Gibbon and His Roman Empire

Gibbon worked on the Decline and Fall (first published in 1776) over a period of twenty years. As he proceeded, he came to consider himself "the historian of the Roman empire," and analyzed himself accordingly. This volume is a critical study of Gibbon and the Decline and Fall, including a discussion of his sources, his philosophy of history, his complex explanation of Rome's fall, and the validity of his views in the light of modern scholarship. Jordan holds that Gibbon created his own Rome out of a mountain of historical materials, and that the principal unity of the Decline and Fall is Gibbon's remarkable mind and personality. He examines Gibbon's extraordinary scholarship, his attitudes toward religion, his dual citizenship in French and English culture, and his literary art. He then moves on to a more specific analysis of the place of enlightenment and erudition in the Decline and Fall, studying Gibbon's debts to the two seventeenth-century Jansenists, Pascal and Tillemont, and considering the influence of earlier "philosophic" historians on Gibbon, especially Bayle, Montesquieu, and Tacitus. Jordan examines in depth the chapters on the Age of Constantine, showing how gibbon created his picture of the past. Stressing the uniquely personal nature of Gibbon's Roman empire, Jordan quotes Lytton Strachey's statement on how extraordinary it is that "the gigantic ruin of Europe through a thousand years...[is] mirrored in the mind of an eighteenth-century English gentleman."