Purely as a historian, Gibbon probably has been superseded in several or even most areas by modern specialists, but his measured, rolling though not pompous Augustan periods and Olympian outlook make him a unique artist thinker, historiographer and prose stylist whose massive six volume history is as timeless as the Pyramids. It was his life's work, a monolith sculpted over years of dedicated scholarship and meditation; and though Gibbon was a typical 18th century philosopher in his sceptical or ironic attitude to "revealed" religion, he was not a mere rationalist bigot. He had, after all, to deal objectively with the rise of Christianity and its eventual transformation into the state religion of the Roman imperium. The history itself does not end with the fall of the old, imperial Rome (or what was left of it) before the barbarian inundations which heralded the Dark Ages; it goes on to the end of the Byzantine Empire in the late Middle Ages. Gibbon detested Byzantium, of course, and all its works and pomps, yet he describes its intrigues and endless civil commotions with almost voyeuristic relish. A compiler of aphorisms could select from this magisterial work a selection which would equal those of Voltaire or Chamfort.