The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 1

Description:

Condition: GOOD - Used with some wear from use. May include stickers on cover, missing or wear to dustcover, inside cover, spine, slight curled corners, stains, and wear to the fore edge. All orders ship via UPS Mail Innovations - can take up to 14 business days from first scan to be delivered. There is a signature, handwriting or stickers on the pages. Seller Inventory # 4J2HM00064PV

About this title:

• 4.17
  3,159 ratings by Goodreads

Synopsis: "It was Rome, on the 15th of October 1764, as I sat musing amid the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind," recorded Edward Gibbon with characteristic exactitude.  Over a period of some twenty years, the luminous eighteenth-century historian--a precise, dapper, idiosyncratic little gentleman famous for rapping his snuff-box--devoted his considerable genius to writing an epic chronicle of the entire Roman Empire's decline.  His single flash of inspiration produced what is arguably the greatest historical work in any language--and surely the most magnificent narrative history ever written in English.  "Gibbon is one of those few who hold as high a place in the history of literature as in the roll of great historians," noted Professor J.B. Bury, his most celebrated editor.
This three-volume Modern Library edition of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire--with Gibbon's notes--is edited with a general introduction and index by Bury, along with an introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Daniel J. Boorstin.  The volumes are illustrated with reproductions of etchings by Gian Battista Piranesi.
The first volume contains chapters one through twenty-six of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

From the Back Cover: "Edward Gibbon, in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, has always been my cynosure...Gibbon's mind was surely the most powerful and most lucid one that has appeared so far in the whole distinguished company of Western historians...Gibbon [produced] a masterpiece of historical research, construction, and writing which had no superior in its own genre in any literature." --Arnold Toynbee

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ...
Publisher: Modern Library
Publication Date: 1996
Binding: Hardcover
Illustrator: Piranesi, Gian Battista
Condition: Good