It's a crappy book full of dreary, inscrutably dense and dry prose and whoever did the editing of this particular version ought to be thrown to the lions or given some other suitably Roman punishment... imagine the most stereotypically boring librarian you can can conjure up and pretend you gave them unlimited funding for twenty years to write an encyclopedia about cabbage production. That's roughly what you get from Edward Gibbon.
His History is one of pure observation. As a compendium of citations with raw descriptions of what happened, it is indeed peerless and will never be surpassed. The amount of reading and note-taking the poor sap must have had to do in an age before the invention of ctrl+f should give everyone horrifying nightmares. The problem is that that is literally the only good thing about it.
Take his legendary rhetoric. At best, this is vastly over-rated. It's not that he didn't know how to turn a phrase so much as it was that he wouldn't stop doing it. Ever. Who needs clarity when you can have pseeudopoetry ? Except that it's rather worse than that... it's more pseudo-poetric ramblings. The occasional flash of rhetorical brilliance can't compensate for the impenetrable fug of verbal diarrhoea that fills most of the book. The real annoyance is that there's just enough good stuff in there - whole chapters, even - that I can't blame this on the writing style of the age. Some parts of the text are crystal clear, flowing narrative. The rest is what I'm calling Gibbonish... not exactly gibberish, but sort of half-narrative, half general commentary that ends up as the worst of both worlds. So focused is Gibbon, nay obsessed, with constructing rhetoric that it feels almost like deliberate obfuscation. It's not text you read so much as parse. And that quickly becomes mentally exhausting and whatever godforsaken point Gibbon was trying to make is utterly lost.
I Read Edward Gibbon So You Don't Have To
Literally. There is no point anyone reading this book unless they're an actual historian. Pretty much any history of Rome will mention, at some point, Gibbon's mighty tome, often in exalted terms as though its sheer magisterialness can be absorbed through osmosis. Well, as y'all know, I prefer to read the source material myself.
I slogged through it all. Gibbon's failures were many. I developed an abiding hatred of all that misinformed flapdoodle. This bit of yours is very good: It's not that he didn't know how to turn a phrase so much as it was that he wouldn't stop doing it. Ever. Who needs clarity when you can have pseudopoetry ? Except that it's rather worse than that... it's more pseudo-poetric ramblings. The occasional flash of rhetorical brilliance can't compensate for the impenetrable fug of verbal diarrhoea that fills most of the book.
ReplyDeleteBut at a purely technical level, the archaeological and historical evidence for the decline of the Roman Empire - I do not say fall for the Roman Empire never actually fell until the fall of Constantinople.
Nor did the collapse of Rome have any impact at all on Hispania or Dacia, not even when the Moors invaded. The Moors added a few flourishes to the architecture of Hispania, borrowed and loaned thousands of words and concepts, learned to take baths and generally enjoyed their stay.
If Gibbon is to be faulted for anything, Barbara Tuchman said the bad historian views the past through the lenses of the present. Gibbon was the Enlightenment's biggest fanboi and one of its weakest thinkers. His research was original, that's the good part. His analysis was just horrible.
And for all his much-ballyhooed hatred of Christianity Edward Gibbon's own spiritual sensibilities were as shallow as a mud puddle, flopping around from Protestant to Catholic, here and there and everywhere. A most inconstant man. A mishmash of Voltaire and every pretentious tourist who ever cast a shadow in the Forum of Rome. Gibbon's pretentiousness still attracts every sophos-moros pseudo-intellectual to him.
Gibbon's a mysterious figure, largely self-taught, a mass of contradictions. His blame of the Christians was affected nonsense: all of it is so much second-hand bilgewater from the French philosophes. But as is the case with so many other self-taught scholars and scientists, Gibbon's lack of credentials only galled him the more. His prose is, as you say, just fecking exhausting .
Empires don't entirely disappear, anyway. The Roman world is not completely gone. It's still with us. Eliot:
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.