The Roman Empire and its decline and fall remain to this day the dominant historical event and Europe and the near East, and nowhere is the march of those events better narrated than in Gibbon’s work. His literary brilliance and ironic power are incomparable, and he excelled as a scholar, in spite of subsequent research, The Decline and fall remains a masterly history, a bridge between the ancient and modern worlds. The present selections do justice to both aspects of Gibbon’s greatness, and introduce of masterpiece to readers who intimidated perhaps by its great length, may not have discovered its perennial fascination. Gibbon divided his volumes equally between the three centuries from Marcus Aurelius to the fall the west, and the thousand years that followed to the capture of Constantinople. In this abridgement greater space is given to the first and, historically speaking, most valuable half. The evaluation of absolute government from the Antonin’s to Diocletian and the Byzantine emperors, with their courts and hierarchies that anticipated modern Europe, is described with it many exciting vicissitude, and Gibbon treatment of Christianity is fairly represented. The most significant parts of the second half have been included, and the abridgment ends with capture of Constantinople and the memorable picture of Rome itself in the dawn of the Renaissance.  

It was in Rome in 1764, Gibbon records, "on the fifteenth of October in the gloom of evening, as I sat musing on the Capitol.that I conceived the first thought of my history." But it was many years before he "grappled with the decline and fall of the Roman Empire." The first volume appeared in 1776. The book sold, in the publisher's phrase, like a threepenny pamphlet on current affairs. "Lo, there is just appeared a truly classic work," wrote Horace Walpole. The second and third volumes were published in 1781, and in 1783 Gibbon left England to live in Lausanne, there to complete his history. - from Amzon