The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
by Edward Gibbon
Phoenix Press, $160
P.J. O'Rourke recalls as an eighth grader betting his sister a dollar he could read all of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 'A Roman Catholic risked mortal sin to read it, because Decline and Fall was on the church's Index of Forbidden Books.' He was hoping for orgies and gladiators, but finding none he paid his sister the dollar, confident he'd committed no sin. This reissue from 1970 of Gibbon's great work of the 18th century, edited and abridged by the late Hugh Trevor Roper, cuts the six-volume original to 680 pages, one-tenth its size. It's all still here - Gibbon's history describes how the dominant civilisation of the second century collapses, succumbing to barbarian invasion and militant Christianity, and takes in the rise of Islam and the Crusades. To write this opus, Gibbon had to invent historical analysis now commonplace. Writing on the Enlightenment, his conclusions about early Christianity were shocking. 'The primitive church ... delivered over, without hesitation, to eternal torture the far greater part of the human species.'