OMG Romanz!!

I’ve just started reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and I think I’m hooked. It’s not what I was expecting. I mean, it’s one of the classics, and we know what that means: some huge doorstop of a book that would be more fun to eat than read. Anytime a book is acclaimed as the definitive work on a subject, you know you’re in for ponderous academic jargon and a dry and endless cataloging of minutiae. To be a serious work of scholarship it has to be “objective,” which isn’t really possible, but some combination of bland, timid, and pedantic seems to be an acceptable substitute.

But the first word that comes to mind to describe the style of Decline and Fall is snarky. He opens by setting the scene of Rome at its peak: “In the second century of the Christian era the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth and the most civilized portion of mankind. … Their peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury. The image of a free constitution was preserved with decent reverence: the Roman senate appeared to possess the sovereign authority and devolved on the emperors all the executive powers of government.” Perhaps a little dated in the phrasing, but he’s certainly not pulling any punches. His summary of the conquest of Britain a few pages later is:

After a war of about forty years, undertaken by the most stupid, maintained by the most dissolute, and terminated by the most timid of all the emperors, the far greater part of the island submitted to the Roman yoke. … The native Caledonians preserved in the northern extremity of the island their wild independence, for which they were not less indebted to their poverty than to their valor. … The masters of the fairest and most wealthy climates of the globe turned with contempt from gloomy hills assailed by the winter tempest, from lakes concealed in a blue mist, and from cold and lonely heaths over which the deer of the forest were chased by a troop of naked barbarians.

I haven’t gotten too far in yet, but the editor’s introduction asserts that “… with minor variations in frequency, the sparkling sentences, paragraphs, and pages are to be found throughout, to the very end. Nor is this a matter of mere style. It is also a matter of wit, of delicately chosen words, of sardonic asides, of an occasional raciness that has caused Philip Guedalla to remark that Gibbon lived out most of his sex life in his footnotes.” This last actually gives me some cause for regret: I only have an abridged edition, which has been vigorously pruned of footnotes. Since even that weighs in around 700 pages, compared to the 3000-some of the full version, it’s probably a fair trade-off. We’ll see how it goes.