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  • The news is often determined to tell us that we live in uniquely critical times, beset

  • by political disasters and afflicted by terrible crises and that the demise of human civilisation

  • is surely imminent.

  • We are encouraged to view the world - and our own lives - in bleak, apocalyptic terms.

  • Oddly, history can be powerfully consoling, not because it tells us that our times are

  • great, but because it shows us how normal large societal troubles really are.

  • The English 18th century historian Edward Gibbon is particularly helpful with this task

  • of bringing us to a less frightened perspective.

  • His massive, elegantly written work covers 1500 years, from the pinnacle of Roman power

  • around the year 180 AD, through the collapse of the Western Empire to the final fall of

  • its last outpost, the city of Constantinople, in 1453.

  • Gibbon started work on the series of volumes around 1770 and completed the final volume

  • on a summer’s evening in 1787 while he was on holiday in Switzerland.

  • The immense story he tells moves from one disaster to another, century after century.

  • There are mad, despotic Emperors, the barbarians invade again and again, the plans for reform

  • fail, the key institutions become corrupt, the government loses control of the army,

  • there are plagues that last for decades, the harvests decline, there is insane factionalism,

  • the economy collapses, the Roman Forum - once the heart of the Empire - ia abandoned and

  • sheep graze amongst the ruins.

  • Only Constantinople holds out, getting weaker and weaker.

  • The vastly prolonged decline ends with the fall of the city - where the people still

  • called themselves Romans - to Muhammed the Second in the middle of the 15th Century.

  • And yet the world didn’t end.

  • The main beneficiaries of the demise of the last fragment of the Empire was the city state

  • of Venice, which became the most widely loved place on earth; and the exodus of scholars

  • to the West was pivotal in the story of the Renaissance.

  • And all the time - in the centuries of decline - new forces had been developing in the background.

  • The wild people of the North who the Romans so feared became, eventually, Danish interior

  • designers and German intellectuals and Parisian socialites.

  • The Picts and Scots who were seen as the least civilised people on earth would, one day,

  • renew their capital city, Edinburgh, as an architectural homage to Roman culture.

  • The disasters are always happening on the surface: they are what we hear about.

  • The gradual process of renewal and elevation escapes our notice at the time.

  • It’s nice to read Gibbon late at night, at the end of a day when the news seems unbearably

  • grim, and to skim through his placid account of yet another moment of apparent catastrophe

  • and think of him sitting learnedly in his study reflecting on disaster and yet being

  • himself the obvious heir - with his classical prose, his quiet dignity and his sense of

  • balance - of the very empire he though he was lamenting.

The news is often determined to tell us that we live in uniquely critical times, beset

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