sardonic footnote

And here Gibbon backs up one of Poe’s remarks:

“M. Voltaire, unsupported by either fact or probability, has generously bestowed the Canary Islands on the Roman empire.”

Unsupported by either fact or probability!

a Gibbon classic

This is one of my favorite passages in the whole history– especially the final phrase:

“The ambition of the Romans was confined to the land; nor was that warlike people ever actuated by the enterprising spirit which had prompted the navigators of Tyre, of Carthage, and even of Marseilles, to enlarge the bounds of the world, and to explore the most remote coasts of the ocean. To the Romans the ocean remained an object of terror rather than of curiosity…”

It’s vintage Gibbon, and we can be thankful to have as many pages by him as we do.

On a minor point, notice his use of the word “which” in the passage above. Today we are harassed by the “which/that” police, and any mainstream present-day editor would force Gibbon to write “the enterprising spirit THAT had prompted the navigators”.

I once consulted Fowler on this point, and even he had no clear rules, just offering a vague injunction that it was impermissible to use which and that interchangeably. I wish we were simply allowed to use them interchangeably again. The importance of having an abundance of synonyms for good literary style is badly underrated. It is important to vary the way of saying the same thing to avoid mental fatigue. Moreover, a word does not just point to a concept, but is also a material entity of greater or lesser sonority and rhythmic grace. Some words work better with certain neighbors, others with different ones.

ancient Alexandria

It’s strange that I didn’t do this much earlier, but I finally went and found a good general map of ancient Alexandria, and it differs in certain respects from the oral reports of guides that I took at face value for some reason.

My sense had always been that there was currently less land area to the city than there is now, but there is significantly more. The current shape of central Alexandria is a half-moon bay. But in fact, in ancient times the left-hand side of the half moon seems to have been an island, linked with the mainland by a narrow causeway. The lighthouse was just a few meters to the east of the island (where Fort Qaitbey is now).

The area where all my hotels are was right in the thick of things, and it’s amazing to think of what world-historic celebrities walked on that same ground.

It looks as though the Jewish Quarter was pretty close to where the current Library is (though oddly, no one seems to have any idea where the ancient Library of Alexandria was– the story I’ve heard is that when Nixon was President he visited Alexandria, asked where the Library used to be, and the Egyptians realized embarrassedly that nobody knew, hence the idea to build a new one).