Read it here or here.

1) Good quotes

This is rather a long anecdote about a bloke who became the Arian Patriarch of Alexandria, was martyred by the pagans, and became an Orthodox Christian saint. It is appealing for the general loely style of the writing, for its revealing snobbery about the sons of tradesmen aspirting to high office, and not least ( Read more... )

Read it here or here.

Sorry for the delay, folks: I have another project on at the moment which is absorbing a lot of my spare time, but will probably be over on 6 May.

NB that since this is halfway through the original second volume, we are now a quarter of the way through the entire Decline and Fall! Hooray for us!

1) Great QuotesWhy the ( Read more... )

Read it here or here.

1) Great Quotes

Taking them backwards for a change.

Monks are like insects: ...the swarms of monks, who arose from the Nile, overspread and darkened the face of the Christian world.
The problem with the Histoire Politique et Philosophique des deux Indes is that we don't know why the author gets it wrong: I am ignorant by ( Read more... )

0) The Text

I found a transcript on the Christian Classics Ethereal Library site, and edited that text into a single HTML file on my own site here (and a .docx file including the footnotes here). However, if you want the full glorious 135 pages of the original, Google Books has it available for you here.

Google Books also has several of the ( Read more... )

0) Preamble

Again this is a very long chapter, so I am posting on Sunday rather than Saturday - it is actually a little longer than Chapter XV. Read it here or here.

1) Good quotes

Slimmer pickings than usual. But here we are on Cyprian: The experience, however, of the life of Cyprian is sufficient to prove that our fancy has exaggerated the perilous ( Read more... )

0) Apologies

Sorry to be a bit late in posting this weekend. This is the longest chapter so far by a long way, and very meaty. You can read it here, here or here.

1) Good quotes

This chapter features Gibbon's sarcasm at the heights of subtlety, mainly directed against the naive pretensions of faith. He ends with a particularly barbed comment on how ( Read more... )