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Gibbon's initial plan was to write a history "of the decline and fall of the city of Rome", and only later expanded his scope to the whole Roman Empire.[10]Although he published other books, Gibbon devoted much of his life to this one work (1772–1789).
The six-volume work The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by the English historian Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) has been reprinted many times over the years in various editions. Editions
Edward Gibbon FRS (/ ˈ ɡ ɪ b ən /; 8 May 1737 [1] – 16 January 1794) was an English essayist, historian, and politician. His most important work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in six volumes between 1776 and 1789, is known for the quality and irony of its prose, its use of primary sources, and its polemical criticism of organized religion.
The Roman Empire included many different nations and cultures, and Rome pushed assimilation by offering citizenship in what Gibbon saw as a profligate manner. The citizens of the Roman world-empire "received the name without adopting the spirit of Romans". [18] This led to what Gibbon saw as an obliteration of what it meant to be Roman. [18]
The empire ruled by the Romans may long since have declined and fallen; its monuments crumbled into ruin; its language evolved to become Spanish, Italian, and French; but its memory remains a ...
The English historian Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) is known primarily as the author of the magisterial The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (6 vols., 1776–1789). Both the imposing length of and awesome erudition displayed in that work have understandably overshadowed his other literary achievements, many of which deserve to ...
Gibbon wrote a short account of his life in French in 1783. [6] For five years he made no attempt to add to this, but in June 1788, one month after the last volumes of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire were published, he began work on the Memoirs by writing to the College of Arms for information about his ancestry.
Until the last decades of the 20th century, the primary theory was provided by Edward Gibbon in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in 1776. Gibbon theorized that paganism declined from the second century BC and was finally eliminated by the top-down imposition of Christianity by Constantine, the first Christian ...