...was the vantage point from which he would look both forward and back: If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the...race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesttation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus. The vast...

...and ponder the Age of the Antonines, of which Gibbon (1981) declared: If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the...elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus [Aurelius' successor]. The vast extent of the Roman empire was governed by absolute power,...

...stands the unchallenged and unchallengeable statement of Gibbon: "If man were called upon to fix the period in the history of the world during which the...elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus. The vast extent of the Roman Empire was governed by absolute power, under the guidance of...

...originality which he saw as characteristic of imperial Roman society even in its Antonine heyday, 'the period in the history of the world during which the...condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous' (chapter 3). For despite this emphatic assertion of the material blessings of peace, law and civilisation,...

...phases of Roman history: the triumphant second century (famously described by Edward Gibbon as 'the period in the history of the world during which the...of the human race was most happy and prosperous'); the so-called 'crisis' of the third century when military, economic, and social turmoil is represented...

...Trajan (98-117), the start of the period of which Gibbon wrote that if a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the...elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus (Bk. I, ch. 3). Human satisfaction is never, of course, unalloyed, and Gibbon went on to surmise...

...von 96 n. Chr. bis 180 die goldene Zeit der Menschheitsgeschichte: "If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the...elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus. The vast extent of the Roman empire was governed by absolute power, under the guidance of...

...encountered. It was to be of high significance to Gibbon; his famous sentence If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the...elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus,14" follows word for word Robertson's sentence about the period 'most calamitous and afflicted',149...

...peace and stability for the Roman empire. The eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon called it 'the period in the history of the world during which the...condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous' (Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ch. 3). The third century, by contrast, was a period of considerable...

...wrote: If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition o\ the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would...elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus The empire reached its greatest extent. Except for two lewish revolts, savagely suppressed,...