The Roman Empire has long held a special spot in the minds of historians, with many having been fascinated with its two-millennia-long story and legacy. Thus, Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, hereafter referred to as The History, may seem like just another text in a sea of Roman historiography. However, The History is more than a record of Roman legacy, showing a sharp look into the Victorian historical paradigm and its perspective towards Rome, as well as an interesting view of the past.

Originally written and published in the 18th century, The History may pre-emptively persuade the reader to look for pro-religious sentiment, Gibbon does not hold his tongue on the effects that the various Abrahamic religions had on the Roman Empire. While Islam and Judaism is deemed to be fanatic and hypocritical, Christianity is singled out to be one of the major factors in accelerating the speed of Rome’s downfall. Gibbon did admit that Christianity cushioned the actual collapse, but he also claimed that the modest ideals of Christianity snuffed out the militaristic and active social traditions that Rome was built upon.

Besides his takes on religion, another point of note that many bring up on The History is its rather offensive treatment of Byzantium, the Eastern half of the Roman Empire that survived after the Empire’s loss of its Western territories. Gibbon’s disdain towards the Eastern Romans was a product of his era, where the complex and overly bureaucratic nature of Byzantium was widely considered to be evidence that the East was inferior to the West.

However, Gibbon was far from a fallacious historian. According to George Ostrogorsky, a renowned Byzantinist, Gibbon was a "very great one [historian]", while on Gibbon's work he cited them to "in spite of factual inadequacy, rank high for their presentation of their material." In fact, the presentation of Gibbon’s text has been quite impactful. This can even be seen today in the usage of the word “Byzantine”, which has come to mean that something is overly bureaucratic and cumbersome, attributed to Gibbon first using the word that way.

Furthermore, Gibbon did give due credit, taking a slight detour from his previously dissenting tone towards the Greeks when he describes the fall of Constantinople. Quoting Gibbon, Constantinople was “irretrievably subdued by the arms of Mahomet the second. Her empire only had been subverted by the Latins: her religion was trampled in the dust by the Moslem conquerors.” – a rather poetic way to put it for such an ardent critic of Byzantium.

To conclude, Gibbon’s take on Roman history is both unorthodox and telling of the time period’s paradigm in a sense that it represents the general outlook on history that his era had, while also showing an active effort to subvert the norm on sanctifying religion. As a masterpiece that took its author a lifetime, The History is surely worth the read.

Book Information

Title: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: Abridged Edition

Author: Edward Gibbon

Publication Year: 1776

Publisher: Penguin Classics

Pages: 795