Giovanni Battista Piranesi, The Colosseum. via Wikimedia Commons, public domain
Everyman's Library
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
How institutions die; published, like Smith, in 1776.
$150.00
Available · worldwide delivery
The maison’s notePenguin Classics abridgement is the default; Everyman's is complete
- Author
- Edward Gibbon
- Publisher
- Everyman's Library
- Published
- January 1993
- Pages
- 0
- Format
- Hardcover, 6 vols
- Size
- Standard
- Language
- English
The Library Essay
An Empire Audited
Edward Gibbon tells us the idea came to him in October 1764, musing among the ruins of the Capitol while friars sang vespers where the temple of Jupiter had stood. The first volume appeared in 1776 and the sixth in 1788, carrying the story thirteen centuries from the Antonines to the fall of Constantinople, in a prose of long balanced sentences and dry irony that remains the summit of English historical writing. His cool treatment of Christianity's rise scandalised the clergy and sold the book.
Everyman's Library publishes the complete work in six volumes with an introduction by Hugh Trevor-Roper. Its scholarship has been superseded on many points and its manner on none, and its great theme, how institutions decay by slow degrees while believing themselves eternal, keeps finding new audiences with reasons to read nervously.
In the Collections
