After the End

COUNT BELISARIUS--Robert Graves-- Random House ($3).

Sitting in the ruins of the Capitol at twilight, a 27-year-old Englishman named Edward Gibbon once dreamed of writing a massive work on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. At that time the British Empire was growing strong. And to young Edward Gibbon the fall of Rome seemed a simple, faraway matter: wealth unmanned the noble Romans; Christianity enfeebled the masses; the barbarians advanced.

Much has happened to England since Gibbon wrote, and to Robert Graves the fall of Rome seems a much more complex matter than it did to Gibbon. Nor does he write of it with the majestic smugness that has made Gibbon an unsurpassed soporific for 150 years. The barbarians were really pretty tough. The emperors whom Gibbon dismissed as weaklings were really doing their best; the barbarian generals were smart men--besides, Rome was a hard city to defend. So in Robert Graves's books Rome falls with a sigh rather than with the sonorous crash that Gibbon heard, falls slowly, painfully, wearily, hopelessly, unaware to the last that she is falling.

Five years ago in Majorca Robert Graves, 43-year-old poet, scholar, teacher and soldier, who gained U. S. fame with his account of his War years, Goodbye to All That, wrote his first Roman novel as a scholarly potboiler. Called /, Claudius and giving a sympathetic account of the emperor whom Gibbon considered only a shade better than Nero, it became a bestseller. In Claudius the God, which followed, Graves pictured Claudius as the one Roman who believed that his wife, Messalina, was an honest woman, preserved the flavor of an old chronicle in a lively, modern story.

Latest Graves novel of Rome's slow fall, Count Belisarius, does not quite measure up to these, largely because Belisarius is noble, dull, honest and courageous, where bumbling old Claudius was gnarled with humanness. Purporting to be the work of Eugenius, educated eunuch and slave of Belisarius' wife, it is laid in Justinian's reign, tells the story of Justinian's one capable general. Belisarius defeats the Persians, takes Carthage, conquers Italy, marries a shrewd, level-headed prostitute, Antonina, is blinded by Justinian, who fears him as a rival.

A good friend of Captain Liddell Hart and of the late Colonel T. E. Lawrence, Robert Graves crams his book with superb accounts of Belisarius' military strategy, makes catapults and mounted archers seem as modern as machine guns and tanks. Count Belisarius sags from its weight of historical detail, as Graves's earlier novels did not.

It pictures a Rome badly decayed, ignoble Romans unable to understand what is happening. Rome has fallen but the Romans cannot believe it. The barbarians are running the world, but the Romans do not know it, dare not face it, cannot believe that for once they are just muddling along instead of muddling through.

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