Day 1/850
Hi guys, today we start our group readthrough of 'The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' by Edward Gibbon.
It should only take us around eight-hundred and fifty days if we break it down section by section.
Today's reading: Volume I, Chapter 1 pages 1-50
Discuss the book in this thread.
Lol. Is it really that big? 42,500pgs?
I'd rather read Thucydides.
Can you wait until June to start it? My copy is at home and I don't want to have it shipped out here only to have to ship it back in a few months.
>It should only take us around eight-hundred and fifty days if we break it down section by section.
Are you being for real here?
Intentional or not, this is the funniest thread I've seen in ages.
Credit to anybody that does this, but holy shit this is making me laugh.
kek
>Veeky Forums
>reading
>reading 50 pages a day
>FOR FUCKING 850 DAYS
the reply so nice you had to send it twice ;)
I got the penguin three volumes on the way, will I be able to join?
I read through the whole thing 3 or 4 times about 10 years ago. Really is, along with Hume's history of Great Britain, the finest, most beautiful prose in the English language. Its purity is wonderful.
Favorite part is at the end, when he is describing the decayed bones of medieval Rome, with poor people living in hovels under the arches of the coliseum. His treatment of the Crusades and the reign of Honorius is also excellent.
>foote's civil war
Fun fact: he wrote that using a dip pen. No wonder it took him a million years.
Count me in, I already read at least 80pages a day anyway.
Nice to see I'm not the only one that removes dust jackets and has the black shit from Everyman books cover their hands.
Reading Foote and Churchill and Hume and Gibbon and Lord Macaulay is extremely comfy. Highly narrative, artistically written history can be as good as any fiction.
They really fall apart under use. I think they are meant to sit on a stately shelf, not actually be read. That said, included bookmark ribbons should be mandatory in all hardcovers.
>Day 1/850
dropped the spaghetti on the first one, pic is related
Waste of time. Most outdated work you can find on late antique and early byzantie history.
Have some newer recommendations?
>History books about a certain time period can become outdated
If you are going to read pure non-fiction obviously you want to be using JSTOR to find academic reviews on works and Oxford Bibliographies to find monographs on the topic of use. Even using wikipedia citations on topics in classics is a good idea. That said, Decline is a massively influential classic, and is a cocksucking faggot
>Highly narrative, artistically written history can be as good as any fiction.
I think this is something really missing with a lot of history books that are released and written now. They're so dry! If all they want is pure fact then just don't even bother with that format and just list it like in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
And speaking of Churchill I ended up getting the 12 vol. release of The Second World War from my mum after it was in her loft for years. This isn't them, but its this edition.
It was written in the late 18century. Discoveries of new texts since then not to mention texts and editions not availavle to Gibbon are enough to dissuade anyone from readding him for his historical analysis. As for recommendations, i guess you could start from Peter brown. Bryan ward perkings share similar notions of decline and fall regarding the empire, while relying on latest textual and material evidence.
Yes. See why
I enjoyed this. The author found a town in England with the greatest amount of extant records from the period of the plague, and turned them into a narrative history, with apologies in footnotes where he was forced to use creative license. I was referred it by a teaching company lecture.
>not reading it as literature
Thats ok, just realize that in regards to his historical analysis its quite outdated and unreliable.
For all that, he is at least extremely honest and rigorous in his citations
In that regard he is not special at all. There are scholars since the early modern period writing mainly in new latin or old french, german or italian who hold the same standards as Gibbon, and in many cases much more than him.
You have literally no idea what you're talking about.
Pop history is full of "narrative" shittery, and it is shit. If you're reading history you should be reading history. Herodotus and others like him get a free pass for not knowing any better.
The Making of Orthodox Byzantium: 600-1025 is as good an introduction as you can. Highly recommended it.
Read Gibbon for the prose, not for the history.
...yes?
There's no such thing as "Byzantium." There is just the Roman Empire, which lasted into the 15th century. The fact that it lost control of its Western territories is meaningless.
I mean, a free pass for blame. The best you can say for them from a historical perspective is that their works let you know what people believed back then, and maybe can serve as a starting point for actual rigorous historical research.
Just because they saw themselves as romans and called themselves a roman empire doesnt mean we have to blindly believe them. There were other empires around the world with the same geneological ambitions (carolingians, captians, hre, russian empire etc). Another example: there are many gentlemens clubs all around the world who believe they are offshots and continuations of templars, cathars, ancient hebrews, homeric heroes and many other impossible geneologies. Do we have to believe them?
>research can become outdated
Clearly an outrageous claim, burn the heretic! #MAGA
HOF thread
Well done
Quote the part where he used the argument that because they called themselves the Romans they were the Romans.
Its what he based his claim when saying there is only a roman empire up to 15th century. And also since byzantium is a term used by historians and not by contemporaries who lived in the empire throughout its existence.