On "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" by Edward Gibbon ****

It's hard not to be astounded by Gibbon's accomplishment--a six-volume work on the history of Roman Empire from the time that the first emperors come on the scene through the final desperate acts as the eastern empire falls to the Turks and into the start of the Italian Renaissance. I listened to this book on a Librivox recording, rather than reading it. Eighteenth-century writing is difficult to read, and in many ways it's even more difficult to listen to. Gibbon, like most writers of the time, is flowery to excess. Worse, many of the readers are not terribly good--some I could barely understand, and others could easily put one to sleep. I often zoned out while listening, and when I finally finished some six months later, I was overjoyed.

Still, I found some sections of the book very compelling, even in audio form. These were mostly sections that I was interested in for my own reasons and thus felt more inclined to put forth the effort to really pay attention.

An exception to that would be Gibbon's account of the emperor Commodus, whose antics were actually fairly comic--he considered himself a sportsman and participated in gladiator events, much to the shock and horror of his patrons.

Otherwise, the portions I found most entertaining had to do mostly with early Christian history, Justinian's restoration of the empire, and Islamic history. In fact, I was rather floored by how much there was about the Muslims, the Mongols, and the Huns, but that's what Gibbon chose to do--not just to write about Rome but to write about the history of Europe, which in many ways is Rome and all that have had interactions with the empire's various iterations throughout its history. The first volume of Librivox recordings are available here.