Roman Greatness

Abstract

In the 1776 preface to his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon set out his aim to recount the revolutions that ‘gradually undermined, and at length destroyed, the solid fabric of Roman greatness’.1 Brimming with erudition, Gibbon’s hefty tomes stood testament to the pervasive influence of Rome and its most famous dramatis personae on English literary culture. Gibbon was uneasy with the violence of empire in all its manifestations, judging it continually self-destructive. Nonetheless, the period of Roman history that he held most in awe, which gave rise to and sustained ‘the solid fabric of Roman greatness’, preceded the narrative of decline that Decline and Fall charts from the accession of Commodus in 180 ce. This earlier period of Roman history, populated by late republican writers such as Cicero and Sallust, famous generals such as Scipio Africanus, and writers of the...