Edward Gibbon and the importance of great writing to great history

As a piece of writing it's excellent. Quoting it in the company of (most) contemporary historians is not going to end well, though.

I did via audiobook. It's much easier to passively listen until you find something interesting. There are so many little stories in history. For example, leaders of armies burning their own ships as soon as they make landfall. This forces their soldiers to fight or die. The conquistadors who followed this pattern (sinking instead of burning) their ships did not come up with the idea on their own. They drew from history.

I've read Volume 1 of "Decline and Fall" twice: once when assigned it in college, and afterward on my own from love. I'm eager to make the time to read the other two volumes, as lucky Jason Epstein did. It is hard to overpraise the gorgeous prose, the mordant wit, the sheer intelligence, and the stunning ambition of the work. It is close to unique in English literature.

Did I mention the mordant wit? Someone once described Decline and Fall as "the funniest serious book in English." I would agree. Hypocrites are the favorite target of Gibbon's irony, which is why the book scandalized all of Europe: The ranks of the bishops and other ecclesiastics in early Christianity did not lack for cynical hypocrites, ripe for the mocking as only Gibbon, deadpan, could do. The zingers are often stashed away in the footnotes, something that David Foster Wallace must have noticed.

Not least, the guy pretty much invented modern evidence-based historiography, in which primary sources are weighed and compared. And he followed his reasoning wherever it led him. To me Gibbon represents the best of the Enlightenment.

I read Vol. 1 on an audiobook from Audible.com, while out on walks. It was slow going at times because of Gibbon's style, but it was entertaining. One of my favourite lines was:

"...it was an inflexible maxim of Roman discipline, that a good soldier should dread his officers far more than the enemy."

I read the whole thing, in fits and starts. I think it took around five years, though there were some stretches of longer than a year when I didn't read any of it. I think it was a worthwhile exercise, and I'd like to do it again sometime.

If one reads the U.S. Declaration of Independence, published in 1776 (the same year as Volume 1 of D&F), it's written in the same Latinate periodic style. That's just how they wrote in the 18th century. Dinging Gibbon for failing to stand outside his historical period is not really fair.

Or try the Federalist Papers, or anything written by the U.S. founding fathers. Same style. Even better, try Fielding's "Tom Jones." Prose as masterly as Gibbon's, but you'll laugh yourself silly at the ribald and bawdy humor, not equaled again until the 20th century. Gotta love the English Enlightenment.

He wrote with his wife, winning a joint Pulitzer, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Durant