Everyone has heard of Gibbon's "Decline and Fall", but how many have read it? Here the ordinary reader is presented with Dero's Saunder's compact and manageable version of this great historical and literary masterpiece.

Concentrating on the centuries from the age of the Antonines to the fall of the empire in the West, this volume chronicles the "triumph of barbarism and religion" in the disruption of the united empire, the rise of Christianity, the progress of the Huns from China, and the revolt of the Goths. Never far below the surface of the magnificent narrative lies the sweeping Gibbonian irony, typified in his famous definition of history as "little more the the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind".