SOURCE: Craddock, Patricia. “Historical Discovery and Literary Invention in Gibbon's Decline and Fall.” Modern Philology 85, no. 4 (May 1988): 569-87.

In the following essay, Craddock explains why the Decline and Fall is still read today, arguing that Gibbon's careful balance between historical analysis and literary description has made the work an enduring classic.

A work of history that is not an account of the author's own times rarely continues to be read after its data and even its interpretative schemes have been superseded. If such a work does find readers, historians and literary scholars alike attempt to explain its continuing interest by pointing to attributes that have little or nothing to do with the work's original value as history. They praise the superseded masterpiece for its rhetorical skill; its formal coherence and beauty; the persistent interest or complexity of its theme; the qualities of the implied personality of the author...