In the midst of this, it occured to me what a truly dreary subject matter Gibbon chose to write about.  The book is — as advertised — a close and detailed examination of the slow death of a great civilization: decline and fall, decay and destruction, rot and corruption.   Still and all, it is compelling reading — a testament to Gibbon’s active intelligence.  It’s not just decline, after all.  It’s a postmortem narrated by an extremely engaging, energetic mind.  Gibbon’s authorial power saves it from being merely one long, long train wreck. 

Of course, the train-wreck element is there:  again and again, an emperor, a rival, a pretender or barbarian, raises an army and goes on the offensive.  Ten thousand mustered here,  sixty-thousand there, one-hundred thousand thrown into the breech, thousands killed, thousands more enslaved, millions the powerless playthings of imperial ambition. . .  And through it all the morals of the Roman people wilt, the military disasterously pursues its own self-interest and the forces of superstition take on a new, more virulent form.  The real question raised by Gibbon isn’t why the greatness that was Rome failed.  Rather, it’s how the thing was able to stand as long as it did.

I’m afraid to admit it, but after 10 days of reading I finished only about 250 pages of  The Decline and Fall.  I’m not a fast reader, so that’s not so very awful for me, but it is troubling given that I hope to finish before summer break is over (all the while accomplishing an ambitious agenda of other things).   At my current rate of progress — averaging only about 25 pages per day — it’ll take me four months and one week to finish.  I have less than three, and would like to move onto my next book in something more like two months.  In other words I need to nearly double my current rate of pages per day.  We’ll see.  

Aside from all this silly worry over my rate of ascent, I’ve already come across some breathtaking vistas, some wonderfully fine examples of great prose communicating fascinating history.  Chapter III, in particular, was a tour de force and will undoubtedly appear on some syllabus of mine in the future, probably at the next iteration of POL 381 (Western Politcal Philosophy I) here at Spring Hill .  Titled modestly, “Of the Constitution of the Roman Empire in the Age of the Antonines,” it is much more than that, providing a brisk moral/political summary of the imperial order instituted by the Julio-Claudians and modified by their Flavian and Antonine successors.   Aside from this chapter, the other most exciting passages have mostly been smaller episodes, quick observations proferred in a casual almost offhand manner by Gibbon as he relentlessly moves along from the time of Trajan and Hadrian to the age of heightened barbarian threat under Decius.  Observations about human nature, motivation, the differences between civilization and barbarism and any number of other things abound.  ¼/p>

 I’m at currently at base camp, so to speak, having just — moments ago — finished with the editor’s introduction — itself an essay of nearly 100 pages.    I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to begin the actual ascent, conditions permitting.

David Womersly’s introduction certainly did its job for me, sharpening my expectations and whetting my appetite for what lies ahead.  I’d always heard that one couldn’t count oneself truly educated until one had read Gibbon (I know, anyway, I learned as much from some anonymous writer for the Economist at some time or other).  Without directly claiming as much, Womersley’s intro makes clear how this old challenge might be understood.  Gibbon, we are told, toiled in the great tradition of philosophical history, an Enlightement mode with clear debts to antiquity.  And this is just to speak in terms of his method or style –  an ironic style, but not so ironic as to preclude its author (a Montesquieu, a Hume, or a Tacitus, perhaps) from offering incisive judgments grounded in genuinely held (though always properly nuanced and relatively flexible) moral commitments.  Gibbon’s substance too, the vast subject of his philosophical gaze, a detailed look at some 1,300 years of civilizational history (Rome’s decline was apparently very slow and drawn out!), Wormersley tells us, bridges antiquity and modernity in a way that simultaneously draws upon and extends the reader’s cultural knowledge. 

In other words, reading Gibbon promises to both test and inform my learning.  And so I’ve decided to begin the ascent as part of my never-ending (though, sadly, often interrupted) effort to become truly and liberally educated.

With this reading I’m finally delving in earnest into the Allen Lane/Penguin Press hardcover boxed-set 1994 edition, that I’d been using more for its brute weight, and almost as a piece of furniture - a sometime bookend, sometime pedestal holding a cheap plastic bust of Mozart draped since last Mardi Gras with a whole bunch of colorful plastic beads.  If nothing else, it’s good to finally be using it for the purpose for which it was designed:  reading.