Explore "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" by Edward Gibbon on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
AD 1430 In the last days of Pope Eugenius the Fourth, [8585] two of his servants, the learned Poggius [8586] and a friend, ascended the Capitoline hill; reposed themselves among the ruins of columns and temples; and viewed from that commanding spot the wide and various prospect of desolation. [8587] The place and the object gave ample scope for moralizing on the vicissitudes of fortune, which spares neither man nor the proudest of his works, which buries empires and cities in a common grave; and it was agreed that in proportion to her former greatness the fall of Rome was the more awful and deplorable.
[8585]: It should be Pope Martin the Fifth. See Gibbon's own note; and Hobhouse, Historical Illustrations of the Fourth Canto of "Childe Harold", p. 155. -- M. ↩︎