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Edward Gibbon begins his history in the second century AD, in what he calls the happiest period in the history of the human race, under the emperors from…
Edward Gibbon begins his history in the second century AD, in what he calls the happiest period in the history of the human race, under the emperors from Nerva to Marcus Aurelius, and then traces how the empire began to decline. This first volume, chapters I to XV, covers the cruelty of Commodus, the soldier emperors and civil wars of the third century, the rise of the new Persian empire of the Sasanians, the first invasions of the Goths, the reforms of Diocletian and the rise of Constantine, and ends with Gibbon's famous and controversial account of the growth of Christianity.
Context and significance
Gibbon (1737–1794) had the idea in Rome in 1764 while sitting among the ruins of the Capitol, and published this first volume in 1776, the year of American independence; the whole work, completed in 1788, carries the story to the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Its ironic, majestic prose and witty footnotes make it a classic of English literature. Read Augustine's answer to the fall of Rome in The City of God.
About the author
Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) was a sickly child from a wealthy English family. At sixteen he converted to Catholicism at Oxford, and his father sent him to Lausanne, where he returned to Protestantism and educated himself in history and languages. In Rome in 1764, sitting among the ruins of the Capitol, he conceived the idea of writing about the city's decline.
The six volumes of his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published between 1776 and 1788, cover more than thirteen centuries, from the Antonine emperors to the fall of Constantinople, in a famously elegant and ironic style. His chapters on the rise of Islam were remarkably sympathetic for their time.