This document provides a summary and analysis of several books that examine how Rome was interpreted and represented in the long 18th century. A key theme is that 18th century writers filtered evidence about ancient Rome through their own cultural lenses and assumptions. Travelers to Rome brought their own visions shaped by what they had read. Rome could not be experienced as a single fixed idea, but rather there were "many Romes." The document discusses how various 18th century writers, artists, and travelers engaged with and made sense of the ruins in Rome, often reconstructing the past in ways that revealed more about their own time period. It also examines how Rome was used symbolically and politically, such as in Napoleon's self-presentation as heir to

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Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 34, no. 2 (2001) Pp. 287–309.
EVIEW ESSAYS
A CITY ENDLESSLY REWRITTEN: SOME VERSIONS AND
APPROPRIATIONS OF ROME IN THE LONG EIGHTEENTH
CENTURY
Kevin Berland
Philip Ayres. Classical Culture and the Idea of Rome in Eighteenth-Century
England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Pp. 266. $ 64.95
cloth.
Peter Cosgrove. Impartial Stranger: History and Intertextuality in Gibbon’s
“Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” (Newark: University of Delaware
Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1999). Pp. 290. $43.50 cloth.
Catharine Edwards, ed. Roman Presences: Receptions of Rome in European
Culture, 1789–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). xii + 279
pp. $64.95 cloth.
Catharine Edwards. Writing Rome: Textual Approaches to the City (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). xii + 146 pp. $19.95 paper.
Edward Gibbon. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 3 vols., ed. J. B.
Bury, illus. Gian Battista Piranesi (New York: Modern Library, 1995). Pp. 928.
$ 26.95 cloth.
Edward Gibbon. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 3
vols., ed. David Womersley (London: Allen Lane/Penguin Press, 1994). Pp.
1120. $59.88 cloth.
R
Kevin Berland teaches English and Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University.
He is currently working on a study of early modern appropriations of Socrates and an edition
of John Gilbert Cooper’s Life of Socrates (1749). He is coeditor of the forthcoming Com-
monplace Book of William Byrd of Westover, and founder of C18-L, the online eighteenth-
century discussion group.

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Edward Gibbon. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 6
vols. (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1993–94). Pp. 1872. $92.00 cloth.
Paul Hammond. Dryden and the Traces of Classical Rome (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1999). Pp. xiii + 355. $75.00 cloth.
Joseph M. Levine. The Autonomy of History: Truth and Method from Erasmus to
Gibbon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Pp. xviii + 249. $27.50 cloth.
Christopher Charles Parslow. Rediscovering Antiquity: Karl Weber and the
Excavation of Herculaneum, Pompeii, and Stabiae (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995). Pp. xx + 394. $27.95 paper.
Alina Payne, Ann Kuttner, and Rebekah Smick, eds. Antiquity and Its Inter-
preters. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Pp. xv + 324. $90.00
cloth.
At first glance, it may seem that no common theme links these books;
they approach Rome from many directions, each author focusing on divergent
topics. However, they all agree that eighteenth-century writers filter evidence about
ancient civilizations through peculiar selective and interpretive processes, and that
these processes are governed by cultural and intellectual assumptions which need
to be explored and understood. This common element marks a welcome shift in
the study of the historiography of ancient civilizations. The term “neoclassical,”
as it was once used to indicate a supposedly unified field of cultural production,
now appears to be one of the great oversimplifications of modern history writing.
Among earlier scholars of the legacy of classical traditions and influences, there
often seems to be an assumption that Greece and Rome were somehow complex
but stable ideas, fixed in time as never diminishing sources of value always amenable
to rediscovery through study and imitation. Today we are more inclined to step
back and examine the interpretive framework that allowed early modern thinkers
to conceive of a past that helped make sense of their present. This framework
allows the interpreter to select or reconstruct a coherent past; such reconstructions
bear the unmistakable marks of the interpreter’s cultural background, sometimes
almost effacing the ancient original.
Thus, of course, in the eighteenth century there are many Romes. Travelers
arriving in the “eternal city” brought with them their own personal vision and
expectations, acquired by reading the classics and perhaps the accounts of other
travelers. Boswell, for instance, declared in a letter to Rousseau, “I entered Rome
with full classical enthusiasm.”1
Though his eagerness was soon dispelled by
encounters with living Romans, he found time (among other pursuits) to observe
antiquities and muse on the notion that poets once walked these streets, and he
observed the striking disparity between past greatness and present ruins, the
“wretched huts” of the artisans in the Forum, the corridors of the Coliseum serving
as dung-filled animal pens. Boswell’s observations are typical, for the strangeness
of the material Rome always produced an effect of defamiliarizing the known
Rome learned through years of classical education and gentlemanly devotion to
ancient texts.
For travelers visiting the remains of ancient greatness, the city is a
palimpsest. Catherine Edwards, in Writing Rome, provides an indispensable key

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to understanding the way travelers sought to understand Rome, a metaphysical
topography illuminating the relations between material and written Rome, between
place and memory. In the “eternal city,” the irresistible presence of the past coexists
with a long series of lamentations over “the destructive workings of time” (12).
Edwards reminds us that some of the most important buildings and texts of
antiquity had already started to disappear in ancient times; Varro claimed that his
books on antiquities (now lost, except for fragments ironically preserved in
Augustine’s arguments against him), freed the greatness of ancient Rome from
destruction by nourishing memory. By building monuments, the Romans embodied
memory, but monuments were constantly altered and place rewritten. Travelers
among the ruins recalled the hopeful emphasis on Rome’s futurity in Virgil’s
construction of a past that warrants greatness, or, perhaps, the trope beloved of
Roman poets, that literary monuments outlast stone, which assumes the
disappearance of the material city. Eighteenth-century visitors, confronted with
the “mass of shapeless ruins and buildings from a bewildering variety of epochs”
(9), made sense of the city through ancient and modern literary texts, grounded
on a sense of place. Sometimes the very disjunction of past and present becomes
the subject, as in the case of Piranesi, who imagined laying bare the fragments of
ancient Roman greatness by annihilating structures of later centuries. In his
topographical map of Rome with its border of fragments of an ancient marble
city plan, Piranesi represents the impossibility of reconciling the “different cities
in time” in the medium of topographical space (26). More frequently, writers
managed to reorganize the evidence to make sense of the material-temporal
disjunction. Gibbon’s method is of course one of the most memorable of these
revisions; Edwards illuminates his relation to both textual tradition and place by
revisiting his account of the moment when he decided to write the Decline and
Fall. Some years ago Patricia Craddock demonstrated the fictional nature of this
account, and Edwards enriches Craddock’s argument by tracing the symbolically
resonant topos—looking over Rome from the vantage point of the Capitoline
hill—back through Petrarch to the Roman authors Gibbon read, especially Tacitus
and Livy. Gibbon’s reading of Rome is informed (and perhaps skewed) by his
position on rationality and enthusiasm. For others, the city’s fall provided lessons
embodying the “vanity of human aspirations in general,” the debilitating results
of luxury, and “the dangers of imperial ambition” (13). Paradoxically, Edwards
concludes, though time altered Rome so dramatically, later writers “repeatedly
made use of the Roman strategy of playing off past against present to articulate
their own responses to the city in ruins” (14). This approach sets up Edwards’
detailed exposition of the parallels between the ancient Romans’ own sense of
their past and later iterations of the dialectic between permanence and decay.
Travelers expecting visible traces of ancient greatness found the material Rome
“disconcertingly strange or strangely familiar” (129), and yet the idea of Rome is
so compelling that even the shock of the palimpsest cannot displace the sense of
allegiance to the greatness that time has so visibly savaged. This allegiance, Edwards
reminds us, is often figured as exile by writers such as Goethe or de Staël, and this
tone of elegy for unattainable Rome is grounded, once again, in the language of
exiled Juvenal, Ovid, and Cicero. Like the material Rome, the idea of Rome
comprehends puzzling layers of time, in which later versions echo earlier notions,
and echoing becomes an agent for transformation.

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In her introduction to Roman Presences, Catharine Edwards describes
how the multivalent potential of Rome can both make sense of and destabilize
history, politics, identity, memory, and desire, but they provide some compelling
instances of the way the predispositions of those who regard the affect their
findings.
In “Envisioning Rome, Granet and Gibbon in dialogue,” Stephen Bann
calls François-Marius Granet the first painter to represent Rome “in its ancientness”
(37). Earlier topographic painters had depicted an “almost inextricable weave”
(40) of buildings and ruins from every era, but Granet (who painted Rome from
1802 to 1824) focused on a historical era recently brought to a close. After
Napoleon suppressed the monastic orders in 1810, Granet was shocked by the
transformation of the religious character of the beautiful city into a harsh, warlike
place. His reconstructions of ancientness often involve “prospects through the
architectural vestiges of the ancient world in such a way that they focus attention
on the monuments of Christianity” (42), nostalgically reconstructing a lost time
of spiritual peace, as in the Choir of the Capuchin Church. Granet sees a
harmonious past where Gibbon sees only disjunction; for the historian barefooted
friars were a modern anomaly distorting the vision of ancient history. The “inverse
symmetry” Bann traces between the two imaginary Romes is interesting, but it
cannot really be called a dialogue, for there is no evidence that Granet and Gibbon
were aware of each other.
Chloe Chard plots the elision between the antique and the feminine in
her essay, “The Road to Ruin: Memory, Ghosts, Moonlight and Weeds.” Both
women and antiquities, travelers often believed, resisted understanding. Traces of
the feminine in ruins, however, could be accessible intuitively. Ruins supported
the quest of travel-writers for emotional intimacy by transmuting historical into
personal time, especially in cases of ghostly female presences. Chard draws some
useful and amusing parallels between travel writing and Beckford’s fictional
biography of the painter Og of Basan before she ventures into the twentieth century.
Duncan F. Kennedy ranges widely through the responses of writers to
Rome and the sense of place, from Gibbon, Goethe, and de Staël to George Eliot,
Henry James, Freud, and Waugh. Also of interest is Valérie Huet’s deconstruction of
Napoleon’s self-created myth portraying him as the heir to the imperial tradition of
Rome. Huet charts his effective campaign of cultural propaganda, including Canova’s
portrait statue, the acquisition of the Borghese collection of antiquities, the design
of the Vendôme column, and “official” salon paintings on Roman themes.
Though its focus is an era prior to ours, Antiquity and its Interpreters
includes several essays providing insight into issues discussed by eighteenth-century
writers. David Galbraith’s “Petrarch and the Broken City” could be read as an
introduction to the links between the poet and Gibbon, especially in the relation
of self-fashioning to the meditation on the possibility of retrieving the past inspired
by a view of Rome from a high place. Galbraith contends that imitatio allows
Petrarch to transform and not supplant ancient greatness, just as Seneca’s bees
make honey into something that moves beyond its original. Virgil conflated the
ages by placing Aeneas in a topography belonging to the poet’s Rome; just so
Petrarch writes of moving through an early modern Rome superimposed on antique
narratives mediated by ruins, setting the pattern for many later writers.

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In “Winckelmann and Warburg,” Richard Brilliant explains
Winckelmann’s utopian aesthetic project of providing a model of perfection in
Greek art “available to artists of his own time who wished, or should wish, to
achieve beauty in their own work” (270). Winckelmann sometimes insisted on
this timeless aesthetic idealism, and at other times showered contempt on those
who failed to ground the production of ancient art in culture and history—two
positions impossible to reconcile. Winckelmann necessarily worked from “the
presence of Greek art behind the Roman screen.” His search for Greek art depended
on locating transparent works from which he could extrapolate lost originals.
This often blinds him to the power of Roman transformations and contributions,
which he sometimes dismisses as bad copying.
Three pieces on architectural history also merit attention. Christof
Thoenes, in “Patterns of Transumption in Renaissance Architectural Theory”
discusses early modern architectural imitation in terms of analysis, distinguishing
the imitable and nonimitable elements of ancient models. Classically-influenced
architecture is necessarily governed by changes in technical, social, and economic
conditions. Accounting for the way these changes affected imitation is essential
for seeing clearly the Renaissance layers of the palimpsest confronting eighteenth-
century observers.
Early modern architects, devoted to what they imagined were classical
rules of harmonious design, were troubled by the ostensibly irregular placement
of windows at the attic level (between the pilasters and the dome) of the Pantheon.
T. A. Marder, in “Symmetry and Eurythmy at the Pantheon,” shows how some
artists imaginatively realigned the windows in their drawings. Inigo Jones, the
“watchdog of style,” notes that even Palladio made adjustments to his illustrations
(221). Bernini was the first to explain the “irregular” placement of the windows
as attaining harmony through “a correspondence of rhythm and proportion rather
than of superimposition” (218). Bernini invoked the Vitruvian critical terms
simmetria and euritmia to dissuade his patron, Pope Alexander VII, from interfering
with the Pantheon’s interior. A painting by Panini records the Pantheon’s interior
before renovations undertaken in the mid-eighteenth century by the
“interventionist” architect Paolo Posi, who rebuilt the attic to bring it into
conformity with the popular notion of classical harmony. Bernini’s philological
line of defense had little or no effect on the architectural theory of his
contemporaries. And once again early modern attempts to “rescue” the past
actually effaced the architectural production of the past.
One revision sometimes supplanted another. Catherine Wilkinson Zerner,
in “Remaking Antiquity in Eighteenth-Century Seville” recounts the controversy
surrounding Lucas Cintora’s restoration of the merchant’s exchange in Seville in
1784. In defending his “corrections” to the work of sixteenth-century classicist
architect de Herrara, Cintora argued that those elements jarring with classical
precedents could not have been Herrera’s doing, so his renovations were a kind of
rescue work.
As for the study of Roman ruins themselves, the eighteenth century marked
the beginning of a complete realignment of values. From 1750 to 1765, Karl
Jakob Weber, a Swiss military engineer in the service of Charles of Bourbon, King
of the Two Sicilies, supervised work at three now famous sites near Mount Vesuvius.

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He was not in charge—that position was occupied by one Alcubierre, whose
mission was to recover precious antiquities for the King’s collection. Winckelmann
famously complained that Alcubierre was “as familiar with antiquity as the moon
is with crabs” (1), and indeed Parslow’s account of the early digs into the Vesuvian
cities reveal a method that could be described as mining for buried treasure.
Antiquities had been found in fields and ditches and wells for years; the official
project began in 1738 when mining engineers were called in to dig tunnels in
search of more. From the start the project was politicized by the historical mission
of enhancing the King’s status by building an unmatched collection of antique
sculpture and painting. There was no interest in the architecture of the Vesuvian
cities, in documenting where items were found, or in observing evidence of every-
day life—in short, no archaeology in the sense we now understand. Much of
value must have been destroyed by haphazard tunneling through walls. Fragments
of metal statuary and implements were melted down. Papyrus rolls were discarded
and destroyed. Artifacts, paintings, and statues were destroyed to enhance the
unique value of items in the King’s collection. Access to the collection and to the
excavation sites was restricted; visitors could neither measure nor draw. This state
of affairs was firmly established by a closed circle of experts, the Reale Accademia
Ercolanese di Archeologia, who retained the exclusive right to publish findings,
which they catalogued typologically, paintings with paintings and statues with
statues, without regard to function, location, or context.
Weber’s important contribution sprang from his stubborn insistence on
observing the architecture and layout of the buildings and streets buried under
the deep ash, mud, and volcanic matter. Charged with mapping the underground
cities, he devised a method of tunneling that followed the city streets and entered
buildings through doors. Though always aware of the need to provide a steady
flow of treasures for the King, he still managed to focus on individual buildings,
especially the theater at Herculaneum. His efforts were blocked at every step by
Alcubierre, hungry for whatever glory the project could provide. Weber could not
get promoted, could not gain admission to the Accademia, could not publish his
findings, and could pursue his investigations only with difficulty. He was not a
successful man, and his early death was probably hastened by toxic conditions in
the underground tunnels. Weber’s struggle did not go unnoticed; Winckelmann
praised Weber’s knowledge, methods, and character, and his development of
archaeological principles owes much to the practical example of Weber’s work. In
Rediscovering Antiquity, Parslow makes exemplary use of a rich, untapped archive
of letters, journals, unpublished manuscripts, and official publications, and the
result makes fascinating reading.
Philip Ayres covers a great deal of familiar ground in his study of the
adoption of Roman ideals in eighteenth-century English culture. Because he revisits
so many authors whose allegiance to classical models is well-known, some readers
might be tempted to decline the opportunity of following his argument to its
conclusion. This would be unfortunate, for Ayres does indeed have a valuable
contribution to make. We may not need another exegesis of the way Pope
appropriates classical forms and personae, or the way Chesterfield recycles ancient
forms of civility, or the Romanness of English portrait busts. But this is not all
that Classical Culture and the Idea of Rome offers.

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For Ayres, the true significance of classical emulation is not formal, but
essentially political. He carefully traces the way the aristocracy and gentry imagined
themselves as heirs to a Roman tradition of civic virtue and liberty under a mixed
constitution. The Revolution settlement of 1688–89 created a powerful oligarchy
which found in the classics a way of legitimizing and preserving the privilege they
had gained (and, at the same time, shoring up the kingdom against counter-
revolution). In adopting the self-image of virtuous Romans to align themselves
with an idealized Roman republic, the ruling class reaffirmed the principles of the
Revolution and created the image of an “oligarchy of virtue” that in fact established
their self-interest. This alignment serves Whig and Tory, since the diminution of
monarchic power transferred power to aristocrats and gentry regardless of party.
They distinguished themselves from their supposedly self-indulgent predecessors
during the Stuart era by claiming a new allegiance to liberty and virtue, a claim
which they made in classicizing architecture, portraiture, self-presentation, and
public discourse.
What Ayres manages to do in his study is to integrate detailed examinations
of all these areas of cultural production throughout the period. Particularly
compelling is the way he links the burgeoning cultural interest in the archaeology
of Roman Britain to the ideological project of establishing the Roman style of
republican public virtue. In so doing, he succeeds in enriching our sense of the
cultural and political contexts of neoclassicism in the architecture and art
commissioned by the ruling classes.
In his study of Dryden’s Latin, Paul Hammond’s thoughtful exposition of
Dryden’s immersion in the Roman poets reveals an English poet whose modernity
is paradoxically achieved through a turn to the classics. For Dryden, Restoration
England is best understood in terms referring to ancient Rome. This means that
Dryden was constantly involved in reinventing his origins, tracing a line running
between English and Roman language and culture in such a way that his
construction of antiquity reflects the modern England he wished for. Hammond
explains that the paired terms (Rome and England) generate and define each other,
so that each “finds its identity by reflection, its stability by the movement between
itself and its opposite. Each carries the trace of the other” (9). This frames the
historiographic problem nicely, for the ancestral Rome upon which Dryden models
his ideal England is itself based on what it supposedly has produced in descent.
The past is not a burden or a fount of anxiety (pace Bate and Bloom);
rather, distance empowers Dryden’s practice. Quotation lends authority, while
allusion, imitation of classical imagery, and Latinate diction supplement the quasi-
Roman invention, “shaping a macaronic space which is an imagined world
composed from both English and Roman materials, a space which he can shape
to his own satisfaction.” The Roman poets are sometimes “not guests but ghosts,”
the Latin text banished but still haunting the English translation. In his chapters
on quotation and translation, Hammond negotiates the often uncertain terrain of
modern theory, negotiating, for instance, with Derrida and Freud to ascertain
whether such terms as differance and unheimlich can help with the kind of close
reading that occupies the center of this study. He selects what is useful and moves
on, creating an admirable fusion of critical sophistication and practical exposition
of interesting texts. Native language is always somehow foreign or unheimlich,

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Hammond muses; and the sense of identity produced by Latin as the “primary
object and medium of knowledge” in early modern English education owes its
allegiance to a home elsewhere (34). This displacement foreshadows the creation
of the authorial persona defined by allusive reference to the Latin poets, which in
turn is the root of some of Dryden’s subtlest linguistic effects.
Often dense and compacted, Hammond’s prose still rises to clarity and
elegance, as when he explains the recurrence of Cromwell in Dryden’s imagination:
“Memory rarely works by constructing coherent narrative; more usually it floods
the past so as to leave just a few islands, sites of special significance which one is
compelled to revisit” (74). Hammond is at his best in tracing the way Dryden
forges English culture from ancient materials, and “the mythology by means of
which that culture represents its connections to its origins” (47). Also rewarding
is Hammond’s detailed exegesis of the role of Latin tone in the projection of
Dryden’s authorial persona, the function of epigraphs, the allusive operation of
Latin background and “pre-texts,” the topos of renewing time in the remaking of
a nation, the connection between classical Rome and Roman Catholicism in The
Hind and the Panther. The last section of the book, dealing with Dryden’s “middle
way” with translation (trimming between metaphrase and free imitation), is
measured and thorough, covering difficulties with parts of Lucretius’s philosophy,
Horace’s lessons on spurning fortune, Juvenal and Persius on satire in a dangerous
time, the limitations of Dryden’s Georgics, and Dryden’s use of Ovid’s discussion
of man’s place in the material world. He concludes with a powerful account of
the politics of Virgil’s Aeneid and Dryden’s Aeneis. Hammond charts a movement
away from the early rhetorical engagement which informed Dryden’s contribution
to Restoration culture, through the darkening tones of later translations and the
use of Juvenalian satire to distance the present by appealing to the past, to the
tragic prospect of destruction of his beloved homeland in the Roman-English
Aeneis, the poem in which Dryden finally takes possession of his home ground.
And now we come back to Gibbon, as any discussion of Rome and the
eighteenth century must do. There is no paucity of Gibbon in print. Book historians
could have a field day surveying the twentieth-century production of Gibbon
editions, with their special formats, bindings, illustrations, marketing strategies,
and new introductions. Hugh Trevor-Roper does the honors for the 1993 Everyman
edition, a Daniel Boorstin essay prefaces the Modern Library edition. The complete
Decline and Fall is available in three different handsome, readable sets, suitable
for the general reader and the specialist alike. Doubtless, the standard scholarly
text is now David Womersly’s 1994 Allen Lane-Penguin edition, though nearly all
the books reviewed here refer to earlier editions, usually J. B. Bury’s magisterial
edition of 1909–14. Womersly’s new edition has been widely recognized as superior
in terms of scholarly editing, but Bury’s introduction and notes are still useful.
The Everyman set uses Bury’s text, as does the Modern Library, which also features
a selection of Piranesi’s Vedute di Roma. In fact, the Modern Library set is a
slightly reduced photoreproduction of the elegant special edition produced in 1946
by the Limited Editions Club. These are good-looking volumes, and while the
engravings are not terrifically well-reproduced, at least Modern Library has given
up the affected sepia tone of the 1940s gift edition, and the pictures serve tolerably
well to enliven the reader’s experience of Gibbon’s Rome. To pursue Piranesi’s

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vedute further, readers will want to consult John Wilton-Ely’s two striking volumes,
Giovanni Battista Piranesi: The Complete Etchings (San Francisco: Alan Wofsy
Fine Arts, 1994).
For interdisciplinary scholars, the use of Piranesi’s vedute as Decline and
Fall illustrations is intriguing, because they represent a peculiar cross-breeding of
eras, conflating the remains of ancient Rome with the architecture of each
succeeding era. Thus, as illustrations to Gibbon, they may be somehow consonant
with the historian’s sense of a disappointing present overrun with ruin, confusion
and loss. They resemble Gibbon more closely in the way the genius of the narrative
vision compels the accumulation of historical fact to rearrange itself. Piranesi
often used sketches taken from different angles to produce composite views that
were topographically impossible and exaggerated in scale. Still, he never claimed
to be an objective reporter of architectural and archaeological fact, though travelers
such as Goethe were prepared to use Piranesi as a kind of visual guidebook, and
were sometimes taken aback by the differences between the striking pictures and
the sometimes disappointing ruins of material Rome. Some critics of Gibbon and
Piranesi have been troubled by inaccuracies and distortions; rather than lamenting
the twisting of evidence as debilitating the objectivity of the historical narrative,
recent students of historiography have been glad of the opportunity to study the
complex relation of approaches to evidence, construction of narrative voice, and
positioning of underlying cultural presuppositions and polemics.
Joseph M. Levine’s The Autonomy of History is a series of essays, many
of which have appeared in print elsewhere, on the subject of English historiography
during the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Levine revisits Collingwood’s notion
of autonomous historiography, not written in a cultural vacuum, but with a logic
and procedures of its own, beginning with the separation of fact and fiction. First
he discusses historians (More, Erasmus, Elyot) who developed philology to establish
historical fact in the service of rhetorical humanist pedagogy, but who in so doing
impeded the development of critical historiography. There is in this collection a
great deal of fascinating material ranging across many important moments in
intellectual history, but in the interest of keeping our focus on Rome, I will
concentrate on the chapters on Roman history. Levine divides eighteenth-century
historiographers into three camps, those who accepted ancient models and wrote
self-consciously neoclassical narratives, the philosophes who wrote reflective
history to “make the past intelligible to enlightened opinion” (158), and the
collectors of historical data, philologists and antiquarians. Gibbon alone combines
the approaches.
It is hard to take issue with Levine’s contention that Gibbon “accepted
that the object of history was truth” (160), and yet this word, “truth,” is surely
the most difficult of historiographical terms. Levine explains that Gibbon “enjoyed
a good story” but insisted on the distinction between storytelling and history. He
used all the tools at his disposal to maintain this distinction, borrowing from the
rhetorical school the perception that interest and passion produced revisions and
distortions, from the philosophes the ideal of dispassionate objectivity, and from
the philologists the evidence needed to clear away forgery, romance, and fantasy.
With Tacitus, Gibbon recognized polemical purpose behind claims of objectivity.
This is an important issue, for the recognition that polemic alters history does not

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necessarily prevent a historian from engaging in polemic. Of course there is polemic
behind the massive erudition and objective stance; incredibly, Gibbon once claimed
he produced “without interposing his own sentiments, the simple narrative of
authentic facts” in The Decline and Fall (163). Nonetheless, Levine accounts for
Gibbon’s method of handling evidence with exemplary clarity—Gibbon insisted
on original testimony, tested the veracity of each testimony by checking against
other sources, sought out concealed interest and bias in testimonies, combined
testimonies to cancel or combine approaches, attempted to recognize and eliminate
his own bias, and maintained the awareness that “historical truth lies on a scale
of probability from barely possible to almost certain” (169). This is indeed the
method Gibbon applied to his account of “the whole complicated relationship
between a falling empire and a rising faith” (179). By recognizing how “the pious
frauds and falsehoods” (175) of traditional Christian historiography distorted
both parts of the story, Gibbon reformed historiography.
And yet some skepticism about motive and method remains—was Gibbon
involved (as Levine maintains) in a heroic endeavor to find out truth hidden in a
thicket of distortion, or a process imbued with “the leaven of infidelity,” as the
Gentleman’s Magazine reviewer described it (171), scholarly erudition and brilliant
method in the service of an anti-Christian polemic? Though Levine does not attempt
a definitive answer to this question, his learned account of the controversies
following Gibbon’s attack on Trinitarianism suggest that the most attentive readers
of Gibbon’s time were confident they knew well enough where Gibbon was
attempting to lead them.
Peter Cosgrove, in Impartial Stranger, almost reverses Levine’s approach,
searching Gibbon’s narrative for the very signs of story-telling historians ostensibly
avoid. Drawing on reader-response literary criticism, Cosgrove allows us to see
how Gibbon constructed an implied author, an artificial voice of implicit authority.
This approach will be more familiar to students of the novel than historians, yet
there is much to learn from the way “the voice of the historian stages a metaphorical
drama of the self in order to convince us that the sum of history on the page is
greater than its textual parts” (13). Historians are accustomed to the suppression
of “overt signs of the narrator” in the service of objective style and so miss the
fact that the historian’s narrative voice is constructed along the same formal lines
as the narrator of a novel, “a special kind of construction designed to impart a
sense of coherence” to the presentation that engages the reader’s subjectivity as if
in dialogue (15). In demonstrating pattern and meaning in the “immense
inchoateness of the historical record,” historical methods, we have been taught,
must rise “above the passions, the conflicting values, the sufferings of the past”
(16). Both this elevated stance and the narrative are representation, contingent on
the relation of the writer and reader. This relation is mediated through an organizing
narrative consciousness, and this consciousness. as it appears to the reader, is a
literary fabrication. The historian (as implied author) occupies the foreground of
the narration, sorting through sources and commenting on the moral implications
of actions, the objective historian whose view is ideally like that of an impartial
stranger viewing human life from a great distance. Objectivity is not Gibbon’s
actual method but his narrative self-presentation; under the fictive guise of impartiality
he organizes material selectively to fit his program of rationalism and progressivism.

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Review Essays
It is certainly no innovation to question the convention of objectivity in
historical narrative, but few students of historiography have devoted as much
scrupulous attention to the “constructedness” of the historian’s narrative voice.
Cosgrove supports his analysis with insights gleaned from a host of eminent
theorists; Barthes, Lacan, Hayden White, Lévi-Strauss, Gadamer, Ankersmit,
Kristeva, and Althusser, among others all appear in his introductory chapter. The
book analyzes Gibbon’s rhetoric of transcendence, by which the dramatized central
consciousness controls both the past and the text that represents it. The
“methodologically pure scholar whose mind, liberated from the stress of ideological
influence, transcends the material world” is a useful fiction; its deliberate artifice
cancels its claim to transcendence (46). History-writing is no less subjective in the
end when it wears the livery of objective reporting. Cosgrove deconstructs another
useful fiction, the notion that history-writing is based on unmediated access to
raw data. His account of the way history-writing incorporates earlier narratives
leads to a fascinating examination of the discursive intertextuality of citations
and footnotes. The “Gibbon” of Decline and Fall is paradoxical: “He is a dream
of the comprehensiveness and the incontrovertibility of knowledge standing outside
and above the condition that create him, yet he is composed entirely of figures of
speech” (100). The actual historian is not viewing the past from the vantage point
of some symbolically elevated hill, he is sorting and collating texts, focused on
words, not things. He polishes abstruse facts and mounts them in arguments that
evoke admiration. Cosgrove takes his argument a long way beyond the mechanics
of narration, addressing issues such as sexual allegory, fragmentary citation and
empiricism, the problems of translation, the anxiety of mortality confronted by
history, and many other interesting issues. In these encounters, his language
sometimes becomes dense, mannered, and even a little overloaded with abstruse
terminology. Nonetheless, Impartial Stranger is packed with insightful and
provocative passages, and will provide scholars of historiography and Gibbon
specialists much to consider.
When eighteenth-century poets, painters, and historians represented Rome,
they often invented a complex city partly of their own devising. Subsequent
historians have pointed out where their predecessors got things wrong in matters
of fact, and they have also recently become interested in the methodology of what
now appears to be the appropriation of the past to fit the cultural context of the
historian’s era or to serve the purposes of the historian’s particular polemical
motive. Such appropriations are not always entirely reliable as sources for
understanding Rome as it actually existed, but they do tell us much about the
later thinker, and in so doing open up a very interesting field of study, the
historiography of anachronistic appropriation.
These appropriations can be situated along a continuum between the
Roman era and that of the early-modern viewer. At the ancient extreme, we may
discern (as with Gibbon) an admirable allegiance to fact, though placed in a modern
frame. And at the modern extreme, we can see more modernity than antiquity.
Though Addison’s Cato is an altogether admirable man, I imagine his words would
have been passing strange to the senators gathered in the Forum. Perhaps another
even more modern analogy might be useful here. In films made about ancient
Rome, we can see the twentieth century everywhere, in Victor Mature’s

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unrepentantly 1950s haircut, Elizabeth Taylor’s period eyebrows, Marlon Brando’s
husky accent and slouch, the cheesy commercial decadence of Caligula, the wistfully
decadent plenitude of Fellini’s Rome—even Gladiator will betray its temporal
allegiances in a few years.
Historians at the borders of the twenty-first century have been turning
their attention to period detail, and this allows them to begin separating the layers
of time that enshroud the idea of Rome. It is good that we are able to study both
Rome as it was (or might have been), and also Rome as it was rewritten over and
over again. It is common enough to see an ancient city inhabited by the ghosts of
its vanished greatness. Perhaps only Rome has a past haunted by its present.
NOTES
1. Frank Brady and Frederick A. Pottle, Boswell on the Grand Tour: Italy, Corsica and France
1765–1766 (London: William Heinemann, 1955), 5.