Abstract

This essay presents J. G. A. Pocock reflections on Gibbon’s fourth volume and the shift it marks in the Decline and Fall towards a narrative we might consider ‘Byzantine’. It is the work of Gibbon’s chief historian, venturing into territory left unexplored by Barbarism and Religion. Pocock observes that, after 395 CE, Gibbon begins to tell two distinct stories: the fall of the Western empire into barbarism, and the Eastern empire’s descent into what he called ‘premature and perpetual decay’. That phrase, Pocock argues, signals a historiographical rupture: Eastern Rome no longer rest on classical virtue and follows a different narrative logic. Tracing Gibbon’s treatment of Constantinopolitan culture, the Persian and Gothic wars, and the Incarnation controversies, Pocock casts the Justinian–Heraclius era as the final chapter of undisrupted Roman agency in the Decline and Fall. The followers of Muhammad will take the centre stage in the next volume. Gibbon’s narrative weaves together an increasing number of historiographical registers to capture the shifting geographies of power and meaning, framing a late antiquity no longer centred at Rome but increasingly Eurasian in scope. Pocock’s essay is prefaced by an introduction that provides a summa of Gibbon’s first three volumes, and of Pocock’s Gibbonian enterprise.