Gibbon -- the urban legend, pt. 12

Last time was another case of Gibbon ignoring a crucial factor in history, disease and the way it changes a culture by redefining "normal". This time he goes on with his tabloid trash and misses another important clue.

He's right about one thing. Bet you never thought I would say that! After 250 CE it didn't matter what the nature of the emperor was, how he got to the throne or how he reigned. This ought to be a warning against one-man rule but it never has been.

The point is that one-man rule only works if he can get and keep the majority of the population behind him. Getting, yes. Keeping, no. There's no such thing as freezing a social order anywhere at any time. There's no such thing as permanent order. There is always something going on somewhere that is going to impact a frozen social order, smashing it.

Gibbon knew this. He knew about the Roman slave wars, social wars, civil wars, Caesar and Augustus. He hated Augustus' government because it showed that Gibbon's "free constitution" destroyed itself in Rome, in the civil wars, and he hated Augustus for replacing it, even though it was the only way to keep Rome alive.

So he skips over pretty much everything and claims that the Antonines were the pattern government for Rome, and he ignores that they were emperors in the Augustine mode, and what happened after the Antonine plague, and what happened after debasement of the coinage, and so on.

When Gibbon gets to chapter 12, the army has been in charge of picking emperors for nearly 200 years, longer if you consider Vespasian the first in line. There is no such thing as one-man rule, there's just whoever the army is backing at the moment. If you have paid attention to history since about 1955, this is a pattern you have seen. The old leader is called corrupt and oppressive, the army throws him out, and whoever gets put on top spends a while there and then gets thrown out in turn. Unless somebody is spending massive bucks to keep him there, usually to get access to important resources.

In a true representative government, there is always a path for a peaceful transition of power. In a nation with freedom of speech and a right peaceably to assemble and petition leaders, there's no excuse for political coups. But Gibbon refuses to admit a) that such was not the case in the Roman Republic, and b) that it is exactly what the Americans eventually put in place. Britain followed suit in the 1800s with the abolishment of rotten and pocket boroughs, repeal of the Test and Exclusion Acts, and the extension of the franchise. That became the British constitution. Gibbon must have been turning over in his grave.

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