The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

What It Is

A history of thirteen centuries in six volumes, running from the empire at its height in the second century AD to the fall of Constantinople in 1453: seventy-one chapters, around a million and a half words. The first volume appeared in February 1776, the same year as Common Sense and The Wealth of Nations, and made Gibbon famous within weeks; the sixth and last followed in 1788, finished in a garden house in Lausanne.

It is the monument of Enlightenment history: events explained by human causes, sources weighed and named, the whole delivered in the most poised ironic prose in the language. Beneath the text run some eight thousand footnotes.

Why It Matters

Its question is the permanent one, and Gibbon pursued it across thirteen centuries of evidence with a patience nobody had brought to the problem before. Every empire since has read the book nervously, looking for its own reflection.

It also fixed the standard for history as literature in English. Churchill trained his style on it and said so. Later scholarship has corrected Gibbon on a thousand points and replaced him on none, because no one has matched the architecture: one intelligence holding thirteen centuries in a single design.

And it was notorious at once. The chapters on the early church set off an uproar that ran for years and drew Gibbon back into print to defend himself. What he says there is best met on the page.

Before You Read

Be honest about the size. This is among the longest works on this list, 120 to 150 hours of reading, and it will not be rushed. Most readers who finish it give it a year, a chapter or two at a time, and that is the right shape for the book. The first three volumes form a natural arc and a complete experience on their own; Gibbon himself paused after writing them, and you may too.

The prose needs tuning rather than effort. The sentences are eighteenth-century sentences, long and balanced, and at first they will feel formal. Then the ear adjusts, the irony starts landing, and the pages move more easily than the reputation suggests. Nobody skims Gibbon and remembers it; the sentences only pay at walking speed.

Read the footnotes. They are not apparatus. They are where Gibbon says what he is too courteous to say in the text.

Which Edition to Read

• Everyman's Library complete set (six volumes in two hardcover box sets, introduction by Hugh Trevor-Roper) — recommended. The right physical form for a book you will live with for a year: sewn bindings, generous type, volumes that stand up to nightly use, and one of the finest short essays on Gibbon at the front. The cost: no modern annotation, so Gibbon's own notes are your only guide, and the set is a real outlay. View on Amazon →
• David Womersley (Penguin, three volumes, 1994). The scholarly standard: the complete text restored from the original editions, Gibbon's notes at the foot of the page where he put them, and his Vindication included. The cost: three enormous paperbacks, and a long book feels longer on a dense page with a cracked spine.
• Womersley's single-volume Penguin abridgment. Whole chapters kept intact, with bridging summaries between them, chosen by the editor who knows the text best. The honest way in for a reader not ready to commit to three thousand pages. The cost: you get a tour of the building rather than a residence in it.

Take the Everyman's to live with Gibbon, the Womersley set to study him, the abridgment to find out whether the two of you get along. A rare case where the best collectible and the best reading edition are the same books.

Getting the Most From This Book

Save Trevor-Roper's introduction for afterwards. Like nearly every essay on Gibbon, it discusses where the argument goes, and much of the experience is watching him build it.

Do not try to hold every emperor, general and frontier; read for the movement, and keep a map of the empire nearby for your bearings.

Gibbon composed his paragraphs in his head, pacing his library, before he wrote them down, and it shows. Read a page aloud occasionally to catch what the silent eye misses.

The commonest first-timer mistake is sprinting: forcing volume one in a fortnight and stopping, exhausted, somewhere in the second. The book took a quarter of a century to write. It can have twelve months of your evenings.