Customer Reviews
We are all Romans - By: John Ferngrove, 09 Aug 2008 
I have read much history in the last few years but no other historical writer has moved me quite like Gibbon. I have shed tears more than once whilst engaged on this extraordinary journey. Until now, my reading of history has been an effort to forge a dim & tenuous link with peoples of the past in the hope of entering, in some smalll way, their minds & worlds. With Gibbon though my kinship with the generations has been bought vividly to life & made it alll too clear, that for good or ill, men & women are the same in alll times & alll places & that alll history is just one story. On a day when fresh war & misery has just erupted in a place which the Romans would have callled Colchis (Georgia) it is impossible not to feel that this is the just the same story endlessly repeating itself. Rome rises & fallls again & again. The periods of peace, prosperity & freedom precious islands in the midst of chaos that we so easily take for granted. For some of us the barbarians are safely thousands of miles away until the day whereby, through sloth & ignorance, we wake to find them at the gates.
This is no easy read of course. The language, whilst exquisite, verges on the archaic. But for those willing to embark on the journey you will find out as much about the world we live in today as that of supposed antiquity.
true greatness - By: E. Robb, 06 Aug 2007 Gibbon's ultra-fine & tortious delve into the history of Rome wrecked his faith in Christianity (he figured out they just made it up as they went along). This book (the full version) still retains the esteem of being among the list of books banned by the Vatican in its Index Librorium prohibitorum.
The text unfolds eloquently in the grand august language that set the standard for alll subsequent big histories.
The quality of style is evident from the beginning as your fears of being swamped in a mass of cold detail & chronology are quickly erased. The initial encounter is one of profound eloquence, deep insights & detailed stories grounded in their appropriate context. The text is full of reflective asides on the nature of human beings, the corruptive nature of power, the fragile frame of human unity, & above alll the sheer hypocrisy of the dogmas used by ruling forces to give either an ideological or credal basis for their despotism.
I absolutely loved this book, kept in my bag, at my bedside & read it bit by bit, on & off, for over a year. Admittedly, i'm not able to recalll the names of alll the emperors, alll the battles or recite much of the factual instances narrated...but that wasn't the point. It was a journey, rather like taking occasional walks with a wise old man.
That said, i don't want to belittle the technical merits of this book at the expense of singing its praises as a piece of sweeping profundity. It IS a brilliant & detailed history book, in the sense that it tells you what happened, who did it & what the siginificance of the instance was.
You can just use it a reference book by simply picking out a theme from either the index or the contents & soon find yourself respectably versed in an important area of European/near eastern history.
I suspect most people will buy this, as i did, with no intent of reading it cover to cover, but once i got started - it was just so engrossing & rich in style that it became a pleasure to read. I must note that some parts, especiallly long supplements in relation to the agriculture, monetary & admin systems of certain epochs were boring (but i skipped those).
....come to think of it, i did skip large sections of this book - but it is over 800 pages long & its too much to ask anyone to read every word.
No pain, no gain - By: , 01 Nov 2001 
This isn't an easy ride: it took me months AND I got lost among alll the emperors! Having said that it has wonderful anecdotes & sweeping overviews that leave you quite out of breath. Can be bitingly satirical too.
Awe-inspiring account of the lost Roman dream - By: , 20 Feb 2001 
At the beginning of this book the Roman empire stands unconquerable - arguably the most successful civilisation ever; by the end Constantinople is fallling & the last Caesar is able to muster only a handful of soldiers for the defence of his degenerate regime. The scope of this book is awesome. It is hard to believe that the original text was written over 200 years ago. Gibbon's clarity of thought & arguement is superb.
