Look at the Gibbon! The Pocket University 18-19 August 2023
He is most famous for writing a book that is referenced again and again in popular culture about one of the most famous empires in Western Civ that grew tremendously large and then shrank ...
Edward Gibbon is most famous for writing The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It is very long. I would be comfortable betting $1 million you will never read it cover to cover.
I know I won’t.
Edward Gibbon’s work is most notable, in my life, for being the subject of a memorable thought from my former father-in-law (and formerly alive, may his memory be a blessing). We talked classics, and his off-handed comment about Gibbon, when we started talking Greece and Rome, was that he remembers, in class, decades ago, that they learned he got it wrong.
This is the perennial danger of history and science. Whatever your smartest folks write today might get overturned by new discoveries and new theories. In the case of great history, we can recognize the genius of work whose writing is brilliant or whose thrust is largely right or whose grand theory is out of vogue for various reasons.
So, without doing one iota of research, I suspect that is the case with the gigantic magnum opus history of Gibbon’s: It’s well-researched, well-written, brilliantly theorized, and, of course, probably gets some things wrong.
But it’s easy for us little people to get out our small bows and arrows, which are really little bent paper clips and flattened staples, and take shots at Goliath.
You can do what you want.
But I didn’t come here to talk about Gibbon’s magnum opus at all.
I came here to talk about an excerpt from his autobiography.1
The Pocket University editors have cut a piece that highlights two things: the perennial tale of ill children who find solace and a purpose in life when they can’t go outside by reading and excelling with their mind … and the tradition of the literary autobiography.
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