The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol 1

Title: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol 1

Author: Edward Gibbon

Publisher: Everyman’s Library, 1993 (First published 1776)

ISBN: 9781857150957

Pages: 567

 

I have always considered the Decline and Fall as a unique reading experience which I would undertake at least once before my life reaches its end. Celebrated as the greatest historical work in English, it had always allured me as a beacon of scholarship and masterful prose through snippets and quotations in other books. Our public library had only an incomplete set and however long I waited, the missing volume was never replaced. That’s why these full volume hardbacks were purchased from Amazon at a price which caused some heartburn. Anyway, since I may never read a book of this stature again, I took the plunge. Edward Gibbon is the first modern European historian who wrote these volumes while the East India Company was consolidating its hold on Bengal. The first volume handling the period between the death of Trajan and ascent of Constantine was published in 1776 and the last of the six came out in 1788. It was challenged all the time but no criticism has ever been able to sink it.

 

The Introduction to the volume presents Gibbon as an uncertain author in the initial stages of his career who was not sure about what to write and where to begin. French was the language of choice for respected company in Europe. Gibbon wrote the first section of his ‘Liberty of the Swiss’ in French and showed it to his mentor David Hume, the Scottish philosopher. Hume appreciated the effort but asked his disciple to write in English. It was the time the Seven Years’ War had ended with England’s glorious victory over France. Canada was annexed to the British Empire. Along with the future USA, Hume predicted ‘a superior stability and endurance to the English language’. If not for this intervention, Gibbon might have written the ‘Decline and Fall’ in French and thus deprived English literature of a great monument. The Swiss episode was later abandoned. The author decided to write on Rome at the end of a grand tour to Italy, the climax of which was a visit to Rome. Gibbon notes in his memoirs on how he finalized the object of his study: “It was at Rome, on the 15^th of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the capitol, while the bare-footed friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started in my mind”.

 

Considering the early-modern period in which this work was written, various axioms of historiography were being evolved. In medieval Europe, religious scholars handled history as well and they assigned divine providence as the reason for movement of historical forces. Civil historians could not override this methodology with ease. They postulated a first and second cause thereby admitting to God’s agency the first and main cause of history. But they argued that in order to achieve His ends, God allowed the operation of secondary causes which were purely secular and could be properly studied and judged by unaided human reason. Gibbon sought to answer the great historical question which haunted the enlightened philosophers: why did the civilization of antiquity fail and could it all happen again? He introduced into England the new constructive historical method suggested by Giannone and Montesquieu. Gibbon concluded that the Roman Empire, during its fall, excluded the public spirit which is the vitalizing principle necessary to the health of a society.

 

The Roman Empire and its aftermath spread through history like an overarching continuity that nourished and developed the state of being in Europe for centuries to come. Rome’s grandeur is not measured by geographical extent alone. Alexander’s and Chengiz Khan’s empires were definitely larger. But the firm edifice of Roman power was raised and preserved by the wisdom of ages. The obedient provinces were united by laws and arts. The general principle of government was wise, simple and beneficent. Rome’s fall began when the soldiers became too powerful to be controlled by the emperor or the senate. Stability immediately gave way to military coups that occurred at the slightest irritation of the troops who went on to kill the reigning monarch and assign the purple to a puppet of their choice. The Praetorian Guards whose licentious fury was the first symptomatic cause of the decline of the Roman Empire. They were instituted by Augustus to guard his person, to awe the senate and to prevent rebellion. In the luxurious idleness of Rome, created by the fighting efficiency of the legionaries who guarded the empire’s frontiers, their pride was nourished by the sense of their irresistible weight. Their modus operandi involved getting donatives for themselves from the newly selected emperor. In 193 CE, they disposed Pertinax from the throne and auctioned it to the highest bidder. Didius Julianus purchased it with the best offer of recompense to the guards. But he also was removed in a violent manner by another group within a matter of weeks.

 

Paganism was the dominant religion in the Roman Empire. It was not at all organized and went about its functions without dogma or the authority of a revealed book. It worshipped numerous deities but was inclusive. The devout polytheist admitted with implicit faith the different religions of the earth. The Greek, the Roman and the barbarian, as they met before their respective altars, easily persuaded themselves that under various names and with various ceremonies, they adored the same deity. This syncretic religious landscape was vitiated with the arrival of Christianity which asserted itself to be the only true religion and believed its god to be the only true one. If they had stopped at that, things would have been probably easier for them. But they went on to abuse the native religion and proclaimed their deities to be demons or forms of devil. It was at this point that they were persecuted. Christians refused to participate in the civil administration or the military defence of the empire, which was attacked on every side by barbarians. However, the Christian proselytizers avoided any contact with learned pagan philosophers and mingled only with the rude and illiterate crowd who were vulnerable. Gibbon observes that illustrious men like Seneca, Tacitus, elder and younger Pliny or Marcus Antoninus overlooked or rejected ‘the perfection of the Christian system’. Even those who condescended to mention the Christians consider them as perverse and obstinate enthusiasts without being able to produce a single argument that could engage the attention of men of sense and learning (p.564).

 

This volume ends with the ascension of Constantine who was the first emperor to embrace Christianity and was instrumental in transforming it as the state religion later on. Gibbon analyses the reasons and situations which prompted the new intolerant and dogmatic faith to take such strong roots in the empire. He lists out five major causes for this change: 1) the inflexible and intolerant zeal 2) doctrine of a future life 3) miraculous powers ascribed to the primitive church 4) pure and austere morals and 5) union and discipline of the Christian society. Early Christians were certain of their sins and doubtful of their salvation who shunned anything that delighted the senses. The censures of luxury included avoidance of false hair, fine garments, music and vases of gold and silver. The virtue of the primitive Christians was thus guarded by poverty and ignorance. Only about five per cent of the people had adopted Christianity before the important conversion of Constantine. But their habits of faith, zeal and union seemed to multiply their number and contributed to their future increase. This also served to render their actual strength more apparent and formidable.

 

This is a great work of modern scholarship and a philosophical interpretation of the most important turning point in European history. Gibbon’s calm narrative is of rich ornamentation with masterly power and lucidity. The unfortunate Valerian, who was the only Roman emperor to be captured alive in a war with Persia and subjected to great humiliation, and the rebellious Zenobia are the two personalities who attract readers’ attention in this first volume. This volume is also endowed with a brilliant introduction by Hugh Trevor-Ropes. This book contains only the first fifteen chapters of the series, of which chapter 15 was especially criticized by the church for its truly factual description of the activities of the early church. Altogether, this is an excellent groundwork for what is to follow in the other volumes.

 

The book is highly recommended.

 

Rating: 5 Star

 

Savarkar – Echoes from a Forgotten Past

Title: Savarkar – Echoes from a Forgotten Past 1883-1924

Author: Vikram Sampath

Publisher: Penguin Viking, 2019 (First)

ISBN: 9780670090303

Pages: 575

 

The struggle for India’s independence contained two distinct streaks from the very beginning. One stream followed a conciliatory approach towards the rulers by petitioning and putting gentle pressure through influencing public opinion. The other followed violent means, often physically eliminating top-ranking bureaucrats and sowing terror in the minds of administrators. The British naturally favoured the former and brutally suppressed the other. The Indian National Congress followed the nonviolent path and revolutionaries like Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, Aurobindo or Bhagat Singh strode the violent one. Not that the Congress protests were always peaceful. But the big difference was that the officials who were killed by Congress workers were always small fry – like the ordinary policemen at Chauri Chaura who were burnt alive – and hence expendable for the British. The revolutionaries targeted the big fish like district collectors, police superintendents and even the viceroy himself. So the British crushed the revolutionaries and sapped their spirit. Savarkar was transported to Andamans with fifty years of hard labour, Aurobindo was exiled and Bhagat Singh sent to the gallows. Finally, they handed power over to Congress and left India. Then came the strangest part. Congress, which virtually got power on a platter, assumed monopoly rights over the freedom struggle cleverly erasing and airbrushing the revolutionaries and falsely inflating the contributions of the Nehru dynasty. Savarkar was one such fighter who was relegated to the footnotes of fabricated official histories. This book tells his story and is the first part of a two-volume series. Vikram Sampath is a Bengaluru-based historian and author. He has doctorate degrees in history and music and is currently a senior fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi.

 

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar is the intellectual fountainhead of the ideology of Hindutva and also one of the most contentious political thinkers. Accounts of his life oscillate between glorifying hagiographies to reproachful demonization. However, his thoughts on social structure were highly progressive. He was an atheist and staunch rationalist. He opposed the caste system and dismissed cow worship as mere superstition. Savarkar advocated unification of Hindu society. However, he stoutly opposed unreasonable Muslim demands and became a sore thumb for the Muslim League in pre-partition days and for the Left-Islamist ecosystem in independent India. His ideology did not involve hatred for the enemy. He considered the British as enemies only till the time they subjugated India. Once India was liberated, they should be accepted as friends and fellow beings. Similarly, the animosity between Hindus and Muslims was necessitated in the past when Muslims were aggressive invaders and rulers and the Hindus the submissive ruled. But in the present situation, the equation changed to that of brotherhood. Both are the children of the soil of India. While driving home this point, Savarkar insisted that religion should not be above country.

 

Savarkar’s early activities are given due prominence in the book. He founded a revolutionary outfit called ‘Abhinav Bharat’ which professed violent struggle to achieve freedom from the foreign masters. It demanded total independence – purna Swaraj – in the first decade of the twentieth century which preceded similar demands from the Congress by three full decades. The organisation was modelled on the revolutionary groups in Ireland and Russia. All the members were not known to each other to prevent leakage of personal details. Giuseppe Mazzini, the Italian nationalist who strived for the unification of Italy, was Savarkar’s hero. He translated Mazzini's biography to Marathi as an inspiration to young men. The similarities between India and Italy were manifold. Like our country, Italy was also divided into several kingdoms under the suzerainty of Austria.

 

In 1906, the young Vinayak managed to obtain a scholarship offered by Shyamji Krishna Varma and sailed to London. He took up residence in India House which was the favourite dwelling place of other revolutionaries. Sampath presents a detailed view of Savarkar’s activities and the minute attention he gave to exploit every loophole provided by British law and custom. Britain celebrated the suppression of the 1857 Rebellion with much fanfare on its fiftieth anniversary in 1907. Large gatherings and adulatory speeches filled the air, but Savarkar shocked them all by convening a parallel meeting at India House and exalting the rebel leaders who were demonized in the British narrative. In fact, Savarkar coined the term ‘First War of Independence’ for the 1857 struggle. Taking sustenance from the spirit of 1857, he preached Swaraj and Swadharma – love for one’s country and religion – as the two cornerstones of Indian revolution. This conceptualization was at variance with Marxist hypothesis and made him different among other European revolutionaries. His work made him a target of surveillance by secret police.

 

Savarkar’s life in England for four years was the last in his life as a free young man. This part of the book makes for poignant reading. He continued to write incendiary articles and smuggle modern weapons to India. He also prepared a manual to make and use bombs. Ganesh Savarkar – Vinayak’s elder brother – was also an eager member of his revolutionary society. He was arrested in India on charges of involvement in subversionary activities and awarded transportation for life to the Andamans. The bomb manual was also recovered from him. Meanwhile, an Indian youth named Madan Lal Dhingra shot dead Curzon Wyllie in London because this officer was suspected to be snooping on Indian revolutionaries (He is not to be confused with Lord Curzon, the viceroy of India). Savarkar’s hand was seen in this incident also. In 1909 Arthur Jackson, district collector of Nashik, was shot dead by an Abhinav Bharat activist which was thought to be in retaliation for Jackson’s involvement in sentencing Ganesh Savarkar. Vinayak was arrested in London and extradited to India. He escaped from the ship while it berthed at Marseilles, France, but the French policeman who caught him handed him back to his pursuers. This caused a great diplomatic hue and cry. Savarkar was eventually punished with double transportation for life which meant fifty years of incarceration. All his property was forfeited and auctioned, including his spectacles and personal copy of the Bhagavad Gita. These were later ‘mercifully’ returned to him to use as government property.

 

The foremost accusation leveled against Savarkar today is that he had sent several mercy petitions to the government in which he regretted his revolutionary work and pledged loyalty to the government in future. This book approaches this touchy subject in an objective manner. The author admits that Savarkar had indeed behaved in a way that smacked of a weak spirit during his prison term that dragged on for years and years. The book suggests two reasons for this. It is quite evident that being locked up in a jail on a remote island with no prospect of release before death, this was the language to be used in order to obtain remission or release. It is obviously no use reiterating revolutionary credo in a mercy petition. Savarkar had no intention of honouring these pledges to a colonial master taken under duress. So liberals portray it as a sign of cowardice while it could be a tactical move to get out of jail. Jail history shows that even after the petitions, he continued strikes in prison and given punishment for it. This does not indicate the temperament of a man who was willing to cooperate with the British. He was given back-breaking work such as grinding oil mills. The prisoner was held in the place of a bullock and forced to go round and round to extract coconut oil. Jailers treated him as the ‘father of unrest’ in the Andaman and he was forced to continue the same work routine even after years of prison life when other prisoners’ conditions were slightly relaxed and they began to earn some money.

 

The author has been eminently able to bring forward Savarkar’s transformation from a radical revolutionary to a sober organizer of Hindu society during imprisonment. The Hindu community was poorly organized and disunited that it was very easy to subjugate them. They were perpetually divided along caste lines which made them doubly vulnerable to attacks. This was most painfully obvious in the Cellular Jail. On entry into the cell, the first act that was committed for a Hindu prisoner was to cut his sacred thread while Muslims were allowed to keep their beards and the Sikhs their hair. The Hindu prisoners were kept under the most bigoted Muslim warders and jamadars, most of them Pathans who were actually thrilled to brutalize a kafir (p.272). The warders forbade Hindu prisoners from reading their religious scriptures pronouncing them indecent and dispersed the gathering that read such books. Religious conversion of prisoners also went on in the sly by threat of torture or coercion. Savarkar returned several of them back to the Hindu fold.

 

Savarkar coined the term ‘Hindutva’ which is the guiding principle of BJP which rules India at present. Sampath spends some time in lucidly explaining the concept to readers. Hindutva is beyond mere religious adherence. Hinduism is only a derivative, a fraction of Hindutva. Inability to understand this difference has given rise to much misunderstanding among sister communities. Adherents of foreign religions can also become a part of Hindutva if they love this land not only as a pitrbhu (fatherland) but also as a punyabhu (holy land). This was a test Muslims supporting the restitution of the Khilafat failed. The Ottoman sultan was a religious leader of the Muslims, but the Khilafat campaign also betrayed the supra-national allegiance Islam claimed from its believers. Hindutva, on the other hand, is a term of ethnic nationalism and the name matters a lot to Indians that can even be identified as the first layer of Indian identity. It has immense relevance for Indian society. Those who subscribe to this concept are one; they can intermarry without caste considerations. Savarkar quoted many examples from mythology to prove that inter-caste marriages were common in ancient times.

 

This book is the first of two volumes in the series, covering the period from his birth in 1883 to release from prison in 1924 after spending 14 years behind the bars. But this was not freedom, rather a change to house arrest. The book contains a good sampling of his writings and poems. A notable feature is the author’s level-headed handling of the narrative. It is definitely not a eulogy. Sampath does not stoop to uncritical adulation. The character-traces are objective and logical. Having completed the first part, readers feel the anticipation for what is in store in the second and final part when Savarkar begins his real work in India. A lot of research has gone into the making of this book. A curious thing to note is that Savarkar subscribed to the Aryan invasion theory which was quite fashionable in his time and supported by British-sponsored academia. The book is easy to read though a bit large.

 

The book is highly recommended.

 

Rating: 4 Star

 

The Pandemic Century

Title: The Pandemic Century – A History of Global Contagion from the Spanish Flu to Covid-19

Author: Mark Honigsbaum

Publisher: WH Allen, 2020 (First)

ISBN: 9780753558287

Pages: 357

 

Natural and manmade disasters strike human societies every now and then. As the world is just getting back on rails after the disastrous spread of Covid-19, other infectious diseases like monkey pox threaten from some corners. Similarly, when the threat of a major war was ebbing after the last one in 2003 Iraq, Russia invaded Ukraine. War and pestilence have been legendary evils that afflict mankind. This book narrates the major outbreaks of diseases in the century from the end of World War I in 1918. The end of the long drawn-out War coincided with the outbreak of Spanish Flu which killed 50 million people across the globe. The disease’s spread was greatly enhanced by the demobilized soldiers returning home from the warfronts. The book is about the events, processes and the reasons why epidemics strike despite our best efforts to predict and prepare for them. Mark Honigsbaum is a medical historian and journalist specializing in the history of infectious disease. He is a lecturer in the department of journalism at the City University of London.

 

Influenza struck in 1918 when there was no idea of what a virus was and how it caused diseases. Bacteria were known, but antibiotics lay two decades in the future. Convalescence at a comfortable location, eating good food and avoiding mental tension were the prescribed antidotes to serious illnesses. As such, such an infection was de facto death sentence for the poor who could not afford the cost of recuperation. Concentration of recruits from rural and urban districts in overcrowded barracks led to the pandemic’s unusual characteristics. Contrary to normal, people of the age group 20-40 died most. It was years later that it was understood that it was caused by a virus. Though influenza was a viral infection, bacteria of the Bacillus family were also identified in many people. Mysteriously, these bacteria were not found in other patients. This contradiction baffled many researchers pursuing a cure. It was only later that it was realized that this bacteria was only a fellow traveler. In some cases it caused death, but the primary agent was the H1N1 virus.

 

Doom-mongers usually cite the occurrence of new and exotic diseases as a corollary to growth in science and technology. Conspiracy theorists allege that all major epidemics are caused by leakage from bio-warfare labs or deliberately spread by high-end pharma companies for commercial gain. Honigsbaum presents a simple but logical explanation for the outbreaks. Humans exert powerful evolutionary pressure on micro-parasites due to their changing social and cultural behaviours or through their impact on the environment of animal and insect ecologies. Sometimes these pressures select for a particularly virulent strain of the parasite or present it with an opportunity to colonize a new host and extend its ecologic range. Technologies and changes to the built environment designed to improve hygiene and ameliorate the conditions of life are giving rise to new threats to health and wellbeing. Legionella pneumophilia has been around for millennia, but it was not until we began building cities and equipping buildings with indoor plumbing and hot water systems that we presented the bacterium with a new ecological niche in which to prosper. This bacterium causes the Legionnaires’ disease which is spread through cooling towers of central air-conditioning systems in large buildings. The part on infections from pet birds and animals warns readers of the risks associated with close intimacy to pets. Parrots and parakeets experience mild infection of psittacosis when young but would never show any symptoms in the wild. In captivity – crowded, filthy and without exercise or sunlight – a flare up of the infection is to be expected. Psittacosis, or parrot fever, can be fatal to humans.

 

Honigsbaum notes with a touch of warning that new diseases come out all the time and it is particularly ironic when medical science practitioners unknowingly assume that they have obtained all knowledge that is there to know regarding diseases and its aetiological agents. AIDS was the epidemic that drove home the lesson that despite vaccines, antibiotics and other medical technologies, infectious disease had not been banished but posed a continuing and present threat to technologically advanced societies. If AIDS had struck in the 1950s, scientists would not have identified it, as the contemporary understanding of retroviruses was very limited. As such, the epidemic broke out at precisely the moment when scientists working in oncology and retrovirology specialists were inclined to believe that a retrovirus was the cause and possessed the tools and technology to test the hypothesis. This argument is ideal food for conspiracy theorists who claim that the HIV virus leaked out from a research lab. However, we have to keep in mind that coincidence is the one thing these people cannot cope with. This brings us to a discussion on the methodology of science and why existing theories have to be revised occasionally. The author elaborates that there is no such thing as absolute certainty in science. Paradigms are constantly being refined by new observations and if anomalies are found, it may be discarded and a new paradigm may come to supplant it. The best scientists welcome anomalies and uncertainty, as this is the way scientific knowledge advances.

 

The book discusses several outbreaks of deadly diseases that shook the medical community at a fundamental level and which produced anxious moments for the administrators. All of them affected the developed world or in cases such as Ebola, had the potential to cause infections in the developed world. Diseases that are endemic to the underdeveloped world are not seen here. What is repeatedly stressed however is the ease with which a contagious disease that entered a human body can reach any part of the world in a matter of just three days, helped by air travel and interconnectivity of the various parts of the globe. In the case of the 2002 SARS outbreak in Hong Kong, the disease infected several people in a particular floor of the hotel in which they were staying. Before it affected people in other floors, the disease reached Canada as one person flew there. The book was published in early 2020, so only a brief mention of the arrival of Covid-19 is given. The author expresses his concern at the prospective death toll in India where he assumes that the infrastructure is nonexistent to handle a disease of this magnitude. Left liberal activists of India had raised this concern with false arguments which the author is unable to spot. It contains an opinion piece by noted novelist Arundhati Roy that ‘although Kerala boasts 38,000 government hospitals, the same is not true of other Indian states where the public health system has been starved of funds and few tests are being conducted’ (p.278). If you do a search, you’ll find that Kerala has only 1200 hospitals and would be struck by the disconnect these so called ‘intellectuals’ have with reality and reason. In the end, India ended up doing far better than most developed nations in death toll, hospitalization and vaccination.

 

The book is recommended.

 

Rating: 3 Star