Word: gibbon
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Sitting in the ruins of the Capitol at twilight, a 27-year-old Englishman named Edward Gibbon once dreamed of writing a massive work on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. At that time the British Empire was growing strong. And to young Edward Gibbon the fall of Rome seemed a simple, faraway matter: wealth unmanned the noble Romans; Christianity enfeebled the masses; the barbarians advanced...
Much has happened to England since Gibbon wrote, and to Robert Graves the fall of Rome seems a much more complex matter than it did to Gibbon. Nor does he write of it with the majestic smugness that has made Gibbon an unsurpassed soporific for 150 years. The barbarians were really pretty tough. The emperors whom Gibbon dismissed as weaklings were really doing their best; the barbarian generals were smart men-besides, Rome was a hard city to defend. So in Robert Graves's books Rome falls with a sigh rather than with the sonorous crash that Gibbon heard...
...Majorca Robert Graves, 43-year-old poet, scholar, teacher and soldier, who gained U. S. fame with his account of his War years, Goodbye to All That, wrote his first Roman novel as a scholarly potboiler. Called /, Claudius and giving a sympathetic account of the emperor whom Gibbon considered only a shade better than Nero, it became a bestseller. In Claudius the God, which followed, Graves pictured Claudius as the one Roman who believed that his wife, Messalina, was an honest woman, preserved the flavor of an old chronicle in a lively, modern story...
Organizers in the drive are: Adams House, Ralph H. Gibbon '38 and Aaron J. Himelhoch '38; Dunster House, Rendig T. Fels '39; Winthrop House, Robert Beck '39; Leverett House, Robert Buka '38; Lowell House, Walter P. Arenwald '38; Eliot House, Robert Cumming '38. Freshman dormitories are organized into committees headed by Edward...
...Harold and I have signed up for a course. It is called "The Influence of Herodotus on Trevelyan and Gibbon" and meets every Monday from two to four. The catalogue says it is a "seminar." We don't think it can be too difficult...