With impeccable timing, in 1776 Edward Gibbon published the opening volume of his seminal history, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In the year of the United States Declaration of Independence, at the exact moment when the revolt of the Thirteen Colonies was threatening to destroy Britain’s empire in America, the reading public was presented with an account of how a great and powerful empire might fall victim to its own success. In Gibbon’s account, the Roman Empire had fallen because it was overextended abroad, with territories so vast that they could not be controlled without relying on an army of mercenaries that sapped the strength of their economy; while Rome’s citizens, in turn, began to abandon the civic and military virtues of their forefathers, leading despotism to creep in at home even as they were menaced by invading hordes. The story of its ruin was ‘simple and obvious’: ‘the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness.’