The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: Volumes 1-3 of 6 (Everyman's Library)

Before you decide to embark on this journey you should be aware of a few things. First, this work is a narrative history, devoid of any real analysis. You will not gain anything from the content of the book other than the chrnological linking of facts and entertaining stories. Second, this work is really really L O N G. If you are looking for a narrative history of the Roman Empire for the entertainment value, look elsewhere. You will tire of this work if that is your reason for reading it. Thirdly, Gibbon's conclusion about the "moral decadence" of the Romans being the cause of the collapse of the Western Empire is wrong. Gibbon has viewed history through the foggy lense of his own value system. If you are looking to discover why the Western part of the Empire collapsed you should take a look at Rostovtzeff's Rome, Delbruck's Barbarian Invasions, Haussig's intro to A History of Byzantine Civilization, and Strayer's intro to The Middle Ages. Finally, if you are interested in reading some of the greatest English language prose of all time, read an abridgment. The Penguin abridgement has all the wonderful narration, entertaining stories, and is only about a third of the length of the whole work.

This is the best edition available of Gibbon's history.

+ It has all of Gibbon's footnotes;
+ it is packaged in an attractive boxed set;
+ it's hard bound in good plain cloth, not snobby leather;
+ it's printed on fine paper;
+ it can be expected to last into the next century;
+ it leaves enough white margin for writing notes;
+ it has an index;
+ it even smells good.

Caveat

- It gives no translation of the better Latin and Greek passages;
- the black paste used to print the cover's gold-on-black logo flakes off;
- don't forget to order the other half (volumes 4, 5, and 6).

(The only other edition worth considering is the unabridged paperback Penguin edition. It also contains the full notes, and it is cheaper, but it is bulkier since two volumes are bound as one and the paper is of much lower quality, so the that other edition won't last much more than 10 or 20 years...)

Typical Twenty-first Century hubris, suggesting that this work should be read in the bite-sized edition and should not be seen as valid or even potential historical analysis. Gibbon was commenting on his time (not that far from our time and the same intellectual environment that produced this country) as much as Roman times and making splendid observations about various dangers that lurked within any organized society.

Gibbon comments at length, for example, on how the early Emperors shunned ostentatious display in order to present the illusion of a still-functioning Republic. The Emperors had so much power (he notes, and I roughly paraphrase) that they did not have to show it off. Sounds a bit like the American Presidency, doesn't it? The most powerful man in the world in a jogging suit? George W. Bush, member of a wealthy ruling elite, pretending to be a "regular Joe" and flimflamming half a nation? Personally I prefered wealthy patrician Presidents--they were at least honest about themselves and, as obliged members of a certain class, were expected to meet certain high standards of behavior and intellect. Both Hitler and Stalin were "of the people" (and startlingly like some of the worst Emperors described in Gibbon!)

In fact much of this 300-year-old gloss on 2000-year-old-goings-on echos the current crisis of the West. Read in this light, this can be an uncomfortable, vaguely dangerous, and politically incorrect book. It explains why Western intellectuals up until relatively recently--all familiar with Gibbon--tended to agree on a lot of basics. Today, people of both the Left and the Right have lost sight of too many of the essentials of freedom and liberty. Gibbon, again, notes how the Empire reached a point where contending sides on any issue weren't debating Liberty versus Empire but simply how the Empire should be administered. Gibbon also makes some interesting observations on how a large, but not overwhelming, military can dominate and control an exceptionally large population; also how a standing army can begin to control the leadership. This isn't banana republic stuff, it's commentary on the pitfalls of Great Republics. His books are stuffed to the gills with this sort of wisdom. Why would you avoid any of it?

Allow me to be insulting: I'm not thrilled with the, again, contemporary predilection toward being patronizing to older Western standard texts. Gibbon was verbose for a reason; this was no modern marketing scheme to entice you to buy volumes you didn't really need. Read all of Gibbon, read it critically, but also read it with humility. Remember that better, more active, and more lucid minds than ours encountered these books and were highly impressed. In the last decades I've watched, horrified, as midgets and munchkins passed vicious judgement on the Western canon. Gibbon comments on that phenomenon too, how the little and often nasty minds--the sort similar to the co-conspirators Shakespeare surrounded Brutus with--eventually gain sway. Western Culture has been hauled down not by sophisticated minds with better to offer but by the jealous and rage-filled, by the greedy, by religious ignoramuses (few excluded), by the mindless mob. No wonder we've been losing our way as a culture.

Finally, the book is written in English, uses few if any words not in the contemporary lexicon, and maintains other accepted standards of syntax. This is not a "tough read" unless you've been raised on milk-soaked bread. In fact if you've managed your way through some of those hideously written jargon riddled texts required in most college courses, modern French philosophers, or somebody like Adorno, then you'll find Gibbon a master of clarity and an utter delight. How anybody in this age of jibberish, buzzwords, and portentious intellectual tripe can complain about the style of this book is a mystery to me! I have little pity for those who stumble and fall off the road whenever they hit a subordinate clause, inverted word order, or a lengthy sentence.

So, read this in full. It's a terrific read. Read Tocqueville, read the Federalist Papers, stop whining about the electoral college and instead find out why it exists. Sit down sometime and try to understand the political reasoning behind the American Civil War, not just the video-game level intellectuality of the feud between the slave-holders and abolitionists. Essentially stop trying to turn History into a one-volume "History for Idiots" manual before forming rock-solid opinions on major issues. You might surprise yourself, you might help prevent a distant future Gibbon from writing unkind words about all of us.

These three volumes constitute the first half of Edward Gibbon's masterpiece. Many would-be readers will find reading Gibbon to be somewhat daunting, but his wit, scholarship, and narrative drive (in these early volumes, anyway) make this book hard to resist.
A word about the text. Everyman's Library reprints the famous J.B. Bury edition (Bury was a famous Irish historian who wrote a well-respected History of Greece), which is close to 100 years old (it dates to 1909). If you're reading Gibbon for a history course on an undergraduate or post-graduate level, you should probably read the more recent David Womerseley edition, which is available in a three-volume Penguin paperback (with, unfortunately, unreadably microscopic type). The hardcover edition was remaindered recently, though, so you might find it on Amazon secondhand.
If you're reading Gibbon for pleasure, however, the Everyman's Library edition is the one to get. The individual volumes are just the right size, and the text is large enough and clear enough to be read easily. The text is complete, which is not always the case (some fancy editions -- the Folio Society's comes to mind -- tend to cut back on the footnotes).
Gibbon makes great bedtime reading. Take him slowly, and don't rush. Keep your eye on the footnotes -- some of the best and snarkiest stuff in Gibbon is discreetly hidden in the footnotes (in one of my favorite early footnotes [in Chapter IV] he mentions the giraffe, "the tallest, the most gentle, and the most useless of the large quadrupeds."). If you decide to push on to the second three volumes (Chapters 39-71), be prepared to be patient, because there are some rough spots. It might take you a while to get through it (my last reading of the entire work took me 26 months), but Gibbon is more than worth the effort. Which is why I've just started reading him again -- for the fifth time.

I thoroughly enjoyed these three volumes, but have no desire to review Gibbon's text: Anyone considering reading the Decline And Fall is presumably well aware of Gibbon's reputation for entertaining prolixity. Rather, I would praise the books themselves. I borrowed a different volume of the Everyman's Library from the library, and was taken with the format, which combines the convenient size of a trade paperback with the sturdy binding of a hardcover book. While these books will probably not survive to grace the shelves of my (hypothetical!) grandchildren, I read them both sitting in an armchair with the book in my lap and also lying in bed, holding the book by the bottom. Such treatment would have devastated the spine of a paperback, but these books look very nearly new after a complete reading. Plus, each book has a ribbon sewn into the binding for use as a bookmark; it's a small thing, but it's amazingly nice to have a bookmark that can never blow away or get lost beside your chair or bed.

On the negative side, there are a few misprints; the Garamond font seems to me to be a poor choice, that leaves the pages vaguely muddy looking; and at 60, I found it hard to make out the small superscript numbers that call out the footnotes.

Finally and fatuously, I do doubt that I am the only reader whose erudition is not up to reading the Latin, Greek, and French in the footnotes! Should Everyman's / Knopf condescend to do a new edition (the current one appears to date from 1995) it would be great if they added translations.

Before tackling Gibbon's daunting work, I had only read smaller volumes of history. Some Livy here, a Polybius there, a Dio in between, but I was unprepared for the joys I would find with Gibbon.
His style is typical 18th century. This may take some getting used to, but it shouldn't take much. From the opening chapter, Gibbon brings the reader through an exciting, fulfilling, and sometimes a hopelessly tragic panorama of the Roman Empire.
He has been criticized by modern scholarship as misleading, since he neglected issues that modern scholars find so pivotal in Roman and Byzantine history, yet the volumes are wonderful reads nevertheless. He has also been criticized for his sarcastic criticism and denunciation of weak socities, religious institutions, government, cultures, etc., but this has been set down as an 18th century fixation -- and who can argue against this?
Gibbon treats his subject very lucidly. He appears in his footnotes from time to time, just to visit with his readership. I thoroughly like the man!

The previous reviewer, Mr. Pille [now "WTA," I see], huffs and puffs as is his wont but, as is often the case, he is dead on target with regard to Gibbon's "Decline and Fall."

Skimming through the Amazon reviews provides a fascinating view of the demotic response to a great classic work in the early Twenty-first Century. Perhaps the most depressing of the bunch is the reviewer who writes, "You will not gain anything from the content of the book other than the chrnological [sic] linking of facts and entertaining stories. Second, this work is really really L O N G. If you are looking for a narrative history of the Roman Empire for the entertainment value, look elsewhere." Those words are so wrong in so many ways. Clearly the poor devil who wrote them, like so many others of our age, has been infected with the peculiar notion that the point of writing is to impart facts efficiently and the point of reading is to confirm your own beliefs. Sad ... oh, sad.

Many reviewers look askance at Gibbon's view of history. Well, that is certainly not new. Some suggest other books with other views. It is well and good that they should do so. There have been many books published and many views expressed on the fall of the Romans (and of other empires) in the 217 years since the final volume of the "Decline and Fall" came off the presses, but Gibbon is still here. If some of those other books are still held in high regard 217 years from now, I hope that someone will come forward to defend them as classics, too.

Gibbon's great work was published in the late 18th century. Don't read it looking for a contemporary style "historical analysis." Read it for its timeless wisdom and beauty, for which there is no parallel. Today's college history text is to Gibbon as the latest Spice Girls album is to Mozart.

Winston Churchill was largely self-educated, and he wrote that Gibbon loomed large in his reading during his early 20's. Read Gibbon; then read Churchill's famous war speeches. Notice the cadence, and consider why Churchill's Nobel prize was awarded for his oratory.

Ah, Sunday morning, a pot of coffee, and Gibbon! You can obtain Gibbon's history in many different editions new and old, cheap paperbacks and pricy collectors versions. Just get one, preferably unabridged, and enjoy.

The quite voluminous "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" is one of the most important books of all times, and is of special interest to the reader who wants to go the extra mile in search of the reasons why the Empire collapsed after almost 1.000 years of existence. Is also a good reminder to everyone of us that, no matter what, all things pass and one world leader is followed by another in a sequence of falling cards. The book, first publishe in 1776, the same year that the "Wealth of the Nations" was published, and the same year the United States declared its independency, is one of the first serious attempts to relate history in a context of sequenced facts where social, political and cultural movements were much more important than the play of personalities. Edward Gibbon lived in Geneva many years and was familiar with the most important intelectual developments of the age, being acquainted with Voltaire and his ideas, reading and writting in many languages but mainly in French. The bibliography he consulted is extensive and, even some 15 centuries after the facts he reports, his is one of the most comprehensive and authoritative analysis of the reasons behind the fall of Rome.
To begin with, he does not list how it all began, that is, it is not his purpose to narrate how the Empire was built. He begins with the Empire as a "fait accompli", with a narrative in the rule of Julius Cesar , the philosopher ruler, and analises with endless detail all the rationale of lack of in each and every ruler's mind, the background of his ascent and the reasons behind the fall of each one of them. The vast majority of Rome's ruler was killed by people who was akin or intimate to the ruler or by members of the Praetorian guard. Also, all the meanings of the empire's hierarchy is explained with a lot of detail, what was the function of a Caesar, what meant to be a senator at the time of Rome apogee, of consulship, etc... Each one of the 3 books, totalling some 2.000 pages, has a very interesting map of Europe, Africa and Asia at the time. A lot of factual information is there to astound the reader with the polyhistoric knowledge of the author. His privileged mind does not permit him to understand that not all the readers speak the languages he does and the text is full of footnotes quotations in Latin and ancient Greek, with no translation whatsoever.
The portrait of the barbarians kings and people is superb and the reader has the opportunity of a face to face contact with Allaric, the king of the Goths, and with Atilla, the king of the Huns. Sure, this trilogy is only focused in the so-called West Empire and its sequel is totally devoted to the East empire, but that is another story.

Having recently struggled with which edition of Gibbons' masterpiece to purchase, let me share that I'm very happy with this (the Everyman's Library) edition. Comparing it to the Modern Library edition which I borrowed from the library, here's what I prefer: 1) much clearer Garamond typeset is easier one the eyes; 2) a header on every page says what year is being discussed; 3) helpful map in the back of every volume; 4) an actual explanation of who wrote the mysterious "O.S." footnotes which appear in both editions. (This was a major aggravation for me -- reading a running debate in the footnotes between Gibbon and O.S. and not knowing who he was.) And, silly as it sounds, biting off such a large undertaking seems easier in 6 shorter volumes than 3 larger ones. Lastly, unlike the Penguin edition, this one is hardcover and therefore likely to put up with more abuse.
Update: Note that the volume breaks here are different than those that Gibbon intended. If you only desire to read the first three volumes (up to the end of the western empire, where Gibbon originally stopped writing), you'll actually end up a few chapters into the 4th volume in this series.