Rome: decline & fall

Kennett

First published in 1696, this short history by the Anglican churchman and scholar, Basil Kennett, recounts the rise, progress, and decay of Ancient Rome eighty years before Gibbon's Decline and fall …. A popular publication, it was reprinted no fewer than seventeen times in the one hundred and twenty five years following its first appearance.
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Gibbon

Of the impulse to write his monumental work on the inevitable decline, Gibbon wrote in the first volume,

It was in Rome, on the 15 October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the City first started on my mind.'

That volume appeared in 1776, the second and third in 1781 and the final three in 1788. Arguably his meticulous almost forensic analysis of source material - the evidence of the decay - parallels the scientific approach of Stuart and Revett a decade earlier.
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Links

Electronic version of The decline and fall of the Roman empire