Chapter VI: Septimius Severus, Caracalla, Macrinus, Elagabalus and Alexander Severus; and taxation

[nwhyte]

Read it here, here and here.

1) Good quotes

The juicy bits are all from the reign of Elagabalus:In a magnificent temple raised on the Palatine Mount, the sacrifices of the god of Elagabalus were celebrated with every circumstance of cost and solemnity. The richest wines, the most extraordinary victims, and the rarest aromatics, were profusely

Comments

[strange_complex]

I was glad of the section on taxation at the end of this chapter, because I have begun to feel that the balance between narrative and argument in Gibbon's work leans more heavily towards the former than I had expected when I began reading. It's all very well to read of the virtues and vices of the various emperors, but so far this is largely familiar material to me, and in any case if that's what I was after, I'd be better off just reading the primary sources directly.

nwhyte picks out above Gibbon's comment that "The personal characters of the emperors, their victories, laws, follies, and fortunes, can interest us no farther than as they are connected with the general history of the Decline and Fall of the monarchy." But although what follows after this particular sentence does manage to move away from the biographical approach for a while, the content of the chapters I've read so far, and the titles of the forthcoming ones, suggest that Gibbon isn't really living up to his own claims about the focus of his work.

Still, I am becoming

[swisstone]

the modern scholarly convention is to use 'Africa' to refer collectively to all those parts of the continent which the Romans controlled

Usually with the exception of Egypt, though?

[strange_complex]

Yes, usually.

[gareth_rees]

I was struck by this passage:the striking contrast of the situation and manners of the contending nations [i.e. the Caledonians and the Romans] might amuse a philosophic mind. The parallel would be little to the advantage of the more civilised people, if we compared the unrelenting revenge of Severus with the generous clemency of Fingal, the timid and brutal cruelty of Caracalla, with the bravery, the tenderness, the elegant genius of Ossian; the mercenary chiefs who, from motives of fear or interest, served under the Imperial standard, with the freeborn warriors who started to arms at the voice of the king of Morven; if, in a word, we contemplated the untutored Caledonians, glowing with the warm virtues of nature, and the degenerate Romans, polluted with the mean vices of wealth and slavery.
It's hard to know quite how seriously to take this kind of rhetoric, especially since it follows from a commentary on Fingal (a legendary hero) and Ossian (a hoax). But if Gibbon is serious, where does this view of the nobility of the Caledonians

[nwhyte]

It's difficult to be sure but I think Gibbon is writing this with tongue firmly in cheek. His cutting line about why the Romans never conquered Scotland back in Chapter I was entirely serious, and the footnote I cited in the original post here suggests that he does not take the Ossian / Fingal stories to be a reliable source. I therefore conclude that Gibbon takes it as almost self-evident that Ossian is a forgery and that the Romans were more civilised than the Scots, so the passage you cite must therefore be mocking contemporary Caledonian pretension, but subtly enough that Whitaker at least didn't see the joke.