PART I: DAVID HUME AND ADAM SMITH

The Scottish philosophers who studied natural and civil history, and whom we have studied as authors of the four-stage theory and the Enlightened narrative, were drawn to the history of the Roman republic and empire, but their writings on this subject rather accompany than precede the first volume of Gibbon's Decline and Fall. William Robertson did not go far into Roman history. David Hume had indeed completed his Essays, which were in part a vindication of ‘modern’ liberty after taking account of its ‘ancient’ criticisms, by the end of the 1760s, and Gibbon was reading them while he composed the Essai sur l'Etude de la Littérature. Hume read and approved his first volume in the last months of the philosopher's life in 1776. As for Adam Smith, Gibbon owned a copy of the 1767 edition of the Theory of Moral Sentiments, but could have had no direct access to the content of his Glasgow lectures; and the Wealth of Nations appeared some months later than the first volume of the Decline and Fall. It is true that Smith and Gibbon were both members of the Literary Club, and possible to imagine that conversation between them on the history of society may have played its part in the development of the Decline and Fall; but the occasions on which they both dined at the Club seem concentrated in the years 1776 and 1777, too late for the composition of the first volume.