SOURCE: Quinn, Arthur. “‘Meditating Tacitus’: Gibbon's Adaptation to an Eighteenth-Century Audience.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70, no. 1 (February 1984): 53-68.

[In the following essay, Quinn argues that Gibbon's Decline and Fall was written in part to give wisdom to his English contemporaries so that England, an imperial power, would not make the same mistakes the Romans had.]

I

“It was Rome, on the 15th of October 1764, as I sat musing amid the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.” This is Edward Gibbon's own, now famous account of the origin of the history for which he is still remembered, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In 1764 his mind should well have been on the fate of great empires. Gibbon had recently been released from service in the Hampshire militia. He had volunteered for this service because from 1755 to 1763 Britain has been engaged in the greatest imperial war of its yet young empire.¹

In the peace treaty that was signed in 1763 all Canada went to Britain. Moreover, Spain, to get back Havana and the Philippines, ceded Florida. France also made sufficient concessions in India to assure British dominance there. In short, Britain, whatever its intentions for entering the war, left it with a great empire.²

With his father, Gibbon volunteered for the militia at a time when a threat of French invasion of Britain seemed serious. He served more than two years on the home front. Then, his duty done and Britannia controlling not just the waves but most of North America and India as well, Gibbon travelled to the continent and eventually to Rome. While he had been in the militia, he considered a number of possible subjects for his first major work, prominent among them a history of the Swiss and a biography of Walter Raleigh. Now as he sat “amid the ruins of the Capitol,” the idea of what was to become his master work “first started to my mind.”

He was living at a time when the prospects of the British empire seemed almost limitless. Europe for the foreseeable future was going to dominate the world, and the island of Britain with its navy had just shown that it would have a major portion of that world. Europe and Britain seemed as securely in control of its world as Rome had been of its. No wonder the fall of Rome started to Gibbon's mind. Rome, eternal Rome had not been eternal at all. Would the same be true of Europe?

Of all the historical sources Edward Gibbon used to prepare his history of the Roman Empire, he deferred to one above all others, the writings of the Roman senator and historian Cornellius Tacitus. One of Gibbon's friends, after the publication of the first volume of his history, observed to him that Tacitus had obviously been “the model and perhaps the source of your work.” Gibbon could not disagree. He had himself admitted that he had written on Roman government only after he had “meditated Tacitus.” And at one crucial point in his narrative he confessed his own limitations by observing that to describe adequately what was happening would require “the pen of Tacitus.”³

What Gibbon got from Tacitus, above all else, was an insider's analysis of the mortal flaws within Roman government. It was understandably a bitter analysis; for by describing the mortal weakness of the Roman empire, Tacitus was, in effect, predicting the end of everything which he and his forebearers had worked to build and preserve. The gloom of his analysis led the seventeenth century to nickname Tacitus “the prince of darkness.”⁴

But Gibbon was not looking for gloom, for darkness. He needed to adapt Tacitus' analysis for an eighteenth century audience, to show how what happened to the old empire of Rome need not happen to the new empires of Europe. He wanted the new leaders of Europe to assume with self-confidence the burden of empire. This required the pen not of a Tacitus, but of a Gibbon. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was based on Tacitus, but it was to be dedicated to Lord North. This is the key to Gibbon's rhetorical task.⁵

II

Tacitus was a Roman senator showing the others of the Roman elite what was destroying their imperial fabric. The strength of Tacitus, what made him so convincing, so reliable a guide, was also for Gibbon a rhetorical limitation. Tacitus could assume responses from his readers which Gibbon could not.

Tacitus once described a battle between German tribes in which more than sixty thousand Germans were killed; the carnage of the battlefield was, Tacitus wrote, a sight “to gladden Roman eyes.” “Long, I pray, may the Germans persist, if not in loving us in hating one another; for the imperial destiny drives hard, and fortune has no better gift for us than the disunion of our foes.”⁶ The sight of a battlefield in the Roman civil war of 69 a.d. evoked from Tacitus quite a different response.

It was a dreadful and revolting sight. Less than forty days had elapsed since the engagement, and mutilated corpses, severed limbs, and the decaying carcasses of horses and men lay everywhere. The ground was blood-stained and flattened trees and crops bore witness to the frightful devastation.⁷

However much Gibbon agreed with Tacitus in his analysis of the Principate, he could not presume that an eighteenth century audience would identify their own interests with those of the Roman empire. His eighteenth century audience had a more complicated relationship to the distant Roman past. Gibbon's readers, as citizens of the growing European empires, might well have been the spiritual descendants of the imperial Romans. Nonetheless, they were also most probably physical descendants of barbarians whose mutilated corpses would have gladdened Roman eyes.

Therefore, before Gibbon could begin to use Tacitus' analysis of the Roman empire, he had first to create in the minds of his readers a commitment to the Roman empire, a faint replica of the commitment which Tacitus could presume. To this delicate task Gibbon devoted the first two chapters of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Gibbon prudently spared his readers any account of the carnage required to establish Roman dominance of the Mediterranean basin. Descriptions that would delight hardened Romans might not have the same effect upon eighteenth century Europeans. Rather Gibbon began his own account of Rome at a time when Roman dominance had already become status quo. It was at a time, in particular, in which the need for what Gibbon termed “martial enthusiasm” had passed. Gibbon could begin with praise for military moderation of the Emperor Augustus.

In the second century of the Christian era, the Empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth and the most civilised portion of mankind. … The seven first centuries [of Roman history] were filled with a rapid succession of triumphs; but it was reserved for Augustus to relinquish the ambitious design of subduing the whole earth, and to introduce a spirit of moderation into the public councils. Inclined to peace by his temper and situation, it was easy for him to discover that Rome, in her present exalted situation, had much less to hope than to fear from the chance of arms; and that, in the prosecution of remote wars, the undertaking became every day more difficult, the event more doubtful, and the possession more precarious, and less beneficial. … He bequeathed, as a valuable legacy to his successors, the advice of confining the empire within those limits which Nature seemed to have placed as its permanent bulwarks and boundaries; on the west the Atlantic Ocean; the Rhine and Danube on the north; the Euphrates on the east; and towards the south, the sandy deserts of Arabia and Africa.

(pp. 1-3)

In the initial portion of his very first chapter, Gibbon was at pains to establish in the minds of his readers the Roman empire as a natural geographical unit. Roman martial enthusiasm had only discovered boundaries which Nature itself had established. Gibbon reinforced this point by recounting the military career of the Emperor Trajan who ignored Augustus' advice. Trajan set off to conquer the East in imitation of Alexander the Great. There he died, and with him died his expansionist policy. His successor Hadrian immediately called the legions back to the natural boundaries.

Having established the Roman empire as a natural geographical unity, and having subsequently also described in detail the Roman military strength which adequately defended these natural boundaries, Gibbon could then take his readers on a tour of the Roman provinces. Britain, Gaul, Lombardy, the German provinces, slowly Gibbon moved his readers around the Roman empire, through eastern Europe, Asia Minor, Syria, Phoenicia, Palestine. About each province he would have something brief to say.

Phoenicia and Palestine were sometimes annexed to, and sometimes separated from the jurisdiction of Syria. The former of these was a narrow and rocky coast; the latter was a territory scarcely superior to Wales, either in fertility or extent. Yet Phoenicia and Palestine will forever live in the memory of mankind; since America, as well as Europe, has received letters from the one, and religion from the other.

(p. 23)

From Palestine he moved his readers slowly across North Africa to where it almost touches Spain, to where in ancient times were the famed columns of Hercules, and where in modern times “the fortress of Gibralta is now seated” (p. 24). Once they had completed the circuit, Gibbon's readers could pause, while he, to conclude his first chapter, reflected upon what they had seen.

This long enumeration of provinces, whose broken fragments have formed so many powerful kingdoms might almost induce us to forgive the vanity and ignorance of the ancients. Dazzled with the extensive sway, the irresistible strength, and the real or affected moderation of the emperors, they permitted themselves to despise, and sometimes to forget, the outlying countries which had been left in the enjoyment of a barbarous independence; and they gradually usurped the licence of confounding the Roman monarchy with the globe of the earth. But the temper, as well as knowledge, of a modern historian requires a more sober and accurate language. He may impress a juster image of the greatness of Rome, by observing that the empire was about two thousand miles in breadth, from the wall of Antoninus and the northern limits of Dacia, to Mount Atlas and the tropic of Cancer; that it extended, in length, more than three thousand miles from the Western Ocean to the Euphrates; that it was situated in the finest part of the Temperate Zone, between the twenty-fourth and fifty-sixth degrees of northern latitude; and that it was supposed to contain above sixteen hundred thousand square miles, for the most part of fertile and well-cultivated land.

(pp. 24-5)

While in his first chapter Gibbon sought to impress his readers with the physical unity of the Roman Empire, in the second he sought to impress them with its spiritual unity. The physical boundaries of the Empire might be natural ones, and its military force sufficient to defend them; but was the humanity it contained a community? Gibbon answered simply, “[T]he firm edifice of Roman power was raised and preserved by the wisdom of the ages” (p. 25).

Part of this wisdom was polytheism, polytheism with its religious toleration. The polytheist was forever open to discovering in new localities new gods, or at least old gods in new guises. So the Romans could tolerate and even do homage to the gods of their conquered peoples. It is true Rome did persecute the Druids in Britain, but that was only because they provided a focal point for opposition to Rome. The Romans, unless provoked to force, wished only to absorb both a people and their gods into the service of Rome.

Of course, Roman polytheism was not a divine democracy. As among men so among gods, to have order among many some had to be more important than others. “A republic of gods of such opposite tempers and interest required, in every system, the moderating hand of a supreme magistrate, who, by the progress of knowledge and flattery, was gradually invested with the sublime perfections of an Eternal parent, and an Omnipotent” (p. 26). This parent eternal and omnipotent was, of course, enshrined in the Roman temple to Jupiter Best and Greatest. So it was that religion helped unify the empire. “Rome gradually became the common temple of her subjects; and the freedom of the city was bestowed on all the gods of mankind” (p. 29).

Just as Rome adopted suitable gods wherever they were found, so she also had the shrewdness “to adopt virtue and merit for her own wheresoever they were found, among slaves or strangers, enemies or barbarians” (p. 29). In this way, as the empire expanded, more and more privileges, once the exclusive possessions of only the Romans, were gradually extended first to Italy, and then to the provinces, to be enjoyed by those who merited them. This gave Rome's subjects the sense that the empire was their own, a system in which they would hope to find the occasion to exhibit their merits. “The grandsons of the Gauls, who had beseiged Julius Caesar in Alesia, commanded legions, governed provinces, and were admitted into the senate of Rome” (p. 33).

For almost two full chapters Edward Gibbon painted for his readers the idyll of the Roman empire, its natural greatness, its strength, its peace, unity, prosperity. “The most northern tribes of Britons had acquired a taste for rhetoric; Homer as well as Virgil were transcribed and studied on the banks of the Rhine and Danube” (p. 51). He painted it for them, as a proud Roman might have. And then Gibbon suddenly stepped back to speak of what only a rare Roman could have perceived. “It was scarcely possible that the eyes of contemporaries should discover in the public felicity the latent causes of decay and corruption. This long peace, and the uniform government of Romans, introduced a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire” (p. 50).

III

By the beginning of his third chapter, Gibbon's readers were ready to see this poison, and its initial effects. They were ready because they now appreciated how much was going to be lost when Rome declined. And so it is that in the third chapter, Tacitus makes his first appearance in Gibbon's narrative, at the very point when the mortal weakness of the empire is being revealed for the first time.

It would require the pen of Tacitus (if Tacitus had assisted at this assembly) to describe the various emotions of the senate; those that were suppressed, and those that were affected. It was dangerous to trust the sincerity of Augustus; to seem to distrust it was still more dangerous. The respective advantages of monarchy and republic have often divided speculative inquirers; the present greatness of the Roman state, the corruption of manners, and the license of the soldiers, supplies new arguments to the advocates of monarchy; and these general views were again warped by the hopes and fears of each individual. Amidst this confusion of sentiments, the answer of the senate was unanimous and decisive. They refused to accept the resignation of Augustus; they conjured him not to desert the republic which he had saved. After a decent resistance, the crafty tyrant submitted to the orders of the senate; and consented to receive the government of the provinces, and the general command of the Roman armies, under the well-known names of PROCONSUL and IMPERATOR. But he would receive them only for ten years. Even before the expiration of that period, he hoped that the republic, restored to its pristine health and vigour, would no longer require the dangerous interposition of so extraordinary a magistrate.

(pp. 54-5)

For Tacitus the usurpation of senatorial powers by the emperor Augustus, the transformation of the Republic into the Principate, was the source of Rome's mortal weakness. Rome was doomed because it was a dictatorship. Why?

In a constitutionally illegitimate dictatorship, such as the Principate, everything had to be subordinate to the dictator, to the emperor. Therefore, Rome under the emperors had exhibited that “blind hostility to merit which is a poison to all states great and small.”⁸ Or so Tacitus had argued in two of his earliest works. In his biography of his father-in-law, Agricola, he had shown how when Agricola had displayed his considerable military talents in Britain the emperor, fearing him as a potential rival, quietly removed him from public life. In Tactitus' Dialogue on Oratory his interlocutors attributed its decline to the fact that there is no need for speeches when all decisions are made by one man.⁹ In a dictatorship the debates of a legislature become a charade. Tacitus wanted his readers to realize “how savage to virtue are our times.”¹⁰

Tacitus chose as the subject of his first major work, The Histories, a civil war through which Rome suffered in the year 69 a.d. In that short period there were not less than five emperors; the empire came close to collapse, and much of the city of Rome—including the temple of Jupiter, “a symbol of our imperial destiny”—was destroyed during the fighting. For Tacitus this destruction of Rome's temple of Jupiter was “the most lamentable and appalling disaster in the whole history of the Roman Commonwealth.” Tacitus' intention was to help his readers “appreciate not only the actual course of events, whose outcome is often dictated by chance, but also their underlying logic and cause.”¹¹

It was chance the civil war began when it did, chance that it continued quite as long as it did. It was also chance that the civil war ended before Rome had been so weakened that the new emperor could not put all the pieces of the empire back together again. Tacitus' readers were to appreciate all this, but they were also to perceive the underlying cause. The cause of this near death of the Roman empire was the Principate itself.

When after Nero's suicide the Roman senators had confirmed the choice of the rebellious western legions and named Galba emperor, Rome must have seemed to be returning to order, not moving closer to the abyss. But there was a deeper logic operating. With the accession of Galba, a “well-hidden secret of the Principate had been revealed.”¹² Augustus had been careful to keep the trappings of the Republic. He was only privately and in reality a military dictator; he and his immediate successors did their best to keep up the false appearance that they were servants of the ancient Roman constitution, not its usurpers.

With Galba, however good a man he might have been, and however suited he seemed to rule, this illusion was destroyed. Galba was chosen by the legions; the senate, although it tried to keep up appearances by negotiating with Galba for the punishment of Nero's minions as a condition of confirmation, had in fact no choice. The senate set as a condition something Galba would have chosen to do anyway. The secret, however hard the senators might try to keep it, was out: emperors were chosen on the battlefield, not in the senate. Or, as Tacitus quietly put it, “It was possible, it seemed, for an Emperor to be chosen outside Rome.”¹³

The secret was a secret no more. Once known, it had a logic of its own. If the western legions so far away from Rome could make an emperor of their own choosing, why could not Rome's own Praetorian Guard replace him with someone they preferred? So Galba was assassinated and Otho named emperor. And if they could do that, soft as they were from the comforts of the capital, why should not the legions of Germany, defenders of Rome from the most ferocious of the barbarians, sweep down to impose their own favorite? And when they had been weakened by their victorious campaign on behalf of Vitellius, who was to prevent the legions of the East from sweeping into Rome to give the purple to their own leader, Vespasian?

Perhaps some idealists could have still seen in the negotiations between Galba and the senate the flicker of a Republican government reviving. Galba, as Tacitus presents him, did not. Tacitus' Galba said to Piso when he selected him as his successor (and thereby doomed him, too, to assassination):

If it were possible for our gigantic empire to stand erect and keep its balance in the absence of a ruler, I should be the right sort of person to hand over power to a republican form of government. But in fact we have long ago reached a point where drastic measures are necessary. Hence my declining years can make Rome no greater gift than a good successor.¹⁴

After four different emperors had been placed at the head of Rome by four different armies in little more than a year, all quickly and piously confirmed by the senate, no one could have doubted that, for better or worse, Rome had reached a point where drastic measures were necessary. No one who had seen these events, at least as Tacitus wished them to be seen, could have retained any serious hope for the return of Republican government. As if to emphasize this point, Tacitus reminded his readers that with the accession of Vespasian, the senate did not even bother to go through the motions of a negotiation. Why go through the charade when all now knew it to be such? To emphasize this point, Tacitus had a Roman senator, such as might have had hopes for the Republic at the time of Nero's death, say to his colleagues after the accession of Vespasian, “We have lost our old vigor, gentlemen. We are no longer the senate which on Nero's death called down on his prosecutors and satellites the traditional punishment of our fathers.”¹⁵

The stability which the illusion of constitutionality had given the Principate was now gone, as all could see. The Principate had to stand on its own as a dictatorship. In Vespasian and his eldest son Titus, the Romans had good rulers. This was the best for which Romans could reasonably hope, the luck of living under moderate emperors. This was the best for which they could hope because nothing could protect them against bad ones, like Nero. That there would be again emperors as bad as Nero, perhaps even worse, was as certain as there would once again be civil wars as terrible as that which engulfed the empire in 69 a.d. This was the underlying logic of the Principate. If anyone doubted Tacitus' pessimism, he had only to read Agricola, to read about Vespasian's younger son, the Emperor Domitian.¹⁶ In fact, The Histories in their original form did extend through the death of Domitian, bringing the reader full cycle to the death of the reincarnated Nero. These concluding sections, however, were one small part of all that was lost in the final collapse of the Roman Empire.¹⁷

IV

Late in life Gibbon seems to have regretted not following Tacitus' Histories even more closely in the early chapters of his Decline and Fall than he did. He wondered in the margin of his own copy of his work if he should have “deduced the decline of the Empire from the Civil Wars that ensued after the Fall of Nero.” Gibbon “deduced the decline” from a much later date, from the civil war that ensued after the death of the Emperor Commodus. But far from being a mistake, it was evidence of his genius, evidence of how creatively he used what he learned from Tacitus.¹⁸

Gibbon might say that only a Tacitus could do justice to the hypocrisy of the senators as they allowed Augustus to usurp their constitutional powers. Nonetheless, he himself tried to do justice to the hypocrisy at the heart of the Principate. He did so with particular force in his characterization of Augustus in his Chapter 3.

A cool head, an unfeeling heart, and a cowardly disposition, prompted him, at the age of nineteen, to assume the mask of hypocrisy, which he never afterwards laid aside. … His virtues, and even his vices, were artificial; and according to the various dictates of his interest, he was at first the enemy, and at last the father, of the Roman world. When he framed the artful system of the Imperial authority, his moderation was inspired by his father. He wished to deceive the people by an image of civil liberty, and the armies by an image of civil government.

(p. 63)

Augustus embodied for Gibbon the Principate, the attractive image, the corrupt reality. And Gibbon had made his readers experience both aspects. In the first chapter they had been introduced to Augustus from the outside, Augustus the wise proponent of traditional Roman moderation. Now in the third chapter they experience the cruel recognition of him as deceiver, as the deceptive usurper of Roman tradition.

Against the background of this hypocrisy, Gibbon could treat the civil war of 69 a.d. much as Tacitus had. The emperors had before this been successful in keeping the illusion of republican government. “The masters of the Roman world surrounded their throne with darkness, concealed their irresistible strength, and humbly professed themselves the accountable ministers of the senate, whose supreme decrees they dictated and obeyed” (p. 61). In 69 a.d. this illusion was broken; then the legions did learn “to consider emperors as the creatures of their will, the instruments of their license” (p. 60).

However, from Gibbon this was not a decisive episode. For Gibbon's perspective, the succeeding emperors were relatively successful in restoring the illusion. They had learned their lesson and henceforth became more careful to assure a regular succession, “to spare the legions that interval of suspense, and the temptation of an irregular choice” (p. 65). Thanks to the superior guile of the emperors, in the century after the civil war “the soldiers were seldom roused to that fatal sense of their own strength, and of the weakness of civil authority” (p. 65).

In fact, soon after the civil war, there was a succession of three good emperors (Tacitus lived to see only the first). Gibbon's praise for Hadrian, Antonius Pius, and Marcus Aurelius was little less than panegyric. Their combined reign of half a century was “possibly the only period of history in which the happiness of a great people was the sole object of government” (p. 68). The whole empire was being governed with an “invariable spirit of wisdom and virtue” (p. 68). Gibbon even proclaimed that in the whole history of the human race this was the period in which “the human race was most happy and prosperous.” Gibbon proclaimed this “without hesitation” (p. 70).

Such praise might have led a reader to expect that perhaps the empire was not yet doomed. Having invited just such an expectation, Gibbon then dashed it. The very paragraph which began by putting this period above all others in human history ended with a foreboding piece of praise: “Such princes deserved the honour of restoring the republic had the Romans of their days been capable of enjoying rational freedom” (p. 70). Had the Romans been capable, but they were not. Not even rulers who together acted in an invariable spirit of wisdom and virtue for almost half a century could retrieve the wisdom and virtue of a Roman citizenry so long accustomed to dictatorship. The poison had reached the vitals. Its effects could be slowed, perhaps even temporarily arrested, but the damage was now apparently irreversible. Anyone who understood the state of the empire would have understood this. Gibbon was convinced that his three good emperors must have understood this.

They must often have recollected the instability of a happiness which depended upon the character of a single man. The fatal moment was perhaps approaching, when some licentious youth, or some jealous tyrant, would abuse, to the destruction, that absolute power which they had exerted for the benefit of their people. The ideal restraints of the senate and the laws might serve to display the virtues, but could never correct the vices, of the emperor. The military forces was a blind and irresistible instrument of oppression; and the corruption of Roman manners would always supply flatterers eager to applaud, and ministers prepared to serve the fear or the avarice, the lust or the cruelty, of their masters.

(p. 70)

They would know the evil possible of an emperor because they would know the reigns of some of their predecessors. Now Gibbon could finally reveal the rhetorical function of his good emperors; they were to serve as a contrasting background for the bad. Now that his readers had been sufficiently prepared, Gibbon could retrospectively introduce them to Tacitus' gallery of imperial monsters—“the dark unrelenting Tiberius, the furious Caligula, the feeble Claudius, the profligate and cruel Nero, the beastly Vitellius, and the timid inhuman Domitian” (p. 70-1). Gibbon's good emperors knew that all or most of these monsters would return with other names and other faces, once again to inflict their caprices upon their imperial subjects.

Then would come the cruellest reversal of all. Then the memory of the good emperors, and of the freedom and prosperity which Rome once enjoyed, would only increase the suffering by having sensitized Romans to their present deprivations. They would have been sensitized much as Gibbon was trying to sensitize his own readers. These readers, after Gibbon's careful tutelage, could see in every good attributed to Rome's greatness, an evil that could come with the decline.

Gibbon had begun his history with a sentence evoking the size of the Roman empire, “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” (p. 1). Now he concluded his third chapter with a sentence that made even this ominous. He concluded it with a sentence from a letter by the great exponent of Rome's divine destiny, Cicero, himself forced eventually to suicide by Augustus. “Wherever you are, remember that you are equally within the power of the conqueror” (p. 73). There was no escape.

If Gibbon had succeeded in his first three chapters, his readers had experienced, indeed identified themselves with the greatness of Rome—and could see how that greatness had been made vulnerable by the Principate. Gibbon was now free to begin his chronological narrative of Rome's actual decline. Here the break with Tacitus seems clearest, for here he begins not with Nero but with Commodus, son and successor to the last of the three good emperors Gibbon so lavishly praised, Marcus Aurelius. And yet this choice itself revealed the depth of Tacitus' influence.

Commodus in Gibbon's estimate was Nero come again, only worse. Nero had at least affected interest in the civilized enjoyment of poetry and music, entering public competitions which, as emperor, he somehow never lost. Commodus preferred to compete as a gladiator, more than seven hundred times. He thought himself the Roman Hercules—or so he had put on his medals—and particularly enjoyed killing exotic animals, giraffes, ostriches, a hundred lions on a single day. Outside the arena, he exercised his ferocity on the Romans closest to him. In his first three chapters, Gibbon had described the weakness of the empire—“the instability of a happiness which depended on the character of one man”—and in chapter four he showed this weakness. Within just a few years Rome had gone from great happiness to great terror, simply because of the difference between a man and his son.

When Commodus finally died (murdered in his sleep), he left to his subjects the same legacy as Nero, civil war. Although Gibbon had downplayed the significance of the civil war to which Tacitus devoted the bulk of The Histories, Gibbon's own initial chronological narrative in The Decline and Fall has striking similarities with that of Tacitus in The Histories. The death of the insane tyrant was followed by the senatorial confirmation of an elderly Roman of exemplary character, not Galba but Pertinax. Soon he alienated the members of the Praetorian Guard, and was assassinated by them. They named an emperor in his stead, and forced the senate to ratify their choice, not Otho but Didius Julianus. Provincial legions then rose in revolt, and saluted their own commanders as emperor, not two legions but three. The closest of these, led not by Vitellius but by Septimus Severus, marched on Italy, and soon all hailed yet another emperor. At this point the plots diverge slightly. Septimus Severus, unlike Vitellius, was able to defeat both his rivals, and the year of civil war ended with him as securely in power as Vespasian had been at the end of 69.

Septimus Severus, however, was no Vespasian. Vespasian, once secure, chose to act like Augustus. He was careful to make the secret that the empire was a military dictatorship a secret once more. Severus had no taste for such deceit, at least once he was preeminent. If the Roman empire was in fact a military dictatorship, then he as emperor would act like a military dictator. The functionless trappings of past ages would be ignored.

Till the reign of Severus, the virtue and even the good sense of the emperors had been distinguished by their zeal or affected reverence for the senate, and by a tender regard to the nice frame of civil policy instituted by Augustus. But the youth of Severus had been trained in the implicit obedience of camps, and his riper years spent in the despotism of military command. His haughty and inflexible spirit could not discover, or would not acknowledge, the advantage of preserving an intermediate power, however imaginary, between the emperor and the army. He disdained to profess himself the servant of an assembly that detested his person and trembled at his frown; he issued his commands, where his request would have proved as effectual; assumed the conduct and style of a sovereign and a conquerer, and exercised, without disguise, the whole legislative as well as the executive power.

(p. 109)

Whatever moderating influence the history of Rome and its Republic had had on the government of Rome was now gone. No longer in Rome would freedom be publically praised. Now ambitious lawyers and historians would only profess that the emperor was above all civil law, the empire his personal patrimony, his subjects his slaves.

The contemporaries of Severus, in the enjoyment of the peace and glory of his reign, forgave the cruelties by which it had been introduced. Posterity, who experienced the fatal effects of his maxims and examples, justly considered him as the principal author of the decline of the Roman empire.

(p. 110)

When Severus first assumed the purple, Gibbon reminded his readers that “mortal poison still lurked in the vitals of the constitution” (p. 107). By the end of his reign, they knew that Severus had released it to do its full work. But if Gibbon, like Tacitus, detested the hypocrisy of the Principate, why should the honest (and competent) Septimus Severus be so condemned? How could Gibbon justify this harsh judgment?

V

In making Septimus Severus, not Augustus, the “principal author” of Rome's decline, Gibbon was making perhaps his most important adaptation of Tacitus for his eighteenth-century readers. The exact significance of this adaptation would not be clear, however, until his treatment of the Emperor Constantine. In the nine intervening chapters, by which Gibbon moves from the death of Septimus Severus in 208 to the rise of Constantine almost a century later, nothing occurred that would have been surprising to anyone who has read his account of the first two centuries of the Principate, from Augustus to Severus—or who had read Tacitus. Civil wars, assassinations, an occasional virtuous emperor, more often a vicious one, rare attempts by the senate to reassert its traditional prerogatives soon put down by Praetorian or Imperial power, barbarian threats from the North and Persian threats from the East each becoming more frequent and more dangerous—the poison was slowly doing its work.

When Constantine assumed the purple, he could number among his predecessors the Emperor Maximin, an illiterate barbarian, and the Emperor Diocletian, the son of a slave. He could also number some whose ends were as ignoble as were the origins of Maximin and Diocletian. Now assassination by the Praetorian Guards was not the worst to be feared. One could think of Emperor Decius lost with his son and much of his army in a German bog; or, worse still, the Emperor Valerian captured alive by the Persian Sapir, to be used until his death as the monarch's mounting block and then to be stuffed as a trophy. The poison was slowly doing its work, but in this narrative a theme was coming to the fore which, if not entirely new, at least placed the narrative in a broader perspective than that envisaged by Tacitus, a perspective which allowed it to speak more directly to the eighteenth century.

Gibbon often played on the ironic juxtapositions of the Roman past with the European present. When Gibbon described the Roman decision that Scotland was not worth the effort to conquer—“The Masters of the fairest and most wealthy climates of the globe turned with contempt from gloomy hills assailed by the winter tempest, from the lakes concealed in a blue mist, and from the cold and lonely heaths, over which the deer of the forest were chased by a troop of naked barbarians” (pp. 4-5)—his eighteenth-century readers could not but be amused because Edinburgh had now become one of the leading centers of European civilization. And when he described how Agricola blithely suggested that just a single legion would be sufficient to bring the savages of Ireland to heel, what British reader would not think of the British generals who had to their grief underestimated Irish stubbornness? Sometimes, as in these two cases, Gibbon simply left the juxtaposition implicit. But sometimes he also made them explicit, as for instance when he observed that “Spain, by a very singular fatality, was the Peru and Mexico of the old world” (p. 139).

The analogies were inescapable, and so were the lessons. Perhaps Spain could learn how best to exploit a province rich with minerals by seeing how long ago, when Spain itself was rich in mineral resources, Spain was exploited by the Romans. Perhaps the descendants of naked barbarians could learn from an Agricola how to deal with the barbarians who defy them.

The imperatives were there for any imperial people who did not wish their empire to pass away as the Roman empire had. It was good for the empire that the Roman government had a single language, allowed the ablest provincials to become citizens, and practiced religious toleration. It was bad for the empire that the executive gained power at the expense of the legislature, that the traditional constitutional formalities were not preserved, that the military had become a predominantly mercenary force. As one after another of the judgments were issued, all of them, useful as they might be individually, constellated about a single imperative: Hierarchies must be preserved.

This imperative was implicit in Gibbon's summarizing judgment of the imperial policy of Constantine and his immediate predecessors, a policy itself based on the recognition of the weakness and vulnerability of the emperor. “The same timid policy, of dividing whatever is united, of reducing whatever is eminent, of dreading every active power, and of expecting that the most feeble will prove the most obedient, seems to pervade the institutions of several princes, and particularly those of Constantine” (p. 540).

At first glance part of this description—“dividing whatever is united, reducing whatever is eminent”—seems itself almost self-contradictory. Of course, the Roman empire was a great example, for Gibbon and his readers the greatest example presented by human history, of the unification of what was previously divided—the unification of the whole Mediterranean world under a single government, a single language, a virtually single polytheistic religion. This great work of unification was itself gradually undone, and none among the contributing causes of this decline is displayed more prominently in the early chapters of The Decline and Fall than the emperor's usurpation of the traditional powers of the senate, an obvious instance of the reduction of what was most eminent. But it also was an equally obvious instance of unification. As Gibbon himself said, Augustus collected “artfully in his own person the scattered rays of civil jurisdiction” (pp. 57-8). He unified the Roman government just as Rome had unified the Mediterranean world. Tacitus the Roman senator could perhaps praise one act and condemn the other, particularly if he was speaking to his fellow Romans, but how could Gibbon centuries later?

The inconsistency apparent in Gibbon's judgment of Constantine is to be found throughout the preceding chapters. Almost all his general judgments seem to be tinctured with it. For instance, Gibbon greatly praised the spread of the Latin language as a source of cohesion within the empire; the empire should not do its business in a multitude of languages. Thanks to this enlightened policy, the “love of letters, almost inseparable from peace and refinement,” spread throughout the empire (p. 51). However, what Gibbon gave on one page, he took away on the very next.

But the provincials of Rome trained by a uniform artificial foreign education, were engaged in a very unequal competition with those ancients, who, by expressing their genuine feelings in their native tongue, had already occupied every place of honour. The name of Poet was almost forgotten; that of Orator was usurped by the sophists. A cloud of critics, of compilers, of commentators, darkened the face of learning, and the decline of genius was soon followed by the corruption of taste.

(p. 52)

Less than a page after praising the spreading love of letters, Gibbon had begun to decry a “daily shrinking … race of pygmies” who would soon be unequal to “the fierce giants of the north” (p. 52). How could he have it both ways?

In the very same chapter that he both praised and condemned the spread of letters, Gibbon also praised, as representative of the “aspiring genius of Rome,” the enlightened policy of making Roman citizenship available to selected provincials (p. 29). Yet chapters later when the successor of Septimus Severus, Caracalla, extended citizenship to virtually all provincials he stood condemned by Gibbon for having trampled down the “last enclosure of the Roman constitution” (p. 145).

Gibbon's choice of the word “enclosure” was an interesting one, given the connotations it would have for an eighteenth-century Englishman. Enclosure was the British legal method whereby lands commonly held by a community since the Middle Ages were divided up into private property. The individual holdings then tended to be gradually absorbed by the landed estates. By enclosure, the distinction between landowners and the landless was more firmly established, and the distance between the lower and upper classes increased. The passage in which the above phrase occurred shows that these connotations were not far from what Gibbon meant.

As long as Rome and Italy were respected as the centre of government, a national spirit was preserved by the ancient, and insensibly imbibed by the adopted, citizens. The principal commands of the army were filled by men who had received a liberal education, were well-instructed in the advantages of laws and letters, and who had risen, by equal steps, through the regular succession of civil and military honours. To their influence and example we may partly ascribe the modest obedience of the legions during the two first centuries of the imperial history.

But when the last enclosure of the Roman constitution was trampled down by Caracalla, the separation of professions gradually succeeded to the distinction of ranks. The more polished citizens of the internal provinces were alone qualified to act as lawyers and magistrates. The rougher trade of arms was abandoned to the peasants and barbarians of the frontiers, who knew no country but their camp, no science but that of war, no civil laws, and scarcely those of military discipline. With bloody hands, savage manners, and desperate resolution, they sometimes guarded but much oftener subverted, the throne of the emperors.

(p. 145)

Gibbon had criticized the replacement of citizen commanders with professional soldiers as early as his first description of the Roman military in the very first chapter. But now he has connected it with his condemnation of the too liberal extension of citizenship. And he has connected it through a more general complaint: the distinction of ranks had been replaced by the separation of professions.

Before there had been a hierarchy of ranks, in the army as well as in law; now there was simply a separation of professions. What had been removed was something essential in Gibbon's view for any enduring unity, the hierarchy. Gibbon continually used organic metaphors when referring to the empire. And this was not by accident. An organism is more than an aggregate of equal parts. An organism possesses a unity precisely because some of its parts are more important than others, the heart than a leg, a leg than a hair. Anything within the organism which threatens to destroy this natural hierarchy, to reduce its parts to equality, is a threat to the very life of the organism, and could aptly be called a poison in its vitals. So in a political organism, like the Roman empire, to reduce what is eminent is, in effect, to divide what is united.

Any reduction of the eminent within the empire, to say the least, weakened the unity of the empire. So, when the senators had no more real power than any other group of Roman citizens, then the unity of the empire was weakened. Or, perhaps to put the matter more precisely, once the senators were perceived by those beneath them as having no more power than themselves, then the unity was weakened.

This is an important difference between Tacitus and Gibbon. Tacitus believed the empire to be held together by Roman strength and Roman honor, by men like Agricola who would act in the interest of empire no matter what that entailed. Once the empire was based upon a “secret,” a lie, then it was doomed, for sooner or later the secret would become known.

Gibbon did not seem so sure. The burning of the temple of Jupiter would have been important to him not because that temple was the symbol of Rome's imperial destiny, but because it was thought to be. Tacitus might have condemned Augustus for changing the reality of Roman government, but Gibbon chose to call Septimus Severus, the first emperor who refused to continue the pretences of the republic, the “principal author of the decline of the Roman empire.” Augustus might have changed the reality, but Severus had changed the more important appearance. For Gibbon, societies, unlike living organisms, were artificial unities preserved by the appearance, the illusion of hierarchy.

Therefore, Gibbon was outraged at the decision of Emperor Diocletian to move the center of imperial government from Rome to Milan, and then more outraged still at Constantine's decision to move the capital officially to a new city, Constantinople, beyond the confines of Italy itself. Some places had to be kept more important than others, and their designation must appear to depend on more than the caprice of a single man or a group of men. “As long as Rome and Italy were respected as the centre of government, a national spirit was preserved by the ancient, and insensibly imbibed by, the adopted citizens” (p. 145). The key word in this sentence is “insensibly.”

And the people of the center, the vitals, had to be more privileged than those of the extremities. (Taxation without representation for the British colonies in North America?) Of course, a few distinguished provincials could be given the honor of citizenship, which was the birthright of the Italians. This was a shrewd policy which encouraged the belief that loyalty to the center was appreciated. However, the distinction between citizens and non-citizens had to be kept, in the tax laws and elsewhere. The ranks had to be maintained. So Gibbon would regard the ignoble origins of some emperors as much an indication of Rome's decline as the ignoble ends of some others.

As for the spread of the Latin language, it was well that the provincials took it up, not simply because they acquired a taste for letters. It was good also because in acquiring a taste for Latin they were acquiring a taste for something in which they as a group could not be expected to compete as equals with those for whom Latin was their first tongue. The illusion of the ruling ranks would be preserved, assuming that these ranks did not delegate more and more the preservation of the Latin literary tradition to these provincials. However, this was just what they did, just as they turned over the military to professionals.

The illusion of superiority could be strengthened through religion. Local deities would be tolerated. Jupiter, however, would remain unchallenged as the greatest and best; and Jupiter's Olympian senate of Juno, Mars, Venus, and the like would remain above all but him. And when Eastern rulers began to claim for themselves divine status, the Roman emperors—reluctantly, Gibbon assured his readers—had themselves placed one step higher in the divine civil service. In the ascending hierarchical chain of being, divinised men occupied the missing link between the human and the divine.

Sophisticated Roman philosophers might scoff at religion, but according to Gibbon, Roman leaders knew better; they knew that the religious beliefs of the masses were useful as instruments of what Gibbon called “policy.” The gods and new provinces would start well down in the hierarchy, as would their people. As the gods had found a place in the empire, so could the people. These people could see before themselves what Gibbon termed “a regular succession of civil and military honors” (p. 145).

By the time Constantine had assumed the purple, this hierarchy, this regular succession of honors, had been all but destroyed. Being a Roman citizen no longer meant anything, and being a senator meant little more. When the ranks that lay between a barbarian and the emperor had been destroyed, then a barbarian could, and did, become emperor. Then surely Rome was dying.

VI

With the accession of Constantine, Gibbon could hope that his readers saw the Roman empire with Roman eyes, eyes that would be gladdened to see barbarians killing one another, whether these barbarians be ancient Germans or eighteenth-century Iroquois. No longer should his readers, now that they understood the necessities of civilization, be squeamish about the imposition of order, nor sympathetic when colonials complained about taxation without representation. Gibbon had given them a Roman education; their loyalties should no longer be divided. But there was to be one final test for them, a test so difficult Gibbon had postponed it as long as possible.

He had waited until that shrewd and cynical embodiment of Rome's twilight, Constantine, had become emperor, until the moment in his career as emperor when Constantine was about to issue the Edict of Nantes; he had waited to the last possible moment, when the mention of Christianity was no longer avoidable, to go back to the time of Augustus to trace the progress of this new religion. His readers hopefully had already made their commitment to Rome, to imperial destiny, to hierarchies both real and artificial. Now Gibbon was going to inform them, albeit indirectly and ironically, that this commitment was not compatible with sincere Christian belief. Christian or Roman, one had to choose. For Gibbon the choice was not difficult.

In the midst of Rome's morbid decay, Christianity grew up as a parasite which embraced the decay and grew fat on it. Christians, after all, professed to believe that the meek will inherit the earth. They deified not a great general who had been given his triumph through Rome, but the son of a carpenter who had been unceremoniously executed in an obscure province. They deified a man who preached the inversion of hierarchies, the last shall be first, the first last. A man who taught his followers to value most the lowest of mankind, and least those who would make themselves high. This was a preaching that threatened all society, and in the eighteenth century it, more than the barbarians, still presented a danger to European civilization.

Notes

1. Edward Gibbon, Autobiography, ed. Dero Saunders (New York: Meridian, 1961), Chs. 5-6. See also Gibbon, Journal, ed. D. Low (London: Chatto & Windus, 1929).

2. The standard narrative of this war is Lawrence Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1956), VI-IX. I have tried to provide a rather different perspective on the American theater in my New France: An Historical Tragedy (in press). Also see Frederic J. Ericson, “British Motives for Expansion in 1763,” Michigan Academy … Papers, 27 (1941), pp. 581-94; Richard Koebner, Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), pp. 77-85.

3. The best previous treatment of Gibbon's use of Tacitus is David P. Jordan, Gibbon and His Roman Empire, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), pp. 172-83.

4. On the reception of Tacitus in early modern Europe, see P. Burke “Tacitism,” Tacitus, ed. T. A. Dorey (London: Routledge, 1969), pp. 35-61; Kenneth Schellhase, Tacitus in Renaissance Political Thought (Chicago: The University Press, 1976). The translations I have used are On Britain and Germany, trans. H. Mattingly (n.p.: Penguin, 1946); The Histories, trans. K. Wellesley (n.p.: Penguin, 1964). Particularly helpful among the many studies of The Histories were Ronald Syme, “How Tacitus Came to History,” Greece and Rome, 26 (1957), 160-67; Syme, Tacitus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), Part 3; R. Häussler, Tacitus und das Historische Bewusstein, pp. 233-66; E. Burck, “Das Bild der Revolution bei rümischen Historikern,” Gymnasium, v. 73 (1966), 101-06; Alain Michel, Tacite et le Destin de l'Empire (Paris, Artuad, 1966), Ch. 11; R. H. Martin, “The Speech of Curtius Montanus,” Journal of Roman Studies 57 (1967), 109-114. On the Agricola helpful were: Kurt von Fritz, “Tacitus, Agricola, Domitian, and the Problem of the Principate,” Classical Philology 52 (1957), 73-97; W. Liebescheutz, “The Theme of Liberty in the Agricola of Tacitus,” Classical Quarterly 60 (1966), 126-39; R. D. Ogilvie and Ian Richmond, “Introduction,” De Vita Agricolae (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967); Ronald Syme, Ten Studies in Tacitus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), Ch. 10. The best survey intended for the general reader is Herbert Benario, An Introduction to Tacitus (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1975).

5. The standard edition (among many) is probably Edward Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. J. B. Bury (London: Methuen, 1909-14). All my references will be to the first volume of the more readily available Modern Library edition (New York: Random House, n.d.). These references will be in the text. Studies I have found particularly useful in reading the early chapters of the work are: Thomas Africa, “Gibbon and the Golden Age,” Centennial Review 7 (1963), 273-81; C. N. Cochrane, “The Mind of Edward Gibbon,” Univ. of Toronto Quart. 12 (1942), 146-66; Lewis Curtis, “Gibbon's Paradise Lost,” The Age of Johnson, ed. F. W. Hilles (New Haven: Yale, 1949); Gerald Gruman, “‘Balance’ and ‘Excess’ as Gibbon's Explanation of the Decline and Fall,” History and Theory 1 (1960), 75-85; David P. Jordan, Gibbon and His Roman Empire (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971); J. W. Oliver, “William Robertson and Edward Gibbon,” Scottish Historical Review, v. 36 (1947), 86; Michel Bairdon, Edward Gibbon et le Mythe de Rome (Paris: Champion, 1977).

6. Tacitus, Britain, p. 128.

7. Tacitus, Histories, p. 122.

8. Tacitus, Britain, p. 51.

9. The most accessible recent translation is in Tacitus, Agricola, Germany, Dialogue on Orators, trans. Herbert Bonario (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1967). On the Dialogue I found useful Reinhard Häussler, Tacitus und das Historische Bewusstein (Heidelberg: Winter, 1965), pp. 221-33; George Kennedy, The Art of Rhetoric in the Roman World (Princeton: The University Press, 1972), pp. 515-23.

10. Tacitus, Britain, p. 51.

11. Tacitus, Histories, pp. 190, 23.

12. Tacitus, Histories, p. 23.

13. Tacitus, Histories, p. 22.

14. Tacitus, Histories, pp. 31-2.

15. Tacitus, Histories, p. 234.

16. Tacitus, Britain, ch. 45.

17. Tacitus, Histories ends in the middle of a speech by the rebel Civilis (Bk. 5, Ch. 26).

18. A final word ought to be said about the remarkable rhetoric of Tacitus himself. He was writing under the very dictatorship which he was so conclusively condemning. Yet he still managed to have a successful career in the Imperial administration, and eventually became Proconsul for Asia, a most important post indeed. He managed this by skillfully camouflaging his own true intentions about his works. He repeatedly assured his readers that his critique applied only to bad emperors, not to the Principate itself. At the end of his Agricola, which was published under Trajan, he recalled how happy Agricola would have been “had he been permitted to see the dawn of this blessed age and the principate of Trajan, a prospect of which he often spoke to us in wistful prophecy!” He has the interlocutors in his Dialogue seem to conclude that the decline of oratory is a good thing now that decisions in Rome are made “by one man of pre-eminent wisdom.” In the very first chapter of The Histories, he assures his readers that the bad emperors about which he was going to write did not imply a condemnation of the Principate: “The interests of peace demanded the concentration of power in the hands of one man.” He has nothing but praise for the present emperors: “Modern times are indeed happy as few others have been, for we can think as we please, and speak as we please.” He was reserving for his old age the task of celebrating “the reigns of the divine Nerva and the imperial Trajan.” Needless to say, when Tacitus came to write his last book, The Annals, he did nothing of the kind, but rather focussed on the successors of Augustus, a series of emperors destructive of merit. A surface optimism and a deep logic of despair—this is how Tacitus adapted his message to his own time, in which critics could not speak as they pleased unless they had the guile of a Tacitus, a true prince of darkness.