The Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire

Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is one of the world's great accomplishments in historical research and writing. It was published between 1776 and 1788 and, in its final form, comprised six volumes and almost half-a-million words. It is a work that is generally recognized, even 200 years later, to be--in style and in breadth of conception--perhaps the finest history ever written.Gibbon divided his volumes equally among the three centuries of the Roman Empire, from Marcus Aurelius to the fall of the West, and the thousand years that followed to the capture of Constantinople. In this one-volume abridgment greater space is given to the first and, historically speaking, most valuable half of the period. The story of the decline and fall unfolds progressively through the exciting vicissitudes of history, through the evolution of absolute government from the Antonines to Diocletian and the Byzantine emperors, with the courts and hierarchies that anticipate modern Europe. Gibbon's famous treatment of Christianity is fairly represented. The abridgment draws as well on the most significant chapters of the second half of The Decline and Fall, and the book ends with the capture of Constantinople and the memorable picture of Rome itself in the Dawn of the Renaissance.This volume was prepared by D. M. Low, a well-known Gibbon scholar and author of a notable biography of the historian. Low's skillful abridgment of Gibbon's work has introduced the masterpiece to successive generations of readers who, due to the great length of the original, might never have attempted to read through all six volumes. Low's effort succinctly presents the sweep of a broad and deeply significant era in history and captures quite effortlessly the power of Gibbon's brilliant writing.