Vicissitudes of fortune, which spares neither man nor the proudest of his works, which buries empires and cities in a common grave.

Gibbon’s sentence distills a central theme of his historical imagination: the instability of human power and the leveling force of time. “Vicissitudes of fortune” evokes the classical and early-modern idea that chance, contingency, and the slow erosions of history overturn even the most confident achievements. By pairing “man” with “the proudest of his works,” the line insists that monuments, cities, and empires share the same vulnerability as their makers. The image of a “common grave” underscores history’s moral: grandeur is temporary, and political or cultural supremacy offers no exemption from decline, catastrophe, or oblivion.