Revisiting the Decadence of Edward Gibbon’s <i>The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire</i> (1776–1787)

Abstract Edward Gibbon’s famous account of the slow ending of the Roman empire, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1787) has long been held to be central to the conception of what decadence is on a civilisational level. ‘Decadence’ as a concept, however, is not something that Gibbon himself ever outlined, and so his links to it were really applied retrospectively. In this article, I outline which aspects of Gibbon’s work were attractive to decadent writers, and what affordances – formal and conceptual – his Decline and Fall provided them. These, I argue, were the following: first, a paradigmatic narrative of civilisational decay: his history of Rome begins at its height and describes a millennium of waning. Second, and related to the first, is that even the zenith of a civilisation contains the seeds of its decay. Thus, the image of the so-called height of a culture is characterised by a pessimistic sense of eventual collapse. His decadence is one in which the perception of civilisation is cultivated by its ending. I look then at how two writers of the fin de siècle , Walter Pater and Michael Field, drew on these aspects of Gibbon’s work.