Gibbon for Moderns is the title chosen by Peter P. Witonski for his one-volume abridgement of Eighteenth-Century Edward Gibbon’s famous history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire (Arlington House, $8.95). And, as part of his didactic purpose, Witonski adds a brief notice that he is presenting the more important parts of an always fascinating historical work for their “lessons for America today.”
Since Rome, with its eastern extension in the Byzantine Empire, lasted for a couple of millennia, the “lessons” that are to be learned from Gibbon, Mommsen or any other historian of the rise, spread and decline of Latin civilization have a thousand faces. More than thirty years ago an American newspaper man, H. J. Haskell of the Kansas City Star, wrote a delightful book called The New Deal in Old Rome. His “lesson” was that Henry Wallace, Harold Ickes, Rexford Tugwell and Franklin D. Roosevelt had had previous incarnations in the age when Gaius Gracchus was championing the Ever Normal Granary and when Augustus Caesar was going strong on the public works that changed Rome from a city of brick to a city of marble. If the New Deal (with its own modern version of “bread and circuses”) hoped to succeed, it would have to do better than Rome. The problem was to build a society which, in Mr. Haskell’s words, would provide “reasonable incentives for the free rise of a general staff of competent managers whose ranks are always open to fresh recruits.” Writing in 1938, Haskell sounded a dubious note. Who and what would come after Wallace, Tugwell and Company?
Albert Jay Nock was more definite. He delighted in pointing out that all the panaceas had been tried by the Romans and all had failed. Nero clipped the Roman coins, but inflation solved nothing. Diocletian tried unsuccessfully to fix prices. “Empire,” in the form of extracting treasure from conquered provinces, ran out when the “movables” had all been removed, leaving only the slaves. The dependence on slave labor ultimately took its own toll by undercutting the free peasantry, who turned up in Rome to live on the dole.
Antisocial Solutions
Dero Saunders, a bright editor of Fortune Magazine whose avocation was dabbling in the history of antiquity, pushed the New Deal comparisons in the edition of Mommsen’s History of Rome which he prepared with John H. Collins, a classical student. Mommsen’s main “lesson,” as passed along by Saunders, was that Robin Hood methods of solving the “social problem” end by tearing society apart, the result being anarchy that finds its Draconian cure in dictatorship.
Witonski’s “lessons” are a bit more subtle than those advanced by Haskell, Nock, Dero Saunders and other Roman buffs of the past generation. Eschewing the “economic interpretation,” Witonski identifies Rome not only with the decline and fall of a temporal empire but also with the rise of Christianity. He holds, with the late Frank Meyer (to whom he dedicates Gibbon for Moderns), that Roman law and Christian ethics have combined to create the concept of the “West,” which, though it is now under seige, is still alive and kicking against the efforts of the new barbarian “counter-culture” to undermine it.
The Fall of Constantinople
Gibbon, a man of the Eighteenth Century “enlightenment,” was a free thinker with a Deist prejudice against any religious specificity. He was inclined to blame the Christians for sapping the morals of the old pagan society, which had its many household gods. Even so, if the conversion of the Emperor Constantine had been able to keep the Turks forever at bay before Constantinople, Gibbon would have held Christianity in the same affection that Voltaire cynically maintained for the God whom “necessity” demanded. The “fall” of the Roman Empire bemoaned by Gibbon was material; it came because the empire, after the Antonines, could not longer fend off the barbarians from the North and the Moslems from the East.
When Mohammed II took Constantinople, it was the end for Gibbon. His descriptions of the ultimate failure of pomp and power are marvelously evocative, and one never tires of the balanced rhythms of the Eighteenth Century style. As for Gibbon’s disparagement of the moral pretensions of the Crusades, it is good for our souls that we be reminded of the often non-Christian behavior of the defenders of the Western chivalric order. For pragmatic reasons, Gibbon had to accept the Crusades as good: after all, they gave Constantinople a “breather” of some three centuries which it might not otherwise have had.
Witonski raises points that are merely implicit in Gibbon. The “breather” of the Crusades allowed the West, as the inheritor of Roman civilization, to develop the nation-State. Rome, in a sense, was pushed into the North by the spread of Islam, which, as Henri Pirenne has pointed out, turned the Mediterranean for a period into a Moslem lake. The “barbarians” from the Gothic North took over enough of the Latin culture to sustain “Rome” as part of Charlemagne’s Frankish Empire. Latinity persisted in Spanish, French and even Rhineland German customs. The Moors took Spain, but Gallic Latinity was saved by the Pyrenees. And the big comeback which, with the Crusades, was to retake the Mediterranean for the “West” was powered by such northern “Romans” as Robert, Duke of Normandy, and Richard the Lion Hearted of England, along with ex-barbarians who had come within the civilizing influence of contact with both Rome and Christianity after they had invaded Lombardy and the Italian peninsula.
The West Again Under Seige
So “Rome” never actually died. It survived in Constantinople until 1453, and it revived in the West when the Moslems were pushed back in the Mediterranean. All of which points to a “lesson” that Peter Witonski does not unduly stress, partly because he wrote his introduction to Gibbon for Moderns before the Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur War. The “West” is under seige again from the East, with the Soviets threatening a complete takeover in the Balkans (a second “fall of Constantinople”?) when Yugoslavia’s Tito dies. Elsewhere the Soviets have cleverly arranged to create the turmoil that resulted last Fall in the Arab oil embargo, which hit at all the Western European states that have inherited the Roman and Christian traditions. The Mediterranean could become a part-Islamic “lake” if Henry Kissinger’s diplomacy, which is directed toward driving a permanent wedge between the Russians and the Arabs, should fail.
If the West would save itself once more, it needs a new Henri Pirenne and a new Edward Gibbon to point to the consequences of losing the Mediterranean to collaborating Communist and Arab jihads. Western Europe consists of small and vulnerable peninsulas (Iberia, Italy, Scandinavia) joined to a shrunken trunk (France, the low countries, West Germany, Switzerland). Loss of the Mediterranean would effectively outflank the European West.
If this should ever happen, a new Gibbon would be required to write a real “decline and fall.” The stakes are big, as the late Frank Meyer and his disciple Peter Witonski have tried to bring home to a world that has read all too little of Edward Gibbon.
