One of a small number of historical texts that have become classics,
Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire demands and deserves the
kind of attention readers habitually grant to the classics of fictional
literature. In Lionel Gossman's thematic and rhetorical study of
Gibbon's masterpiece, the foundation of authority is seen as the
historian's chief concern. The central problem of the work - the
foundation of political authority - also appears in another form,
Gossman contends, as a central problem of the work - that of the
authority of the historical text itself.