Is Edward Gibbon’s ‘The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’ Worth Reading Today?

Even if you know nothing else about the historiography of the late Roman Empire, there is one work of scholarship on the subject that you’ve probably heard of: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon, which was originally published in six volumes from 1776 to 1789. At the time, it was at the very cutting edge of historical scholarship. In the two and a half centuries since its first publication, it has been reprinted in dozens of editions and has been continually referenced in popular culture in a way that almost no other work of academic history can boast, from the (often-cut) opening song of the 1971 Stephen Schwartz musical Godspell to the titles of countless other works, such as William L. Shirer’s 1960 nonfiction book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and Chappell Roan’s 2023 album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess. To this day, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire holds great historiographical, literary, and cultural significance, and it may be…