Was He One of Them?

J.G.A. Pocock

  • Edward Gibbon: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vols I-VI edited by David Womersley
    Allen Lane, 1114 pp, £75.00, November 1994, ISBN 0 7139 9124 0

David Womersley’s massive and elegant edition of Gibbon is the better timed because it comes a century after the edition scholars have been obliged to use as the nearest to a critical text. It was in 1896 that J.B. Bury brought out the first volume of his edition, which he reissued in 1909 and which until now has been considered standard. We can therefore look back from Womersley to Bury, across a century of upheavals in both historiography and history, and wonder, Neoclassically, what will have become of both text and new edition when the next fin de siècle is on its way out. If there are readers then, and if they are reading Gibbon, they may not be Euro-Americans and may be integrating the Decline and Fall into histories of their own – if, again, they are so fortunate as to possess histories.

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[*] Everyman, two boxed sets of three vols, 1715 pp. and 1944 pp., £25 each, 15 September 1993 and 13 October 1994, 1 85715 095 3 and 1 85715 192 5.