Decline & Fall

I mentioned in my last column that I’d been reading Gibbon’s famous history of the Roman Empire , Decline and Fall , which I’d never tackled before. I’ve never read Herodotus, either, on the Peloponnesian War, or Xenophon’s Anabasis , two other celebrated histories. I know them only by reputation. There was a time, of course, when both of them were regularly taught, and in the original. It was the…