The news often tells us that we live in uniquely critical times, beset by political disasters and afflicted by terrible crises, and that the demise of human civilization is surely imminent. We’re encouraged by the media to view the world and our own lives in bleak, apocalyptic terms. Oddly, history can be powerfully consoling at such moments, not because it tells us that our times are great, but precisely because it shows us how normal large societal troubles actually are.
The English 18th century historian Edward Gibbon is particularly helpful with this task of bringing us to a less frightened perspective on what we face. His massive, elegantly written work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, covers a thousand five hundred years, from the pinnacle of Roman power around the year 180 A.D. through to the collapse of the Western Empire and the final fall of its last outpost, the city of Constantinople, in 1453.
Edward Gibbon started work on the series of volumes around 1770 and completed the final book on a summer’s evening in 1787, while he was on holiday in Switzerland. The immense story that Gibbon tells us moves from one disaster to another, century after century: there are mad, despotic Emperors; the Barbarians invade again and again; the plans for reform fail; the key institutions become corrupt; the government loses control of the army; there are plagues that last for decades; the harvest declines; there is insane factionalism; the economy collapses; the Roman Forum, once the heart of the Empire, is abandoned and sheep graze among the ruins. Only Constantinople holds out, getting weaker and weaker, until its vastly prolonged decline ends with a fall to Muhammad II in the middle of the 15th century.
And yet, the world did not end. The main beneficiaries of the demise of the last fragment of the Empire was the city-state of Venice, which became the most widely loved place on Earth. The Exodus of Scholars to the West was pivotal in the story of the Renaissance. All the while, in the centuries of decline, new forces were developing in the background: the wild people of the North, who the Romans so feared, became eventually Danish interior designers and German intellectuals and Parisian socialites; the Picts and the Scots, who were seen as the least civilized people on Earth by the Romans, would one day renew their capital city Edinburgh as an architectural homage to Roman culture.
The disasters are always happening on the surface: they’re what we hear about. The gradual process of renewal and elevation so often escapes our notice at the time. It’s nice and good to read Edward Gibbon late at night at the end of another day when the news seems unbearably grim, and to skim through his placid accounts of yet another moment of apparent catastrophe, and think of him sitting learnedly in his study in the 18th century, reflecting on disaster, and yet being himself the obvious heir, with his classical prose, his quiet dignity, and his sense of balance, of the very Roman Empire he thought he was lamenting.