He has the courage to juxtapose his lists of large causes with the minutiae of persons and places. He reminds us of our ties to the cosmos without pretending to unlock its secrets. He remains a modest man, refusing to carve neat channels where the course of history must flow. He lacks the conceit of the system builder, whose naïveté is revealed only with the centuries.

No historian has seen more vividly how nettlesome is the texture of the human past. Yet few have been bolder or more successful at grasping the nettle. He helps us share his pleasure at touching the random prickliness of experience. All this he does because he does not overestimate the dogmatic capacities of his own “enlightened age” nor does he underestimate the mystery of what remains untold and untellable.

At the end of his twenty years’ voyage into the Roman Empire, he asks himself whether he should try another such voyage. With characteristic prudence he concludes that “in the repetition of similar attempts a successful Author has much more to lose, than he can hope to gain.” Yet he insists that “the annals of ancient and modern times may afford many rich and interesting subjects.… To an active mind, indolence is more painful than labor.” So he cheers us on, both readers and writers of history. For he, as much as any other writer in our language, reminds us that, even across the centuries and the oceans, people can talk to people about people. Just as Gibbon was not imprisoned in the jargon and special conceits of his age, so perhaps we need not be imprisoned in ours.

This essay appeared as “The Intimacy of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall” in Hidden History, 1987.

When Gibbon was in Rome as a young man in 1764–1765, he may have visited a shop which was noted in the address book of many of his well-to-do countrymen. It was that of Giovanni Battista Piranesi in the Palazzo Tomati, where antique sculptures (expertly restored) were to be bought, and an excellent series of prints of the Roman landmarks could be purchased for so little as two and a half paoli apiece—about half a crown—say, a dollar today. Gibbon may not have laid out any money on these impressive etchings, inexpensive as they were, for he was doing the grand tour economically, on an allowance of £100 a year, which had to cover his own expenses and those of his tutor–traveling companion. But he must have lingered wishfully over the portfolios.

There is no record that he acquired any of these Roman views in later years when he was more affluent. He was not the sort to dress up his house for show or to stock his library with ornamental accessories. His snug workroom in Bentinck Street, London, eschewing the usual mahogany, had shelves painted blue and white, which probably took most of the wall space. He could not have framed and hung a series of Piranesi views, as Sir Walter Scott was presently to do in his dining room at Abbotsford. Nor was Gibbon’s next library, in his house “La Grotte” at Lausanne, adapted for prints on the wall. In commenting on this room, or series of rooms, when he was making an addition to it, he wrote, “not forgetting the water closet, few authors of six Volumes in quarto will be more agreeably lodged than myself.” He was apparently content without the mementos and pictures which seem appropriate for the professional writer’s study, for his bookcases lined the walls, having solid wooden doors so that they could be locked like boxes. The southern windows overlooking Lake Geneva were the only pictures necessary.

(We know about “La Grotte” because it was still intact in the 1880’s. The Geneva post office now occupies its site, and there is a balcony toward the lake over approximately the spot where Gibbon put the final touch to the Decline and Fall in his summerhouse one evening as the moon was rising. William Beckford, author of Vathek and caliph of Fonthill, to whom Piranesi dedicated a plate of an antique vase, had purchased the place, thousands of books and all, after Gibbon’s death, “to have something to read,” he remarked, “when I passed through Lausanne.”)

A record exists of about four-fifths of the books that Gibbon possessed. He himself kept catalogues of them; that of the library at “La Grotte” is a card index, written on the backs of playing cards. Among these there were no bound volumes of Piranesi such as an English gentleman might have cherished as a souvenir of Rome. Gibbon was no sentimental collector. He bought only what he could use; once he had decided upon the subject that was to occupy most of his writing life, it was reference material. He had seen Rome. Why, therefore, squander money on views of it?

He had, in fact, seen more of the antique Rome than exists today. While there have been new excavations and clearances of Renaissance structures from old remains since his time, many ruins have also dwindled and vanished. Piranesi too saw Rome as it stood in the eighteenth century, columns deep in the rubbish of centuries, greenery sprouting from the architraves, and goats grazing where senators had paced. This Rome in its twilight, with the barefoot friars of St.