Edited, abridged, and with a critical Foreword by Hans-Friedrich Mueller
Introduction by Daniel J. Boorstin
Illustrations by Giovanni Battista Piranesi
Edward Gibbon’s masterpiece, which narrates the history of the Roman Empire from the second century A.D. to its collapse in the west in the fifth century and in the east in the fifteenth century, is widely considered the greatest work of history ever written. This...

Gibbon offers an explanation for why the Roman Empire fell, a task made difficult by a lack of comprehensive written sources, though he was not the only historian to tackle the subject. Most of his ideas are directly taken from what few relevant records were available: those of the Roman moralists of the 4th and 5th centuries.

"This is the first comprehensive, single-author history of the eastern Roman empire (or Byzantium) to appear in over a generation. It begins with the foundation of Constantinople in 324 AD and ends with the fall of the empire to the Ottoman Turks in the fifteenth century, covering political and military history as well as all major changes in religion, society, demography, and economy. In recent decades, the study of Byzantium has been revolutionized...

In 430 AD, in the besieged city of Hippo, seventy year-old bishop Augustine recalls his reckless youth, his days as a renowned but dissolute orator, and how after converting to the guilt-free tenets of Manichaeism, he was called to the imperial court in Milan to serve as opponent to the Christian bishop Ambrose, but was finally converted to Christianity through the patience and devotion of his mother Monica.