Edward Gibbon, an English historian, published The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in six volumes between 1776 and 1788. This is the Preface of that work. He follows Rome from the prosperous age of Trajan and the Antonines, around the year 100, through the fall of the West and on to the Ottoman capture of Constantinople in 1453.

Before the narrative, Gibbon sets out his plan: three periods, from the Antonines to the Gothic conquest of the West, from Justinian to the revival of the Western empire under Charlemagne, and from the ninth century to the taking of Constantinople. The footnotes — Gibbon’s famous asides — are not in this reading. What you have is the prose, in his own eighteenth-century English.