiavelli, republics rose through virtù – a mixture of energy, civic courage, military discipline - and decayed through corruption, luxury, faction, and dependence upon mercenaries.

Machiavelli’s younger contemporary Francesco Guicciardini carried the break even further. His History of Italy (Storia d’Italia), published in 1561, abandoned medieval moral allegory in favour of documentary evidence, diplomatic realism, and psychological scrutiny. Guicciardini distrusted grand abstractions and concentrated instead on contingency, motive, and self-interest.

But such secular historiography came under immense pressure from religious orthodoxy. The Counter-Reformation had reasserted theological authority across Catholic Europe. Meanwhile, Protestant states had developed rival providential narratives of their own. Both confessions sought to reclaim history as evidence of divine order.

It was in this atmosphere that Jacques Auguste de Thou produced one of the boldest historical projects of early modern Europe. His Historia sui temporis (“History of My Times”), published between 1604 and 1620, attempted the audacious feat of narrating the French Wars of Religion without surrendering to sectarian hatred.

Though personally Catholic and loyal to the French crown, de Thou treated Protestant actors with striking fairness and resisted reducing politics to theology. The result scandalised zealots on all sides.

The same spirit animated Paolo Sarpi’s History of the Council of Trent (1619), which dismantled triumphalist Catholic accounts of the Counter-Reformation by exposing ecclesiastical politics, factional intrigue and institutional self-interest.

The most decisive precursor to Gibbon, however, was Pietro Giannone. Gibbon had encountered Giannone’s Civil History of the Kingdom of Naples (Istoria civile del Regno di Napoli, 1723) - a pioneering work of secular history - during his formative years in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he had been sent after a disastrous period at Oxford, of which he later would memorably recall as being “steeped in port and prejudice.”

Giannone treated the Church not as any sacred institution but as a political corporation competing for wealth, legal privilege and temporal authority. It was a frontal assault upon ecclesiastical historiography. Giannone paid heavily for this. Condemned by the Church, excommunicated, driven into exile, he was lured into Savoyard territory under false assurances of safety and eventually imprisoned in Turin, where he died in 1748 after more than a decade in confinement.

Giannone’s ideas on history were adopted and extended by an even more consequential writer, the President de Montesquieu, whose Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline (1734) supplied perhaps the single most important model for Enlightenment historiography before Gibbon himself.

Montesquieu broke decisively with providential explanation by analysing Rome through institutions, military organisation, commerce, civic virtue, and political psychology rather than divine favour. Rome’s greatness, he argued, contained the seeds of its own corruption.

Scottish Enlightenment

David Hume (1711-1776)

The Scottish Enlightenment and Montesquieu’s disciples had carried this “philosophic history” to its fullest eighteenth-century expression. David Hume’s History of England (published between 1754 and 1762) demonstrated that historical writing could combine philosophical explanation with literary elegance - a combination that would deeply shape Gibbon’s own prose.

Like Montesquieu, Hume treated commerce and public opinion as historical forces equal in importance to battles or dynasties while approaching national myths with ironic detachment.

William Robertson widened this historical inquiry still further. His ‘History of Scotland’ (1759), ‘History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V’ (1769), and ‘History of America’ (1777) expanded the historical narrative beyond courts and campaigns towards colonialism, religion, and social development. Gibbon admired Robertson enormously.

Gibbon inherited this entire tradition and fused it with the severity of Tacitus, his supreme ancient model. Gibbon believed that it was Tacitus, alone among the ancient historians, who most clearly revealed the hidden workings of power – the fear, servility, corruption and imperial hypocrisy lurking beneath the language of Roman government.

Gibbon’s staggering erudition was in scintillating display on almost every page. In the opening chapters alone, he moved effortlessly between the ancient historians - Tacitus, Polybius, Dion Cassius, Josephus among others while cross-examining ecclesiastical writers such as Eusebius and Sozomen with almost prosecutorial care. He drew upon Roman law, military organisation, provincial administration, imperial taxation, frontier defence, geography, coinage, trade, demography and religious controversy with equal confidence.

What astonished contemporaries was not simply the range of his learning but the way he marshalled it. Gibbon seemed to command the entire surviving literature of the ancient world. Greek and Latin chroniclers, Church fathers, Byzantine annalists, legal codes, inscriptions, theological treatises and medieval chronicles were all summoned as witnesses in a single argument.

More than a million words and six volumes later, Gibbon brought his narrative to a close in 1788, having traced the fortunes of Rome from the age of the Antonines to the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 - a span of thirteen centuries.

What distinguished Gibbon above all predecessors was his understanding of decline as a process rather than a single cataclysmic event. Rome, in Gibbon’s telling, was already doomed in the moment of her zenith.

Fierce Controversy

No part of ‘Decline and Fall’ provoked a greater storm than Chapters XV and XVI, where Gibbon coolly argued that Christianity, far from saving the Roman Empire, had contributed to its weakening by turning men’s energies away from civic duty and public life towards the concerns of the ‘next’ world.

The Course of Empire: Destruction by Thomas Cole, 1836

Contrary to popular perception, he did not claim that Christianity single-handedly destroyed Rome but rather, it altered Roman priorities at a moment when martial discipline and civic energy were already eroding.

The backlash was immediate and ferocious. Clergymen denounced Gibbon across Britain. It was only in 1779 when Gibbon responded with his Vindication, defending himself with devastating erudition and icy composure.

It was Gibbon’s treatment of Byzantium that remains more problematic today. He viewed the Eastern Roman Empire with barely concealed impatience, as a civilisation of eunuchs, theological pedantry and endless palace intrigue.

Steven Runciman later complained that Gibbon lacked both the Greek scholarship and theological sympathy necessary to understand Byzantine civilization on its own terms. Gibbon’s distaste for what he regarded as monk-ridden superstition prevented him from grasping the intellectual seriousness of Byzantine theology.

Yet even where he misjudged Byzantium, Gibbon’s prose retained its hypnotic grandeur. Under his hand, the reign of Heraclius, the eruption of Islam, the Mongol invasions, and the fall of Constantinople in 1453 became part of a single civilisational drama of Rome slowly surrendering the Mediterranean to younger, harder, and more disciplined powers.

Every historian who has attempted a civilisational panorama on a comparable scale has done so in Gibbon’s shadow - from Theodor Mommsen and Arnold Toynbee to Ronald Syme, whose ‘The Roman Revolution’ (1939) perhaps came closest to Gibbon’s irony and authority. In India, Sir Jadunath Sarkar brought a distinctly Gibbonian grandeur to his history of Mughal decline.

No historical work of such scale has retained its authority for so long as ‘Decline and Fall.’

As Hugh Trevor-Roper observed, “Its intellectual content remains valid today, and any discussion of the course and causes of the decline of Rome is still dominated by it. Of no other historian writing before 1830 can this be said.”

Why does Gibbon still feel so modern? Because the anxieties that haunted him remain our own. Overextended states, polarised societies, military overstretch, ideological fanaticism, elite decadence, bureaucratic paralysis and the illusion that prosperity guarantees permanence are not merely Roman problems.

That is why Rome never stops falling. For every age sees in Gibbon’s Rome an image of itself.