Chapter XI, which is mostly about Aurelian

[nwhyte]

Read it here, here or here.

1) Good quotes

On how the citizens of Autun received no reward for their loyalty: Such, indeed, is the policy of civil war: severely to remember injuries, and to forget the most important services. Revenge is profitable, gratitude is expensive.
Tweaking an earlier historian: [Vobsicus] relates the particulars [of

Comments

[strange_complex]

I've always had a soft spot for Aurelian because of his wall, so it was fun to cheer along for him while reading this chapter. On the wall itself, I would temper Gibbon's statement that "It was a great but a melancholy labour, since the defence of the capital betrayed the decline of the monarchy." Obviously the wall does have to be seen partly as a response to disquiet on the frontiers, but a monarchy that was truly in decline would hardly have had the resources to build walls on this scale. They probably carried more weight as a symbol of stability, security and investment in the future than as a real practical measure - not to mention providing plenty of jobs for the urban poor.

Gibbon's figures for the length of Aurelian's wall, and also the earlier Republican (the so-called 'Servian') circuit are also quite revealing. For a start, they are both over-estimates: he has the Servian circuit as being 13 miles long, when it is now known to be slightly under 6, and Aurelian's wall as 21, when it is actually about 12.5. This, of course, would make Aurelian's efforts even more incredible than they actually were, and thus still less plausible as an index of decline.

It's also clear that Gibbon stands on a cusp between two competing traditions of information. He has taken the length of the Republican circuit from a rather difficult passage of Pliny, rather than from the archaeological / topographical information which scholars use today. Meanwhile, for Aurelian's wall he suggests that he is stepping away from the literary sources when he states that "The extent of the new walls... was magnified by popular estimation to near fifty;48 but is reduced by accurate measurement to about twenty-one miles." But the step is obviously not yet entirely successful, given that the 'accurate measurements' have still over-shot by a factor of nearly three-quarters.

Finally, I hadn't previously heard of the mint riot mentioned towards the end of this chapter, but was struck by Gibbon's approach to it. He argues that the story as related in the literary sources is "inconsistent and incredible" on the basis that the causes given are not sufficient to produce violence on the scale described. It's quite unusual for Gibbon to be this critical of his sources (I still die a little inside every time he refers to a document from the Augustan History as an 'original letter'), so I thought I'd see what the state of the debate on this riot was today. Judging from this PDF of a 2006 journal article, matters are still largely up in the air (though the application of metallurgy to ancient coins does at least mean that we can now produce tables like this one showing the decline in the pure metal content of various different denominations of Roman coinage in the preceding period). So on this particular point Gibbon's approach has yet to be trumped by any particularly convincing alternative.

[nwhyte]

It is interesting how often one can catch Gibbon out on matters of local topography. (I found another case, slightly less egregious and slightly more excusable, in the next chapter.) He is much more interested in synthesising his sources than in actually checking the facts on the ground. (We should have been alerted to this by his remarks about Scotland in the very first chapter!)

On original correspondence - do we believe the material that Suetonius claims to have copied into The Twelve Cæsars? It feels more convincing than the Augustan History, but that is not saying much...

[strange_complex]

Yes, we seem to be on reasonably safe grounds with Suetonius' documents. He was working as Hadrian's secretary when he started the Lives, so would quite genuinely have had access to the imperial archives. And his comments on the physical characteristics of some of the documents he reports (e.g. Julius Caesar's use of note-book form for his letter, Augustus' spelling and handwriting), certainly do, as you say, feel very genuine.

I think what really convinces me, though, is that he only reproduces this kind of material in his Lives of the Julio-Claudian emperors - after Nero, they dry up. The reason may be that he lost his privileged access to the archives around AD 122, due to being disgraced and expelled from Hadrian's service; or perhaps simply that such documents did not exist for the later emperors he covers. But either way, it again helps to convince, since if he had been forging documents all along, he may as well have done it consistently for all of the Lives.

[swisstone]

I still die a little inside every time he refers to a document from the Augustan History as an 'original letter'

True, but Gibbon was a century before Dessau's brilliant deconstruction of the Augustan History, which took a while to be fully accepted (Bury's edition of Gibbon, which is a few years after Dessau published, still accepts the existence of the six authors).