The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Gibbon set out to explain how a civilisation that had lasted for centuries could come apart, and produced six volumes of narrative, footnotes and irony. The famous chapters on the early Christians and on the Antonine period are the ones most often quoted, but the whole work is a sustained argument about institutions and decay.
The prose is formal and often very funny, and Gibbon's footnotes are a performance in themselves. It is not a book to read straight through, and it does not need to be. Start with the first volume and the chapters on the fall of the Western empire, then follow whatever interests you.
Public-domain status
First published in 1776. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Edward Gibbon died in 1794, so this work has been free to republish there since 1865.
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