History of the Decline and Fall of Roman Empire [complete]

Best narrative history ever written. Gibbon had so many fewer sources and tools than we have today, but his basic conclusions from the late 18th century information he had are still largely correct today.

A weakened military and political state that relied heavily on barbarian mercenary soldiers for defense was doomed. The different internal barbarian factions just served to divide the military and political and religious structures to a point to where they were easy pickin's from both inside and outside the empire. The western empire falling first while the eastern (Greek) Byzantine empire, under less external pressure, survives much longer. (Until their Roman Christian Crusader brothers came to sack them.)

Gibbons details the whole ugly show more mess down to minute detail and doesn't leave anything out, from incest to slaughter. His narrative is lively and opinionated, full of both shock and humor.

Read the whole damned thing, footnotes and all, not some abridged abomination. This is a literary work as much as an historical work.

Anyone who needs an abject lesson on how the modern western world is going to go, should read these books. We're already in the age of bread and circuses. show less

An 18th century exploration into the events surrounding the Roman Empire and its territories from ca. 180 until the 15th century.

The author is an 18th century Brit who has granted the ancient Romans their conceit, and the work must be read and understood in that light. One of the great opportunities for reflection in reading this work in the early 21st century is to consider what Europe, north Africa, and western Asia must have looked like to someone living in 1776, and the different forms of continuity and discontinuity which are maintained. As an example, Gibbon confesses how there are some areas of Italy which, in his day, had not yet recovered in population from the Byzantine-Gothic wars and the bubonic plague of the middle of the show more 6th century; we would not be able to make such an observation on the other side of the population boom which has attended to the industrial revolution.

Gibbon does well at considering not just secondary but especially primary sources, and he is rather opaque about his biases and prejudices regarding them. The length of discourse ebbs and flows with the amount and quality of these witnesses: the introductory books set forth the condition of the Empire in the days of the Antonines, the generally confessed high point of the Roman Empire, and fills in some of the details about the infrastructure of the Empire as it had developed from the days of Augustus. Then over a few books Gibbon covers the long/awful "third century" of 180-280 and all of the trials of the Empire. The fourth century resurgence and crisis defeats of 280-400 are covered in many books, including discussions of the development of Christianity, and thus ends the first modern volume. Then Gibbon gets to the collapse of the Empire at the hands of the German tribes in the West, and the maintenance of the Empire in the East. Over many books we read of Justinian, his conquests, and his law code; Gibbon has precious little to say about the Justinian plague beyond its virulence. Gibbon quickly covers Justinian through Heraclius, and the second modern volume ends with his characterization of the various Emperors from Heraclius until Isaac Angelus and the Latin conquest of Constantinople. The third modern volume covers the medieval period, and does so in two phases: from 600-1200, looking in across the world of the former Roman Empire and the exploits in Italy, Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire, Muhammad, the rise of Islam, the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates, the Bulgarians, Russians, Normans, the Turks, and then the Crusades, leading to the Fourth Crusade. Then Gibbon does something similar with the 1200-1450 period: the Greek loss of Constantinople, their fragmented empires, and recovery of Constantinople; the Mongols and the rise of the Ottomans; relationship between Byzantium and the West; the final loss of the Eastern Roman Empire; and Gibbon concludes by considering Rome itself from the tenth century until the end of the Great Schism. He then renders some conclusions.

Gibbon is often criticized for how he blames the fall of Rome on Christianity. I did not perceive in his work any truly monocausal explanation of this sort. In places where he would presume Christianity would have loosened the "martial spirit" of the Romans, he would be misguided. While Gibbon is a man of the Enlightenment - and in his notes you can tell he is a big fan of Hume and the Scottish Enlightenment in particular - his explorations of the various doctrinal controversies are well expressed and reasoned, and he seems less condemnatory of the religion itself and much more fatigued with the constant in-fighting over ultimately speculative matters. And in truth the divisions within Christianity absolutely weakened the standing of the Empire: when the Coptic Christians of Egypt welcomed the conquest of the Muslims so they would no longer be under the yoke of Constantinople, that tells you something; a big part of the ultimate end of the Byzantine Empire was the division and hostility engendered between them and the Catholics to the west.

What should stand out about this narrative, both as told by Gibbon and in general, is not about how Rome declined and fell, as if we can thus read the tea leaves about how such powers decline and fall in order to ameliorate our own, because all powers invariably rise, decline, and fall. Instead, it should be about the resilience of the Roman Empire: the miracle is not that it collapsed, but that it endured for so long in reality, and has never been exorcised from the mentality of Europeans ever since. "Caesars" as Kaisers and Czars and Sultans ruled in Europe until only a century ago; one cannot understand medieval and modern European history without grappling with how the Roman Empire continually captured their imagination.

The most modern research leads us to put far more weight on the role of climate change and its attendant consequences: more challenging food growing conditions which can quickly lead to greater ravaging and repine, the ferret and the transmission of the bubonic plague, and thus a devastation in the 6th century which leaves its mark in the archaeological record for over a century and which the world of Late Antiquity could not adequately recover (and, as seen above, in some respects, had not even recovered by the time the United States of America came into being!). If we're looking for a big lesson from Rome about how powers fall, that's the one we should heed. show less

A big book, and one which will not stand being edited. the epigrams fall thickly, and the insights into general human behaviours and particularly of the Enlightenment frame of mind are very valuable. If you want training in the prose that the framers of the American Constitution worked in, it is a valuable and entertaining tool. I used the Everyman edition, for this entry because of the valuable notes, and the Great Books of the Western world has a great binding, though the notes are relegated to the end of the volume...an annoying habit for the footnote reader, thus the need of a sturdy binding. Oh, the actual matter of the work is the history of the end of the Western Empire in 476, and the continuing history of the Eastern show more Mediterranean basin until 1453. It is always worth reading. The publishing of the six volume original edition was protracted from 1776 to 1789. show less

A truly monumental work, covering nearly a millennium and a half of European history, from the Antonine emperors through the rise of Christianity and the conversion of Constantine, Diocletian's attempts to restore the empire to its pagan roots and the final collapse of paganism, ending the first half with the fall of Rome and the end of empire in the west. The second half mainly deals with the eastern Byzantine empire and includes many interesting historical episodes, from Justinian's attempt to reconquer the west, to Mohammed and the rise of the Arabs, Charlemagne, the Crusades, Zingis (Genghis) Khan and the Mogul (Mongol) conquests, through the final capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks and the end of the empire in the show more east.

Gibbon was also so far ahead of his time that many historians to this day still haven't caught up to him in some respects, offering insightful interpretations of many of the events he covers. For example, discussing the Mogul conquests and many other destructive wars, he argues that, contrary to the opinions of other historians who find all kinds of positive consequences resulting from such conquest, "If some partial disorders, some local oppressions, were healed by the sword...the remedy was far more pernicious than the disease." Similarly, commenting on the invention of gunpowder, he writes: "If we contrast the rapid progress of this mischievous discovery with the slow and laborious advances of reason, science, and the arts of peace, a philosopher, according to his temper, will laugh or weep at the folly of mankind."

All this shows the influence on Gibbon of Voltaire, who held that history should properly focus on those who have actually contributed to the advance of civilization, rather than on kings and warriors who more often hold it back. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is mostly focused on the kings and warriors, but Gibbon clearly shares Voltaire's evaluation of them. This is apparent from the opening pages, where Gibbon writes, "as long as mankind shall continue to bestow more liberal applause on their destroyers than on their benefactors, the thirst of military glory will ever be the vice of the most exalted characters."

Gibbon also shares Voltaire's evaluation of Christianity, and again is insightful ahead of his time. For instance, he demolishes the idea that the early Christians were brutally and systematically persecuted by the pagan emperors, thoroughly demonstrating that such persecution as did take place was usually local, half-hearted if not reluctant, and short-lived. But he doesn't stop there. He shows how the Christians persecuted each other far more severely than the pagans ever did, ruthlessly stamping out any sect deemed heretical down through the centuries. Further, he asks, if the Christians were so persecuted by the pagans, how come it's the Christians who ultimately won out and it's the pagans who were finally extinguished? The outcome speaks for itself, but Gibbon writes movingly about the final triumph of Christianity and what that meant for pagans like Hypatia of Alexandria.

Gibbon's writing is full of such insight and is often quite witty, and his subjects are often very interesting. My only complaint is that the material occasionally gets bogged down with page after page about the same city being taken and retaken by opposing sides in a conflict, and this can start to seem painfully redundant after a while (though if that's how it feels to read about it, just imagine what it must have been like to live through it!). But just keep reading and it will soon again be worth it. And even if at times I wish Gibbon would in some ways adjust his focus or his organization, I can forgive him all that for all the value his great work provides!

http://www.amazon.com/review/R3USX7XF5B8R7J show less

My gosh this was a slog! Six books of 600 pages each. It was definitely worth the effort, though. I must admit that the level of detail was daunting, but the patterns that such detail exhibited the rhyming history that Mark Twain remarked upon.

I have neither the time nor the inclination to comprehensively rate the series. My favorite aspects of the series are the comprehensive research against primary sources (I gave up trying to read the footnotes after about the second book) and the double-history perspective of a late-18th-century writer examining Roman and Byzantine history. This is an impressive feat of scholarship!

Another motivation for my reading the series was to fill the gaps of my understanding of this massive span of time. show more Naturally, the interminable list of emperors' names blended together after a while, but the sweep of the narrative will guide me when I next encounter these names, times, and places. The podcast Hardcore History had already done a pretty comprehensive job covering the Mongolian Empire, so it was satisfying to see that narrative mesh with Gibbon's description of the period. I expect this will happen many times over the course of my future reading.

If you're interested in the history of Western Civilization, I'd recommend putting in the effort to read the entire series. Although I found the level of detail to be tedious at times, I am glad that I persevered. show less

In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon argues that the loss of civic virtue amongst the Romans enabled barbarian invaders to succeed in their conquest. The book traces the period from 98 CE to 1590 CE and, as an Enlightenment thinker, Gibbon spends a great deal of time criticizing Catholicism, arguing that Christianity accelerated the fall of the Empire, though he does offer that it may have “mollified the ferocious temper of the conquerors” (ch. 38). In many ways, Gibbon invented modern historical scholarship as he relied wherever possible on primary sources rather than secondhand accounts. Further, he documented all of his sources through footnotes, commenting on the importance of the sources and even injecting show more some levity into them at points. Though modern historical research and archaeology have disproved his conclusions, the basic summary of events remains a good introduction for those interested in the period Gibbon covers while his footnotes will be of interest to historians looking at Roman historiography. This edition reprints Gibbon’s unabridged text in three volumes with illustrations from Giovanni Battista Piranesi. show less

Truly grand in scope, in subject matter, in style. Some conclusions/sources are out of date, but it is still a joy to read.