Decadence and Roman Historiography
by Shushma Malik
Abstract: Decadence was not a word used by the historians of ancient Rome during classical antiquity, but the concepts, anxieties, and fears encapsulated by it are without question present in their works. Ancient historians such as Livy, Sallust, Tacitus, and Appian describe an idealized past in order to draw a contrast with an immoral, inferior present. Spurred on by literary accounts from antiquity, Enlightenment authors such as Montesquieu, a political theorist, and Edward Gibbon, a historian and Member of Parliament, were particularly interested in studying Rome to learn the symptoms of imperial decline. Thus, this chapter explores the language of decadence in the early histories of the Roman Empire, up to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, including why later historians such as Niebuhr and Mommsen wished to challenge this language (present from antiquity) and disentwine decadence from Roman imperial history for good.`
Chapter in Decadence and Literature, edited by Jane Desmarais and David Weir, Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp. 30-46.
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