Eighteenth century British historian Edward Gibbon died as he lived: with huge balls. By the time a watermelon-sized hydrocele on the scrotum claimed him at age 56 in 1794, Gibbon had published his definitive six volume history of the Roman Empire, the template for all future histories and standard by which they would be judged, and the most presciently critical scrutiny of early Christianity anyone had dared put down on paper at the time. Traveling from the time of Christ through the fifteenth century and impressing into the service of its narrative Romans, Gauls, Goths, Greeks, Eastern Europeans, Africans, and Arabs, the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a fifteen-year effort that consumed the most fruitful years of Gibbon's career, stands, alongside Thucydides' Histories, at the zenith of the historical genre. And yet, only two courses in all of our Ivy League peer schools (one at Harvard and one at Brown) feature this work at all.

Gibbon's magnum opus, however, is poised to be rehabilitated to its rightful place in undergraduate academia. Any pop culture maven can point to the resurgence of the Classics--Greek and Roman stuff--in the last few years. Gladiator, Kingdom of Heaven, Troy, and 300 have provided audiences in spades with an epic, heroic, even quixotic rendition of the ancient world. Critics have called these successes reflective of a post-9/11 desire to see good but embattled heroes triumph in a sordid world. This is the movie version of Classics.

The last two years, however, have seen classical narratives invested in a markedly different bent. The HBO series Rome, specifically, is the centerpiece of this new appropriation of the ancients: here is a hard world of military realpolitik and blunt amorality, in which the best of men are spouse-killers, or at very least lecherous flaneurs. Life is emotionally depleting; those living do what they can to help themselves. It is the TV version of Classics--long and tortuous, withholding easy characters and easy resolutions. This version of Classics is a subtle departure from the debauched and unredeemable world of Caligula, I, Claudius, and other lurid '70s and '80s takes. It aligns, however, very well with Cullen Murphy's recent book Are We Rome?, the affronted charges of revisionism against Oliver Stone's movie Alexander (the great leader couldn't possibly have been so flawed and so...gay!), and the renewed fascination with Thucydides' early draft of the realist doctrine in foreign affairs that parallels our contemporary Middle East exercises. It is this cast of ancient history, the one that brings it closest to home, which now excites us the most. This is the Wild West of Gibbon's Decline and Fall. For example, none of the many, many characters (the book does quite often have the feel of a long-running TV drama) in Gibbon are strictly good or bad, they are merely effectual or ineffectual. Our favorite heroes today are the likeable means-to-an-end types, the ferally self-interested, driven people who supposedly see through all the bullshit and (to use a Gibbon word) pusillanimity around them and get results: Ari from Entourage, Titus Pullo and Marc Antony in Rome, the fat kid in Superbad, cyber-douchebags Tucker Max and the Leveraged Sellout guy, etc.

These are the men (and women, sometimes) who get ahead in Gibbon's Rome. He writes, "As long as mankind shall continue to bestow more liberal applause on their destroyers than on their benefactors, the thirst of military glory will ever be the vice of the most exalted characters." In the span of a few hundred years, Gibbon proves this statement more and more axiomatic, indicative of the type of character a man must possess to succeed in such a duplicitous world. Rome's first emperor, Augustus Caesar, who delivered Rome from the civil war that threatened to destroy it, is described in one remarkable passage:

A cool head, an unfeeling heart, and a cowardly disposition, prompted him, at the age of nineteen, to assume the mask of hypocrisy, which he never afterwards laid aside. With the same hand, and probably with the same temper, he signed the proscription [execution] of Cicero, and the pardon of Cinna. His virtues, and even his vices, were artificial; and according to the various dictates of his interest, he was at first the enemy, and at last the father, of the Roman world. When he framed the artful system of the Imperial authority his moderation was inspired by his fears. He wished to deceive the people by an image of civil liberty, and the armies by an image of civil government.

He was also the most celebrated figure in Roman history. As the times get tougher, Gibbon excoriates the offending characters more and more vehemently, but must concede, by the end of the 2nd c. AD, that thuggish Emperor Septimius Severus, who felt "to be mild, it was necessary that he should first be cruel," held judgments that "were characterized by attention, discernment, and impartiality." By the time of the AD 312 victory of Constantine over another would-be emperor, Gibbon can only offer that Constantine, in murdering his adversary's family, did no worse than what would have been done to him had he been the loser.

Gibbon--writing with retrospection from the enlightened, secular humanist, wine-and-roses perspective of an aristocrat of the British Empire--is unambiguous in the remonstration and condemnation he employs through the Decline and Fall: almost every figure in history lets him down. Many of us, however, especially in our generation, are enthralled by brutal capitalism, fast-and-loose morality, and winning at all costs, so Gibbon's disapproval is not necessarily our own. Indeed, it is de rigueur now to question whether this period was actually even one of decline; reading about almost any period in Roman history gives one the impression of everything being on the verge of spontaneous combustion. And let's not forget the words that have been spilled by latter-day Gibbons about our own country recently: "nightmare," "catastrophic," "recession" (a nice word that means "decline"). A historian in the future might easily get the impression that we're in death throes ourselves. Like Gibbon, many Americans who dote on the myths about our farmer-patriot ancestors have a tendency to conflate "complicated" with "bad." Where we are now, and where Gibbon's Rome was, is "complicated"--the type of morass of social, political, cultural, and intellectual confusion that has always, throughout history, attended very large groups of very different, very independent, and very self-concerned people. Suzy wants to drink Appletinis, date two boys at once, and do whatever they do at Goldman; Jerry wishes he could raise his kids in the world he grew up in, without all the Spanish-speakers and gay sex scandals; each thinks the other is ruining America. This is why, while we like the Spartacus version of Classics, we identify with the Rome version, the Decline and Fall version.

Unfortunately for such a flippant attitude toward Gibbon's Romans, though, the historian holds the trump card: I can grin and shrug, "So what, nice guys finish last!" but Gibbon could respond, "You're right Ben, the assholes won the day every time, and then you know what happened? Barbarians were able to overrun the Empire and burn down all the cities so that by the 7th century, the Roman Forum was an overgrown sheep pasture." Once it became the norm for generals to sell out their comrades to increase their power, or for Christians (by then the majority) to ignore the health of the Empire and chase personal salvation instead, the Empire was too fractured and individualistic to function. It is abundantly clear throughout Gibbon's tome: the Romans were the author of their own ending.

*     *      *

Edward Gibbon, however, is not the author of his own lackluster following today. At Dartmouth, he is all but ignored in undergraduate teaching, with one curious recent exception. Gibbon's work appeared recently in a one-off Socy course, Selected Topics in Sociological Theory, offered last fall. That it would pop up on a Sociology curriculum is unexpected but highlights both the usefulness and difficulty of placing and studying his work. Gibbon is no longer, by a long shot, the go-to for an accurate and objective history of the period he writes about; indeed, it is often the lot of chroniclers of the past that they are only widely popular during their own day, as archaeology and revisionism usually force them to cede their authority to later historians studying the same periods. Furthermore, anything one can extrapolate from Gibbon's prose about the milieu within which he writes--what does his take on Rome say about his take on late-18th c. Europe--comes in an oblique and conjectural way. There are plenty of contemporary writers we can study who articulated their thoughts on the Enlightenment period in a much more straightforward manner. So Gibbon doesn't quite fit into Classics, English, History, or Philosophy easily, and I doubt Dartmouth will see the establishment of a Historiography Department any time soon. Sociology, however, the great supercollider of disciplines, found a place for him. Today, after first the theorists and now the more mainstream academics have begun to question the partitions between fields of study, Gibbon should be ripe for reconsideration, as he is both a commentator on one era and an exemplar of the attitudes of another--in short, an author very conducive to the type of interdisciplinary study that continues to become more and more prevalent.

Imagine, for instance, the possibilities of a discussion seminar parsing Gibbon's take on the rise of Islam in Arabia. There's a lot to talk about. Here is an Englishman penning a history of a people who were not nearly so familiar to eighteenth-century European readers as the Romans were, bringing to bear some of the misconceptions that identify Gibbon as a man of his place and time. "The heat of the climate inflames the blood of the Arabs; and their libidinous complexion has been noticed by the writers of antiquity," Gibbon writes.. At the same time, though, Gibbon also recognized the ways in which Islamic culture could form a superpower that would eventually destroy the Byzantine Empire and influence Europe forever after. For Gibbon, the rise of Islam represents "one of the most memorable revolutions, which have impressed a new and lasting character on the nations of the globe." Ultimately, it is still the cantankerous, cynical Gibbon, a unique and enjoyable voice distinct from any literary tradition, who prevails, relishing that as historian, he can be as much an exposer of hypocrites as a kingmaker. Of the Prophet Muhammad, Gibbon spares no quarter: "Of his last years, ambition was the ruling passion; and a politician will suspect, that he secretly smiled (the victorious impostor!) at the enthusiasm of his youth, and the credulity of his proselytes."

*     *      *

In my early-to-middle high-school years, I harbored a weird obsession with imperial Roman history, to the shameful extent that I went through a phase of frequenting online history messageboards and memorizing the names and biographical details of the first forty emperors (though I did go to prom!). It was during this time that Gibbon showed up under the Christmas tree, and Volume 1 came with me to Florida for summer vacation. I remember trundling through Gibbon's prose, laboriously reading and rereading what felt like hundreds of copies of the Declaration of Independence in terms of writing style. I've revisited Gibbon since to discover that the prose is not inaccessible at all, for eighteenth-century stuff, and also to try to figure out why I was so fascinated by the Rome of the Decline and Fall, besides that I had a lot of free time not spent on house parties and girls.

The best and seemingly most perverse reason to read the Decline and Fall is for enjoyment. The pleasure factor is not immediately obvious, but it lies, I think, in the cinematic quality of Gibbon's narrative; the high-budget TV series really is the best format for translating this historical period for modern audiences. Gibbon, like a director, is an expert at freighting moments with significance and drawing climaxes out of the ebb and flow of the "one fucking thing after another" that comprise history, as a character in The History Boys so eloquently put it. The ancient world Gibbon focuses on makes his job easy for him sometimes: "decline"-era Rome can be the academic equivalent of tabloid trash, but with more killing people. It's all hard guys and power plays, booze and dirty, dirty sex (I also spent a great deal of my time in high school dreaming about how awesome college would be). But still, even the best historians who preceded Gibbon did not understand the way he did how the human brain craves stories that build and climax, with arresting characters, beginnings and ends, and the dynamism of fiction we so rarely find in our quotidian reality. Thucydides, for instance, often makes a sterile science of the high-octane Peloponnesian War, tediously cataloguing troop movements and other tactical minutiae of each battle while only expending a few sentences on the action. Granted, that sober-sided historian was writing for a long-ago Greek audience, but one cannot argue that the people who came up with the Iliad did not want to read about guys getting hit in the face with axes. On the flip side, Suetonius, a biographer of the Caesars, comes off as a sleaze broker in a professor's tweed. He detachedly lists character-assassinating facts about his emperors, handling his most sordid and exciting (and possibly apocryphal) material like a porn flick--all orgies, no plot.

Gibbon, however, sets his scenes much more expertly. The reader gets characters like Emperor Maximinus Thrax, a bad-guy dude with a bad-guy name.

Whenever he was alarmed with the sound of treason, his cruelty was unbounded and unrelenting...Without a witness, without a trial, and without an opportunity of defense, Magnus [an accused conspirator], with four thousand of his supposed accomplices, was put to death. Italy and the whole empire were infested with innumerable spies and informers. On the slightest accusation, the first of the Roman nobles, who had governed provinces, commanded armies, and been adorned with the consular arid triumphal ornaments, were chained on the public carriages, and hurried away to the emperor's presence. Confiscation, exile, or simple death, were esteemed uncommon instances of his lenity. Some of the unfortunate sufferers he ordered to be sewed up in the hides of slaughtered animals, others to be exposed to wild beasts, others again to be beaten to death with clubs.

The climactic sequences in the Decline and Fall are similarly evocative. Gibbon describes the night before the final fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453 in an extraordinary passage:

The noblest of the Greeks, and the bravest of the allies, were summoned to [Byzantine Emperor Constantine Palaeologus'] palace, to prepare them, on the evening of the twenty-eighth, for the duties and dangers of the general assault. The last speech of Palaeologus was the funeral oration of the Roman Empire: he promised, he conjured, and he vainly attempted to infuse the hope which was extinguished in his own mind. In this world all was comfortless and gloomy; and neither the Gospel nor the church have proposed any conspicuous recompense to the heroes who fall in the service of their country. But the example of their prince, and the confinement of a siege, had armed these warriors with the courage of despair...They wept, they embraced; regardless of their families and fortunes, they devoted their lives; and each commander, departing to his station, maintained all night a vigilant and anxious watch on the rampart.

Gibbon was almost too good at cleaving such epochal moments out of the bulk of history. His work has been criticized for conditioning generations of thinkers to take his interpretations as unassailable truth. For instance, while the fall of the Empire in the East was undeniably epic, the Empire in the West just sort of petered out. Students are still taught, however, that the Western Roman Empire de facto ended in AD 476, which was Gibbon's somewhat arbitrary designation, embellished by his choice to present together the subchapters "Extinction of the Western Empire," "Decay of the Roman spirit," and "Miserable state of Italy."

Nonetheless, historians ever since have followed Gibbon's style of narrating his subject, and this is what most sets him apart from other Dead White Men most of us study at Dartmouth. His subject matter is piquant today and his cross-disciplinary perspective is academically fashionable to study, but perhaps the most revolutionary thing about Gibbon is that he changed the way we read our past: he was the first great thinker to package history as a story.