Grounding one's understanding of Gibbon's masterpiece; why Rome is so important to Gibbon and his readers; what makes the periodic style so essential to the book's accessibility; why people should want to read it in the 21st century.

Following Edward Gibbon's intellectual development; exploring his childhood obsession with reading, his military service, his disappointed love, his social circles, his personal politics, and his life as a gentleman scholar of leisure.

Professor Damrosch reviews early Roman history; exploring the empire's important provinces, the excessive influence of the Roman military, the emergence of imperial dictatorship, and other facts Gibbon's original readers took for granted.

Exploring Gibbon's understanding of the role of the historian; discovering his thoughts about Hume, Voltaire, and other enlightenment writers; learning how he revolutionizes the use of extensive documentation in his work.

Exploring the rule of the Antonines; from Nerva to Hadrian to Marcus Aurelius, these five good emperors rule the only period of history in which the happiness of the great people is the sole object of government.

Discovering the horrific reigns of emperors like Commodus, Caracalla, and Elagabalus; Gibbon illustrates the hidden poison by which one-man rule produced a vicious cycle of incompetent, power-corrupt emperors.