Gibbon -- the urban legend pt. 2

 Last time I gave you the four characteristics of urban legends that distinguish them from oral traditions, and I lumped the 10 faults committed by Gibbon into 3 of the four features of urban legends. 

This time I give you chapter 2 of volume 1, which has three features.

1)    More evidence that Gibbon could not access primary sources in Greek, but cited to editions we can't identify well enough to search for on the web.

2)    More classic Euro-centric bigotry, this time about "conquerors benefitting the conquered," the same argument used by enslavers of all times.

3)    Exaggerations typical of urban legends, side by side with outdated information also typical of urban legends.

This last is the really big one in this chapter. Gibbon buys into the urban legend that Mithridates the Great executed 80,000 Roman army personnel. At the time, a legion consisted of about a thousand men -- infantry and auxiliaries -- so this represents 80 legions. There is no outcry over this in surviving Latin literature, as there was over Varus' loss of three legions a century later. You can say all you want about the missing literature being just that, missing, as opposed to never having existed, but the earliest surviving citation is Plutarch and he says 150,000, an exaggeration showing that he relied on an urban legend. 

In fact a 2013 book shows that the population of Roman citizens (everybody in Italy) was just under 7 million in 28 BCE (from a review that gives the conclusion, https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2014/2014.02.45/). There is a standard quote that a standing army can never be more than 1% of the entire population (https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed46.asp). If Hin's conclusion is anywhere close to correct, Mithridates destroyed 1.1% of the population of the Roman republic. That 7 million is a modern population estimate, comparable to Karl Beloch's estimate for Augustus' census. 

We want to believe that earlier sources are more accurate, because they are closer in time to the events, but obviously that's not the case.  Herodotus' chapters on the Persian War, citing Persian urban legends about the origins of the Greeks, are not accurate. Modern archaeology dooms Herodotus in almost every instance. Modern DNA destroys a claim by Gibbon which I will discuss in a future post.

And by the same token go to the information in this chapter's PDF on alfalfa, linen, and some other agricultural products. In every case, archaeology since 1995 shows that Gibbon is wrong.

Of course, we can't fault Gibbon for not knowing things that weren't known until 200 years after his death. We can only fault 21st century writers or teachers who fail to present the facts at the same time as they lecture on Gibbon. It's disinformation. Anybody who takes a course on Roman history and finds that Gibbon is the main text, or that the professor presents Gibbon as truth, should protest in front of the whole class, and inform the department and dean that disinformation is not acceptable under the guise of academic freedom. But maybe all the historians at all the universities in the US have waked up and none of them teach Gibbon as true.

It is characteristic of urban legends that later versions will have exaggerations even worse than earlier versions. It's exciting and attracts attention. What urban legends never do is update their information. On my Fact-Checking blog I have examples of urban legends that have not been updated in 10, 100, 200 and even 2000 years. 

History cannot claim an exception as being descriptive. Astronomy is descriptive -- you can't run hands-on experiments with quasars -- but it adopts updates as they are peer-reviewed and confirmed.

History cannot claim an exception as being a liberal art. Sociology is in the liberal arts college; psychology can also be in that college. Both of them rely on updated peer-reviewed information.

History cannot claim an exception as a personal choice, aka academic freedom. It is disingenuous if not disreputable to award grades, let alone promote students to advanced studies, based on how well they learn falsehoods -- which is actually happening in another liberal arts field, religious studies, by incorporating Documentary Hypothesis.

So it's not a matter of restricting academic freedom. It's... it's... 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR5ApYxkU-U

Now. If you read the lonnnggg footnote at the end of the PDF that I give a link to later, you will probably get the impression that I think there was all this stuff floating around and what survived was just a small percentage of all of it. It's not what I think; it's a dead cert. We know that some 80 of Aeschylus' plays disappeared; we know that Agatharchides wrote 49 volumes about Europe none of which survived. You probably all know about Jane Austen and Pride and Prejudice, but did you know about the works of Mary Brunton? Jane almost entitled her work Self-Control, but she heard that Brunton had already published a novel under that title. So Jane took a phrase from Fanny Burney's Cecilia, which you also may not know about, and the rest is history. (Brunton is available online now, but only in soft-copy; even Valancourt Books doesn't publish her novels.)

So it's a dead cert that there was lots of literature floating around in Greek that we don't have any more, and it's highly probable that some of the work between 100 and 400 CE disappeared because it was judged heretical by one ecumenical council or another. And that is what the footnote means.

Saskia Hin, The Demography of Roman Italy: Population Dynamics in an Ancient Conquest Society (201 BCE – 14 CE). Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

The link for this post: 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FrwfjEr2OGm0AWF5xReO3pZjd3VCdvi3/view?usp=sharing