another great Gibbon half-sentence

He’s always able to say a lot very elegantly before he hits his first semicolon:

“The arts of negotiation, unknown to the simple greatness of the senate and the Caesars, were assiduously cultivated by the Byzantine princes…”

But the theater of action under discussion here is Persia, and Gibbon just can’t ever quite make Persia as interesting a theme as it really is.