9 - ‘The more rational ignorance of the man’

Summary

With a fine sense of the piquant, Gibbon chose as the epigraph for Volume I of The Decline and Fall a quotation from the historian who had recounted the foundation and prodigious growth of the Roman state:

Jam provideo animo, velut qui, proximis littori vadis inducti, mare pedibus ingrediuntur, quicquid progredior, in vastiorem me altitudinem, ad velut profundum invehi; et crescere pene opus, quod prima quaeque perficiendo minui videbatur.

There is, of course, a becoming modesty in an author's confessing his inadequacy before the majesty of his subject. Nevertheless, the controlled shapeliness of Volume I is so striking that it cannot but seem surprising to have this indication of overwhelming immensity standing at its head. Nowhere is Gibbon less at sea than in the first volume of his history.

An historian may encounter different kinds of difficulty. On the one hand, he may feel burdened by a mass of meaningless particularity from which nothing of value can be extracted, and for which he feels little sympathy; a philosophic historian (if Gibbon has rightly taken the measure of the man in ‘Sur la Monarchic des Mèdes’) will be especially liable to this, because he will have such a well-defined idea of what it is he has to say. On the other hand, the historian may feel oppressed by evidence too weighty and plentiful for him to dismiss as meaningless, and yet determinedly resistant to his efforts to read and understand it.