In the Ruins of Edward Gibbon's Masterpiece | Hacker News Reader

In the Ruins of Edward Gibbon's Masterpiece

newrepublic.com

49 pointsbenbreen26 comments

> the idea of a sudden visible collapse of civilization is not supported by the record

The idea that there was no "fall" and that late antiquity is just a "transition" between arbitrary value-balanced political org charts is what's not supported by the evidence. This revisionist take is annoyingly common these days -- see https://www.amazon.com/Fall-Rome-End-Civilization/dp/0192807... for a masterful refutation and defense of the original interpretation. If you look at industrial output, lead pollution levels, sophistication of literary output, literacy rates, and tons of other metrics, you'll see a dramatic decline around the time that the Roman social order fell apart. Britain became nearly illiterate. Italy was ransacked by the Gothic Wars and its population collapsed. The aqueducts stopped working. The Pantheon was half-buried (the front doors couldn't be opened for centuries) and full of muck. It was, altogether, an absolutely miserable period of history. Gibbon's history of the era is masterful.

In his blog (acoup), Bret Devereaux had a decent sized three part series examining this debate. He mostly comes down on the "decline and fall" side (especially when it comes to the living conditions of people in the region), but does give a fair shake to the "change and continuity" argument.

Part 1: https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-f...

Great series (as expected from Devereaux to be honest), I really enjoyed it. Thanks for sharing!

There is plenty of evidence for the "decline and fall" camp but notably that conclusion varies a lot based on geography and perspective. Relying on mostly archaeological evidence, we do indeed see substantial drops in urbanization and economic output in the 5th and 6th centuries across the Western Empire which surely would have made life significantly, tangibly worse for a lot of people. But that decline happened at very different rates in different places, such that a 5th century Roman in North Africa might have experienced a slow transition whereas their peer in Britain might have experienced a near-total collapse. From a political perspective, many of the successor states in places like Italy continued to rule in a distinctly Roman fashion, using Roman norms, Roman laws, and Roman institutions - in other words, yes, a "'transition' between political org charts." These states were certainly weaker and poorer, but the wealth and capabilities of the Western Empire itself had been shriveling for a century by the time 476 rolled around. The continued expansion of the Church also made up for some of this decline in state administrative capacity among the successors. From a cultural perspective, your point about the sophistication of literary output is flat-out incorrect. And we haven't even mentioned the Eastern Empire - which was always the richer half to begin with, and actually experienced a number of later periods of resurgence and growth. So the actual evidence is much more nuanced, and neither of your conclusions ("an absolutely miserable period of history", "Gibbon's history of the era is masterful") are sustained by any modern scholarship.

The byline is kinda small, but it's helpful contextual information that this article is by Mike Duncan, who is likely to be familiar to HN readers as the guy who did the Revolutions and The History Of Rome podcasts.

This makes me want to read it. Thanks!

"Shortly after my book was in print, I began to reread Gibbon, ... and after I started it occurred to me to count the errors that his expert editor, J. B. Bury, recorded in the footnotes. I do not mean misstatements due to later research, but Gibbon's errors in using his own sources – wrong names, taking a town for a man, saying the opposite of what the cited source plainly says. I found 20 such in volume 1, forty in vol. 2, 20 again in 3, at which halfway point I stopped. And the curious thing is that the text with these blemishes is of Gibbon's own revised edition. But even so, there is nothing like Gibbon, Burckhardt, and others whose work is or was thus pockmarked."

— Jacques Barzun

I already read SPQR, by Mary Beard, on the history of Rome's kingdom, Republic and early empire.

I liked it so much that now I am in the middle of Emperor of Rome.

Does anyone here have any good recommendations on Rome's history?

I like this historian:

https://www.amazon.com/The-Storm-Before-Storm-audiobook/dp/B...

To avoid burying information, that's "The storm before the storm" (as the slug suggests), by Mike Duncan. I can second that someone who enjoyed SPQR is likely to enjoy this one.

Go back to Suetonius and The Twelve Caesars. Amazing read, even if you can't believe everything. The contemporary (or close) historians are lots of fun.

The Gallic Wars.

Rubicon by Tom Holland. I am currently (re)reading Gibbon.

Check out the Storm before the Storm by Mike Duncan about the last hundred years leading up the the fall of the Roman Republic. The sequence of events and personalities that emerged were almost incomprehensible as being possible in real life. By the end of it, I couldn’t help but feel that Hollywood is dead (no movies could compare to what had unfolded in this period of time)… so much drama, tension, betrayal, reversal of fortunes, action, suspense etc had unfolded. Young Julius Caesar - and thus the entire direction of western civilization - was a whimsical decision away from being executed. Anyway that’s my hard sell, consider it.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34184069

> But in the late nineteenth century, German historian Hermann Dessau broke critical ground by arguing the Historia Augusta was not written by six different authors over many years but was in fact the work of a single anonymous hoaxster writing in the late fourth century.

Is anyone familiar with Dessau's work? A cursory search makes it look fairly obscure. "Textual analysis" seems rather like alchemy to me.

The Wikipedia page seems like a decent summary, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historia_Augusta#Debates_on_da...

Anachronistic phrases and references seem to be what made Dessau doubtful of the origin.

A lot of textual analysis is fairly mundane — it's the equivalent of a document allegedly from 1962 saying "when Reagan became President" or being typeset with LaTeX or referring to "selfies". Specialists, of course, can pull off much more sophisticated versions of this kind of thing ("that is a phrase that never appears elsewhere in the Pauline corpus and also it doesn't fit with Paul's soteriology and also it's from the wrong dialect of Greek, therefore it's probably not authentic").

Heh. Yes. Like "three of the Gospels were derived from a lost document called 'Q' "

How TF can they prove that to anyone who's not a specialist like them? And how can they ever be sure they're right, barring some new ancient text being discovered?

They can construct various internally-consistent models of what's going on, debate the merits of those models, and check them against the available evidence while doing their best to procure and evaluate new evidence. It's not fundamentally dissimilar from what, say, particle physicists do. The raw materials are different and so the research toolkit necessarily reflects those differences, but serious fields of intellectual inquiry all resemble each other in these fundamental ways.

Since you mentioned Q particularly, I remember the college course in which I learned about it was using Stevan Davies' New Testament Fundamentals, which my college-aged self was able to come to grips with pretty readily. For me that answers the question of "how do they prove that to anyone who's not a specialist" — they can publish a (relatively slim!) undergraduate textbook that incorporates the theory.

ok, thanks. The difference, though, is that even in astronomy (a non-experimental science) they can always do new observations, more precise ones, different parts of the spectrum, etc. etc. With ancient texts, there's no new data. That's the difference.

I actually hosted Svante Pääbo at Google, and he said that in his youth he was really interested in Egyptology, but then he shifted to recovering ancient DNA. 20 years later he had a reunion with his old Egyptology friends. They were still arguing about the same things.

Archaeology (as well as new technology that allows us to interpret archaeological finds in different/more interesting ways) is constantly providing new data that changes our understanding of the ancient world. To return to the original article, certainly Gibbon was a product of his time and his narrative relies heavily on a number of unsupported biases, but he also didn't have access to the last few hundred years of archaeological evidence which has totally transformed what we know about the Roman Empire.

Hand-waving. Are you seriously comparing "the last few hundred years of archaeological evidence" to the advances made by the Hubble and the James Webb, or other progress in astrophysics in the last 90 years?

They do have a trickle of new information. Gibbon probably IS outdated. But don't try to say that archaeology is anywhere close to other sciences.

I'm not really sure I understand your point - isn't it self-evident that there is new data available to different fields at different rates at different times? And that when there are fewer available data points, each newly available data point has more potential to totally shake up a field? We can quibble over what a "trickle" means, but to use an example from my own graduate research (Chinese Literature), pretty much every piece of scholarly research written a hundred years ago is now considered wrong, totally outdated, or requiring huge caveats. I personally wouldn't call that a trickle.

> fewer available data points

we've probably gone as far as we can go on this.

When you don't have a lot of data, you have to torture what you have more and more. That makes the discipline not "science" but "sciencey." Just like economics is not science but sciencey.

We might as well call any theoretical discipline like math or computer science “not science” then, but somehow I doubt that’ll persuade you since you appear to have a priori decided on the relative validity of a bunch of disciplines anyways.

Here are a couple of great videos about this topic:

https://youtu.be/b_fcC_fmQqc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIctOo6thEc

Tim.

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