Catherine Nixey on the ancient world
The History of the Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire
by Edward Gibbon (1776–88) is a work of awesome erudition and towering intellect. When it was first published, the English aristocracy therefore welcomed it with their usual reverence for all things intellectual. Or, as the Duke of Gloucester supposedly said: “Another damned, thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr Gibbon?” Decline and Fall might be damned big, but it’s also damnably brilliant: Gibbon combined the mind of a scholar with the effortless wit of a good dinner-party companion. The Catholic church was less amused, and popped his volume onto their Index of Prohibited Books.
There was a period in the late 20th century when the discipline of history seemed to lose a sense of its purpose. Sure, books had all the right bits: dates and battles and emperors and whatnot. But authors seemed to have somehow forgotten that the chief purpose of books is not to be written but to be read – and that books should therefore be not merely accurate but entertaining. Enter Tom Holland, with his fabulously vivid history of the fall of the Republic,
Rubicon: the Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic
(2003). Replete with eye-opening facts (a Gallic slave cost one jar of wine) and vivid vignettes of thugs hurling excrement in a street fight, this reminded us all what history could be. It’s a superb book.
Next I would nominate Alaric the Goth: An Outsider’s History of the Fall of Rome by Douglas Boin
(2020). Where you start a story from matters.
As the old storytelling saying goes, start the story of a burglary inside the house and you will be on the side of the homeowner; start it outside, and you will be with the burglar. This brilliant book by Boin, an American academic, starts the story of the sack of Rome not from inside the walls of the eternal city, but outside, with Alaric the Goth. It’s a great trick, superbly executed. Some books tilt the world so that you will never quite see it in the same way again, and this is definitely one.
My final recommendation has to be Peter Frankopan’s
The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (2015).
As a boy, Frankopan used to lie in bed and gaze at the map of the world next to his bed, at its countries and oceans and rivers, with their names in “urgent italics”. And how puzzled he was when he went to school and found that his lessons, far from considering the history of these places to be urgent, all but ignored them.
In this marvellous and evocative book – that is not just about silk, or just about roads, but that also finds time for frankincense and furs and engaging Chinese myths about Spanish melons – he fills in some of those historical blanks.
Catherine Nixey is a journalist and classicist. She is the author of The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World (Macmillan, 2017)