Grandeur, Condensed

THE PORTABLE GIBBON: THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE (691 pp.) --Edifed by Dero A. Sounders--Viklnq ($2.50).

Among the stubborn ghosts that stalk the mind of modern literate man are the great books he intends to read some day. High on many such lists--behind War and Peace, but well ahead of the Summa Theologica--is Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. From now on, procrastinators will have to find fresh excuses: Gibbon has been streamlined. Dero Saunders, one of the editors of FORTUNE and an old Gibbon fan, has given Decline and Fall a close trim, from 1,400,000 to 200,000 words, without scalping it of all meaning.

Editor Saunders' biggest cut was the entire last half of the work (barring a few excerpts), which deals with the Eastern Empire centered in Constantinople. Except for a final chapter, the story now closes where Gibbon once intended to end it, with the fall of the Western Empire. Into the basket, too, went nearly all of Gibbon's footnotes, by actual count almost a quarter of the original history. Wherever Editor Saunders had to snip the narrative line, he spliced it together with summaries. His estimate of the final collaboration: "96% Gibbon and 4% Saunders."

The Portable Gibbon preserves what has kept best in Gibbon: his sly wit, his stately prose rhythms, his knack for making the mummies of history sit up on the printed page and kick off their wrappings, and his intoxication with the grandeur of Rome. Not a philosopher of history in the vein of Spengler, Toynbee and Sorokin, but a true son of the Age of Reason, Gibbon blamed Rome's downfall on the "triumph of barbarism and religion."* His dim view of Christianity shocked his own and successive generations.

Equally shocking to later expurgators. e.g., Thomas Bowdler, were Gibbon's racy reflections on imperial sex life. Of the Empress Theodora he wrote: "After exhausting the arts of sensual pleasure she most ungratefully murmured against the parsimony of Nature," adding in a footnote, "She wished for a fourth altar on which she might pour libations to the god of love." No bowdlerizer, Editor Saunders lets Gibbon have his say.

*Spengler, Toynbee and Sorokin respectively blame "civilization," "inherent defects," and "Sensatism" (roughly, materialism). Other ideas range from malaria to birth control.

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