Edward Gibbon tells us that it was in the ruins of the Temple of Jupiter while listening to the singing of the barefooted friars that he first began to meditate on a history of the decline and fall of the city of Rome. He was far from the first English visitor to Rome to be deeply and profoundly moved by the ruins of the ancient empire; an early medieval English visitor in the 8th or 9th century wrote a poem describing the “works of giants decaying.” Nor was Gibbon the first to speak of the decline of Rome. As Edward Watts makes abundantly clear in his new book, The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome: The History of a Dangerous Idea, no one was ever more preoccupied by the decline of Rome than the Romans themselves.

Edward J. Watts is Professor & Alkiviadis Vassiliadis Endowed Chair in Byzantine Greek History at the University of California San Diego. The author of numerous books, he was last on the podcast in Episode 93 discussing his book Mortal Republic.