Durant is here interested in tracing out the progress of civilization. For Gibbon, everything worthwhile-philosophy, art, literature, science-happens in spite of the course of history, not because of it.Īs I said, Durant holds the opposite view. When Gibbon is not tracing out the long history of some martial campaign, with its dreary catalogue of victories, defeats, and slaughters, he is describing some horrid revolt at home, some cloak-and-dagger scheme for power, in which innocent after innocent are put to the sword-the bloody affair inevitably ending with some wretched villain clothed in the purple, destined to be hewn down by another villain. The heroes in Gibbon’s history are the few brave and compassionate souls who fought against the relentless tide of circumstances, only (at best) to slow the inevitable ruin of the empire. Gibbon so often saw the worst in humankind: war, rebellion, deceit, mutiny, betrayal, mania, persecution, dogma, and any other crime you care to name. Edward Gibbon, never the optimist, in his long chronicle of the collapse of the Roman Empire defined history as “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” Will Durant thinks this is a terrible mistake, and his series on the Story of Civilization can in part be seen as a corrective to the Gibbonian view.
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