Gibbon Ch. 1-3 (Part 1 of 3): Dense Prose, Roman Backstory, and a Monarchy in Disguise
From Porch Dialogues: Reading the Great Books · 40:07
Show by Porch Dialogues
Two friends on the porch, still nameless as Thing One and Thing Two, start The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire with Edward Gibbon’s first three chapters. They talk about his dense, ironic style, catch up on Roman history from Romulus to Augustus, and dig into how Gibbon paints Augustus as a subtle tyrant.In this part* Why Gibbon’s sentences reward a second read, and what he shares with Churchill* The opening paragraph: Gibbon lists the causes of the decline up front, and Christianity is not the headline* A quick Roman catch-up: Aeneas, Romulus and Remus, the last kings, the Republic of 509 BC, Caesar and the Rubicon, then Augustus* Rome’s genius for conquest, and how polytheism made it easy to welcome other people’s gods* Roads, aqueducts and olives, plus a detour to the American interstate system* Marcus Aurelius, stoicism, and the rumors about his wife Faustina* Augustus as moderate and conniving at once, and Gibbon’s line about an absolute monarchy disguised by the forms of the commonwealth* Gibbon on slavery: the pity, the “progress of manners,” and the line that a slave had no country of his ownMentioned: Edward Gibbon, Winston Churchill (The Birth of Britain), Marcus Aurelius (Meditations), Plutarch (coming later in the series), the Everyman edition of GibbonFull Reading Notes from your Hosts Get full access to Porch Dialogues at porchdialogues.substack.com/subscribe
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