Last time, if you read chapter IV of Gibbon and then read my post, you were all like wtaf. Well, Gibbon may have been trying to write history as literature, but he was writing trashy literature. He used all the trashy parts of Cassius Dio, who was a contemporary of Commodus, and of Historia Augusta, which was not and is unreliable. So he came to trashy conclusions that actually had nothing to do with the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.
I get sort of ornery about tracking down quotes. So in the second post, I referred to a standing army being 1% of the population.
Gibbon has this statement at the start of chapter 5. Of course, as with the Horace quote, he gives no citation.
The quote also appears in Federalist Papers #46 by James Madison. The Federalist Papers were published in 1787 and 1788. Gibbon published volume 1 in 1776, and James Madison is one of the last people in the world that Gibbon would have quoted. So there's an older quote that both are relying on, as Gibbon says, but neither gives a citation.
I tracked the quote to Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Chapter I, Part I, published in 1776. But even he says that it is computed "among the civilized nations of modern Europe". So it goes back before him, and it isn't necessary to suppose that Gibbon changed his manuscript on the eve of publication, after reading Smith.
You might suspect that it's in Clausewitz' On War. It isn't. It could have been. Clausewitz was born in 1780, but he might have heard this quote thrown around. The J.J. Graham translation is at Internet Archive as one searchable volume. I tried to find the quote a couple of different ways with no luck.
https://archive.org/details/onwartrbyjjgrah00claugoog/page/n8/mode/2up
So if you succeed in finding that quote in a European work published before 1776, tell all of us.
Second, in this chapter Gibbon demonstrates ever more conclusively that what he calls the "Roman constitution" is a figment of his imagination. He is trying to make it over as a sort of fore-runner of the British constitution, but it wasn't. The emperor, beginning with Augustus, was the paterfamilias of the empire, with all the rights and privileges thereunto appertaining. There was no progressive loss of "liberty" in the sense that Britons used the word in the 1700s.
In addition, Gibbon accuses Septimius Severus of being severe because he was brought up in camps. There are two problems with that. Gibbon is ignoring the cursus honorum which upper class Roman men went through on their way to serving in the senate. At its beginning, it consisted of serving in the army and achieving promotion as the man demonstrated ability. Gibbon is a heavy critic of patronage, which promotes people through favoritism, but at the same time Gibbon hates Severus for his demonstrated ability.
The other problem with Gibbon is that he will soon call Elagabalus effeminate for not going through the cursus honorum but growing up in Syria as a high priest and being pushed onto the throne by his mother.
So with Gibbon, you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't, at the same time as we know that Gibbon doesn't understand the "Roman constitution" at all.
In this chapter Gibbon gives a citation that leads to destroying something he said back in chapter 2. Back when Gibbon touted the 150,000 dead at Mithridates' hand, he did not cite to Appian, another case of hiding inconvenient truths from his (uncritical) readers. Here in chapter 5 he does.
The subject is a "malicious" note that the sovereign was king in all but name, and Gibbon says this in connection with Septimius Severus. The quote is in Appian's Preface to his Foreign Wars, paragraph 6. It's not about Severus at all, it has strictly to do with Julius Caesar. The "malice", like the connection to Severus, is all in Gibbon's head.
The problem for Gibbon is that one section of Appian's work is on the Mithridatic war. In chapter III, 19, Appian discusses how the war came about. Mithridates put a puppet on the throne of Bithynia; Rome restored the rightful heir, Nicomedes, who promptly attacked Mithridates with an army intent on plunder. Nicomedes did not have Roman legions with him, but he did have Manlius Appius, the Roman ambassador to Mithridates, supposedly with 40,000 men in his force. Appian says Nicomedes lost 10,000 dead and 300 captured out of a force of 40,000 infantry and 4000 cavalry. (The Perseus text in English is mistyped; this is what the Greek says.) The camp of Manlius was captured but Appian does not say the men were slaughtered, and he does say that Mithridates released the 300 captives from Nicomides' force. But I doubt that Manlius had a total of 8 legions with him.
I doubt it because when Sulla finally set out on his assignment against Mithridates (a couple of years late) he had 5 legions of veterans. Since Manlius was not assigned to this war by the senate, they had no opportunity to vote legions to send to him, so I doubt he had Romans with him, and I doubt that Bithynia could come up with 80,000 infantry. There's an old saying -- and if you can help me find the source I'd love it -- that in ancient enumerations, you should always divide by 10. Here's another example of why that would be true.
Appian states that Mithridates needed 250,000 infantry and 40,000 cavalry against the Bithynians. It would be in the interest of Bithynia to exaggerate this number to account for the defeat of Manlius as well as Nicomedes. Divide all the numbers by 10, and Mithridates still has a superior force.
What Sulla did once he got to the east, was to take one site after another back from Mithridates, who then sued for peace. I don't think that a king who started with a force of 250,000 would sue for peace to a Roman general who started with a maximum of 25,000. I think it's more likely that the non-Roman forces were comparable in number. And that's why there was no outcry in Rome in 88 BCE like there was in 9 CE when Quinctilius Varus' 3 (count 'em, three) legions were destroyed.
But exaggerations are the stuff of urban legend, so no wonder Gibbon reports the largest number he can find. So much for his leanings toward mathematics. And so much, too, for his analysis of Sulla's funding, see page 8 of F.P. Lock's 2012 The Rhetoric of Numbers specifically directed at Gibbon's work.
https://udpress.udel.edu/book-title/the-rhetoric-of-numbers-in-gibbons-history/
By leaving out a citation to Appian in chapter II, Gibbon commits sampling bias. This has discredited scientific claims time out of mind. Just because Gibbon is writing tabloid trash doesn't mean he gets to commit sampling bias; any real mathematician would take shame to himself for doing so because he might think he had proven a theorem that is actually false.
Now that you're used to discounting what Gibbon says, because he's cherry-picking his facts or because other information contradicts him, this is a good place to look at how he says things. I've given footnotes before to "Gibbonisms" and there are several in chapter 5. If you are used to reading 18th century English literature, Gibbon's usage may not have confused you, but for everybody else, my notes might be useful.
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