The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Vol. 3

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Volume III

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Yet the reader does sometimes long for some variety, some bit of headstrong passion or unrestrained pathos on the part of the author. Both of the above qualities—his reuse of certain phrases, and the uniformity of his style—combined to give an artificial homogeneity to the material under discussion.

Whether discussing the Turks or the Tuscans, the same phrases are heard, the same cadences sounded. His heroes are all cultured gentlemen and amateur philosophers; his villains are philistines and savages. Gibbon will connect the decline of an empire with the decline in literary taste, and the ruin of a polity with the ruin of a monument. His historical explanations all involve loosening standards of personal honor—something most modern readers are wont to regard as an effect, rather than a cause, of decline.

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Volume III: Edward Gibbon: www.farmersmarketmusic.com: Books

Yet I will speak no more of this. It feels dishonest of me to nitpick an author who has so deeply influenced me, and has filled so many of my leisure hours with pleasure and companionship. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is as great a monument of the human spirit as is the Coliseum. And like that ancient amphitheater, this work exquisitely blends the most noble and most base aspects of our species: View all 3 comments. Aug 22, David rated it it was amazing. Ok I'm onto volume III and starting to shake because it's coming to the end. By now I am a complete addict, just a few thousand pages in.

What can I do when I get to the last page?

Is there a centre that treats people for Edward Gibbon withdrawal? It is a great shame that the Roman empire collapsed so quickly after a mere years of analysis because Gibbon could have just kept going. If you find yourself in prison, on a slow train or on a desert island take all three with you.

The only downside is that I have started to speak in arcane English which is insensible in the present world. I have mostly laughed because Gibbon is a superb ironist but I have also learned that the more the world changes in terms of our material culture the more we humans living in it stay the same. I also learned that I am a Barbarian. The majority of the 22 chapters deal with the rise of Islam and the resultant political and martial effects that would ultimately determine the fate of the Byzantine Empire. Although beginning with the Iconoclastic controversy that began the schism of the Christian church as the bishop of Rome rose to power in the West, Gibbon used those developments to launch into how Islam rose in Arabia then spread across not only areas once under Roman control but also their long-time Persian rivals in the aftermath of the reconquests of Heraclius.

While detailing the internal struggle within the Caliphate period, Gibbon reveals how Emperors attempted to combat this new faith and military force to increasing little effect has time went on. Also playing into fate of Byzantine was the barbarian Christian West that the Emperors called for aid not only from kings but the Pope as well. Unfortunately the resulting Crusades and mercenary arms that went East would inflict a mortal wound to the Empire in thus beginning a centuries long death spiral that only lasted as long as it did because of internal revolutions with the growing Ottoman Empire until This dreary recounting of the end of Byzantium is mirrored by Gibbon in his recounting of the history of the city of Rome itself throughout the Middle Ages until the fall of the New Rome in the East.

Yet in retelling the eventual fall of Constantinople, Gibbon paints a huge picture for the reader about how events both near and far away from the Bosporus affected the fortunes for both good and ill of the New Rome. And in recounting the history of the city of Rome throughout the Middle Ages, a reader sheds a tear with Gibbon about the loss of the monuments of both Republic and Empire due to the necessity or vanity of the people of Rome after for the fall of the Western Empire.

I grow more fascinated, as I continue this long and detailed history, with just how much material Gibbon imbibed in order to organize and write this work. Some highlights from this portion of the journey: What followed were numerous invasions of barbarians, and the sacking of Rome by the Goths.

See you at the end of Volume 4! In my Victorian edition, this third volume stretches from the fall of Rome itself to the conquests of the Islamic empire under the first caliphs and the early Umayyads. I don't know if it's just me getting used to his style, or maybe reflects a difference in his sources, but it seems to me that in this volume Gibbon is looser, more vivid, more willing to tell stories; there is plenty of excitement and fun here.

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 3 (Unabridged)

Thanks to Procopius, who wrote both sober, eyewitness-based history and outrageous, tabloid-style scandal reporting, Gibbon has plenty of material. He professes to be skeptical of the Secret History , saying "a lover of truth will peruse with a suspicious eye the instructive anecdotes of Procopius Ambiguous actions are imputed to the worst motives, error is confounded with guilt, accident with design, and laws with abuses; the partial injustice of a moment is dextrously applied as the general maxim of a reign of thirty-two years," all of which sounds exactly like blogs and online comment threads today.

But in fact Gibbon allows himself to be swayed by Procopius's malice, and he never misses a chance to mock and belittle the emperor who takes up so much of his book. It's funny to read, for example, the account of the conquest of Italy, which Gibbon consistently credits only to the generals not the "timid" emperor who never took the field while his own narrative suggests that the skillful diplomacy and artifice of Justinian and Theodora were just as important.

Gibbon does not even really pretend to scruples about Theodora, a figure so fascinating to us today, or her frenemy Antonina, the wife of Belisarius. Overall the Justinian chapters are magnificently fascinating, though I admit I struggled through the long chapter on his legal code and the history of Roman law in general.

It did have, in my edition, the closest equivalent yet to the wonderful squabbling footnotes of chapters 15 and 16; Reverend Milman brought a legal scholar in to correct Gibbon, adding even more length and boredom. During the war between Khosrau and Heraclius who lost Syria, Palestine, and Egypt to the Persians, won them back in an insanely bold campaign, and then lost them again forever to the Muslims , Gibbon even puts in some wonderful foreshadowing: Khosrau recieves a letter from some guy down south called Mohammed, urging him to recognize the one true God, which he impatiently tears up and tosses away as an irrelevant distraction from the war.

That guy down south turns out to be one of Gibbon's favorites; like Julian the Apostate, he lingers on his virtues, and throws in some faults mostly to avoid the appearance of bias. By contrast, he is completely uninterested in and dismissive of Charlemagne. Gibbon is very sympathetic to Islam, even more than to iconoclasm, both of which better fit his Enlightenment Deism than the orthodox Catholics do. Early Muslim heroes in general get plenty of admiration from Gibbon: I'm sure more accurate Western accounts of the early Caliphs have been written since Gibbon, but I doubt whether any of them are more evenhanded, which to me is remarkable.

I'm three-quarters of the way through now, and my enthusiasm is undiminished. Can't wait to read the last volume! I will add more to the list of my favorite Gibbonian construction. Here are a few highlights of it from this volume: I never get tired of these. What will I do when the book is over, and there are no more to look forward to? Jul 28, Jemma rated it really liked it.

Quite the masterpiece but very, very long and the language is both archaic and complicated, so a fair effort is required. This is, however, repaid as this complete Historian covers all the angles. So, his account of the end of the Roman Empire includes the fate of the Eastern Empire based at Constantinople and this, in turn, includes the rise of Islam, the Crusades, the Mongols and the viccissitudes within the Islamic states.

A pleasant surprise is his modern mind. Gibbon's critiques of religion Quite the masterpiece but very, very long and the language is both archaic and complicated, so a fair effort is required. Gibbon's critiques of religion are Enlightenment gold and still not perceived by many today. Indeed, in the appendicies we find his response to critics who have called him on his religious comments and like so many religious critics of our own day, their criticism are ill considered and often simply not relating to what the text says.

While his language is a treasure trove of disused spelling and grammar such as sea-shore, fewell and use of an before any "h" even remotely considered silent. The 4 reasons for the decline and fall are also very telling. Barbarian invasion we all know about, internicine rivalries also. More surprising is the importance he uneraths of recycling the physcial material of the great buildings of Rome, which literally and figuratively diminishes it.

Perhaps above all though, the lesson for our times is that environmental factors were the fourth cause. Nov 02, Gonzo rated it liked it. Then again, the Age of Reason ushered in the philosophy of the ruling class. Christianity had already destroyed the notion that strength alone should determine who should rule.

It was not until our current age when rule based on brute strength, in the form of ethnic superiority, returned to legitimacy. Gibbon finished his masterpiece in the sweet age when materialism ruled, yet before , when materialist ideology had to fail in practice. His chapters on Christianity once again display almost no ability for theological thought.

But materialists are the only people who think their ignorance makes them wiser. Gibbon elides theology, and is left with only his scabrous wit in discussing the iconoclasm and the eastern schism. This is inadequate for anyone interested in the subjects. The doctrine of the 73 celestial virgins is met with an understanding smirk. Given the fact that Christian kings were yet protecting the welfare of the Voltaires and Gibbons of the world, it was not likely fear of jihadists. Islam offers a weaker theology and a stronger legal system.

The theology of Islam is secondary to the demands of temporal rule and conquest. No social scientist could envision a better creator of social capital than a submission. Christianity is a religion of middle ground and contradiction. It is not a pacifist religion—however much scoffers like Gibbon might like to dishonestly suggest—yet it is also not a bellicose religion, since converts must be won by the cross, not the sword.

Christianity proposes grand principles, but no formal code for civil life. In these senses—by its own looseness, Christianity can claim to be truly catholic. Islam is mind-numbingly simple by comparison. There is even a Christian way to drink alcohol see Ecclesiasticus 31, rightly stripped from the Bible by Puritans. Insofar that Gibbon will approve of Christianity, it is in the Islamified, dumbed-down and yet more strident form of Zwingli and Luther.

Why does Gibbon speak more kindly of rigid protestantism than liberal Catholicism? Because it is easier to ignore. Similarly, Islam is simple.

No alcohol, four wives, conversion or death. But the philosophy itself is merely a system of government, and can be relegated to the outskirts, so long as its adherents can be relegated to the outskirts as well. These are theological subtleties which do not interest Gibbon. Modern readers cannot be indifferent to the continued takeover of Europe and America by Islamic forces—not sensible ones, at least.

All this might simply be a matter of philosophical differences. These ancestors had been dead for fifteen centuries. The brief revolts of Rienzi created no true spirit of liberty which might be eulogized by Gibbon. Marius and Caesar killed the spirit of liberty in the Romans, not the popes. Or in the final chapter, Gibbon decries the fortifications of St.

Gibbon lauds Plato without seeming to ever had read him. His complete elision of Albert Magnus and Thomas Aquinas is just as embarrassing—he mentions Peter Abelard only to note that his ideas may have been heretical to the Church, all without mentioning the ideas or the heresy! When the libraries of Constantinople are burned, he expresses some pleasure in the destruction of reams of theology Let us keep an imperfect score of where this disdain has taken him.

Perhaps the popes of the Middle Ages appear faint compared to the Antonines, but certainly after hundreds of pages of squalor Gibbon knows the mean average Emperor was much more corrupt than these popes! Gibbon does not quite adhere to the conceit that allows this third volume to exist. The Holy Roman Empire lasted until , when Napoleon destroyed it. By then, it was both more amazing and more pathetic than the foundering Byzantine Empire, a product of its own deceits more than any actual connection with the Tarquins and Caesars.

The schism between the Western and Eastern churches gets perfunctory treatment. While filioque may seem a small matter to the oblivious Gibbon, it once again replays the scenes of Arianism in which the divinity of Christ is disparaged. To any believer, this is no little issue; an entire cosmology may depend on this little word. Gibbon cannot understand this; like all materialists, he cannot begin to comprehend what he cannot understand.

After two-plus centuries, does Gibbon have anything to teach us? The steam engine made a new European empire necessary simply so it could be put to use. Guttenberg made it feasible that the literary greatness of Cicero and Pliny—if not Plato and Demosthenes—might against flourish across this empire. Yet now technology more than leaders or events has enslaved us. The modern Western empire has no outside adversaries, not really.

The Persians and Germanics which posed a perpetual threat to Rome could be disposed of at the push of a button. Since , the moral has been eaten away by Protestant heresy. The span between and was the war of materialism. Thoreau's mourning the fact that average workers could not make deities of themselves is only an Americanized i.

Zarathustra and Luther differed only in that Luther was too cowardly to follow through with his thoughts. The change was that the spiritual world was now transformed into mad rush for material prospects. The emblem of this is the British Empire, which was always Locke and Bacon and almost nothing of Chaucer and Shakespeare.

The British Empire was a materialist empire. The coin flipped again. Materialism no longer had an intellectual role in Western history. The wants of the affluent nations were met, were so greatly exceeded that no economy could function without the principle of conspicuous waste. Warfare was obsolete in an age where no nuclear power could reasonably attack another, and any barbarian nemesis continued to exist only by the benevolence or apathy of the First World.

The American Empire is recognized only tacitly by the ruling class. Its boundaries are spiritual and intellectual, not physical. It is spread by technology and ambivalence. We lack any true intellectual justification for rule. More than anything, this is what is necessary for a happy society. Raw power justifies all acts. Our rights have been completely divorced from right, and therefore are only a matter of being grandfathered into them.

The material necessities of life decayed, but the light of man and the light of God shone still. The light of reason has been snuffed out of public light, and we now only have disputes over raw power—over race and sex. Reading Gibbon is to read one of the greatest works of a revolution that failed. The story of collapse of the empire Gibbon envisioned will not be written for another millennia, if anyone still exists to write it. Jun 16, Nicholas Whyte rated it it was amazing. Rome, Chapter LXX: May 11, Jeff rated it it was amazing. Magnificent, majestic, and monumental.

I find it interesting, that to Gibbon at least, the very last remnant of the actual Roman Empire is really only the single city of Constantinople by One thing is certain: Gibbon summarizes the fall in its most basic terms with the following: The various causes and progressive effects are connected with many of the events most interesting in human annals: Mar 17, Andrew Hill rated it it was amazing.

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Vol. III

If you were taught by your school histories that Rome fell, a dark age descended on Europe, and then the Renaissance happened, you may appreciate this book. It's an awesome tour of an era full of drama, and populated by some of history's greatest figures. A lot of life happened in those "dark ages". Despite its title, this book contains the concluding two volumes of Gibbon's six-volume work, and has some of the historian's best chapters. Volume 5 starts with the rise of Islam, the conquests of th If you were taught by your school histories that Rome fell, a dark age descended on Europe, and then the Renaissance happened, you may appreciate this book.

Volume 5 starts with the rise of Islam, the conquests of the Arabs, and their loss of control of the Islamic empires--first to the saracens, then to the Turks. It chronicles the establishment of the empire of the Franks, and the ongoing decline of the Byzantine Greeks. Volume 6 describes the crusades of the Western Europeans against the Turks in the Holy Land, ongoing strife in Italy and the Eastern Roman empire, the conquests of the Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, and the collapse of the last vestiges of the Roman Empire with the Turkish capture of Constantinople in Gibbon is justly renowned as a master of style.

As the happiness of a future life is the great object of religion, we may hear without surprise or scandal that the introduction, or at least the abuse of Christianity, had some influence on the decline and fall of the Roman empire. The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of military spirit were buried in the cloister: Faith, zeal, curiosity, and more earthly passions of malice and ambition, kindled the flame of theological discord; the church, and even the state, were distracted by religious factions, whose conflicts were sometimes bloody and always implacable; the attention of the emperors was diverted from camps to synods; the Roman world was oppressed by a new species of tyranny; and the persecuted sects became the secret enemies of their country.

Yet party-spirit, however pernicious or absurd, is a principle of union as well as of dissension. The bishops, from eighteen hundred pulpits, inculcated the duty of passive obedience to a lawful and orthodox sovereign; their frequent assemblies and perpetual correspondence maintained the communion of distant churches; and the benevolent temper of the Gospel was strengthened, though confirmed, by the spiritual alliance of the Catholics.

The sacred indolence of the monks was devoutly embraced by a servile and effeminate age; but if superstition had not afforded a decent retreat, the same vices would have tempted the unworthy Romans to desert, from baser motives, the standard of the republic. Religious precepts are easily obeyed which indulge and sanctify the natural inclinations of their votaries; but the pure and genuine influence of Christianity may be traced in its beneficial, though imperfect, effects on the barbarian proselytes of the North. If the decline of the Roman empire was hastened by the conversion of Constantine, his victorious religion broke the violence of the fall, and mollified the ferocious temper of the conquerors chap.

Voltaire was deemed to have influenced Gibbon's claim that Christianity was a contributor to the fall of the Roman Empire. As one pro-Christian commenter put it in As Christianity advances, disasters befall the [Roman] empire—arts, science, literature, decay—barbarism and all its revolting concomitants are made to seem the consequences of its decisive triumph—and the unwary reader is conducted, with matchless dexterity, to the desired conclusion—the abominable Manicheism of Candide , and, in fact, of all the productions of Voltaire's historic school—viz. The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosophers as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.

He has been criticized for his portrayal of Paganism as tolerant and Christianity as intolerant. Drake challenges an understanding of religious persecution in ancient Rome , which he considers to be the "conceptual scheme" that was used by historians to deal with the topic for the last years, and whose most eminent representative is Gibbon. With such deft strokes, Gibbon enters into a conspiracy with his readers: So doing, Gibbon skirts a serious problem: Gibbon covered this embarrassing hole in his argument with an elegant demur.

Rather than deny the obvious, he adroitly masked the question by transforming his Roman magistrates into models of Enlightenment rulers—reluctant persecutors, too sophisticated to be themselves religious zealots. Others such as John Julius Norwich , despite their admiration for his furthering of historical methodology, consider Gibbon's hostile views on the Byzantine Empire flawed and blame him somewhat for the lack of interest shown in the subject throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. Gibbon's initial plan was to write a history " of the decline and fall of the city of Rome ", and only later expanded his scope to the whole Roman Empire:.

If I prosecute this History , I shall not be unmindful of the decline and fall of the city of Rome; an interesting object, to which my plan was originally confined. Although he published other books, Gibbon devoted much of his life to this one work — His autobiography Memoirs of My Life and Writings is devoted largely to his reflections on how the book virtually became his life. He compared the publication of each succeeding volume to a newborn child.

Gibbon continued to revise and change his work even after publication. The complexities of the problem are addressed in Womersley's introduction and appendices to his complete edition. Many writers have used variations on the series title including using "Rise and Fall" in place of "Decline and Fall" , especially when dealing with large nations or empires. Piers Brendon notes that Gibbon's work, "became the essential guide for Britons anxious to plot their own imperial trajectory.

They found the key to understanding the British Empire in the ruins of Rome. In , an established journal of classical scholarship, Classics Ireland , published punk musician's Iggy Pop 's reflections on the applicability of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to the modern world in a short article, Caesar Lives , vol. Of course, why shouldn't it be? We are all Roman children, for better or worse I learn much about the way our society really works, because the system-origins — military, religious, political, colonial, agricultural, financial — are all there to be scrutinised in their infancy.

I have gained perspective. The criticisms upon his book In accuracy, thoroughness, lucidity, and comprehensive grasp of a vast subject, the History is unsurpassable. It is the one English history which may be regarded as definitive. Whatever its shortcomings, the book is artistically imposing as well as historically unimpeachable as a vast panorama of a great period. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

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This article is about the book. For the historiography spawned by Gibbon's theories, see Historiography of the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The decline and fall of the Roman Empire. This article lacks ISBNs for the books listed in it. Please make it easier to conduct research by listing ISBNs. Pocock, "Between Machiavelli and Hume: Gibbon as Civic Humanist and Philosophical Historian".

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Dictionary of National Biography.

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