Romans and Pictsies

Books read this week: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Volume I (Edward Gibbon) 7/10, A Hat Full Of Sky (Terry Pratchett) 7/10

This week I've been making my way through the first volume of Gibbon's phenomenal Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It is an amazingly well researched, and often extremely funny journey from the age of the Antonines (which Gibbon identifies as the happiest period of human history, ever) to Constantine the Great. It's basically the period when the Romans collectively sat back, after conquering the known world, and said "fuck it. Let's go on a bender." We have a bewildering succession of emperors, some lasting only weeks, or even days, before being bumped off by their soldiers/concubines/passers-by. It's a long list of the sad (the Gordians), the mad (Elagbalus) and the bad (Caracalla).

It is fascinating to me how high the heights of civilisation were scaled under the Romans, before collapsing back into darkness - I was reading a book by Churchill the other week, where he argued that at the time of writing (1956) the average inhabitant of England was less comfortable that his ancestors under the Romans. I think that's highly debatable, but it's certainly only in the last century that the general level of human comfort has approached that obtained under the Roman empire at it's height. It's a sobering thought (for me at least), and one that dispels any lingering faith one might have in the inevitability of human progress.

The best thing about Gibbon is, of course, the footnotes; a treasure trove where he hides all his most cutting and entertaining comments; unfortunately I haven't sufficient language skills to understand the best bits - writing as he was in the 18th Century, and dealing with a high level of censorship (this volume was banned in several countries) and enlightenment views of propriety most of the more salacious footnotes read something like "He had a most unusual arrangement with the virgins of Antioch: <GREEK>" .

It was however the chapters on Christianity which got Gibbon into trouble; basically because he applied the same standards of historical evidence to the claims of the church as he would to any other institution, which leads to thing like Gibbon pointing out that it is strange that if there was darkness at noon when Christ was crucified, that this is mentioned by none of the Roman authors of the time who collected information about solar and lunar eclipses and other strange phenomena. Gibbon also wonders why it is that Bernard of Clairvaux discusses at length in his letters the miracles of other saints, but never discusses his own. It's fairly innocuous by today's standards (and also bloody obvious), but at the time it caused a serious stir - mainly because Gibbon is just too good a historian to accept "God did it" as an explanation.

The fundamental problem Gibbon had was that he was a rational, sensible man, and so he's incapable of understanding the mad fanaticism which motivated the early Christians to demand martyrdom - and they did demand it. We have, for example, the Emperor Hadrian's system where there were severe penalties for being a Christian, but also severe penalties for accusing someone of being a Christian - basically amounting to a classical system of "Don't ask, don't tell." Unfortunately, this broke down when Christians started to march into law courts, denounce themselves as Christians and demand that they be punish with the full rigour of the law. One gets the feeling that Gibbon is very much on the side of the exasperated Roman magistrates, one of whom is quoted as saying "If you're all so desperate to kill yourselves, why don't you just jump off a bridge and save me the paperwork?". The mindset that drives someone to seek martyrdom is as alien to Gibbon as the literal interpretation of Matthew 19:12 that led Origon to self-castration (the account of which  here is accompanied by a footnote that basically says "What the fuck did you just do? It's supposed to be allegorical, all-e-gor-i-cal, for fuck's sake.", in Gibbon's very proper 18th Century English, of course).

My second book this week was Pratchett's A Hat Full of Sky, the second book in his Tiffany Aching sequence and the sequel to the Wee Free Men. It's a very good read, as Pratchett always is, although I thought it lacked some of the sparkle of the Wee Free Men - but maybe that's just my mood; sometimes I'm in a Pratchett mood, and sometimes I'm not.