Chapter IX: The state of Germany till the invasion of the Barbarians
Read it here, here or here. I have invested in the first of the three-volume Penguin complete Decline and Fall, which was pretty inexpensive second-hand from *m*z*n and has a decent list also of changes between the various editions.
0) Normal service resumed
This time last week, I was at a conference on Tudor Ireland in Connecticut; the Saturday before, I was on a gruelling Turkish Airlines flight from Nairobi to New York via Istanbul; and the Saturday before that, I was on an only slightly less gruelling trek to Juba in Southern Sudan via Addis Ababa. One obvious lesson learned is that when I am travelling, Gibbon doesn't come with me. Anyway, I shall warn in advance of similar future interruptions.
1) Good quotes
I'm going to start at the end of the chapter, where Gibbon muses on the mismatch between the numbers of people affetcted by historical events and the significance attached to those events by later ages: Wars, and the administration of public affairs are the principal subjects of history; but the number of persons interested in these busy scenes is very different according to the different condition of mankind. In great monarchies millions of obedient subjects pursue their useful occupations in peace and obscurity. The attention of the writer, as well as of the reader, is solely confined to a court, a capital, a regular army, and the districts which happen to be the occasional scene of military operations. But a state of freedom and barbarism, the season of civil commotions, or the situation of petty republics,87 raises almost every member of the community into action, and consequently into notice. The irregular divisions, and the restless motions, of the people of Germany dazzle our imagination and seem to multiply their numbers. The profuse enumeration of kings and warriors of armies and nations inclines us to forget that the same objects are continually repeated under a variety of appellations, and that the most splendid appellations have been frequently lavished on the most inconsiderable objects.
87 Should we suspect that Athens contained only 21,000 citizens, and Sparta no more than 39,000? See Hume and Wallace on the number of mankind in ancient and modern times.
On the importance of literacy: ...the use of letters is the principal circumstance that distinguishes a civilized people from a herd of savages incapable of knowledge or reflection. Without that artificial help, the human memory soon dissipates or corrupts the ideas intrusted to her charge; and the nobler faculties of the mind, no longer supplied with models or with materials, gradually forget their powers; the judgment becomes feeble and lethargic, the imagination languid or irregular. Fully to apprehend this important truth, let us attempt, in an improved society, to calculate the immense distance between the man of learning and the illiterate peasant. The former, by reading and reflection, multiplies his own experience, and lives in distant ages and remote countries; whilst the latter, rooted to a single spot, and confined to a few years of existence, surpasses, but very little, his fellow labourer the ox in the exercise of his mental faculties. The same, and even a greater, difference will be found between nations than between individuals; and we may safely pronounce that, without some species of writing, no people has ever preserved the faithful annals of their history, ever made any considerable progress in the abstract sciences, or ever possessed, in any tolerable degree of perfection, the useful and agreeable arts of life.
On the perils of alcohol: Strong beer, a liquor extracted with very little art from wheat or barley, and corrupted (as it is strongly expressed by Tacitus) into a certain semblance of wine, was sufficient for the gross purposes of German debauchery. But those who had tasted the rich wines of Italy, and afterwards of Gaul, sighed for that more delicious species of intoxication. They attempted not, however (as has since been executed with so much success), to naturalise the vine on the banks of the Rhine and Danube; nor did they endeavour to procure by industry the materials of an advantageous commerce. To solicit by labour what might be ravished by arms was esteemed unworthy of the German spirit. The intemperate thirst of strong liquors often urged the barbarians to invade the provinces on which art or nature had bestowed those much envied presents. The Tuscan who betrayed his country to the Celtic nations attracted them into Italy by the prospect of the rich fruits and delicious wines, the productions of a happier climate. And in the same manner the German auxiliaries, invited into France during the civil wars of the sixteenth century, were allured by the promise of plenteous quarters in the provinces of Champagne and Burgundy. Drunkenness, the most illiberal, but not the most dangerous, of our vices, was sometimes capable, in a less civilised state of mankind, of occasioning a battle, a war, or a revolution.
And a few shorter one-liners, starting with this from footnote 11: It may be remarked, that man is the only animal which can live and multiply in every country from the equator to the poles. The hog seems to approach the nearest to our species in that privilege.
In a case of the pot calling the kettle black, Gibbon mocks Tacitus for misogyny: "The neighbours of the Suiones, the Sitones, are sunk even below servitude; they obey a woman."41
41 Tacitus Germania c. 44, 45. Frenshemius (who dedicated his supplement to Livy to Christina of Sweden) thinks proper to be very angry with the Roman who expressed so very little reverence for Northern queens.
And finally the Pays de Vaud, which of course Gibbon knew well from his time at Lausanne, is: a small district on the banks of the Leman Lake, much more distinguished for politeness than for industry
2) Summary
This chapter does what it says in the title, giving us an account of the Germans largely (and occasionally critically) based on Tacitus, and ending by wondering why they did not make more effort to attack Rome between Varus [9 AD] and Decius [251 AD] (the explanations given being lack of metal technology, and too much internal dissent). But Gibbon also uses it to attach a lot of other philosophical speculation, in particular about the politics, social life and culture of the German tribes as precursors of the civilisation of Western Europe (in particular of course England).
3) Points arising
i) Freedom
This is an opportunity for Gibbon to showcase why the Germanic tribes' version of freedom is important, and he doesn't quite pull it off; the chapter is long (very long) on romantic speculation about noble savages and rather short on political detail. The word "freedom" is used five times in the main text, the word "liberty" three times; both come together in this telling couple of sentences: A warlike nation like the Germans, without either cities, letters, arts, or money, found some compensation for this savage state in the enjoyment of liberty. Their poverty secured their freedom, since our desires and our possessions are the strongest fetters of despotism.
It seems that civilisation and liberty are to a certain extent in contradiction (NB also the comments about literacy quoted above). Perhaps Gibbon is using "liberty" here only to mean freedom from foreign domination, rather than freedom of the individual? That would certainly be consistent with the rather odd statement at the beginning of the section on civil assemblies that: To obtain the desired end, it is absolutely necessary that each individual should conceive himself obliged to submit his private opinion and actions to the judgment of the greater number of his associates.
This doesn't sound very libertarian or even very liberal; I almost wonder if the sense has been garbled through the centuries?
ii) Women and sexual morality
As well as eroding liberty and freedom, civilisation also has a deleterious effect on sexual morality and the chastity of women: Although the progress of civilisation has undoubtedly contributed to assuage the fiercer passions of human nature, it seems to have been less favourable to the virtue of chastity, whose most dangerous enemy is the softness of the mind. The refinements of life corrupt while they polish the intercourse of the sexes. The gross appetite of love becomes most dangerous, when it is elevated, or rather, indeed, disguised, by sentimental passion. The elegance of dress, of motion, and of manners gives a lustre to beauty, and inflames the senses through the imagination. Luxurious entertainments, midnight dances, and licentious spectacles present at once temptation and opportunity to female frailty.58 From such dangers the unpolished wives of the barbarians were secured by poverty, solitude, and the painful cares of a domestic life. The German huts, open on every side to the eye of indiscretion or jealousy, were a better safeguard of conjugal fidelity than the walls, the bolts, and the eunuchs of a Persian harem.
58 Ovid employs two hundred lines in the research of places the most favourable to love. Above all he considers the theatre as the best adapted to collect the beauties of Rome, and to melt them into tenderness and sensuality.
I'm quoting a bit selectively here, as Gibbon has already teased Tacitus on this subject and goes on to say: To this reason, another may be added of a more honourable nature. The Germans treated their women with esteem and confidence, consulted them on every occasion of importance, and fondly believed that in their breasts resided a sanctity and wisdom more than human. Some of these interpreters of fate, such as Velleda, in the Batavian war, governed, in the name of the deity, the fiercest nations of Germany. The rest of the sex, without being adored as goddesses, were respected as the free and equal companions of soldiers; associated even by the marriage ceremony to a life of toil, of danger, and of glory.
Of course, this isn't a total improvement; the phrase "fondly believed" means that the Germans were slightly nutty to think that their women's breasts held "a sanctity and wisdom more than human". I shall stop talking about breasts now.
iii) Climate Change
I noted this passage at the start of this year, but I will repeat it again here: Some ingenious writers have suspected that Europe was much colder formerly than it is at present; and the most ancient descriptions of the climate of Germany tend exceedingly to confirm their theory. The general complaints of intense frost, and eternal winter, are perhaps little to be regarded, since we have no method of reducing to the accurate standard of the thermometer the feelings or the expressions of an orator, born in the happier regions of Greece or Asia. But I shall select two remarkable circumstances of a less equivocal nature. 1/. The great rivers which covered the Roman provinces, the Rhine and the Danube, were frequently frozen over, and capable of supporting the most enormous weights. The barbarians, who often chose that severe season for their inroads, transported, without apprehension or danger, their numerous armies, their cavalry, and their heavy wagons, over a vast and solid bridge of ice. Modern ages have not presented an instance of a like phenomenon. 2/. The rein deer, that useful animal, from whom the savage of the North derives the best comforts of his dreary life, is of a constitution that supports, and even requires, the most intense cold. He is found on the rock of Spitzberg, within ten degrees of the Pole; he seems to delight in the snows of Lapland and Siberia; but at present he cannot subsist, much less multiply, in any country to the south of the Baltic. In the time of Caesar, the rein deer, as well as the elk and the wild bull, was a native of the Hercynian forest, which then overshadowed a great part of Germany and Poland. The modern improvements sufficiently explain the causes of the diminution of the cold. These immense woods have been gradually cleared, which intercepted from the earth the rays of the sun. The morasses have been drained, and, in proportion as the soil has been cultivated, the air has become more temperate. Canada, at this day, is an exact picture of ancient Germany. Although situated in the same parallel with the finest provinces of France and England, that country experiences the most rigorous cold. The reindeer are very numerous, the ground is covered with deep and lasting snow, and the great river of St. Laurence is regularly frozen, in a season when the waters of the Seine and the Thames are usually free from ice.
Gibbon is probably unaware of the Gulf Stream warming northwestern Europe (Benjamin Franklin described it a few years later, in 1786). It's also fairly clear to the modern reader that human destruction of their habitat alone is enough to drive the reindeer and elk beyond the Baltic, rather than the trees providing some sort of continental cooling effect as Gibbon seems to believe. Like Gibbon, I do wonder a bit if the cold was exaggerated by Roman writers - he footnotes Ovid describing frozen lumps of wine being served at dinner, but I would observe that the Danube was a cold place for Ovid in more ways than one, and he was also a master of figures of speech.
Data are few and dubious, but the "Little Ice Age" generally described as having lasted from about 1500 to 1850 seems to have let up - and warmed up - specifically at the time that Gibbon was writing. It's not at all clear if this took Europe back up to the temperature levels of the first or second century, though. (Paul Treadaway politely challenged my account of climate change in the last 2000 years when I first posted about this; I would be grateful for any further data.) Yet Gibbon's fundamental conclusion, that the major cause of climate change was anthropogenic and related to environmental exploitation, is well ahead of his time, even if the details are mostly wrong.
4) Coming next
Chapter X: The emperors Decius, Gallus, Aemilianus,Valerian and Gallienus, The General Irruption Of The Barbarians, The Thirty Tyrants. Read it here, here or here.
0) Normal service resumed
This time last week, I was at a conference on Tudor Ireland in Connecticut; the Saturday before, I was on a gruelling Turkish Airlines flight from Nairobi to New York via Istanbul; and the Saturday before that, I was on an only slightly less gruelling trek to Juba in Southern Sudan via Addis Ababa. One obvious lesson learned is that when I am travelling, Gibbon doesn't come with me. Anyway, I shall warn in advance of similar future interruptions.
1) Good quotes
I'm going to start at the end of the chapter, where Gibbon muses on the mismatch between the numbers of people affetcted by historical events and the significance attached to those events by later ages: Wars, and the administration of public affairs are the principal subjects of history; but the number of persons interested in these busy scenes is very different according to the different condition of mankind. In great monarchies millions of obedient subjects pursue their useful occupations in peace and obscurity. The attention of the writer, as well as of the reader, is solely confined to a court, a capital, a regular army, and the districts which happen to be the occasional scene of military operations. But a state of freedom and barbarism, the season of civil commotions, or the situation of petty republics,87 raises almost every member of the community into action, and consequently into notice. The irregular divisions, and the restless motions, of the people of Germany dazzle our imagination and seem to multiply their numbers. The profuse enumeration of kings and warriors of armies and nations inclines us to forget that the same objects are continually repeated under a variety of appellations, and that the most splendid appellations have been frequently lavished on the most inconsiderable objects.
87 Should we suspect that Athens contained only 21,000 citizens, and Sparta no more than 39,000? See Hume and Wallace on the number of mankind in ancient and modern times.
On the importance of literacy: ...the use of letters is the principal circumstance that distinguishes a civilized people from a herd of savages incapable of knowledge or reflection. Without that artificial help, the human memory soon dissipates or corrupts the ideas intrusted to her charge; and the nobler faculties of the mind, no longer supplied with models or with materials, gradually forget their powers; the judgment becomes feeble and lethargic, the imagination languid or irregular. Fully to apprehend this important truth, let us attempt, in an improved society, to calculate the immense distance between the man of learning and the illiterate peasant. The former, by reading and reflection, multiplies his own experience, and lives in distant ages and remote countries; whilst the latter, rooted to a single spot, and confined to a few years of existence, surpasses, but very little, his fellow labourer the ox in the exercise of his mental faculties. The same, and even a greater, difference will be found between nations than between individuals; and we may safely pronounce that, without some species of writing, no people has ever preserved the faithful annals of their history, ever made any considerable progress in the abstract sciences, or ever possessed, in any tolerable degree of perfection, the useful and agreeable arts of life.
On the perils of alcohol: Strong beer, a liquor extracted with very little art from wheat or barley, and corrupted (as it is strongly expressed by Tacitus) into a certain semblance of wine, was sufficient for the gross purposes of German debauchery. But those who had tasted the rich wines of Italy, and afterwards of Gaul, sighed for that more delicious species of intoxication. They attempted not, however (as has since been executed with so much success), to naturalise the vine on the banks of the Rhine and Danube; nor did they endeavour to procure by industry the materials of an advantageous commerce. To solicit by labour what might be ravished by arms was esteemed unworthy of the German spirit. The intemperate thirst of strong liquors often urged the barbarians to invade the provinces on which art or nature had bestowed those much envied presents. The Tuscan who betrayed his country to the Celtic nations attracted them into Italy by the prospect of the rich fruits and delicious wines, the productions of a happier climate. And in the same manner the German auxiliaries, invited into France during the civil wars of the sixteenth century, were allured by the promise of plenteous quarters in the provinces of Champagne and Burgundy. Drunkenness, the most illiberal, but not the most dangerous, of our vices, was sometimes capable, in a less civilised state of mankind, of occasioning a battle, a war, or a revolution.
And a few shorter one-liners, starting with this from footnote 11: It may be remarked, that man is the only animal which can live and multiply in every country from the equator to the poles. The hog seems to approach the nearest to our species in that privilege.
In a case of the pot calling the kettle black, Gibbon mocks Tacitus for misogyny: "The neighbours of the Suiones, the Sitones, are sunk even below servitude; they obey a woman."41
41 Tacitus Germania c. 44, 45. Frenshemius (who dedicated his supplement to Livy to Christina of Sweden) thinks proper to be very angry with the Roman who expressed so very little reverence for Northern queens.
And finally the Pays de Vaud, which of course Gibbon knew well from his time at Lausanne, is: a small district on the banks of the Leman Lake, much more distinguished for politeness than for industry
2) Summary
This chapter does what it says in the title, giving us an account of the Germans largely (and occasionally critically) based on Tacitus, and ending by wondering why they did not make more effort to attack Rome between Varus [9 AD] and Decius [251 AD] (the explanations given being lack of metal technology, and too much internal dissent). But Gibbon also uses it to attach a lot of other philosophical speculation, in particular about the politics, social life and culture of the German tribes as precursors of the civilisation of Western Europe (in particular of course England).
3) Points arising
i) Freedom
This is an opportunity for Gibbon to showcase why the Germanic tribes' version of freedom is important, and he doesn't quite pull it off; the chapter is long (very long) on romantic speculation about noble savages and rather short on political detail. The word "freedom" is used five times in the main text, the word "liberty" three times; both come together in this telling couple of sentences: A warlike nation like the Germans, without either cities, letters, arts, or money, found some compensation for this savage state in the enjoyment of liberty. Their poverty secured their freedom, since our desires and our possessions are the strongest fetters of despotism.
It seems that civilisation and liberty are to a certain extent in contradiction (NB also the comments about literacy quoted above). Perhaps Gibbon is using "liberty" here only to mean freedom from foreign domination, rather than freedom of the individual? That would certainly be consistent with the rather odd statement at the beginning of the section on civil assemblies that: To obtain the desired end, it is absolutely necessary that each individual should conceive himself obliged to submit his private opinion and actions to the judgment of the greater number of his associates.
This doesn't sound very libertarian or even very liberal; I almost wonder if the sense has been garbled through the centuries?
ii) Women and sexual morality
As well as eroding liberty and freedom, civilisation also has a deleterious effect on sexual morality and the chastity of women: Although the progress of civilisation has undoubtedly contributed to assuage the fiercer passions of human nature, it seems to have been less favourable to the virtue of chastity, whose most dangerous enemy is the softness of the mind. The refinements of life corrupt while they polish the intercourse of the sexes. The gross appetite of love becomes most dangerous, when it is elevated, or rather, indeed, disguised, by sentimental passion. The elegance of dress, of motion, and of manners gives a lustre to beauty, and inflames the senses through the imagination. Luxurious entertainments, midnight dances, and licentious spectacles present at once temptation and opportunity to female frailty.58 From such dangers the unpolished wives of the barbarians were secured by poverty, solitude, and the painful cares of a domestic life. The German huts, open on every side to the eye of indiscretion or jealousy, were a better safeguard of conjugal fidelity than the walls, the bolts, and the eunuchs of a Persian harem.
58 Ovid employs two hundred lines in the research of places the most favourable to love. Above all he considers the theatre as the best adapted to collect the beauties of Rome, and to melt them into tenderness and sensuality.
I'm quoting a bit selectively here, as Gibbon has already teased Tacitus on this subject and goes on to say: To this reason, another may be added of a more honourable nature. The Germans treated their women with esteem and confidence, consulted them on every occasion of importance, and fondly believed that in their breasts resided a sanctity and wisdom more than human. Some of these interpreters of fate, such as Velleda, in the Batavian war, governed, in the name of the deity, the fiercest nations of Germany. The rest of the sex, without being adored as goddesses, were respected as the free and equal companions of soldiers; associated even by the marriage ceremony to a life of toil, of danger, and of glory.
Of course, this isn't a total improvement; the phrase "fondly believed" means that the Germans were slightly nutty to think that their women's breasts held "a sanctity and wisdom more than human". I shall stop talking about breasts now.
iii) Climate Change
I noted this passage at the start of this year, but I will repeat it again here: Some ingenious writers have suspected that Europe was much colder formerly than it is at present; and the most ancient descriptions of the climate of Germany tend exceedingly to confirm their theory. The general complaints of intense frost, and eternal winter, are perhaps little to be regarded, since we have no method of reducing to the accurate standard of the thermometer the feelings or the expressions of an orator, born in the happier regions of Greece or Asia. But I shall select two remarkable circumstances of a less equivocal nature. 1/. The great rivers which covered the Roman provinces, the Rhine and the Danube, were frequently frozen over, and capable of supporting the most enormous weights. The barbarians, who often chose that severe season for their inroads, transported, without apprehension or danger, their numerous armies, their cavalry, and their heavy wagons, over a vast and solid bridge of ice. Modern ages have not presented an instance of a like phenomenon. 2/. The rein deer, that useful animal, from whom the savage of the North derives the best comforts of his dreary life, is of a constitution that supports, and even requires, the most intense cold. He is found on the rock of Spitzberg, within ten degrees of the Pole; he seems to delight in the snows of Lapland and Siberia; but at present he cannot subsist, much less multiply, in any country to the south of the Baltic. In the time of Caesar, the rein deer, as well as the elk and the wild bull, was a native of the Hercynian forest, which then overshadowed a great part of Germany and Poland. The modern improvements sufficiently explain the causes of the diminution of the cold. These immense woods have been gradually cleared, which intercepted from the earth the rays of the sun. The morasses have been drained, and, in proportion as the soil has been cultivated, the air has become more temperate. Canada, at this day, is an exact picture of ancient Germany. Although situated in the same parallel with the finest provinces of France and England, that country experiences the most rigorous cold. The reindeer are very numerous, the ground is covered with deep and lasting snow, and the great river of St. Laurence is regularly frozen, in a season when the waters of the Seine and the Thames are usually free from ice.
Gibbon is probably unaware of the Gulf Stream warming northwestern Europe (Benjamin Franklin described it a few years later, in 1786). It's also fairly clear to the modern reader that human destruction of their habitat alone is enough to drive the reindeer and elk beyond the Baltic, rather than the trees providing some sort of continental cooling effect as Gibbon seems to believe. Like Gibbon, I do wonder a bit if the cold was exaggerated by Roman writers - he footnotes Ovid describing frozen lumps of wine being served at dinner, but I would observe that the Danube was a cold place for Ovid in more ways than one, and he was also a master of figures of speech.
Data are few and dubious, but the "Little Ice Age" generally described as having lasted from about 1500 to 1850 seems to have let up - and warmed up - specifically at the time that Gibbon was writing. It's not at all clear if this took Europe back up to the temperature levels of the first or second century, though. (Paul Treadaway politely challenged my account of climate change in the last 2000 years when I first posted about this; I would be grateful for any further data.) Yet Gibbon's fundamental conclusion, that the major cause of climate change was anthropogenic and related to environmental exploitation, is well ahead of his time, even if the details are mostly wrong.
4) Coming next
Chapter X: The emperors Decius, Gallus, Aemilianus,Valerian and Gallienus, The General Irruption Of The Barbarians, The Thirty Tyrants. Read it here, here or here.