So we just got through another ethnic disquisition that proves you should never rely on what Gibbon says about ethnic groups. This will happen again in a few chapters, and if you have been doing the reading I told you about many moons ago, you'll understand why you should skip this upcoming chapter.
For now, we have another example of Gibbon's sampling bias to deal with.
He has had a chance for four chapters now, to discuss the effects of the Antonine and Cyprian plagues on Rome, when a quarter of the population was wiped out each time, a generation or so apart. You can understand the effects if you know anything about the Black Death. There was a demand for higher wages by a smaller pool of employees. This didn't really matter at first, because the lower population meant a glut of goods on the market. These were contrary influences on inflation.
One paper compares the Black Death to the aftermath of WWI, which of course means after the Spanish flu epidemic. The insane spending of Caracalla and the crazed behavior during the "Decian persecution" mirror persecutions during the Black Death and the behavior of people inheriting everything when their families were wiped out, as well as the jazz age and stock market madness of the 1920s. Population displacement changed the nature of whole regions, similar to the refugees of WWI and the 3rd century migrations of Germanic tribes -- who would have found more opposition if it hadn't been for the plagues.
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/213206
The outcry over the Germanic invasions of the Roman Empire is not an absolute complaint about what happened. It's more like what I saw on Twitter when the pandemic hit in 2020: "what more can happen?" and then we would find out and somebody would post the news story saying with flat irony, "2020, the year that keeps on giving."
Proscriptions and murderous rampages against people of senatorial rank left high government offices -- up to and including priesthoods -- gasping to be filled. Promotion of "barbarians" to positions as high as emperor were related to the 3rd century population crash and displacement.
And the environment was ripe for people to say, "the gods have forsaken us," and turn to another way of religious thought. It's a no-brainer that this was an opportunity for Christianity to fill the gap. It was useless for Diocletian to try and turn back the clock by some persecutions. He even undercut his own efforts to prop up the old Roman religion, when he abandoned the west to its own devices.
Gibbon had access to plenty of material about the Black Death. He ignored the Black Death until it was time to bring it up, at the end of his work. He never thought back to see that he had ignored a fundamental influence on Roman Imperial culture, any more than he bought a clue about inflation after Adam Smith's work was published. (There's no evidence Gibbon read Wealth of Nations.) He kept on collecting his tabloid trash.
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