And, as pessimism has become increasingly fashionable about the future of our Western civilization, the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire has become a handy guide to the sources of decay in other empires and civilizations. I will not enter the debate over the adequacy of Gibbon’s explanations of the fall of Rome. Nor will I explore the easy—or uneasy—analogies between the career of the ancient Roman Empire and that of our modern Western civilization.

My interest in Gibbon’s work is quite different. I will not assess it as a “great” book. Rather I will consider it as an “intimate” book. By this I mean a book that has something personal to say to us today. I am aware that it may seem odd to characterize a man of Gibbon’s grandiloquence of phrase and a multivolume work on such a grandiose subject as “intimate.”

For me personally Gibbon’s book has an especially intimate significance. It was the first extensive work of English literature (or of history) which I read and reread. It occupied much of my thought during my university years as an undergraduate. And the engraving of Gibbon’s rotund face, made by Chapman in 1807, a dozen years after his death, hangs on the wall of my study. Gibbon’s face has been with me ever since I first made his acquaintance.

Gibbon’s work can have an intimate, personal significance for all history readers and history writers in our age. He may help us discover some of the peculiar weaknesses and strengths of our way of looking at the past. To discover this intimacy we must try to see Gibbon not simply as a spokesman for the Enlightenment, nor his work as an effort to perfect one genre in the social sciences. Rather, let us think of him as an original, giving his own form to a large chunk of the past.

Toward this end it will help us at the outset to recognize a distinctive, if not entirely unique, feature of his place in the roll of great Western historians. Despite the wide popularity and continuity of Gibbon’s audience, he seems not to have founded a “Gibbonian” school of historical interpretation. For example, the authoritative International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, which includes extensive articles on such lesser figures as Bryce, Burckhardt, Huizinga, Maitland, Ranke, Savigny, and Spengler, gives no such attention to Gibbon. Serious scholars do not doubt the originality or the significance of Gibbon’s work. Still, he has not become the founder of a “school.” He has not taken a place as the originator of any large new conceptual framework, or any novel way of pigeonholing the human past. I will suggest that this is a clue to the intimacy of his message about that past, and what he can tell each of us about the role of people in the grand chronicle of empires and civilizations.

The historical profession, with all its paraphernalia of learned societies and prestigious academic specialties, has grown up only since Gibbon’s day. Not until the early nineteenth century did professional historians reach beyond the techniques of classical scholarship and textual criticism, to draw on the new disciplines of archaeology and philology, anthropology, sociology, and economics, to create new vocations of searchers for facts and movements and forces.

It is doubtful if there is another example in the social sciences of a work of similar longevity, respectability, and popularity, which has had so small a dogmatic or doctrinaire ingredient. The comprehensive historical works of recent years—those which are taken seriously by students of the social sciences—are heavily laced with dogma. I am thinking of the potent works, for example, of Macaulay, Carlyle, Marx, Pareto, Tawney, and Toynbee. These seem to owe much of their fame and their influence to the special charm of some new formulas to explain or contain historical experience.

How, then, can we explain the power and longevity and appeal of Gibbon, despite his lack of substantial original conceptual content?

In the first place, we must remember that Gibbon had the advantage of being an amateur. Unlike some other great interpreters of the past, many of whom were also amateurs, he was not enticed or driven to his subject by the urgencies of his time, or by a revolutionary, a religious, or a patriotic passion. In the original sense of the word “amateur,” he was simply a lover of his subject. And in a famous passage in his memoirs he recalls the precise moment when, as he sat in the Colosseum in Rome, he first felt that passion. In another, less famous passage, he recalled his mixed emotions as that exacting love affair came to an end:

It was on the night of June 27, 1787, between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last lines of the last page, in a Summerhouse garden.… I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and perhaps, the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind, by the idea that I had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that whatsoever might be the future date of my History, the life of the historian must be short and precarious.

Like other great amateurs—and other lovers—he had taken his plunge without really being ready for it. He was not equipped by formal training for his work as a historian of the Roman Empire. His fourteen “unprofitable months” at Magdalen College, in an Oxford which, according to him, was “steeped in port and prejudice,” did not give him the academic tools he needed.