Five-minute digest
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Selections)
Summary
Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire runs in seventy-one chapters from the age of the Antonines in the second century to the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the condition of the city of Rome in the fifteenth century. The library holds a selection from the Milman edition, with Gibbon's footnotes and the added notes of the editors: Chapters I to III, the General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West that close the third volume, and Chapter LXVIII on Mahomet the Second and the capture of Constantinople. The first three chapters form a portrait of the empire at its height. The stored text of Chapter I begins partway through, with the orderly Roman camp, the legion on the march and the two standing fleets at Ravenna and Misenum, and then surveys every province from Spain and Britain to Egypt and Mauretania, closing with the empire's measurements. Chapter II explains the empire's unity: a tolerant civil religion, a gradual extension of citizenship, Latin in the West and Greek in the East, the condition of slaves, a population Gibbon estimates at a hundred and twenty millions, and the cities, roads, harbors, farms and luxury trades that bound the provinces together. Its last pages warn that long peace was quietly draining Roman courage and genius. Chapter III describes how Augustus kept the outward forms of the republic while holding absolute power, how later emperors were checked only by the army or by their own character, and how the adoptive emperors from Nerva to Marcus Aurelius governed so well that Gibbon names their reign the happiest period in human history, while noting that it rested on the virtue of a single man. The General Observations step back to explain the fall in the West: Rome's immense size, the soldiers who learned to make and unmake emperors, the division of the throne between East and West, the influence of Christianity and the monastic life, and the pressure of the northern peoples. Gibbon then asks whether modern Europe, divided into rival states and armed with artillery, could suffer the same fate, and ends with confidence that the useful arts can never be wholly lost. Chapter LXVIII tells the rise of the young sultan Mahomet (Mehmed) II, his fortress on the Bosphorus, the great cannon cast by Urban, a founder whom Gibbon calls a Dane or Hungarian, the reluctant union of the Greek and Latin churches proclaimed in St. Sophia in December 1452, and the fifty-three-day siege of 1453. The Turkish fleet is dragged overland into the harbor; the Genoese captain John Justiniani is wounded and withdraws; Constantine Palaeologus dies fighting at the walls on 29 May; and the sultan prays in St. Sophia and recites a Persian couplet on fallen greatness. The chapter ends with the conquest of the Morea and Trebizond, the alarm of Latin Christendom and the sultan's death in 1481.
Top Lessons
Greatness can carry the seeds of its own decline
Gibbon's most famous judgment is that Rome fell because of its immoderate greatness: the larger it grew, the more it depended on armies, distant governors and a single ruler. He even says we should wonder that it lasted so long. His account invites readers to see that the strengths of an empire and its weaknesses may be the same things seen at different times.
Forms can hide realities
In Chapter III Augustus keeps the consuls, the Senate and the language of the republic while holding absolute power. Gibbon admires his skill and notices how gladly the Romans accepted names in place of freedom. The same chapter shows that the Antonines' good government depended on their personal virtue, not on any law that bound them.
A historian's judgments on religion invite a reply
Gibbon writes of Roman paganism with ironic detachment and argues that Christianity and monasticism weakened the empire's military spirit, while granting that the faith softened the conquerors. Christian scholars answered him from his first volume onward, and Milman's notes in this very edition qualify several of his claims. Reading Gibbon well means hearing his argument in his own words and also listening to the replies.
Courage at the end
Chapter LXVIII shows a besieged city divided by quarrels over the church union and outnumbered many times over, yet its last emperor stays at his post and dies with his men. Gibbon, who rarely praises Byzantine rulers, gives Constantine Palaeologus a soldier's honor, and contrasts him with the commander who left the wall.
Verified Quotes
“The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful.”
“it may be defined an absolute monarchy disguised by the forms of a commonwealth.”
“which is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.”
“If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.”
“But the decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness.”
“If the decline of the Roman empire was hastened by the conversion of Constantine, his victorious religion broke the violence of the fall, and mollified the ferocious temper of the conquerors.”
“every age of the world has increased, and still increases, the real wealth, the happiness, the knowledge, and perhaps the virtue, of the human race.”
“The spider has wove his web in the Imperial palace; and the owl hath sung her watch-song on the towers of Afrasiab.”
Medical Lens
The selections are political and military history, and their medical interest is modest. Gibbon repeatedly uses the language of the body for the state: long peace introduces a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire, and the deepest wounds are inflicted during the minorities of the Theodosian princes. A footnote in Chapter II records that many Roman physicians were slaves, and a note by the editors lists physicians among the learned men of the Antonine age. Chapter LXVIII turns on a wound: Justiniani, struck in the final assault, leaves the wall in search of a surgeon, and the editors' notes compare the sources on where he was hit and how serious it was. Constantine's death and the burial of his body under the slain are described from conflicting chroniclers. Gibbon's estimate of a hundred and twenty million inhabitants is an early exercise in historical demography.
- Chapter II, Part II, note 57
Footnote observing that many Roman physicians were slaves.
- Chapter II, Part IV
Long peace described as a slow and secret poison in the vitals of the empire, an organic metaphor for decline.
- Chapter LXVIII, Part IV, and notes 58–59
Justiniani's wound, his withdrawal to seek a surgeon, the varying accounts of the injury, and the death of Constantine Palaeologus.