| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

J. G. A. Pocock. Barbarism and Religion: Volume Three, The First Decline and Fall. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2003. Pp. xiii, 527. $60.00.
In reviewing for this journal the first two volumes of J. G. A. Pocock's Barbarism and Religion, the present reviewer observed that there is a symphonic quality to Pocock's writing, as polyphonic lines in the form of concepts are spun out, developed, inverted, and brought into counterpoint with others. This third movement offers a scherzo reminiscent of the author's 1975 book, The Machiavellian Moment, and it sounds some of the same chords (republicanism, political cycles, civic virtue, arms vs. commerce).	1
The subtitle of volume three is deceptively simple: it refers to the first (and best-known) volume of Edward Gibbon's masterpiece, which he published in 1776. That book commenced (after a very brief account of the structure of the Augustan principate) with the "Five Good" Antonine emperors from Nerva to Marcus Aurelius, and concluded (narratively) with Constantine's defeat of Licinius and restoration of a unified rule—a temporary resolution immediately followed by two chapters on Christianity that seem jarringly out of place, given the fact that Christians are scarcely mentioned through the previous fourteen chapters. Gibbon's readers had to wait until 1781 for the story to pick up again. Exposition of this "first decline and fall" in fact occupies only the last hundred pages of Pocock's volume and therefore serves as both a climax to the Pocockian story so far, and a bridge to the next volume.	2
Volume one of Barbarism and Religion situated Gibbon intellectually within a number of different European "Enlightenments"; volume two located him on a different axis, among the various writers of "narratives of civil government" in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. (We are still missing the parallel vector running through ecclesiastical historiography, although Eusebius, Augustine, Orosius, and Otto of Freising figure prominently here. Christianity only begins to signal its importance with chapter fifteen of Gibbon; where he used ecclesiastical authorities, up to that point, it was to document civil rather than sacred history.) Volume three moves in a third, diachronic dimension, tracing the transformations of key themes, in particular the idea of "decline and fall" itself, from very ancient origins up to the Scot Adam Ferguson's Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic (which appeared seven years after Gibbon's first volume and is thus offered for comparison rather than direct influence). The flight of concepts and motifs is dizzying, the lengthy quotations apposite, and as with the previous volumes, one can scarcely miss a sentence without losing a nuance or a parenthetical qualification. The theme of decline and fall, which informs the conception and beginning of Gibbon's book, would eventually yield to "barbarism and religion" as its principal causes in later volumes (along with over-taxation, which Gibbon mentions at the close of chapter fourteen). But behind that idea, which only gradually emerged from Polybian political cycles via medieval notions of the translatio imperii, lay much else, including sequential recognitions of crucial turning points in Roman history going back to Gracchan land reforms in the late second century B.C.E.	3
The core problem, historiographically, remains how to explain why Gibbon, committed from an early stage to a Tacitean narrative, chose to begin his account not with the Julio-Claudians but instead at the "Antonine moment" of imperial zenith achieved by Trajan. (As he once did with cinquecento Florence, Pocock inclines to define major turning points or episodes, both historical and intellectual, in terms of "moments"—a historical Constantinean and historiographical Zosiman moment lie ahead, and the Machiavellian version even puts in a cameo appearance when this volume reaches the early eighteenth century.) Gibbon knew intimately the character of Augustan rule and the flaws of the late republic; he had read his Sallust as well as Tacitus. The later imperial historians, especially Appian of Alexandria and Ammianus Marcellinus, also figure in this account as historians of decline, but of a decline that takes a great deal of time—all the way to the "Illyrian" recovery of the late third century—really to become unmistakeable.	. . .

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