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 worth reading for those reasons. But people often ask: How well does it hold up as history? The short answer is that, if you want to learn about the later history of the Roman Empire as modern scholarship understands it, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is extremely outdated. This post will briefly discuss some of the work’s merits and shortcomings and provide a list of more up-to-date works that cover some of the same history.

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’s merits

Gibbon was an extremely well-read man of his time, and he knew Latin better than probably most twenty-first-century historians do (although his Greek was significantly inferior). In contrast to many other historians of the time who relied heavily on secondary sources, he used, engaged with, and cited primary sources extensively and critically. He was one of the first modern historians to make use of sources that had only relatively recently become available in his own time and one of the first historians to use extensive and detailed footnotes documenting his sources. (Indeed, he basically invented the proud academic tradition of bashing other scholars’ arguments in the footnotes.)

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is also remarkable for the sheer breadth of history it covers. It was originally published in six volumes and covers in detail the entire history of the Roman Empire from the reign of Nerva (r. 96 – 98 CE) to the fall of the last Roman rump states to the Ottomans in the late fifteenth century CE. Few historians before or since have attempted to cover such a vast span of history in the same level of detail as Gibbon. (There are histories that cover such vast spans of time, but generally not in the same level of detail.)

Gibbon’s work was also notable for its incorporation of Enlightenment thought and its willingness to criticize both Christianity itself and historical figures whom Christians have traditionally revered. Most previous authors who had written about late Roman history were pious Christians, whereas Gibbon was a Deist who saw Christianity’s legacy as predominantly negative.

As a result of this, Gibbon isn’t bound by the same Christian pieties as many other historians of his time, and he doesn’t try to massage his narrative to portray figures whom Christians traditionally revere in a more positive light. For instance, he portrays the emperor Constantine I (r. 306 – 337 CE), whom Christians have traditionally regarded as a literal saint, as starting out as a brave military leader who, by the end of his reign, had thoroughly transformed into a cruel and depraved despot.

Finally, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is notable for the extraordinary literary quality of the prose in which it is written. Gibbon was a masterful writer, and the whole work is written in beautiful, vivid, eighteenth-century English prose that evokes both the extraordinary grandeur of Roman achievement and the shocking lows to which they fell. He is at times bitingly sardonic, even sarcastic. I don’t think any other historian can verbally eviscerate historical leaders for their vices and failures with quite the same gusto, grandiosity, and eloquence as Gibbon. Take, for instance, his description from Volume I, page 121 of the emperor Elagabalus (r. 218 – 222 CE):

A rational voluptuary adheres with invariable respect to the temperate dictates of nature, and improves the gratifications of sense by social intercourse, endearing connections, and the soft colouring of taste and the imagination. But Elagabalus . . . corrupted by his youth, his country, and his fortune, abandoned himself to the grossest pleasures with ungoverned fury, and soon found disgust and satiety in the midst of his enjoyments. The inflammatory powers of art were summoned to his aid: the confused multitude of women, of wines, and of dishes, and the studied variety of attitude and sauces, served to revive his languid appetites. New terms and new inventions in these sciences, the only ones cultivated and patronized by the monarch, signalized his reign, and transmitted his infamy to succeeding times. A capricious prodigality supplied the want of taste and elegance; and whilst Elagabalus lavished away the treasures of his people in the wildest extravagance, his own voice and that of his flatterers applauded a spirit of magnificence unknown to the tameness of his predecessors. To confound the order of seasons and climates, to sport with the passions and prejudices of his subjects, and to subvert every law of nature and decency, were in the number of his most delicious amusements.

Whether one agrees with Gibbon’s actual judgments about historical figures or not, no one outshines him in the rhetorical art of praising and blaming.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble portrait head of the emperor Elagabalus

Why The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is now outdated

Ultimately, though, Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is a work of its time, and it is now extremely outdated in terms of its methods, evidence, and narrative.

First, and most significantly, Gibbon wrote his history long before the emergence of scientific archaeology as a field, so his work relies virtually entirely on written sources and incorporates very little material evidence. Over the past two hundred years, archaeologists have excavated and extensively documented thousands of Roman sites all over Europe, North Africa, and the Levant and uncovered hundreds of thousands of Roman inscriptions, papyri, ostraca, and other written materials. All these kinds of evidence, which Gibbon did not have access to, have radically reshaped historians’ understanding of later Roman history over the past two hundred years.

The field of economics was also far less advanced in Gibbon’s time than it is today, and, when Gibbon does engage in any kind of economic analysis, it is relatively rudimentary compared to what economic historians today are capable of. Gibbon also did not have access to environmental, ecological, and genetic kinds of evidence, which only really became available to scholars in the last decades of the twentieth century and are continuing to reshape our understanding of later Roman history in the twenty-first century.

Gibbon’s prejudices

Gibbon’s personal biases and prejudices also strongly influence his narrative. Gibbon himself was a well-educated, upper-class man who only really viewed male rulers and upper-class men as important. As a result, he pays virtually no attention to the lives of women and non-aristocrats in general. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire focuses heavily on political and military history and largely ignores many major social and cultural changes that took place over the period the work covers.

One of the cultural changes that Gibbon’s work does cover is Rome’s conversion to Christianity, but here Gibbon’s anti-Christian (and especially anti-Catholic) prejudices led him to espouse some rather eccentric theories that modern scholarship doesn’t generally take seriously. Notably, Gibbon argues that Christianity’s teachings of asceticism, pacifism, chastity, and mercy and its excessive focus on the afterlife sapped Roman civil virtue and martial spirit and made the later Romans weak, pusillanimous, and excessively focused on otherworldly concerns rather than the affairs of the state, which he held contributed to Rome’s decline.

Gibbon’s entire attitude toward the surviving eastern Roman Empire after the sixth century CE is one of disdainful scorn. He portrays the medieval eastern Romans through a negative, Orientalist lens as essentially backwards, superstitious, unenlightened, and stagnant. The field of Byzantine Studies still struggles to overcome the negative stereotype of their subject matter that Gibbon had a role in shaping.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of mosaic work from the Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna (a stunning example of sixth-century CE Roman mosaic artistry)

Recommendations on works about the later Roman Empire to read before Gibbon

If you want to learn about the later history of the Roman Empire as it is understood by modern scholarship, here are a few works I recommend reading instead of or before Gibbon (in alphabetical order by author’s last name, with multiple works by the same author in order of publication date):

• Brown, Peter. 2014. Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD. Princeton University Press.
• Harper, Kyle. 2013. From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity. Harvard University Press.
• — 2016. The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire. Princeton University Press.
• Herrin, Judith. 2007. Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire. Penguin Books.
• Kaldellis, Anthony. 2017. A Cabinet of Byzantine Curiosities. Oxford University Press.
• — 2019. Romanland: Ethnicity and Empire in Byzantium. Harvard University Press.
• — 2023. The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium. Oxford University Press.
• — 2026. 1453: The Conquest and Tragedy of Constantinople. Oxford University Press.
• Neville, Leonora. 2019. Byzantine Gender. Arc Humanities Press.
• Watts, Edward J. 2020. The Final Pagan Generation: Rome’s Unexpected Path to Christianity. University of California Press.
• — 2021. The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome: The History of a Dangerous Idea. Oxford University Press.

Of all these works, I especially highly recommend Kyle Harper’s book The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire (Princeton University Press, 2016), which is an absolutely phenomenal, accessible, and grippingly well-written exploration of new evidence for the roles that climate and disease played in the reshaping of the Roman world in late antiquity. If you’re interested in Gibbon, that book may be the place to start, but there’s obviously a lot of other phenomenal scholarship to read after that. The list above is meant only as a starting place.

(NOTE: This post is adapted from an answer I originally wrote to a question in the r/AskHistorians subreddit.)