Last time Gibbon proved he didn't understand the issues of debasement of the coinage or of the inflation that goes with it.
This time he starts off by condemning every form of government on earth, including democracy. Remember, he was a friend of Lord North, and he probably hated the way the Americans were rebelling against him. So basically, since the Romans had tried everything, and now they were down to a series of warlords, that spelled the end of the empire.
And of course what we get for a series of emperors, is the European bigotry that says if your ancestors were X, you have the bad qualities that bigots ascribe to them. Well, the first emperor, Maximin, descended from the Goths and Alani, and his father was -- wait for it -- an accountant! And he didn't work for Haft Accountemps, he worked in the governor's office!
Well, not quite. Maximin came too early in the empire for his father to be a Goth, but the Historia Augusta wouldn't know that, having been written around the time of the Gothic invasion by somebody who didn't really know anything about history.
So this is another chapter full of tabloid trash. And here we come to a claim made by Eusebius.
Before you get excited, let me tell you one of Eusebius' stories. He claimed that Philo of Alexandria and Peter met in Rome.
Not even close. Philo died soon after his embassy to Caligula, to keep a statue of the emperor from being put up in the Second Temple in Jerusalem. He wrote about this; he also wrote a pamphlet against Flaccus who attacked Jews for not worshipping Caligula as a god. But Philo was dead by 50 CE, and Peter went to Rome where he was crucified in Nero's reign -- which did not start until 54 CE.
Eusebius, like all the other historians of past ages except maybe Thucydides and Xenophon, reported stories that sounded good, but weren't necessarily based on eyewitness evidence, documents or oral traditions. In his History of the Church, Book II, chapter 17, point 1, Eusebius doesn't say for himself that Philo and Peter met, he says it's something he heard. Obviously this is an urban legend. Why would Eusebius say that?
Well, he was a Greek geek. He had read a work in Greek that was attributed to Philo. But nobody who was an educated, practicing Jew would have written the work, which was supposedly about Judaism. It isn't. It's a Neoplatonic tract grafted onto Judaism. There are scores of more or less gross errors and misinterpretations; I've read it, that's how I know. Eusebius also thinks that Philo's work agrees with Christianity. And he thought that Peter had influenced Philo to write that way. But since "Philo" didn't know anything about Judaism, and neither did Eusebius know enough to detect the errors, we have a comedy of errors here.
So when, in Book VI chapter 28, Eusebius says that there were Christians in the household of Maximin's predecessor Alexander, we have to ask some questions. If Maximin persecuted Alexander's household because of the Christians in it, how did he know they were there to begin with? If Christianity was persecuted at the time, how did their security precautions fail so badly that Maximin knew about them? If their security was that bad, how did Alexander not know about them and take measures, if there was a general persecution of Christians on at the time? How does Eusebius, born 30 years after Maximin's death, know that Maximin singled out the Christians instead of just killing everybody who might be loyal to Alexander?
Again, you would like sources from close in time to an event, to know what they're talking about. But over and over we find out that the writers of antiquity did not follow the rules we would like to set for historiography today. Expecting any such thing from them is a case of the Presentism Fallacy.
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