Gibbon. What can I say about somebody who wrote 12 volumes, some 3600 pages in all, who is referred to by so many and understood by so few?
I could say that
the monkey with infinite time could randomly produce Shakespeare, but that a
human with intelligence, education, discernment, good writing skills, and the
ability to access primary sources, could purposely turn out the 300 pages of
nonsense in the first volume of Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire, is the fevered dream of an insane man.
Let’s go through
his faults.
1) Citing. I haven’t found a valid citation in Gibbon. One example is citing to "xxii" of Ammianus Marcellinus -- which comes in three volumes, each with a section numbered xxii. This is common in way too much academic writing even now. It is one of the features of urban legends that the propagators give a source but never check whether it matches the primary source. If it’s an issue of differing editions, Gibbon owed it to his readers to say which editions he was using. He doesn’t. Everything marked in the online version as citation to a given writer, has to be exhaustively verified and that won’t be possible for the sources from the two centuries preceding Gibbon, because he doesn’t give enough information. The Internet has done a heroic job of putting this exact kind of material online (online access to Samaritan scripture was crucial to my destroying Documentary Hypothesis), but there’s no way to find Gibbon’s citations.
2) Sources. It looks like Gibbon copied
citations from his sources. His source said or implied something he wanted to use, and gave a citation; Gibbon copied the idea from the source and copied the citation without checking whether it applied. One of the most glaring examples is Gibbon giving sentiments that might be in Juvenal's Satires -- I didn't check because a satire is not evidence of a fact -- to which Gibbon cited, but definitely is not in Ammianus, to which Gibbon also cites.
3) Primary sources. The farther I get into
Gibbon, the more clear it becomes that he could not access some primary
sources, specifically those written in Greek. This includes Polybius, Josephus,
and Cassius Dio. It also looks like he did not access Latin sources,
specifically the Historia Augusta. He has this in common with the purveyors of
the “Jesus in Talmud” urban legend who could not read Talmud.
4) Misreliance on sources. In classical
times and even more recently, it was common for writer C to a) put a famous
name on writer C’s work, see the Anecdota about Justinian attributed to
Procopius and the 12 volumes of garbage attributed to the Philo of the Embassy to Gaius; b) report second hand, third hand, tenth hand, see Herodotus and
Ammianus; c) write in accordance with a patron’s desires, see Josephus; d)
report current rumor as fact, see Paterculus; e) write so long after the fact
that events consuming days or weeks are reduced down to a single line –
evidence that better sources for the event don’t exist, see Tacitus and
Suetonius.
5) Mixing contexts. The best example I can
give is Gibbon citing to Vegetius on the Roman Army. Gibbon pretends that his
data applies to the army of all times. Vegetius wrote in the time of Theodosius
I, after the split in the empire and conversion to Christianity. Vegetius pretends
to use Cato the Elder and Augustus as sources, but we have to doubt if much of
their work survived 300 years. Vegetius could not consult the Library of
Alexandria, which was burned in the late 200s CE.
6) Absolute falsehoods. Gibbon’s numbers
for the troops of a Roman legion are too high. He claims Hadrian ranged all
over Scotland north of his own wall; his citation to a source turns out to say
no such thing.
7) Bigotry. Gibbon is utterly Euro-centric.
He uses “barbarians” equally for non-Italians like the Cimbri, and Mesopotamians
who inherited 3000 years of civilization before there was a Roman Empire. He
ignores the Chinese of the Jin Dynasty who ruled a similar territory and
population to the Roman Empire of the Antonines, with similar beauty of culture
and riches. Gibbon almost never misses an opportunity for a slur -- but he misquotes Horace by leaving out the term "savage" which refers to the Latins.
8) Self-contradiction. In volume one, within the confines of page 23, Gibbon contradicts himself about
whether the barbarians were stationed strictly on the frontier or “promiscuously”
throughout the empire. Aside from that, Gibbon doesn’t seem to understand what “frontier”
means, where it was, or how it was demarcated.
9) Vocabulary. Gibbon wrote in the 1700s
and uses many words in the meanings they had prior to the British Regency,
which they no longer have. Some words he uses so often and in so many contexts
that they lose all significance.
10) Obscurity. The editor of the version at
OLL, Lecky, claims that Gibbon used the clearest language. But in a reference
to Britain, Gibbon calls it “insulated” where he claims there was no conflict
between its conquest and Augustus’ instructions not to extend imperial
territory. To us, nowadays, “insulated” means walled off from external
influences. Gibbon may have been thinking of Britain as an insula, island.
In either case, the context is incomprehensible.
You are hostage to Gibbon's faults if you can't read Greek or Latin. In fact, you are hostage to any writer if you don't know foreign languages, because in every field, some work is not available in English.
You must also read 20th and 21st century papers, such as the ones on Jstor, which you may be able to access with a Google or Facebook account if you register. Our understanding of the Sea Peoples has been revolutionized and now it turns out that some of them are pre-Hellenic Greeks while others are pre-Latin Italians. You won't get this from any author working before 1995.
On my Fact-Checking thread, I discussed the difference between oral tradition and urban legend. Aside from the fact that Gibbon worked in writing, not orally, we know he a) wrote about a culture he was not living in; b) misused, misunderstood, manipulated, or ignored sources of information; c) falsely cited to authorities that either didn't say it or don't exist. He's not much better than Jean Astruc, whose falsehoods gave rise to Documentary Hypothesis, another urban legend, a little before Gibbon's time. There must have been something in the air in the 1700s to produce two such monumental piles of falsehood.
Here are two useful
links.
The complete work
with both Gibbon’s and Lecky’s notes.
My footnoted
version of Chapter 1, the first 34 pages of volume 1.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_JtGMtLZUBzv5K3w5ibjZT0P3pXpiHJE/view?usp=sharing
If you can get
through my footnotes without realizing that Gibbon didn’t know what he was
talking about, you weren’t paying attention.
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