ABSTRACT
Gibbon saw peace as then preserved by political and cultural unity at continental level. He saw that unity as upheld by a continental elite imbued with a philosophic agnosticism more encompassing and empathetic than the moral arrogance of his own day, whether emanating from the religious sectarians or the Voltairean atheists.2 He felt this Pax Romana was everything the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century could have been.3 Yet in almost the same breath, he recognised the inherent ‘instability of a happiness which depended on the character of a single man’ – whoever occupied the imperial throne at a given time.4 The two that bracketed his ‘golden age’, Titus Domitian and Lucius Commodus, were summed up by Gibbon as timid yet cruel. Each fell to an assassin. Gibbon’s confused attitude to arbitrary autocracy is epitomised by his modish celebration of ‘the incomparable’ Frederick the Great, modish in that the likes of Voltaire and Goethe similarly subscribed.
