The Death of Honor
Finding Meaning in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
The following is the author’s new introduction to The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: A Modern Abridgment by Moses Hadas
As I write these words, it has grown fashionable in American culture to ponder why men, in particular, appear so interested in the Roman Empire — and its fall. The reason most often given is that we as a nation are obsessed with our own slow demise, at least as a globe-spanning economic and military power in the progressing twenty-first century.
There is, undoubtedly, truth to that framing. But I have always sensed something else, both anxious and idealized, beneath the oft-held explanation — a something that I, and perhaps others, have been unable to grasp but that is subtly (although sometimes blatantly) woven into Edward Gibbon’s (1737–1794) extraordinary work of primary historicism, known properly as The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The English historian issued his six volumes from 1776 to 1789.
The theme of Gibbon’s epic exploration is that, after accounting for all the sundry battles, scandals, military victories and mishaps, alliances made and broken, mercenaries hired and dispensed, sits one indelible truth, which is that the Western empire died from lack of virtue. The…
