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to 14 A.D., to Romulus Augustulus, who reigned for less than a year before his deposition by the barbarian Odoacer in 476. Moreover, Gibbon concentrated on the period of Roman history known as the Empire-from Augustus, who ruled as the first emperor from 27 B.C. Gibbon didn’t deal with this huge and inconvenient contradiction: Why did the Eastern Empire, which was centered in Constantinople and was even more Christian, flourish for another thousand years after the fall of the West? For example, he focused on the Roman Empire in the West, which fell to invaders in 476 A.D. Just a few inconvenient facts are sufficient. Thankfully, six volumes are not necessary to puncture Gibbon’s dubious interpretation. But in answering the central question of what caused the Empire’s fall, Gibbon failed utterly. Gibbon deserves considerable credit for taking on such a massive project, for his extensive use of primary sources and even for his appealing prose. More than two centuries later, he is still considered an authority on ancient Rome because of the six-volume magnum opus that made him famous: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The British author and parliamentarian Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) was celebrated as one of the greatest historians of his day. They may over-emphasize some factors while under-emphasizing others or allow their personal biases to color what they write. Even the best of them may find their way to the wrong conclusions. Some are very good at what they do, others are quite bad at it, and most fall somewhere in between. In The Devil’s Dictionary, the writer Ambrose Bierce offered this definition of History: “An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.”īefore you dismiss Bierce’s cynical perspective, remember that historians are mortals.