The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Nonfiction | Book | Adult

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-6

Chapters 7-8

Chapters 9-10

Chapters 11-12

Chapters 13-14

Key Figures

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Background

Intellectual Context: Gibbon and the Writing of History

Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was just one part of a sea change in how writers in Western and Central Europe thought and wrote about history. Histories produced before Gibbon in the Christian Middle Ages were often written by members of the Church clergy. With some exceptions, many of these works were chronicles of local cities and regions that attempted to record facts or histories of the world, beginning with the creation of humanity as described in the Book of Genesis from the Bible and ending with the author’s own time. These histories tended to take for granted the total reliability and authority of both the Bible and ancient sources, and were much more concerned with communicating moral and religious truths to the reader than what we would consider historical analysis today. Even when these works were written by people outside the Church, they still often wrote with the idea that historical events were directed by God, and that major events came from the accomplishments and virtues or the crimes and failings of great individuals.

With the rediscovery and new translations of the works of pre-Christian historians, such as the Greek historian Thucydides and the Roman biographer Suetonius, this approach to history began to give way to new trends. The intellectual movement of the Renaissance—humanism—inspired scholars to be more critical of historical sources, even ancient and biblical ones. Historians began to focus on human, cultural, and social forces rather than just recording events, and to emphasize human control over events rather than seeing history as a part of a divine plan. History was still often seen as a means to educate people in the present time, but the focus was more on what history teaches about human behavior and less on history revealing divine truths.

By the 17th and 18th centuries, the time of the Enlightenment, these shifts in historical thought became more entrenched. In fact, works from the French Enlightenment, like Montesquieu’s Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline and Voltaire’s Age of Louis XIV downplayed individual personalities in history and instead focused on broader political, social, and cultural trends. While Gibbon also discusses broad trends in history like his French Enlightenment counterparts, Gibbon still keeps a focus on individual historical actors. For Gibbon, there is no problem in seeking to both write history as a dramatic narrative and in a scholarly, analytical way.

Historical Context: The Fall of Rome and the Dark Ages

When Gibbon writes about the “fall of the Roman Empire,” he is referring to a specific event. By 476 CE, the territories of the western half of the Roman Empire had shrunk to mostly just modern-day Italy. The emperor Romulus Augustus, based in Rome, was deposed. Instead of being replaced by someone else as emperor, the German general Odoacer declared himself the king of Italy. This is still seen by most historians as the “fall,” even though the eastern half of the empire, whose capital was Constantinople, continued to exist until 1452, when the Ottoman Empire conquered Constantinople. Although modern historians refer to that territory as the Byzantine Empire (a term that was not actually used until the 18th century) and the predominant language of the government and the people was Greek, not Latin, the people of the Byzantine Empire still thought of themselves as Romans.

Nonetheless, for centuries, European writers treated the fall of Rome like a catastrophic event in the history of Europe. Medieval writers and thinkers thought of the fall of Rome as the beginning of an irreversible decline that would only stop with the end of the world. Later historians, beginning in the Renaissance, began to regard the centuries immediately following Rome’s fall as the “Dark Ages”—a reversal in terms of Western civilization, involving the widescale loss of centralized authority and a steep decline in literacy and culture. The reverence felt by the Renaissance humanists toward ancient Greece and Rome continued into Gibbon’s time, playing major roles in the revolutionary political and philosophical ideas of the 18th century. Gibbon’s cynical attitude toward Christianity and the decline of Rome throughout The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire reflects his intellectual and social background during this era, embodying the newfound religious skepticism in the Enlightenment and the continuing intellectual belief in ancient Rome’s cultural and historical importance for Western culture.