Edward Gibbon is so (in)famous for his discussion of Christianity in relation to the Roman Empire in Chapter 15 of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that it can easily be missed or forgotten that Gibbon thought that Rome’s decline started long before the Christianization of the empire, and that the empire itself was, in fact, a symptom of Roman decline.

One piece of evidence for decline before Christianization comes from his treatment of the reign of Sepitimius Severus (193-211) and his campaign against the Caledonians in Scotland. In discussing this, he mentions the hero Fingal and refers to James Macpherson’s Ossian (without naming him). Whatever one makes of the historicity of Fingal and Macpherson’s publication, it is Gibbon’s comparison of the Caledonians to the Romans that matters for my purposes here. Gibbon says this:^[1]

[I]f we could, with safety, indulge the pleasing supposition, that Fingal lived, and that Ossian sung, the striking contrast of the situation and manners of the contending nations might amuse a philosophic mind.

The parallel would be little to the advantage of the more civilized people, if we compared the unrelenting revenge of Severus with the generous clemency of Fingal; the timid and brutal cruelty of Caracalla with the bravery, the tenderness, the elegant genius of Ossian; the mercenary chiefs, who, from motives of fear or interest, served under the imperial standard, with the free-born warriors who started to arms at the voice of the king of Morven; if, in a word, we contemplated the untutored Caledonians, glowing with the warm virtues of nature, and the degenerate Romans, polluted with the mean vices of wealth and slavery.

The Caledonians are, unlike the Romans, uncivilized–but they are, paradoxically, humane. They lack cultivation–but also decadence.

The Romans, by contrast, have waxed fat and grown old on the luxurious spoils of conquest. They possess territory–and, with it, vice. They are slaves.

The Caledonians may live in narrower confines. But they have virtue; and they are free.

This aside of Gibbon’s provides an important window into Gibbon’s own politics, and demonstrates that his critique of Rome’s decay has to do with much more than the Christian faith, which can–even on Gibbon’s reading–be no more than incidental to (at best), or a hastening and auxiliary cause of (at worst), said decay, given that the Greatness Train had left the station long before the days of Constantine.^[2]