On Gibbon
Explaining why and how England's greatest historian still ought to be read in the modern era.
A long period of distress and anarchy, in which empire, and arts, and riches had migrated from the banks of the Tyber, was incapable of restoring or adorning the city; and, as all that is human must retrograde if it do not advance, every successive age must have hastened the ruin of the works of antiquity.
A few months back, I had mentioned offhandedly that I spent a vacation listening to all six volumes of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on audiobook, reading along and pausing where the abridgements appear. In an effort to best present my ideas, I have repeated this task in full. The Decline and Fall is admittedly not the best resource for learning about Roman history for reasons we’ll get to in a moment, but I nevertheless found the experience incredibly refreshing. Not only did it bolster my confidence that the thesis I set out to prove when writing this is true, but it also made me rethink the direction I would want to take with that potential Ganghofer project in the style of the prose. Gibbon’s greatest impact on the modern world has undoubtedly been the beautiful way that he writes, but is this an accurate assessment of his esteem, or has he done more for us than mankind currently acknowledges? Convincing any significant population of modern Americans to read any book is a Herculean task; convincing them that they would benefit from reading 6 volumes about Roman history is therefore a fool’s errand. The reception to these ideas is wholly independent of their validity, though. Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall has multidisciplinary value and still has use as a tool to help us understand how our view of the Roman Empire has formed over centuries.
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