Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: v. 2 (Modern Library) - Tapa dura

Discusses the Roman Empire's rise to greatness as well as its eventual decline and fall brought about by increasingly dramatic military, economic, and social changes.

is a kind of bridge that connects the ancient with the modern ages," noted Thomas Carlyle.  "And how gorgeously does it swing across the gloomy and tumultuous chasm of these barbarous centuries."  Indeed, Gibbon, the supreme historian of the Enlightenment--the illustrious scholar who envisioned history as a branch of literature--seemed almost predestined to write his monumental account of the Roman Empire's terrible self-destruction.  "I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion," wrote the author in the famous epigram that summed up his towering achievement in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
"Gibbon is not merely a master of the pageant and the story; he is also the critic and the historian of the mind," said Virginia Woolf.  "Without his satire, his irreverence, his mixture of sedateness and slyness, of majesty and mobility, and above all that belief in reason which pervades the w