No other work has portrayed with such clarity the march of Rome's empire into anarchy and ruin, and no other historian has given his readers so much to ponder in their own situations. Concentrating on the 13 centuries beginning with the rule of Antennas Pius (138-161 A.D.) and ending with the fall of the Empire in the West, this author-abridged volume chronicles "the triumph of barbarism and religion" in the disruption of the united Empire, the rise of Christianity, the progress of the Asiatic Huns, and the revolt of the Goths. Never far below the surface of this narrative is Gibbon's sense of irony, typified in his definition of history as "little more than the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind."