So last time I said that Diocletian would have been a fool to split the empire if he couldn't feed the eastern part, and he probably couldn't feed it from Africa because of the Vandals. But the existing structure of tax payment in kind from eastern provinces like Bithynia made an eastern empire viable.
And now we get into a new round of history being written by the victors, and probable demonization of previous competitors. The emperor that Diocletian left on the eastern throne was greedy and murderous, cruel and lustful. According to Constantine's press machine. His father Constantius, emperor in the west, was nearly a saint and was married to one. When Galerius died and the throne passed to Licinius, things got worse in the east, while the disgruntled Maxentius who thought he was going to be caesar in the west, got a well-deserved drubbing.
But this time, when the Praetorian Guards declared for Maxentius, they lost. Maxentius committed a stupid error, having the Tiber river at his back when Constantine attacked. Maxentius was facing north; Constantine had just travelled south on the Via Flaminia to reach the Tiber.
Constantine, facing south, could easily look up and see the sun, as the legend indicates. Why he would see a cross is unknown. But this story first appears in Eusebius, and we know from a few posts ago that Eusebius was capable of making things up to suit himself.
In fact, Constantine was a devotee of Sol Invictus, like many of his troops. Sol had been an official god since the reign of Aurelian, one of Gibbon's heroes; the temple was dedicated 25 December 274 CE. The last surviving inscription to Sol was made in 387 CE, and he was still worshipped in the time of St. Augustine. Constantine's triumphal arch lines up with the sun and carries three reliefs of Sol. Constantine did not convert from this religion until 337 CE.
So when Constantine looked up at the sun, he did not see a cross. He was making a last prayer to Sol Invictus to win the battle for him, and it worked.
And the rest is sort of history: the founding of Constantinople; the union of the two empires; their disunion under Valentinian I; the beginning of persecution under Theodosius II.
What -- wait, what?
And here is the chapter of Gibbon that you can basically ignore: chapter 15. It is nothing but ignorance and slurs. It's also an introduction to the hypocrisy in chapter 16, where Gibbon pities and sympathizes with the Christians for doing what he slams the Jews for doing in chapter 15, and for the same reasons. If you did not read my blog using the link I gave before, here it is again. It has a lot of entries; most of the posts are about the length of one page in MS Word. If you want to know something about Jews, read my blog, not Gibbon.
Under Theodosius II Jews were kicked out of the army and out of civil office, except as tax collectors. Tax collectors who fell short had to make up the shortfall out of their own pockets. Jews could not buy slaves but could trade in them. Jews could not build new synagogues. Luckily, Jews can pray anywhere, and say all the prayers if only they can get ten men together.
Under Justinian I new restrictions were enacted: in North Africa their synagogues were confiscated; they could not testify to the detriment of Christians in court; Torah readings in Hebrew were prohibited, they had to be in Greek, Latin, or some other language and in Greek, they could be the [horrible] Septuagint or Aquila's translation; Jewish courts were basically prohibited because the Mishnah was prohibited and it was the basis for the Gemara.
The Wikipedia article on Gibbon calls him dispassionate. I challenged it for a citation. Nobody who reads Gibbon can call him dispassionate unless they are a hypnotized fan. His attitudes were shared by some contemporaries, and for this reason people will say "but he didn't know he was anti-Semitic." My answer is, sneers and hate speech are not dispassionate; Gibbon may have drunk in hate with his mother's milk, but his isolated life and study cut him off from associating with people who might have taught him differently. Or not; it depends on how obstinately he clung to his hate speech, which at some point would have led to being isolated again because nobody wanted to be around him. His anti-semitism is a corollary to his appetite for tabloid trash among his sources, ignoring large issues that ancient sources do address.
It's another reason why Gibbon is an urban legend. He goes for the excitement, the exaggeration, the stirring of passions. He's more of a historic novelist than a historian. It just so happens that too many of his readers don't have the critical thinking skills or education to catch him out.
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