The Decline and Fall of the Roman EmpireEdward Gibbon

Gibbon published the first volume in 1776 and the last in 1788. The work covers more than thirteen centuries, from the age of the Antonines to the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Its scale is unmatched in English historical writing.

The central argument was controversial from the start. Gibbon traces the decline of Rome to internal causes: the loss of civic virtue, the enervating effects of luxury and prosperity, and above all the rise of Christianity. The new religion, Gibbon argues, redirected Roman energy from civic duty toward otherworldly salvation, sapped military spirit, and divided the empire with doctrinal quarrels. Chapters XV and XVI, which treat the growth of the early church with cool irony, provoked outrage among Christian readers and made the Decline and Fall a permanent object of controversy.

Gibbon's prose is the other reason the work endures. The sentences are balanced, the irony is precise, and the judgment is severe without being shrill. He writes as a man of the Enlightenment surveying the wreckage left by enthusiasm and credulity, and the confidence of his voice has carried his argument further than its evidence alone could support.