'Subject Only to the Empire of Time':Gibbon and Posterity

As numerous commentators have observed, Gibbon’s unfinished Memoirs give a speciously linear account of his intellectual development. They imply that Gibbon was always destined to become the historian of the decline and fall of the Roman empire, underplaying the fact that, for years, he remained anxiously undecided about his subject. But the Memoirs are more reliable in attesting to a key consideration that weighed heavily on Gibbon in seeking a subject: namely, his determination to write a work that would command the attention of posterity. From his earliest published work, the Essai sur l’étude de la littérature (1761) onward, Gibbon gave concerted attention to the question of the qualities that mark such “immortal” works. He concluded that their success lay in bequeathing to the future an image of a mind of a particular kind: characterized above all by the qualities of elasticity, vigour, good judgment, and freedom. Such qualities could only be cultivated by the study – initially as a disciple, subsequently as an equal and intimate friend – of other such minds, both living and (especially) dead. No other eighteenth-century historian was as determined to write for posterity; and perhaps this explains why only Gibbon succeeded in doing so. This essay turns to Gibbon himself for an explanation of how, and why, he did it.