Edward Gibbon

Edward Gibbon was a sickly child who read everything, was sent to Lausanne to be cured of Catholicism, served as a militia captain and a silent member of Parliament, and on the steps of the Capitol in Rome in 1764, hearing friars sing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, conceived The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Six volumes appeared between 1776 and 1788, carrying the story from the Antonines to the fall of Constantinople in a prose of balanced irony that made the triumph of barbarism and religion sound like a comedy. The chapters on Christianity caused a scandal that has not entirely died.