Chapter II: Of the Union and Internal Prosperity of the Roman Empire in the Age of the Antonines

[nwhyte]

Available here, here and here, though again I was able to use my Wordsworth condensed edition (which will see me clear to the end of Chapter IX).

1) Best line

Slimmer pickings here than last time. But this nicely encapsulates the chapter and perhaps the whole book: It was scarcely possible that the eyes of contemporaries should discover in the

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Part 2

[swisstone]

Antonine literature: Here Gibbon is led by the biases of his sources, and of contemporary attitudes to ancient literature, and of plain survival. Latin literature seems to have had a flurry right at the beginning of the second century, with the likes of Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, and Suetonius. After that, major works in Latin seem few and far between. This doesn't mean that there wasn't literature within the Roman empire - but almost all of it was in Greek, which became the literary language of the empire. This used to be explained as a product of a Greek intellectual resurgence modern scholars titled the 'Second Sophistic', though some people like Tim Whitmarsh are now arguing that this didn't really exist as a major intellectual movement (as opposed to a philosophical school which is how the term was applied in antiquity); I've not decided which way I go on this argument. In any case, this was the time of Plutarch, Pausanias, Lucian, and the Greek novelists, all of whom wrote in Greek. What this has meant in terms of posterity is that these authors have always been somewhat neglected, because the great works of Greek literature are perceived to be those of the fifth and fourth centuries BC. This notion, which was already being promulgated in the second century AD, has meant that Greek works of the imperial period tended not to be copied, and so didn't survive, and when they did, they are often considered lesser works of literature, and so a notion grows of the second and third centuries representing a period of intellectual decline.