History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon

History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon brings Gibbon's history to a podcast feed as a public-domain LibriVox recording. The episodes are numbered chapters, several of them split into parts. The words are Gibbon's own. That is the whole idea, and it works because Gibbon's sentences stack clause on clause before landing on a verdict. One of the sharpest comes in Chapter 01 Pt. 1, where he describes the conquest of Britain as a war 'undertaken by the most stupid, sustained by the most dissolute, and terminated by the most timid of all the emperors'. The same part follows Trajan's conquests in the East and the doubts that hung over them after his death. Chapter 01 Pt. 2 moves from maps to men. It begins with the legend of Terminus, the boundary god who refused to give up his place even to Jupiter, a refusal the augurs took as a sign that Rome's borders would never shrink. From there it turns to the soldier's oath, the golden eagle at the front of the legion, the pay and rewards of service, and the punishments for cowardice. Chapter 01 Pt. 3 describes a Roman camp as a fortified city, then tours the provinces, from British tribes such as the Brigantes and the Iceni to an empire Gibbon measures at more than three thousand miles across. Chapter two asks a different question. Gibbon argues that Rome's greatness should not be judged only by how fast or how far it conquered, and he sets its firm structure against the conquests of Alexander and the short-lived empire of Genghis. He writes about philosophers who privately despised the gods of the crowd, and he rates Lucian's satire as a better weapon than Cicero's reasoning. Chapter 02 Pt. 2 covers the line between Italy and the provinces and the spread of Latin through the West. It also covers the Greeks, who in his telling had too much taste to give up their language and too much vanity to adopt foreign institutions. The same part includes what he calls an imperfect calculation of the Roman world's population, which he suspects may have exceeded that of modern Europe. For a first listen, Chapter 01 Pt. 1 is the natural place to start. Chapter 00 Introduction and Prefaces suits a different appetite. There Gibbon explains why he cites the ancient imperial biographers under the single title of the Augustan History, restates his plan to trace the empire in both the West and the East from the age of Trajan and the Antonines, and defends small spelling choices such as Moslem over Musselman. Those pages show a historian at his desk, arguing with his sources and his spellings. The credited voices change between recordings: Kirsten Ferreri is named on the prefaces and Chris Chapman on Chapter 01 Pt. 1. There is no retelling here, only the text and whoever is reading it, and Gibbon's judgments land on their own.