(Roughly) Daily

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As we remind ourselves of Mark Twain’s observation that, while history never repeats itself, it rhymes, we might recall that it was on this date in 1764 that then-twenty-seven-year-old Edward Gibbon, on a Grand Tour of Europe, was inspired by a group of chanting clerics to begin work on The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

It was at Rome, on the [fifteenth] of October[,] 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare[-]footed fryars were singing [V]espers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the [C]ity first started to my mind.
– Gibbon, Memoirs

Gibbons “Capitoline vision” (as historians now call it) expanded from Rome to the entire empire, and resulted in a magnum opus that was published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788.

Sir Joshua Reynolds’ portrait of Gibbon (source)