The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Penguin Classics)

I bought Gibbons, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. All three volumes. The single most boring treatment ever written.

I bought Gibbons, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. All three volumes. The single most boring treatment ever written. And it's very well written though. I just kept reading and reading and reading...

That was Edward Gibbon in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, one of the most famous passages of historical prose overwritten. He is describing the legacy of the Battle of Tor, which was fought on the 10th of October 732, or perhaps 733, nobody is entirely sure, between the Franks and what he called an invading force of Saracens.

I mean, Gibbon's decline and fall of the Roman Empire, a great example of this.

So it's famously summed up by Edward Gibbon in the decline and fall of the Roman empire.

Edward Gibbon, you know, great author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, who loved all this stuff.

It was Edward Gibbon in 1776 who originally cast the second century AD as the most golden of golden ages. Famously, in the first volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he defined the reigns of Hadrian and of his immediate predecessors and successors as the period ... during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous.

This is a myth that emerges basically in the writings of Edward Gibbon, the author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He writes that the valuable library of Alexandria was pillaged or destroyed and that the shelves were left empty.

On the evening of 27 June 1787, the historian Edward Gibbon wrote the final sentences of his great book The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

But Tom Holland, it took Gibbon 20 years to write that book. It's a massive, massive book.

as Gibbon suggested in that passage that you read, there is the salient fact that of course, what we're talking about is the fall of the Roman Empire in the West.

If a man were called upon to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would without hesitation pick the period from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.

Gibbons, a history of the decline of all the Roman Empire. On audiobook, he describes countless peoples as savages.

Gibbon writing about all that in The Decline and Fall.

I spent 14 months at Magdalene College. They proved to be the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life.

By thus introducing the Praetorian guards as it were into the palace in the Senate the emperors taught them to perceive their own strength and the weakness of the civil government.

To view the vices of their masters with familiar contempt and to lay aside that reverential awe which distance only and mystery can preserve towards an imaginary power.

And this luxurious idleness of an opulent city their pride was nourished by the sense of their irresistible weight.

Nor was it possible to conceal from them that the person of the sovereign, the authority of the Senate, the public treasure and the seat of empire were all in their hands.

By thus introducing the Praetorian guards as it were into the palace in the Senate the emperors taught them to perceive their own strength and the weakness of the civil government.

To view the vices of their masters with familiar contempt and to lay aside that reverential awe which distance only and mystery can preserve towards an imaginary power.

And this luxurious idleness of an opulent city their pride was nourished by the sense of their irresistible weight.

Nor was it possible to conceal from them that the person of the sovereign, the authority of the Senate, the public treasure and the seat of empire were all in their hands.

One of the first influential works of his modern historic scholarship is The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It's a whole book about why a society fell apart.

Every society is screwed up. Elisa Yudkowski is one of the few thinkers on earth who are trying at the most general level to understand why. And this is like... Wow...

He'd talk about the Beach Boys, quote French philosophers, and talk about historian Peter Gay's writings on human misery.