The inspiration for The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, as Edward Gibbon famously recalls in his memoirs, came from ruins: "It was at Rome on the fifteenth of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol while the barefooted fryars were singing Vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the City first started to my mind." 1 In its topographical specificity-the Capitol lies in ruins while the temple of Jupiter has been taken over by "fryers"-this scene captures the broadest historical argument of Gibbon's enormous work: Rome fell to ruin when the city became Christian and its new leaders destroyed or neglected the former monuments of its classical past.
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