Gibbon in Rome 1764
“... At the distance of twenty-five years,” wrote Edward Gibbon, “I can neither forget nor express the strong emotions which agitated my mind as I first ... entered the Eternal City.” By J.J. Saunders .
Two hundred years ago this October, Rome and her greatest historian first met, and Edward Gibbon conceived the idea of writing the story of her decline and fall “as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter.”
The plan thus formed in his mind on that October evening in Rome in 1764 was brought triumphantly to completion twenty-three years later in the summerhouse of his garden in Lausanne, where on a June night in 1787 he wrote “the last lines of the last page” of the finest history in our language.
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