The display included all seven volumes of Edward Gibbon’s 18th-century opus, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire ; both volumes of Oswald Spengler’s World War I–era tract, The Decline of the West ; and a 2,500-year-old account of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, who “was the first historian to look at his own culture, Greece, and say, I’m going to tell you the story of how stupid we were,” Gioia explained.