'Gibbon: Making History' by Roy Porter

This month marks the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the first volume of Edward Gibbon's epic, landmark work of history, 'The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'. At the same time that I have been reading this, I have also been reading some books and articles about Gibbon himself. This book, by the extraordinarily prolific social and medical historian Roy Porter (1946 - 2002), is not exactly a biography, but it is also much more than a dry academic analysis of Gibbon's work. It falls between these too stools, being mostly a celebration of the man and an exploration of what he was looking to achieve.

Edward Gibbon was an eccentric in some ways, being tiny (under five feet tall) and very fat. Born into a reasonably well-off family, he had no intention of spending his days living on and running a country estate, so instead, after several false starts, devoted himself to researching and writing history. He was surprised by the commercial success of 'The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' and the fame it brought him. He would surely have been astonished to know that it would still be in print two and a half centuries on and that it would be seen as constituting an influential milestone in the development of historical study and writing.

Gibbon was thrown out of Oxford as a young man when he converted to Catholicism, and headed off to Lausanne in Switzerland where he lived for five years, fell in love with an apparently unsuitable woman and reconverted back to Protestantism. Spells in the army and as an MP followed, but he soon settled on a life of writing history.

The key point that Roy Porter makes in this book is that Gibbon was the first to 'do' history, at least in England, in a seriously professional way. He looked at every possible source he could lay his hands on and wrote as accurate and authoritative a history as he was able to, including vast numbers of footnotes setting out where he got his information from. He sought impartiality, explaining different perspectives, while also interpreting the story he was telling. He was happy to court controversy, particularly by arguing that the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire was a major antecedent of its ultimate collapse.

I think I would have agreed with Gibbon on many things. He was a political moderate who feared the rise of tyrannies, imperial overreach and overbearing religious influence. An enlightenment man who brought all the values of his age to his writing. Roy Porter sums up his approach as follows:

Gibbon advanced a coherent thesis to explain what had made Rome mistress of the Mediterranean littoral by the first century after Christ, what had given Rome that mission of ruling, that temper of government compounded of justice, clemency, toleration, civic virtue, patriotism and cosmopolitanism which he so warmly admired.