A Classic Finally Being Read

I'm finally reading the massive and famous but probably little-read classic "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," by Edward Gibbon.

I'm reading it on the computer, something that until a short while I wouldn't have considered doing. In addition to habit, the main reasons for that avoidance were the small 15" and even 17" monitors of the past, but now I have a rock-steady 21" screen that, besides the obvious advantage of larger type, allows for easier scrolling.

Still, I will have to fight off the temptation to buy the book anyway, "just to have it," even though I'm well aware of how that makes no sense this late in the day -- a day that has consisted of the lifetimes of three people accumulating books until now my house is so crammed with reading material that there's scarcely room for anything else.

I don't know why I waited so long to read this book, since Ancient Rome has always been of such great interest to me that reading it amounts to an absolute necessity. Maybe, because "Decline and Fall" was written so long ago (first published in 1776), I thought the language would be too learned and archaic. And actually the language does present problems. In the intervening generations there have been not only lots of changes in the meanings of words but also in fashionable sentence constructions and in the names of people, places, and things. But those obstacles haven't turned out to be formidable.

I think I am reading this book at a good time -- immediately after the U.S. once again celebrated the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and so soon after I re-read Thucydides' account of the Peloponnesian War, because, underlying their central themes, both books are also close explorations into governments and the age-old question of which kind works best.

In that respect Thucydides and Gibbon could be the chief authorities on the ancient Greek and Roman experiments in government respectively. Thucydides had the advantage over Gibbon in writing of democracies, oligarchies, kingdoms, and the like in which he had lived or had witnessed close up. Gibbon, on the other hand, while having always lived in a kingdom, had the advantage over the banished Athenian general in that he could write about Rome from the comfortable remove of well over a thousand years, with access to materials accumulated over all that time.

And now I have the advantage over Gibbon in knowing about the reappraisals of things about which he had a somewhat different view.

Just for instance -- I've only finished the first four chapters so far -- today the wall that the Romans built to separate England from Scotland is commonly called "Hadrian's Wall," but Gibbon gives the credit for it instead to Hadrian's immediate successors, whom he calls the "Two Antonines."

Also he has no use for the Emperor Claudius, usually calling him "stupid." But Gibbon didn't have the advantage of having seen the great BBC TV miniseries of some years ago, "I, Claudius," based on the book by Robert Graves, which paints Claudius as actually having been a very shrewd and moral operator who used the perception of him as being light in the head to protect himself from the plethora of deadly characters that surrounded him.