re: #314 engineer cat
i found it fairly entertaining, if you ignore the byzantine part: the late night roman emperors were a pretty eccentric lot, and of course they had a distinct tendency to get murdered
the book could be renamed Tales Of Countless Weird And Suddenly Dead Emperors
The version of Gibbon that I have is annotated by people who take issue with Gibbon’s treatment of Christianity. So, the most entertaining thing I’ve seen so far is the sniping at Gibbon in the added footnotes.