What specifically is wrong with Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire?

What specifically is wrong with Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire?

I see people claiming it's full of lies or half truths. Which lies specifically? Were they really lies or was Gibbon just writing with less archaeological knowledge in the late 18th century than we have now?

I only ask because it feels like the same type of historical revisionism the West is rife with at the moment. Admonishing the influence of individual actors and ideologies. Attributing greater if not total influence to large scale anthropological forces like climate, geography, technology, population etc. (I don't innately disagree with this perspective of course but I do think a middle ground is preferable)

It feels like most people just criticise Gibbons conclusions about Rome's loss of martial spirit due to high culture/Christianity and their resultant over-reliance on foreign, hostile mercenaries. It seems like this is just an opinion drawn from the facts and can't really be called a lie in and of itself. Do the revisionists merely object to Decline's position of dominance in the Western canon? If that is the case then I suppose that's just par for the critical theory course.

Your thoughts?

His focus on moral reasons has a lot in common with the ideological bent critical theory which focuses on sociological reasons.

It is possible to be factually right yet theoretically wrong. There is evidence that Rome lost martial spirit, however one can point to Caligula collecting sea shells and claiming he conquered Britain as a loss of martial spirit, yet this was at Rome's height. The evidence is simply not enough to prove his theories.

He makes a mistake similar to left wing extremists who vastly overinflate a small event or phenomena while ignoring the bigger picture. He may not have had the same motives, however he made the same error, confirmation bias or whatever fallacy is used to described overinflating the importance of insufficient evidence.

Gibbon fundamentally misunderstands some aspects of the Late Roman state, as well as engaging in some very shoddy historiography and just plain getting shit wrong.

Most of it is just due to things like historiography, translation and archaeology improving since his time, which he can't really be faulted for, but he does willfully mislead the reader sometimes in order to enforce his narrative.

One thing he is very insistent on hammering home is that the later Romans had no connection to their forebears and that earlier Roman history was forgotten about. Yet, in Sidonius Apollinaris' Panegyrics, we find a multitude of references to the Gods, Romulus, Roma, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, Tarquinius Superbus, Hannibal, Alexander, Sulla, Marius, Vercingetorix, Julius Caesar, Augustus, etc. in the late 6th century. I'm not sure if this is his fault because I'm not sure to what extend later Roman literature was available when he was writing.

He also places a lot of trust in Vegetius, in fact using him as his main source for his evaluation of the state of the Late Roman Army. We know that Vegetius was completely full of shit and on top of knowing basically nothing about the army, lied about what he did know in order to portray the army as being much worse than it actually was. His lack of credentials were well-known among historical commentators, but Gibbon uses him uncritically because he supports the narrative of the army going downhill.

Here's something Gibbon does that is really pretty scummy and totally ruins my opinion of him, but it's subtle to someone who doesn't know much about Late Antique military history. He conflates several Roman military terms - foederati, pseudocomitatenses, auxilia, συμμαχοι, μισθωτοι, óμαιχμιαι, limitanei, riparienses, ripenses, castellani and burgarii, into one word. "Mercenaries". I think this is the most disingenous thing he did, and in my opinion shows definitively that he was a slave to his narrative.

He implies the Roman empire fell

Roach, get ye gone!

Would've been perfect it it wasn't for him saying
>'It was the Christian's fault!'

it's like reading an excellent essay on some historical topic and the last sentence is 'by the way Jews and ZOG are responsible for autism'
completely ruins the endeavor

Good post

>He conflates several Roman military terms - foederati, pseudocomitatenses, auxilia, συμμαχοι, μισθωτοι, óμαιχμιαι, limitanei, riparienses, ripenses, castellani and burgarii, into one word. "Mercenaries"
This part went kinda over my head. Why is this bad?

I'm not too informed on Late Roman military terms but essentially the mistake being made by Gibbon is this:

>the Roman Empire was strongest when its military was strong enough to conquer
>eventually the military was reformed with mercenaries and didn't conquer
>ergo the Roman Empire declined

Foederati were Germanics who were allowed to settle within the Empire in exchange for military service, they were put on land that wasn't in use and assigned to defend it.
Limitanei were border troops.
Comitatenses were city garrisons.
By saying all were mercenaries Gibbons implies that Rome forgot its military history, where proud citizens fought bravely for the Empire, instead relying on money and barbarians to defend itself.
The reality is that Rome had to restructure its military precisely because the old legionary model was inflexible and incapable of dealing with the new threats that faced the Empire.

Late Roman military commentators were quite independent of each other. So they ended up using a lot of different words to mean the same thing and a lot of similar words to mean different things. None of those terms were actually widely used to mean mercenaries. Gibbon lied or at least stretched the truth in order to fit his narrative of a dramatic military decline for Rome.

This
user is pretty on point about that, but I'll go ahead and clear some of the terms up and explain why Gibbon was wrong to equivocate them with mercenaries.

>Foederati
Foreign troops in Roman service, analogous to the Auxilia of earlier centuries. They were paid and equipped by the Roman state and operated within the command structure of the Roman army. If you'd asked them or their commanders, they would've called themselves Romans, but people like Gibbon were very intent in portraying them as barbarian mercenaries with no loyalty to Rome.
>Limitanei
Border guards, basically. They were considered to be lower ranking than Comitatenses who were the main field armies, but were about as effective. They were different from Comitatenses in that they were expected to guard one area instead of moving all across the Empire, and were usually supplied with older or obsolete equipment, at least early on. Again they were part of the Roman army, not mercenaries.
>Pseudocomitatenses
A unit of Limitanei which had been upgraded to a field army. Not mercenaries.
>Auxilia
In this period it's mostly used interchangeably with Foederati, but it gets complicated because some writers did use it to refer to mercenaries. So this may be the only case where Gibbon was right.
>συμμαχοι
Foreign peoples who fought alongside Rome out of political obligation or through sharing a common goal. Also sometimes used to refer to Foederati. In most cases they operated within their own military structures, but they were not paid, so they can't be considered mercenaries.
(1/2)

Its just too old, vastly more revelations and information has come to light since Gibbon wrote it, primarily through archaeology which was just non existent in his time.

It's nonetheless an excellent foundational piece on the fall of Rome but it's not the definitive answer.

>μισθωτοι
Another term for Foederati.
>óμαιχμιαι
Another term for Limitanei.
>Riparienses, ripenses
Soldiers which ranked below Comitatenses but above Limitanei, and could function as both. Definitely not mercenaries, actually probably the closest thing the army had to the Legionaries of earlier centuries.
>castellani
Fort guards, usually Limitanei.
>Burgarii
City guards.

So you can kinda see Gibbon's angle. He tried to present any Roman soldier that wasn't part of the field armies as a barbarian mercenary. This is incredibly disingenuous and dishonest, and shows how important his agenda was to him, more important than truthfully informing people about history.

The Jews destroyed Rome

Basically if it was submitted today, Decline and Fall wouldn't get past Peer Review.

You'd be surprised at some of the stuff that makes it past peer review

Peer review isn't a stamp of approval that means something is correct. It's a process to ensure that someone hasn't made serious mistakes in their analysis and that their conclusions are at least somewhat reasonable based on what they're presenting. Bullshit can get by, but it has to be well-argued bullshit. Mistranslations are definitely the kind of thing that would get called out for revisions.

literally nothing. The city of Rome was founded by a God and grew for over a thousand years. The citizens became christians and darkness, balkanization, loss of territory, and feudalism ensued. Purely because christians are IMPIOUS

So that's from where that /pol/ meme of the romans not wanting to fight anymore but using only german mercenaries come from?

Very interesting discussion. Is Gibbon the source of the idea that Christianity was a cause of the fall of Rome? Because that idea seems very suspect, and might be more related to a post enlightenment backlash against Christianity. If the thesis is true that Christianity weakened Roman society, and reduced their fighting spirit, then it seems to have been short lived, as many later Christian societies were very warlike and martial.

I don't really buy it.

The cause of the collapse of the Roman Emprie seems to be quite simple:

1. The Crisis of the Third Century significantly reduced the economy of the Empire. Enmpires are not cheap.
2. The Empire could no longer expand.
3. Could not ressist invasions.

Focusing on the invasions is wrong, as those were only the killing blow. The real weakness occurred earlier.

Basically yes.

Isn't there some basis to this claim though?

Kind of but it lacks nuance and generally does what Gibbon does, ignore facts to push a single narrative.

It's in reference to foederati, which were mainly Goths that were let into the empire and allowed to settle in exchange for military service, these Goths would go on to rebel against the Romans and lead to the sack of Rome.

The part that gets ignored is that the Goths were fully ready to honor the deal and fight for Rome. It was general mistreatment from regional commanders and governors that led to the first revolt, and the battle of Adrianople. They were pacified by Theodosius and again allowed to settle and fought for Rome against the other migratory tribes and the huns.

This would get fucked up again by Theodosius' son Honorius when he has the wives and children of the foederati that were settled in Illyria murdered leading to a open revolt from the soldiers, lead by Alaric.

And even after this Alaric came to the bargaining table and asked just for land on the danube for his people to settle and defend, and an official rank in the Roman army and Honorius spurned the deal, leading to Alaric turning around and sacking Rome after he held it in siege.

The Romans were hardly innocent bystanders who put their trust in savages and were betrayed. When they actually honored their end of the terms, things worked out fine.

This narrative also ignores that the other migrators like the Franks and the Alans were not allowed to settle on Roman territory but by that point the army was depleted and couldn't do anything to stop them. One such group were the Suebi that settled in Iberia and Majorian actually made good use of them as foederati on his reconquest.

It wasn't that the Romans didn't want to fight, its that they couldn't. They simply didn't have the money or manpower to supply a standing army in the way they used. Economic and political instability ruined the tax system and caused massive depopulation, which meant only small cadres of homegrown troops could be equipped. Barbarian mercenaries were the best solution to a bad situation - "Instead of fighting against us, we'll pay you with land to fight for us."

Of course, that caused a whole bunch of other problems, but it wasn't the Roman's being stupid.

>συμμαχοι, μισθωτοι, óμαιχμιαι,

>Focusing on the invasions is wrong
if no invasion then WRE would have survived just like the byzantine empire

It's a complete misunderstanding of the term "mercenaries". The Late Western Empire didn't use many mercenaries, they were broke, they couldn't afford them. What they used were called Foederati. Foederati weren't mercenaries, they were integrated into the command structure of the Roman army, equipped and paid by the state, and given somewhere within the borders to live. Their children would adopt Roman culture and language, you can see this in epitaphs where you've got Roman soldiers called Apollinaris and Romulus and their fathers are called things like Arbogast and Dadazi.

You can see this show up in the linguistics as well. The Late Roman terms for 'mercenary' are mostly derived from Greek. The Eastern Empire could use all the mercenaries they wanted.

On top of this, and this is what people seem to forget, the Roman Army was always mostly composed of native Roman citizens. When you look up the sizes of the units of Foederati, they were always tiny, usually only comprising of a few hundred men each.

I think this is mostly down to Gibbon. He described every Roman soldier who wasn't a Comitatens as a mercenary, including things like border guards and promoted militia, so people get the idea that the Roman army was basically all mercenaries.

New to the thread (And this is addressed to everyone else that harped on this point) but some of that might be linguistic drift in the other way. Medieval and Renaissance (Admitteldy, a bit before Gibbon's own time, but not so far long that they were completely out of circulation), referred to any soldier who was paid as a "mercenary", even people like the London Beefeters, or Corrughadh forces in Ireland were referred to as such, even though they worked for single employers and were loyal to them.

Simplistic bullshit.

To show how quickly Foederati could "Romanize" two of the most famous and competent Western Roman commanders were 1-2 generations removed from Foderati.

Flavius Stilicho was born to a Vandal who enlisted in the Roman army.

Flavius Aetius was born to a Gothic Roman General.

This thread got me very interested in the fall of the Roman empire. Could someone recommend a n up-to-date book about it?

You shouldn't read Decline as a history book. Read it as literature. It's arguably the greatest prose masterpiece in the English language, an epic, eternal high water mark.

I'm not too good with the late empire so I may be talking out of my ass, but wasn't one of the problems that the proto-feudal Italian aristocracy was locked out of government and military, and so did not care to contribute money or men tied to them for the Empire's upkeep? The less established, more dynamic aristocracy of Constantinople was one of the factors in ERE's survival.

Warfare in Roman Europe, AD 350-425 by Hugh Elton is a good one, though it does miss out the later 5th century, though there isn't much exciting that happens apart from Aetius' campaign against Atilla and Majorian's reconquests