Illustrated Passages from The Histories

Among Gibbon’s innumerable flowers of rhetoric in the Decline and Fall, “ekphrasis” (εκφράσις) is vivid, colorful description, often of works of art or architecture, also of noteworthy places. He “draws” on many sources which include actual illustrations (etchings, etc) of his subjects.

Illustrated Passages from the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Spanheim’s Commodus (4.117)

Maffei’s Colosseum (12.353-54)

Adam’s Palace of Diocletian (13.396-97)

Pococke’s Thracian Bosphorus & Constantinople (17.591-94)

d’Anville’s Jerusalem (23.885-86)

The Bad Road (30.124)

Grelot’s St Sophia (40.595.103)

Gates of the Caucasus (40.609)

Wood and Dawkins: Palmyra and Baalbec (51.263.71)

Shaw’s Sufetula (51.293)

Swinburne’s Zehra (52.345)

The Byzantine Beacons (53.406 & n 74; 48.48)

Roman Ostia (31.196.89)