Philip Stern

Possibly the one of the creative Book Covers : Cover design of the 1946, edition of Edward Gibbon's "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" Volumes. The book that permanently made me a sadder and wiser man was Edward Gibbons' The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. To follow one of the greatest civilizations of all time as it degenerated and fractured, even before being torn apart by its enemies, was especially painful in view of the parallels to what is happening in America in our own times. The fall of the Roman Empire was not just a matter of changing rulers or political systems. It was the collapse of a whole civilization - the destruction of an economy, the breakdown of law and order, the disappearance of many educational institutions. It has been estimated that a thousand years passed before the standard of living in Western Europe rose again to the level it had once reached back in Roman times. How long would it take us to recover from the collapse of Western civilization today -if we ever recovered ? Gibbon offers an explanation for the fall of the Roman Empire, a task made difficult by a lack of comprehensive written sources. According to Gibbon, Roman Empire succumbed to barbarian  invasions in large part due to the gradual loss of civic virtue among its citizens. He began an ongoing controversy about the role of Christianity, but he gave great weight to other causes of internal decline and to attacks from outside the Empire. Like other Enlightenment thinkers and British citizens of the age steeped in institutional  anti-Catholicism, Gibbon held in contempt the Middle Ages as a priest-ridden, superstitious Dark Age. It was not until his own era, the "Age of Reason", with its emphasis on rational thought, it was believed, that human history could resume its progress. #archaeohistories