I’m lying on my side and my neck itches, right below the collar. The Kindle screen is a rectangle of forlorn, crowded type and in the dark it looks sepia. “The rampart itself was usually twelve feet high, armed with a line of strong and intricate palisades, and defended by a ditch of twelve feet in depth as well as in breadth.”
The Roman legions made sure the ground was all flat when they set up camp, just pulled up all the rocks and gathered the twigs, I guess, and their camp was always 2100 square feet or so. Gibbon estimates the figure. The last time I read some of Decline and Fall, it was a nice Penguin edition and it was abridged. How one feels the absence of abridgement when reading the book’s authentic, full-fledged beginning chapters. Long-ago authors dared you to keep going, so Gibbon piles up his great wheat sacks of indifferent fact. Pannonia, Illyricum, Rhaetia—a map could do all this and do it better. In fact maps have done it, but he still must march his paragraphs along the familiar, extensive route, stopping at each province. A kids book could tell you about the legions’ typical camp in a two-page spread, and another spread could give you the numbers for how many soldiers per legion and how many legions in the army, and a picture would show the men shoulder to shoulder as helpful captions explained about helmet and pilum and the rest.
Not that I want to read such a book, since legion accoutrements aren’t my chosen angle regarding Rome. But watching Gibbon’s caterpillar sentences trundle their load, I realize they’re a stand-in for the information’s correct vehicle; and this stand-in, this accident, is a prime piece of English literature that I have to read if I want to feel smart. Not the abridged. But I liked the abridged.
“After the Danube had received the waters of the Teyss and the Save, it acquired, at least, among the Greeks, the name of Ister.” It feels like my armpit’s being cut, the other one too, and this is my comfortable shirt. I shouldn’t have fallen asleep after dinner. Or, given that I fell asleep then, I shouldn’t have woken up at 10. I should be asleep now. That’s what I mean. I should be asleep.
I like the emperors. If you come down to it, that’s my interest in the Roman Empire. The map and the emperors. The bigness and the poor fools who got to preside over the bigness, and look what happened to them. Take out I, Claudius and my Rome interest would be chopped by a third. Take out the map of the Mediterranean swallowed by provinces and my interest would be a nub. There’s how the empire fell, that’s something, there’s the slow march of centuries and the accelerating changes that tip over a civilization and undo a familiar world. But without the giant expanse, the nations and a sea packed together, I wouldn’t care so much. Boy, it was big. So much for my intellectual interest.
Itch under the collar, itch on the scalp. Roll over, pull my bolster tight. “Among a crowd of these private benefactors, we may select Herodes Atticus, an Athenian citizen, who lived in the age of the Antonines. Modern travelers have measured the remains of the stadium which he constructed at Athens. It was six hundred feet in length, built entirely of white marble, capable of admitting the whole body of the people, and finished in…” The minutes crawl.
Down in the lower left corner of my Kindle, the little two percent flips over into three percent. I was surprised enough back when the 1 became a two, sometime earlier in the middle of the night. I went back and counted screens to see how much I’d actually read and there were 54 screens I’d skipped, because this is one of those Kindle cheapo editions where a classic comes bundled with public domain verbiage from the 19th century: foreword, introduction, notes, notes on the notes, all by forgotten three-named eminentos of the Victorian Age. Fifty-four unread gimmes went into my reaching two percent. But that was then. Here I am at three and it’s solid. All right, there are more notes and I only read the ones by Gibbon. But pretty solid.
The floorboards are visible now, one next to the other. The black sky’s gone a royal blue at the edges. “This long peace, and the uniform government of the Romans, introduced a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire.” Something’s afoot now. I like that sentence; I find it interesting.
Four hours later I still haven’t slept, but at least the day is here. The New Yorker has an interview with Bill Burr, one more friendly sitdown tied to the new Glengarry Glen Ross (he plays the Ed Harris part). I’m not going to read it but I glance down the first few paragraphs. My eyes stop, I stare. I call up Twitter and write, “Fucking coincidence, as Bill Burr would say. I just read in The New Yorker: ‘he is far better known as a standup, having sold out arenas from the Royal Albert Hall to the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, in Athens.’ And at five this morning I was reading about Herodes Atticus in Gibbon.” I’m a man of learning.