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Hello, on the 15th of October, 1764, Edward Gibbon sat

amidst the ruins of Rome, while bare-footed friars

were singing Vespas in the Temple of Jupiter,

then an idea came to him.

This was to write the history of the decline

and fall of the Roman Empire, covering 13 centuries,

an enormous intellectual undertaking that

became a phenomenal success.

It ran to six large volumes and was published within 1776

and 1789.

And in doing so, he reinvented what it meant to write history

to be a historian and the importance of sources.

So it's worth saying that the source of the bare-footed

friars anecdote is Gibbon's own.

We'd made to discuss Edward Gibbon, our David Womersley,

the Thomas Wharton professor of English literature

...