“Vanity is a foolish suicide; she destroys herself with her own hand.”
“Private knowledge always outstrips that of the public.”
Such are the quality of many statements made by the historian. The reader, a Mister Timpson, pauses with appropriate gravity for the presentation of truths between the scenes of the lively narrative of Gibbon.
Gibbon closes on a note about the ancient Roman knowledge of the Torrid Zone, the world beneath the great Sahara. As I listened to this on MLK Day, I chuckled when the historian announced that the 16,000 souls a year that were being shipped into oversea slavery out of Africa were the suffers of two crimes, of the weak minds of Africa and the evil avarice of Europe.
This was a fitting way of bringing his readers up to date after the increasingly dark turn of the Roman chronology. Gibbon even complains that his most accurate historian records the crimes against humanity by the emperors and their generals with “tedious and disgusting accuracy.”
With the death of Julian the Apostate the religious war within the empire in the east and in Africa intensified. Likewise, the cruelty and lack of honor and oath keeping [1] among the creatures of power became more severe from east to west. Some Enlightenment Historians of Gibbon’s time blamed this on Christianity, of the outward zeal of Near Eastern style fanaticism. Gibbon notes that the Christians forgot the spirit of their gospels and the pagans imbibed their fanatic zeal. It seems that the clergy were almost entirely corrupted in one generation in power, that priests, monks and bishops only behaved with virtue under Constantine.
Gibbon’s record of the progressive degeneration of values, means, honor and decency seems to be more than the corruption of power, and simply corollary to the progress of Christianity. The excess tortures and mutilations of victims of the state during the ensuing reign of terror that followed Julian, hissed of the decadent east: the removal of hands, that suspicion equals conviction, that soldiers should fear their masters more than the enemy. These were values that would deeply embed themselves in Europe through Gibbon’s time. [2]
The agents of this excessive cruelty and culture of social justice conspiracy were Christians. These Christians preyed most avidly on other Christians with accusations of witchcraft. It might interest those people who currently read this, who now live under a reign of social justice terror and political correctness, that the functionaries of this reign of terror under a handful of vicious rulers, were eunuchs, the original transgender instruments of state power. As cruelty is the primary characteristic of the emasculated human, the increase in sexually maimed men in positions of appointed power, explains the increase in an already cruel world.
Jovian was elected emperor and most likely poisoned by an eunuch on his way to Costantinople.
Valentinian was elected emperor and assigned his younger brother, Valens to rule the East while he fought the barbarians. Both monarchs reigned through fear and fueled their government with property taken from accused witches and heretics. One historian of the age, a contemporary, makes a claim that Gibbon doubts, that “prisoners, exiles and fugitives” made up the majority of the population in some regions such as Italy.
Valentinian was as cruel as any Asiatic potentate and delighted in having people beheaded, burned alive and beaten to death with clubs over such minor crimes as releasing a hound too soon on the hunt. His one humane act was to outlaw infanticide, really in an attempt to save the tax base, for children were taxed. Another act that a modern mind slave might consider humane, was his demand that youths be schooled until age 20 so as to effectively serve the government.
Julian Hydra was eating its young.
In the same year, in Armenia and Pannonia, on either sides of the empire, allied kings were invited to banquets by Roman generals and then slaughtered at the host’s table. Leading men had not only put away the most ancient Pre-Christian value, the duty of the host not to prey upon his guest, but used such deceit as a means of deliberate government policy.
The 70 year reign of Sapor, the Persian monarch who recovered much of what is now Iraq from failing Rome, came to an end. Christian Armenia was alike preyed upon my the Magis of Persia and the soulless political functionaries of Rome.
The legions were now, for some generations, devolved into ethnic war bands. The best of these troops were nominally Christian but abided by pagan oaths [1]. As Christian factions slaughtered each other in the east under Valens, and individual people were denounced so that the government could pillage their wealth, climate continued to oppress Rome and the barbarians.
A Gothic king, between his 80th and 110th years, conquered 12 barbarian nations on the northern borders of Rome. His tribes and other barbarians were in a crisis, with hordes of Scythians being pushed by some force westward out of the deep hinterlands that they had occupied as far east as Siberia for thousands of years.
The Romans and these tribes engaged in “the cruel equity of retaliation.”
The Saxons began invading Britain and Gaul.
The incompetent tribes of North Africa rose out of the hinterlands to pillage and raid.
These two threats would be dealt with by one heroic general, who was the father of one of Rome’s great Emperors, Theodosius, both of the same name. This man was able to deal with barbarian armies that numbered in the tens of thousands with a few thousand veterans of the most storied war bands. These bodies of men might be called “legions” but they were war bands: Jovians, Batavians, Herculeans, etc. Theodosius was murdered by order of one of the emperors before returning from Africa, as Roman rulers feared their successful generals of old date. His son of the same name was discontinued from the military service and permitted to retire to an estate in Iberia.
After a Roman governor murdered the King of the Quadi at a banquet, those people rose up with their Sarmation allies and humiliated the Roman military under Valens. The war was destructive to the people and lands of the empire and the barbarians. Valen’s generals had to take a year long break in campaigning because the rivers swelled so high from continual rains. Valentinian was required east of the Alps. As he screamed at barbarian ambassadors a blood vessel exploded in his neck and he died.
This cruel but effective emperor was succeeded by his 17 year old son Gratian and his infant son Valentinian II.
The wrathful death of the dread Valentinian and the effeminate rule of his brother Valens in the east set the stage for the great menace out of the hinterlands. At this point in the narrative, in the 370s the barbarians appear upon the Moral High Ground, as the monster Rome eats its own.
Notes
-1. Zeus/Jove, in the pagan worship, was the chief god as a reflection of the sanctity of oaths. The great difference in the pagan ranks against the monotheistic Persians in the 400s B.C. was that Persians did not regard oaths with pagans as binding. This general sense that appears in all monotheistic faiths, that oaths made with unbelievers are not binding, in Rome, was also reflected internally, by the withdraw of legal protection from believers in any doctrine that differed in the slightest from the perfected orthodoxy upheld by the State. Without the ancient tradition of oaths, the early Christian emperors, Valentinian in particular, appear little different then the ideological tyrants of the 20th Century.
-2. Gunpowder era armies of Gibbon’s time, were slave armies, staffed largely by abducted and convicted men, in which officers were armed to kill their men, the pistol intended for back shooting those unwilling to walk into death, the sergeant’s short pike and halbred for shoving the men forward. The story of Rome represents “Western Civilization” as an Asiatic social cancer that infected its European host from east to west, in the end, producing the world Gibbon wrote from and for in hopes that his colleagues might benefit from the lessons of the past.
