The last post was about how urban legends never update their information. During their life, they may acquire greater exaggeration because that's exciting and promotes transmission. But it's too boring to go back and try to correct the falsehoods they contain, and the corrections never catch up with the urban legend in the minds of people who love urban legends. That's why urban legends persist despite the best efforts to debunk them.
This time, we're up to chapter 3 of Gibbon which has one major fault. Gibbon describes the early empire as sowing the seeds of decline. It's not true; everything that grows has a decline at some point. Human cultures are no different from human beings in that way. What Gibbon says about the start of the decline is a classic example of misunderstanding or willfully misinterpreting his sources, one of the features of urban legends that contributes to their falseness.
Gibbon's description is something I've seen before: a pretense that Gibbon's description is accurate. Where I've seen it before is in the behavior -- or at least statements -- of the prosecution in the Mendel Beilis trial. The prosecutors pretended that they were working under a system similar to that in Britain or even the U.S. While Tsarist Russia adopted the 1813 nullum crimen principle, in fact Beilis was tried in 1913 for a "murder out of religious fanaticism" charge that was wiped out of the criminal code in 1906. Much to the chagrin of the Black Hundreds and in particular civil prosecutor Aleksey Shmakov. It's possible that Andrey Yushchinsky's death was whomped up into a federal case so as to justify passing a new law criminalizing this charge. But the evidence was all forged, the testimony perjured; the jury knew it by day 8 of a 34 day trial, and Beilis was acquitted specifically on that charge (though the bigoted urban legend pretends otherwise).
Gibbon is falsifying his testimony as to Roman government. He continues his pretense that Rome had a free constitution in the same terms as Britain of his own times, and provided liberty in the same terms. No doubt this is what has led the Online Library of Liberty to host his text, and they operate under a similar misapprehension. I talked about this in a footnote to chapter 1 but let me say it here.
In Gibbon's time, liberty as opposed to non-liberty was the freedom to enjoy one's property without fearing that government would confiscate it without justification. This was the difference between the Stuart monarchies, and the Glorious Revolution followed by the Hanoverians.
Nevertheless, Gibbon was a friend of Lord North, the prime minister at the time of the American Revolution. Not only did the colonists have no representation in Parliament, but they -- and Britons who supported them -- were prosecuted for sedition. But Gibbon had a horror of real democracy and it shows throughout his work.
Gibbon's government was a thing of patronage, privilege, and jobbing. Gibbon got into Parliament for St. Germains, a rotten borough (nobody lived there so he represented no actual Britons) in Cornwall, under the patronage of the 1st Baron Eliot, Edward Craggs-Eliot. Eliot only needed Gibbon to pass legislation; Gibbon never made a speech or did anything noteworthy. Again, Alexander Wedderburn's patronage named Gibbon to the Board of Trade when Gibbon's finances were shaky. Gibbon had ignored Eliot; he lost his patronage -- and his parliamentary seat and position at the Board.
But Gibbon is hypercritical of patronage, privilege and jobbing in the Roman Empire. He pretends that Augustus destroyed a free government with real elections, when the Roman Republic was run by the patricians and equites. When it degenerated into the civil war between Sulla and Marius, the stage was set for somebody to use the army for a takeover. Julius Caesar got the blame and was assassinated. Revenging him, Octavian made it possible to actually run the unwieldy structure that Rome had become after conquering western Europe and northern Africa. Northern Africa, including Egypt, was crucial to feeding an Italy that dispossessed farmers in favor of slave labor, pushing lots of people into the cities where they might not be able to make a living wage. Getting food to these people required big government. The upper classes were too busy fighting their rivalries to provide big government.
Idle hands also were lent to crime. Gladiatorial games would distract the jobless population, but gladiatorial games were expensive; good gladiators needed good training, good food, housing, and a little cash for drink and prostitutes because gladiator survival rates meant they were not good marital prospects. It took big government to run good gladiatorial games. In the 1984 version of Last Days of Pompeii, when the nouveau riche candidate tries to buy votes by paying for games, that's one of the most realistic things in the whole miniseries.
What's more, the experience of the social war showed that if you tied your allies up in your armies, you could move them where they were no danger to Rome. If they rebelled or disobeyed, they were subject to death under military discipline. This set the stage for putting the "barbarians" of conquered territory into legions that were sent far from their homes to serve and, upon retirement, settle.
This all rested on Augustus making himself paterfamilias of the empire, instead of just the head of the senate. Whatever the paterfamilias ordered, the familia had to do. He even had the right to sell his children into slavery. Once the Emperor was a Christian, his troops and population were highly motivated if not required to follow suit. When Constantine supported the Council of Nicaea in 325, it was a foregone conclusion that the outcome would become the law of the Empire.
Gibbon writes about the concept of paterfamilias, He shows that he knows Augustus took on this role. But even after chapter 2, he continues to argue that his own attitudes toward government applied to the Roman Republic and were suppressed by Augustus in the Roman Empire.
There's a disconnect there, which I describe as "the left side of the brain is not talking to the right side." I've known people trained in a given field who, when they leave the office, leave behind everything they learned and do the exact opposite in their personal life, with the same outcome their training prevents for their employer. I've known scientists go haring off after unproven concepts in a field not their own; Linus Pauling is probably the most famous example. I've known people with college educations falling for every urban legend they meet up with, because they simply have no critical thinking facility outside their own field.
In this chapter Gibbon tells outright lies about what was going on in the empire. He claims that all was peace with the exception of the Year of the Four Emperors, until 192 CE. His sources would have showed him differently. He either suppressed an inconvenient truth, or he didn't read the sources that give the information, as I have said before. I'll say more about this a couple of posts from now.
Gibbon is writing about a culture he does not live in. He can't use his sources adequately -- some he can't access at all. And he makes up his mind as to what he thinks, rejecting all information suggesting that he's wrong, some of which he actually records.
There is more ahead and I will keep posting. But as a spoiler, I recommend you start reading my blog of urban legends about Judaism. Then when you get to the point where Gibbon is what they call "not even wrong", you will understand why I would say that.
If you want to know about Roman government, especially the history of it, you are better off reading
Abbott, Frank Frost (1901). A History and Description of Roman Political
Institutions. Elibron Classics
https://ia800309.us.archive.org/18/items/historydescripti00abbouoft/historydescripti00abbouoft.pdf
No comments:
Post a Comment