The Necessary Evil of Gibbon
For years I’ve put off reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, even though there it was, right to hand on my Dad’s bookshelves. I managed Henry Mayhew when I was 11, so why couldn’t I be bothered with Gibbon?
But Roman history and Latin were school subjects and not to be countenanced after the bell went. That was tea, biscuits and Jackanory time.
Lately though I’ve often considered getting it to read, if only to say I have read it, but procrastination has always won. It’s a big book, and I’ve already had to read Hobbes and Swift and Locke and Montesquiou and even some Macaulay and isn’t that enough yet, damn you? What do you want from me, blood? I deserve a rest with a few cosy detective novels or a 1930’s copy of Strand magazine and a bag of fudge, not endless accounts of battles and dry, turgid prose.
But having read this archive piece Billmon points to in the course of expounding on the arrogance and the folly of Bush’s foreign policy, the need to read it has become a little more urgent. The history of Rome in its latter days sheds much light on current events.
Perhaps I should’ve listened to our Latin master at school – “Culley minor ” ( yes, really, Culley major being my elder sister) “Sit up! Stop chatting and pay attention!” – but it can be a little difficult to be attentive with a blackboard eraser hurtling past your ear at 60 miles an hour.
Ah, happy days.
However my lack of erudition is made good thanks to the wonders of modernity. There is now an online edition so I have no excuses, none at all, not to read it anymore. Onwards to enlightenment then. How very helpful of those internet bods, damn them.
It may help if I try and visualise Lurchio as the narrator.
