Below Deck

Having rhapsodized and apostrophized and otherwise sung the praises of the Rockaway Ferry yesterday (see below), in my loyalty I rushed down to Wall Street in torrential rain to get on the 5:30 boat. It was the first time ever that I sat inside. I am exaggerating when I say there was “torrential rain,” but only because inside the boat there was a TV tuned to the news and they were giving the weather, which we could see perfectly well for ourselves out the ferry windows, and the weatherman was saying (according to the captions) that there was now or would be later “torrential rain” somewhere. The boat sped through the harbor, lurching over the waves, and water sloshed up against the windows and I felt ever so slightly as if I just might be seasick . . . I didn’t dare go up top for my customary beer, choosing instead to cling to my tabletop, turning my eyes occasionally onto the horizon (still visible) for stability.

Probably my choice of reading matter didn’t help any. I had forgotten my current book yesterday morning—I am on a Jonathan Ames kick, and he can be so perverted and scatological (yet hilarious) in his personal essays that they might have helped distract me—so on the way out of the office I grabbed a review copy of “Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World,” by Glenn Stout. The book begins, for reasons that will become clear, with a description of the Slocum disaster, the worst maritime disaster in New York history. On June 15, 1904, more than a thousand women and children drowned when the General Slocum, an excursion boat that was carrying a party of German Lutherans up the East River, caught fire. The captain and crew made all the wrong decisions, and none of the lifesaving equipment worked—it was ancient or inaccessible, and hadn’t been inspected in years. Women were not taught to swim in those days. Most of them drowned in shallow water off North Brother Island. Two chapters later, in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, Trudy Ederle (born October 23, 1905) learns to swim.

The ferry arrived safely and not a moment too soon at Riis Landing, and rain fell well into the night, though once we were on land it did not seem quite so torrential. I went to bed haunted by visions of maritime disaster. If it got really bad out there in the harbor, it would be so much worse to be on (or under) water than it would to be in a subway.

This morning, I reverted to the A train. Rather than continue with “Young Woman and the Sea,” I read this week's Wave. In a letter-to-the-editor, the paper’s historical columnist, Emil Lucev, wrote eloquently about, of all things, the Slocum disaster. The letter ends, “In nautical circles, the General Slocum is known as the ‘Poor Man’s Titanic’! The captain, William H. Van Schaick, was sent to prison at Sing Sing, New York … and was pardoned by President William Howard Taft in 1912. Shortly thereafter, the real Titanic went down with another great loss of life. The cause was ice, not fire, but the reasons were similar.”

Transition

So today, it turns out, is the A train's seventy-fifth birthday. There was a piece in the Times— "Longest, and Possibly Coolest, A Train Still a-Thrummin at 75," by Manny Fernandez. No mention of its relevance to the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, however.

Last Friday, I took my last one-seat ride of the season with the four chatty guys on the 7:59 out of Rockaway Park. They sit in the first car, commenting on the news of the day. The one with the most annoying voice reminds me of Cliff the Mailman on "Cheers." A woman applied her makeup. A guy was watching a DVD—"Heroes"—when a willowy pregnant black woman got on at Utica (where else?). He did not hesitate: he stuck out his hand and tapped her and offered her his seat. "Thank you," she said, accepting. He stood against the door at the head of the train, balancing and bobbing as he held his portable DVD player and watched his movie. He got a seat at Jay Street.

The population on the train changes drastically when school starts. Suddenly kids are lugging physics textbooks. A student sat next to me, with his back to me, for part of the ride: he was well turned out, in a black-on-black Yankees cap, worn backwards, with the sticker still on (size 7 1/2, but it was purposely too large), oversize white T-shirt and black jeans, a black North Face backpack, and sapphire-blue headphones. Once the train goes underground, and cell-phone coverage stops, it's really kind of intimate, being sealed underground together.

So today I was back in the driver's seat, parked in a Monday/Thursday 8:30-10 A.M. spot. I got there at about 9:20, having parked last night in a commercial zone that was good till 8 this morning, then moved to a meter for an hour and a quarter. I got the last spot on the block. My studies of the Wave this summer paid off, as I now that I know it's illegal to paint your curb yellow, and I have no fear of parking at a yellow curb. This yellow curb extended the entrance to a parking lot, and it was nerve-racking to watch in my rearview mirror as S.U.V.s turned into the lot, missing me by inches. There is a notice posted at the parking lot: "We are not responsible for nicks or scratches to plastic or painted bumpers." I just hope I still have both tail-lights when I return on Thursday.

Martyrs

It happens every year: by Labor Day I’ve had it with the commute from Rockaway; I’m lucky I don’t have to do this all year round. Still, I can never suppress a little surge of nostalgia for the A train, even as I’m riding on it. So I stay at the beach an extra week, and usually I regret it.

Yesterday’s train had signal problems, and I didn’t have Gibbon with me. Last week, I came to a good stopping place—page 505—having finished the famous chapters on the early Christians, and suspended Gibbon for the season. I had hoped to get to the conversion of Constantine, but was distressed to read, on page 496, that “the motives of his conversion, as they may variously be deduced from benevolence, from policy, from conviction, or from remorse . . . will form a very interesting and important chapter in the second volume of this history.” It turns out that Gibbon was referring to the second volume as published in his lifetime, which begins with Chapter XX, a mere 129 pages away, but the second volume of my three-volume Modern Library edition is 451 pages in the future. The edges of Volume One are getting frayed, by the way. Either the A train is hard on books or the Modern Library is not the quality product I thought I it was. (Does "modern" turn out to mean "disposable"?)

So today I was carrying Gibbon, a paperback biography of Cicero, the bound galleys of a book by a guy who built a vineyard in Tuscany, two notebooks, and yesterday’s mail: three bills, an invitation to a wine tasting, and a notice of an increase in the late fee for co-op maintenance. (Have I mentioned that I bought a new bag just for Gibbon? It’s a luscious oversize brown woven-leather Italian shoulder bag, acquired at an end-of-season sale at a boutique in Tribeca, and it’s heavy even when Gibbon isn’t in it.) When the shuttle got to Broad Channel, the platform there was ominously crowded. One of my fellow-commuters, a beefy middle-aged guy who I think works at John’s Pizza—at any rate, he wears a John’s Pizza T-shirt, though today, like everyone else, he was in back-to-school mode, in a long-sleeved black T-shirt—got on his cell phone. “There’s five hundred people on the platform at Broad Channel,” he told someone. “I’ve never seen anything like this. There has to be something wrong. Yesterday it took forever. . . . Is there another way to get to West Fourth?”

It was the first morning since the flood that there were no seats on the train, and there was not much chance of one opening up, since the train tends to fill rather than empty as it approaches Manhattan. “What do we have for dinner tomorrow, Friday, and Saturday?” the guy from John’s Pizza went on into his phone, effectively addressing the entire car from his position at the head of the train, with his back to the door. “We’ve got the mustache pie, right?” Standing on the A train, I was surprised to discover in myself new depths of optimism as I realized that the door gave me an excellent view to the east over Jamaica Bay (usually I break my neck trying to get a window seat looking west, at the funky backwater of Hamilton Beach). Since the weekend, when I took the boat down along the unpopulated edge of this island at high tide, I have been obsessed with seeing the lay of the land at low tide. You never really believe that land is there, under the water, unless you see it—or run aground on it, which I’d rather avoid. This strip, called the Raunt, used to be full of houses on stilts—summer bungalows and fishermen’s shacks—and even had its own train station on the old Rockaway line. It is now part of the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, where last weekend I spotted a lesser yellow legs and some khaki-legged birders who had seen a Hudsonian godwit and a phalarope. But I digress.

Gibbon is quite droll on the subject of martyrdom. “I have purposely refrained from describing the particular sufferings and deaths of the Christian martyrs,” he writes, near the end of Chapter XVI. “It would have been an easy task, from the history of Eusebius, from the declamations of Lactantius, and from the most ancient acts, to collect a long series of horrid and disgusting pictures, and to fill many pages with racks and scourges, with iron hooks and red-hot beds, and with all the variety of tortures which fire and steel, savage beasts, and more savage executioners, could inflict on the human body. These melancholy scenes might be enlivened by a crowd of visions and miracles destined either to delay the death, to celebrate the triumph, or to discover the relics of those canonised saints who suffered for the name of Christ. But I cannot determine what I ought to transcribe, till I am satisfied how much I ought to believe.” And he doesn’t believe much. He suspects that the persecution of the Christians was exaggerated (and can't resist pointing out that the Christians persecuted others in their turn). He prefers to analyze the development of the Church hierarchy along the lines of the Empire’s, and the tendency of bishops, having no temporal power, to accrue moral power.

The one martyr that Gibbon goes into detail over is Cyprian—“the zealous, the eloquent, the ambitious Cyprian”—“who governed the church, not only of Carthage, but even of Africa.” His was a dignified martyrdom, reluctantly imposed. Four emperors died by the sword during the ten years that Cyprian was bishop of Carthage. “It was only in the third year of his administration that he had reason, during a few months, to apprehend the severe edicts of Decius, the vigilance of the magistrate, and the clamours of the multitude, who loudly demanded that Cyprian, the leader of the Christians, should be thrown to the lions. Prudence suggested the necessity of a temporary retreat, and the voice of prudence was obeyed.” In other words, Cyprian got out of town.

Eight years later, he was summoned by the proconsul in Carthage, and “acquainted” with the imperial mandate that “those who had abandoned the Roman religion should immediately return to the practice of the ceremonies of their ancestors.” Cyprian declined, and was banished, but later recalled from banishment and installed in his own former gardens outside Carthage. A year later, there was a crackdown on Christians. “The bishop of Carthage was sensible that he should be singled out for one of the first victims, and the frailty of nature tempted him to withdraw himself, by a secret flight, from the danger and the honour of martyrdom;* but, soon recovering that fortitude which his character required, he returned to his gardens, and patiently expected the ministers of death.” Cyprian spent the night “custodiâ delicatâ,” according to Gibbon's Footnote No. 87 (it sounds like he had a lavish last meal). The next day, “he was led away under a guard of tribunes and centurions, without resistance and without insult, to the place of his execution, a spacious and level plain near the city, which was already filled with great numbers of spectators. His faithful presbyters and deacons were permitted to accompany their holy bishop. They assisted him in laying aside his upper garment, spread linen on the ground to catch the precious relics of his blood, and received his orders to bestow five-and-twenty pieces of gold on the executioner. The martyr then covered his face with his hands, and at one blow his head was separated from his body.”

*A footnote to a footnote from Oliphant Smeaton defends Cyprian, explaining that it was not "frailty of nature," otherwise known as fear in the face of martyrdom, that made Cyprian “conceal himself for a short period.” Rather, “he was threatened with being transported to Utica," and "it was his earnest desire to die in Carthage, that his martyrdom there might conduce to the edification of those whom he had guided during life.”

The A train makes many stops in its interminable passage through Brooklyn, and I have managed to forge some connection with most of the express stops, at least, to make the trip seem shorter. Manhattan bound, there is Euclid, which has the same name not only as the ancient Greek geometer but as a street in downtown Cleveland; there is Broadway Junction/East New York, where you can switch via a stained-glass passageway to the L train; there is Nostrand, the halfway point (I think of it as the opposite of the beach: strand/no strand); there are the three last stops before Manhattan—antepenultimate (Hoyt/Schermerhorn), penultimate (Jay Street/Borough Hall), and ultimate (High Street/Brooklyn Bridge). But there always comes a moment when the trip feels endless, and I get restless and look up to see where we are, and it never fails: Utica. My only association with Utica is another train station somewhere upstate between Syracuse and Schenectady. I understand it's on the old Erie Canal. Ancient Utica has ceased to exist altogether—who even knew there was such a place? Say what you will, Edward Gibbon, Cyprian had a point: Nobody deserves to be martyred in Utica.

L Train

I love a good thunderstorm, and the one that came through the city yesterday morning was dramatic enough to make me wish I’d made my will. I thought lightning was going to strike the tree that shades the house, and I would be crushed in my bed and then incinerated. My imagination was all inflamed by the untimely death of Carus, on the banks of the Tigris in 283 A.D., just as he was poised to conquer Persia. Gibbon quotes a letter from the imperial secretary: “Carus, our dearest emperor, was confined by sickness to his bed, when a furious tempest arose in the camp. The darkness which overspread the sky was so thick that we could no longer distinguish each other; and the incessant flashes of lightning took from us the knowledge of all that passed in the general confusion. Immediately after the most violent clap of thunder we heard a sudden cry that the emperor was dead; and it soon appeared that his chamberlains, in a rage of grief, had set fire to the royal pavilion, a circumstance which gave rise to the report that Carus was killed by lightning." Carus had two sons, Carinus and Numerian, to carry on when he was gone (though the Romans were too superstitious to pursue the invasion of Persia). If lightning struck in Rockaway, who would carry on for me?

The storm passed, and with it all thoughts of mortality. I was on the A train platform in time to score that elusive one-seat ride into Manhattan on the second-last express, at 7:39, but the train never came. Just before eight, the shuttle to Broad Channel hove into view, and we passengers, who had been left standing on the platform like fools, had to gamble on whether to hop aboard or wait now for the last express, at 7:59. “It’s not worth the risk,” I said to a woman who couldn’t make up her mind, and I hopped on the shuttle. The announcements were ominous: “There are no A trains going into Manhattan. Be prepared for a crowd at Broad Channel.” The station was not that crowded, but the A train was. Its windows were all steamed up. The conductor announced that this was a shuttle to Rockaway Boulevard. At Rockaway Boulevard, he said, “This train is going as far as Broadway Junction due to flood conditions." The flood seemed to be at Hoyt-Schermerhorn (pronounced Skimmerhorn), the antepenultimate stop before Manhattan. "If you have any other way of getting into Manhattan, get off the train,” the conductor said. Some people followed his advice, and their seats were immediately taken by those who didn’t. The spirit of adventure was upon us. There is a connection at Broadway Junction with the J and L lines, and we wanted to see what would happen. At Euclid, the conductor announced, “There is no J or L service at Broadway Junction. In other words, you will be stuck at Broadway Junction.” More commuters bailed out, freeing up more seats for the intrepid.

Broadway Junction was a classic bottleneck. A trains and C trains had emptied out there, and commuters thronged the platform and squeezed up the stairs, trying to get information (nobody knew anything) or get out on the street and catch a bus. I followed the signs for the L train, up a long ramp and a nonworking escalator. It was steaming hot out. This station, which is partly aboveground, is decorated with stained glass windows, and has digital signs, like the ones in Barcelona, announcing how many minutes before the next train. An L train was supposed to arrive in one minute. I didn’t believe it, but even misinformation was something to go on, so I crossed over to the Manhattan-bound side of the tracks and, incredibly, got a seat in an air-conditioned car on the Canarsie line. Two hours after the storm, I was in Union Square, late for my Pilates class but early enough to walk the rest of the way to work.

And so it came to pass that on the L train, in 285 A.D., Diocletian was invested with the purple. The son of slaves, he was probably originally called Docles, for his mother’s home town of Doclia, in Dalmatia. The name looks like a typographical error before its time. (It sounds like something Ned Flanders would say to Homer Simpson: “Oakley-doaklies!”) “He first lengthened it to the Grecian harmony of Diocles, and at length to the Roman majesty of Diocletianus,” Gibbon writes, in a footnote. Elsewhere, he calls Diocletian “the artful Dalmatian.”

Emperors come and go pretty fast on the subway. “Such was the unhappy condition of the Roman emperors, that, whatever might be their conduct, their fate was commonly the same. A life of pleasure or virtue, of severity or mildness, of indolence or glory, alike led to an untimely grave; and almost every reign is closed by the same disgusting repetition of treason and murder.” Just the other day, Carus's predecessor Probus had his troops draining marshes in Pannonia—which seems to correspond mostly with Hungary—on one of the hottest days of summer, when he was forced to climb a tower to escape a mutiny: "The tower was instantly forced, and a thousand swords were plunged at once into the bosom of the unfortunate Probus." But Diocletian, who reigned for twenty years, was still going strong last night on my way home, late, with the A train making all local stops and the shuttle sitting at Broad Channel, for six full minutes, because the bridge was up. It was a long, hot day for a stubborn commuter.

Zenobia on the A Train

This morning was perfect: a quick dip in the Atlantic, which was the ideal temperature—and from which I made a perfect exit, catching a not-too-wild wave onto shore, just me and the clams—then a shower to get the sand off, and enough time to eat a banana before rushing off to catch the A train. I got a window seat on the 7:59, the last express out of Rockaway Park. I saw lots of gulls and geese in the bay, and two egrets in flight, and got a glimpse of the swans in their preferred pond. I was right on schedule for a 9:30 appointment on the Upper West Side when the train came to a halt after leaving the Jay Street station in Brooklyn. The announcement, by a well-spoken woman, was polite: “Ladies and Gentlemen, due to a brake emergency on the train directly ahead of us at High Street, we are being held. As soon as the track is clear, we shall be moving. We apologize for the inconvenience.” Thank God I had Gibbon.

I set the bevel on my diver’s watch. I haven’t been diving in years, but I find it helps, when you’re afraid you’re in for a long haul, to set a stopwatch. Sometimes—as when a friend who stammers and has overcomplicated thoughts is going on about something (but what?), and impatience is rankling your vital organs but you’re determined to let her spit it out—what feels like an eternity is really only two or three torturously long minutes. It was 8:52, and I was on page 255, in 268 A.D., during the reign of Claudius. This was not the Claudius of Robert Graves’s “I, Claudius” (Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus, Emperor 41-54 A.D.) but the Gothic Claudius (Marcus Aurelius Claudius), who, somewhat to his own surprise, defeated the Goths at the battle of Naissus (wherever that is), in 269. “The virtues of Claudius, his valour, affability, justice, and temperance, his love of fame and of his country, place him in that short list of emperors who added lustre to the Roman purple.” Claudius was succeeded by his general Aurelian, who struck a mutually beneficial deal with the Goths (they wanted to stay) and then beat the shit out of the Alemanni (the Germans), who got so close to the gates of Rome that the senate panicked and fell back on religion, consulting “the Sibylline books.” Aurelian, far from being insulted at their lack of confidence in him, asked what had taken them so long and told them to spare no expense. Gibbon: “However puerile in themselves, these superstitious arts were subservient to the success of the war; and if, in the decisive battle of Fano, the Alemanni fancied they saw an army of spectres combating on the side of Aurelian, he received a real and effectual aid from this imaginary reinforcement.” And so the superiority of Rome was restored, but my train was still sitting between Jay and High Streets.

We finally moved again at 9:16, after twenty-two minutes. I was going to be at least twenty minutes late for my appointment. But instead of agonizing, I moved on: There were rebel emperors in the West and the East. Some really bad stuff was going down in Gaul. One Tetricus, puppet of his mother Victoria, was on the throne, but he was so afraid of his own army that he conspired with Aurelian to fake a civil war and then deserted; his soldiers “were cut in pieces almost to a man.”

I thought about hopping off the A train at Broadway/Nassau and switching to the Broadway line, but it is a long subterranean passage from the IND to the IRT, and it would be worth it only if the A train continued to be balky on its way uptown, something I had no way of predicting and no oracle to consult. So I stayed in my seat, hoping the obstruction had been cleared, and read about Zenobia, “the celebrated queen of Palmyra and the East.” Zenobia had been the wife (and hunting companion) of Odenathus, and took an interest in military campaigns. When Odenathus was assassinated by a nephew, his widow assumed the throne (and sacrificed the nephew). Gibbon goes on and on about her: “Zenobia was esteemed the most lovely as well as the most heroic of her sex. She was of a dark complexion (for in speaking of a lady these trifles become important). Her teeth were of a pearly whiteness, and her large black eyes sparkled with uncommon fire, tempered by the most attractive sweetness.” In his enthusiasm, he resorts to italics IN HIS FOOTNOTES for the first time. (I have to represent italics with capitals.) “She claimed her descent from the Macedonian kings of Egypt, equalled in beauty her ancestor Cleopatra, and far surpassed that princess in chastity [55] and valour.” (Footnote 55: “She never admitted her husband’s embraces but for the sake of posterity. If her hopes were baffled, in the ensuing MONTH she reiterated the experiment.”)

“Instead of the little passions which so frequently perplex a female reign, the steady administration of Zenobia was guided by the most judicious maxims of policy,” Gibbon writes. (I think this is a reference to PMS.) Still, it was unusual for a woman to be on any Roman throne, and though Claudius put up with it, Aurelian did not. The Roman army laid siege to Zenobia at Palmyra, or Tadmor—an oasis in the Arabian desert which, Oliphant Smeaton tells us, was built by Solomon—and she held out until all hope of reinforcements was gone. “It was then that Zenobia resolved to fly. She mounted the fleetest of her dromedaries,[72] and had already reached the banks of the Euphrates, about sixty miles from Palmyra, when she was overtaken by the pursuit of Aurelean’s light horse, seized and brought back a captive to the feet of the emperor.” (Footnote 72: “Though the camel is a heavy beast of burden, the dromedary, which is either of the same or of a kindred species, is used by the natives of Asia and Africa on all occasions which require celerity.”)

At this point, I finally got to Columbus Circle and switched from the A train to the No. 1. If trains were livestock, the A would be a camel; I should have switched to the dromedary.

Zenobia, meanwhile, sucked up to Aurelian, betrayed her Greek teacher—“the sublime Longinus”—and got a free trip to Rome, where she was paraded before the public in “fetters of gold.” (Gibbon credits Vopiscus, his source for the details of this pageantry, in a footnote, adding, “He relates the particulars with his usual minuteness; and on this occasion they HAPPEN to be interesting.”) Tetricus of Gaul was also part of the parade, and he was wearing pants. (Footnote 79: “The use of BRACCAE, breeches, or trousers, was still considered in Italy as a Gallic and barbarian fashion.”)

I got off the train on page 270, exactly twenty-two minutes late for my appointment. Zenobia set up housekeeping in Tivoli, lucky queen. The parade celebrating the triumph of Aurelian was still going on.

Gibbon on the A Train

Parking occupies me for only a few minutes a week these days, though last Sunday, when a whole lot of DFDs (that’s people Down For the Day) drove out to Rockaway, I had to go around the block twice before a van pulled out and left a space big enough for two of me. I’d have parked farther away, but I’d just done a big grocery shopping and bought a lot of beer substitutes (fake beer, root beer, lemonade, diet Dr Pepper—oh, all right, one six-pack of Carlsberg), and besides, in this case “farther away” meant “closer to the beach,” where I was even less likely to find a spot.

So I’m back on the A train again, commuting to midtown, and this year it doesn’t seem as charming as it has in the past. I aim for a window seat in the morning, and gaze out over the bay and the houses on stilts. I’ve seen egrets, swans, geese, cormorants, red-winged blackbirds, and gulls gulls gulls, including some baby seagulls—puffy gray chicks about the size of softballs—on the island the train goes over, which is basically a seagull hatchery. Some days Jamaica Bay has the aspect of a mirage, with an airport instead of palm trees. When the train goes underground, about a third of the way into the hour-and-a-quarter trip, I open a book.

The three-volume Modern Library edition of Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” has been sitting on my shelf for something like twenty years. I don’t know what I was waiting for—a period of convalescence following a bunionectomy, I suppose—but I finally decided to crack it. Volume I has 956 pages, and I’d need a baby scale to weigh it. I’m on page 78 (Commodus, in 180 A.D.—the beginning of the end). Already the cover flap has split along the folds—it’s a rugged commute—so I removed it and left it at home.

For years I have been hearing about Gibbon’s prose style, his mastery of the periodic sentence. Yes, the sentences are clear and balanced—I find myself reading them twice—but the punctuation is killing me. It must have been the fashion in Gibbon’s day (he was a contemporary of Samuel Johnson, writing in the second half of the eighteenth century) to poke in a comma whenever one ran short of breath, even if it separated the subject from the verb. For instance: “The narrow policy of preserving, without any foreign mixture, the pure blood of the ancient citizens, had checked the fortune, and hastened the ruin, of Athens and Sparta.” And: “Happily for the repose of mankind, the moderate system recommended by the wisdom of Augustus, was adopted by the fears and vices of his immediate successors.” And just one more (among thousands), also about Augustus: “A cool head, an unfeeling heart, and a cowardly disposition, prompted him, at the age of nineteen, to assume the mask of hypocrisy, which he never afterwards laid aside.”

I am also frustrated by the footnotes. Chapter I has ninety-six of them, waving like seaweed at the bottom of the page. I tried skimming them in advance to determine whether there was anything down there worth interrupting myself for. Many of them are simply Gibbon crediting his sources, but others add sly little notes in a voice reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock (M. de Voltaire, "unsupported by either fact or probability, has generously bestowed the Canary Islands on the Roman empire”; “Mr. Pope, without perceiving it, has improved the theology of Homer”). Others, in brackets and signed O.S., take issue with the author (“Gibbon’s account of the military system of the Romans contains several errors that must be corrected”; “Gibbon’s remark here is wholly incorrect”). At first, these uppity editorial comments made me grit my teeth, but I softened when I found out, from a modest note on the copyright page, that the initials O.S. stand for Oliphant Smeaton. Yet other footnotes are entirely in Latin, a language in which I am, unfortunately, illiterate. I find myself wishing these footnotes had footnotes.

I am not sure if I'm going to persist with Gibbon, but I'm already superstitious about lugging him around: the day I give up and leave him at home, my train will get stuck between stations and I'll need something interminable. Yesterday on the train I was disturbed by murmuring behind me: a woman was reading aloud, in Spanish, from a prayer book with oversize type ("del Señor ... oramos ... Ave Maria"). Another woman was holding up a volume about the same size as mine, labelled “Holy Bible.” On the way home, I squeezed into a window seat next to a guy who was playing a handheld video boxing game. I opened my Gibbon; he changed seats.