Penguins on Parade: The One-Volume Gibbon!

Some Penguin Classics win against tough competition, and one of my favorite of those is David Womersley’s wonderful one-volume abridgement of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. This volume came out in 2000, hot on the heels of Womersley’s gigantic, utterly definitive three-volume unabridged edition of Gibbon’s masterpiece (the three fat paperback volumes of which I once owned and now mysteriously own no more, even though I yearn for them with an undisguised yearning), and the success it enjoyed was due entirely to the fact that far more people are comfortable praising Gibbon’s work than reading it – so a one-volume edition is vital for the all-important college market.

This isn’t quite the sacrilege it appears at first glance, either. I doubt you’ll meet many people who’ve read the complete, unabridged Gibbon more times – or with more sincere enjoyment – than I have, but the simple truth is, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire veritably cries out for shortening. Gibbon loves the sound of his own rhetoric, and as with most scholars who’ve done more in-depth research than is good for their health, he’ll launch off on a learned digression at the drop of a proverbial hat. The Decline and Fall is full of such digressions – vast stretches of pages where the only possible interest for the general reader will be the feisty beauty of the prose itself, not any of its rightfully obscure subject matter.

Womersley of course saw this clearly, and he offers his one-volume edition for those readers who don’t have the wherewithal to tackle his three-volume edition:

The text for this abridgement has been taken from the Penguin complete edition of The Decline and Fall. This was the first edition of the history to offer a text established on a bibliographically secure foundation, as a result of a methodical collation of the earliest editions. The present volume thus surpasses other abridgements in respect of accuracy and reliability.

But the task of abridging Gibbon doesn’t devolve only to a matter of page-count. No, there’s another key area of contention among the shorteners of this literary monument: the footnotes. Gibbon filled his book with footnotes, and they often go on for great length, in many languages. And in addition to their daunting erudition, they’re often scandalous: this was where Gibbon often put not only his own knife-edged humor but also the less propriety-friendly quotes from his sources. Any shortener of Gibbon has to figure out what to do with the footnotes, as was seen by the tough competition Womersley’s volume faced: in 2003 Hans-Friedrich Mueller came out with his own fat abridgement of The Decline and Fall for the Modern Library, and he chose to eliminate the footnotes altogether – and while he was at it, he did his best to eliminate the digressions as well. He went through Gibbon’s sprawling narrative cleaning up its sight-lines and cutting out its excesses, and although his resulting volume was even longer than Womersley’s (and gorgeously produced by the folks at Modern Library), it was clearly intended to be a more inviting reading experience.

That editorial approach – stitching together the pertinent chunks scattered throughout Gibbons’ more leisurely story – had been the favored method of most abridgers since the completed work first appeared in 1789, but Womersely himself is having none of it. His one-volume edition contains 11 of Gibbon’s 27 chapters, all uncut, all with the original footnotes; “it includes only whole, complete chapters,” as he puts it, “fragments of chapters have therefore not been silently conflated with fragments from other chapters to create heterogenous monsters unshaped by Gibbon’s historical art.” Heterogenous monsters being well-acknowledged as the worst monsters of them all.

Is it worth it, preserving all this ancillary matter, great swaths of which will be either distracting to most modern readers or incomprehensible to them? Gibbon’s digressions have been maddening his readers since his own day, and his salacious footnotes have earned him plenty of scorn from general readers and scholarly readers alike. It was one of the latter who snarled, “If the history were anonymous, I should guess that these disgraceful obscenities were written by some debaucheee, who having from age, or accident, or excess, survived the practice of lust, still indulged himself in the luxury of speculation.”

But it’s better to leave them in than to take them out, for one crucial reason: they reflect the fact that Gibbon’s enormous work (which he knew perfectly well had gained him that most elusive prize of them all, immortality) is an active dialogue with the past. The main body of Gibbon’s narrative brilliantly captures the lure of history, the fact that when it’s written well it makes better reading than any other kind of literature; but the footnotes also capture something brilliantly: the joy of active, engaged, pen-in-hand reading. The footnotes aren’t exclusively or even mostly salacious; they’re mostly Gibbon at his studies, not only distilling but also reacting. They form a more fascinating and revealing portrait of the man himself than even his own autobiography does or ever could.

Take just one example from many hundreds: the murder of Alexander Severus in AD 235. He was assassinated by a catspaw of his ambitious underling Maximin, as recorded by the Historia Augusta (which it pleases Gibbon to treat as having been written by one man), and first Gibbon gives us the account of the deed, in his main narrative:

The writers, who suppose that he died in ignorance of the ingratitude and ambition of Maximin, affirm, that, after taking a frugal repast in the sight of the army, he retired to sleep, and that, about the seventh hour of the day, a part of his own guards broke into the imperial tent and, with many wounds, assassinated their virtuous and unsuspecting prince.

But he can’t stop himself, in his footnote, from making the kind of quick and magisterial snark of a type no historian had made in centuries (and that all subsequent historians learned from Gibbon), telling us “I have softened some of the most improbably circumstances of this wretched biographer.”

And his footnote-sarcasm isn’t reserved only for his fellow historians – everybody’s fair game, especially if they have the bad luck to be in any kind of holy orders. Even the great St. Augustine isn’t spared but instead twitted on his greatest work:

Augustin composed the two-and-twenty books of de Civitate Dei in the space of thirteen years, A. D. 413-426 (Tillemont, Mem. Eccles. tom. xiv. p. 608, & c.). His learning is too often borrowed, and his arguments are too often his own, but the whole work claims the merit of a magnificent design, vigorously, and not unskillfully, executed.

Those parenthetical insertions, often detailing endless hours of grubbing, beetling research among documents and sources that were intensely obscure in Gibbon’s own day and are virtually invisible now, are also an important part of these footnotes, another reason to be glad Womersley left them in: even though the average reader will never (could never) consult those sources, there’s a weirdly bookish comfort to imagining Gibbon consulting them. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire famously contains some of the finest history-writing in all the genre – but it’s only really fine if you don’t chop it up and re-stitch it. And the deeply obscure footnotes show that history-writing in its composite elements – a thrilling side-show, really, and one that often upstages the main attraction.

At least it did for me, in my latest re-reading. I much prefer Womersley’s pocket-Gibbon to anybody else’s.