So the big thing I showed last time is that when Gibbon gave only part of the citations about the Mithridatic war, he covered up evidence that undercut his chapter 2 claim that 150,000 Romans were destroyed by Mithridates. The number was given as 80,000 by Appian, but they were not all destroyed and they could have been Bithynians, not Roman legionaries. Mithridates' army was supposed to be 250,000 strong. The whole thing looks like one of those 10x exaggerations some historians warn about, all the more so as Sulla beat Mithridates with only 25,000 veteran Roman legionaries.
Gibbon hides more inconvenient truth in Chapter VI when he praises the victory at Narva of Charles XII, but leaves out his defeat at Poltava, after which he was forced to flee and spent years in exile in Ottoman-ruled Moldavia.
In Chapter 6 we get three things.
a) Gibbon proves he didn't read Cassius Dio because he constantly gives the wrong section number and even claims that something is in Dio that I haven't been able to find.
b) He shows he believes that Ossian was genuine. In fact he died before people started writing that James MacPherson was the actual author. There are objective tests as to whether MacPherson composed that work or it was genuinely oral in origin, in Axel Olrik's 20th century work with oral narrative traditions. This is another in a long string of "OK Gibbon wouldn't have known this but we know it now so this part of what Gibbon wrote is irrelevant."
c) I have a long footnote about Julia Domna being an Arab the same as the emperor Philip, and about his "brigandage" being an urban legend invented by a bigoted Roman writer. If you can, read Glenn Bowersock. “Roman Arabia”. Cambridge, MA, US: Harvard University Press. https://archive.org/details/romanarabia0000bowe/page/122/mode/2up
In this chapter, Gibbon begins to inveigh against eunuchs in Roman culture. Some chapters ahead, Gibbon will write about Narses who conquered Italy for Justinian, but he was not the only eunuch with military or other power: a eunuch named Rifq took Aleppo for the Muslims. There have been other eunuch generals throughout history, along with bodyguards, prime ministers, Sima Qian the historian, Origen, and some of the Mamluk slave-soldiers of Egypt. Gibbon sees eunuchs as something worse than slaves, but I think that's just because he can't think of them without feeling the knife being taken to his own flesh. You know what I mean.
'Tany rate, the soldiers decided they didn't like Elagabalus and turned to the last of the Severans, Severus Alexander. It was a bad choice. He debased the coinage again, and his troops suffered humiliating losses to the new Sassanid dynasty, the last non-Muslim dynasty of Persia. The Praetorians murdered his advisor, jurist Ulpian, and the Germans breached the line of fortresses along the Rhine and Danube. Alexander was also assassinated. Gibbon seems to believe he was an angel, despite letting his mother run things, but there was no stopping the setting of the Severan sun.
From here on out, an emperor might as easily be a barbarian as an Italian, and the objections to Macrinus' non-senatorial rank seem very weak. But the fact is, the army was making the emperors, not the Senate, and the turnover was too fast for the senate to keep up with. All they had was resentment.
Toward the end of this chapter, Gibbon tries to show that he understands economics. He writes about internal taxes and customs, and inheritance taxes, and confiscations of the property when somebody wrote an "unjust" last will and testament. He never talks about inflation caused by debasement of the coinage, and how the revenue suffered because of it, leading to confiscatory practices by government. His main beef with confiscation is that it proves that Roman "liberty" was declining. Again, he fails to understand the paterfamilias concept; the emperor had the right to do whatever he deemed necessary so as to pay the troops who were supposed to be defending the Rhine and Danube.
And of course, immediately after this chapter, we get into the consequences of the plague.
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