Mr. Beck muses on a passage of Gibbon:
This, ladies and gentlemen, comes with all emphases original at pp. 682-683 of volume I of Oliphant Smeaton’s edition of “The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire” (Modern Library — Random House). It precipitates this footnote:
“Socrates acknowledges that the heresy of Arius proceeded from his strong desire to embrace an opinion the most diametrically opposite to that of Sabellius.”
Do not, dear readers, confabulate this Socrates — the late fourth century writer — with the Greek sage of some seven-plus centuries earlier. I’m just telling you: Gibbon simply presses on as if one knows these things.
I too have Gibbon cum Smeaton featured prominently on my bookcase.
Good old Oliphant Smeaton, product of an age when Oliphant was accepted as acceptable first name, and not reduced to a halfing’s wonder–and he writes like it. He finds plenty to correct in Gibbon, but such is the progress of knowledge that his corrections need many corrections themselves–and sometimes Gibbon turns out to have been more right than Smeaton.
But half the joy of Gibbon is his footnotes, where he feels himself free (even more than in the main text, where his own opinions shine out on almost every page) to snark at passing pedants, praise obscure scholars, damn unreliable chroniclers and rhetoricians, relate a life history in one paragraph, consider whether an obscure city is located in this province or that province of what was then the Ottoman Empire or the fragments of Italy, or, in summing up the knowledge of that era on one topic or another, compress more information than might be found in some entire Ph.D. dissertations–the trimmings of a narrative that manages to cover the history of almost all Eurasia as it flowed over twelve centuries. The only real shortcut he allowed himself was to elide much of later Byzantine history on the grounds that all those scheming Byzantine emperors were much of a muchness. It’s a wonder that he kept it as brief as he does, and probably no historian of our time, even if they accumulated the necessary erudition, could come close to repeating the feat. It is one of the pinnacles of the Enlightenment. And that’s not taking into account his achievement as a literary stylist, a summation of the best the 1700s could offer, and a model for almost every writer for the next hundred years.
July 16, 2009 at 5:13 pm |
[...] This post adds a little (kishnevi’s assessment of Smeaton’s aptitude strikes me as about right), though more detailed information about the man seems relatively hard to come by. He was an editor of some renown, but not enough to make Wikipedia, yet. Hmmm. [...]