Anyone else here had the pleasure of reading Edward Gibbon?

[Lummel]

Well keep in mind that Gibbon is writing this as a political commentary to be read in 18th century Britain, where you had a patronage based political system from which he had been excluded, or lost out in.

In some ways Gibbon is much closer to the world of ancient Rome than people in the developed world can be - its a world in which the weather has a vastly more significant impact on the economy than the ruler can and a world that is de facto decentralised because of the practical difficulties in involved in running anything from the capital.

History is also for Gibbon a teacher of moral lessons. So good and bad emperors are central to his project. But he is also making a point about his world. The good ruler, demonstrating their good judgement rewards and promotes those of ability (like Gibbon!) and by means of their virtue and personal attributes presides over good times. The bad ruler is the rotten apple that will spoil the barrel.

If you want something more nuanced then look towards a modern, academic historian.

[White Walker Texas Ranger]

Well, they are called "good" not excellent. Besides it is more a description of relatively stable era, when all rulers were sane and competent, than claim that previous emperors were all bad. Augustus is generally considered good, Tiberius competent, but tyrannical, Caligula crazy, Claudius one of the better, but he executed a lot of people too, Nero another crazy one, Vespasia and Titus good and Domitian the same as Tiberius. To the outside Rome looked strong and stable, but internally it was up and down before Nerva.

When did the empire first show external weakness/ did craziness of the Emperor adversely affect people outside of the Roman elite? The Crisis of the Third Century? The Crossing of the Rhine?

[Zocc Arris]

Well, they are called "good" not excellent. Besides it is more a description of relatively stable era, when all rulers were sane and competent, than claim that previous emperors were all bad. Augustus is generally considered good, Tiberius competent, but tyrannical, Caligula crazy, Claudius one of the better, but he executed a lot of people too, Nero another crazy one, Vespasia and Titus good and Domitian the same as Tiberius. To the outside Rome looked strong and stable, but internally it was up and down before Nerva.

Up and down for whom though? The senatorial class? A scattered handful of equestrians? Apart from the Great Fire (outside of anybody's control) and the Year of the 4 Emperors (you can blame either Nero or the rest of the state for that one) even inside of Rome only a tiny fraction of the population ever suffered from the instability of individual rulers. And that, frankly, was also the fault of the senate for mounting endless conspiracies against the individuals emperors. The emperors responded for the cause of self-defense, sometimes more or less restrained.

The implication carried by the 5 "good" emperors is still a silly one. The first century, on balance, was a prosperous and expansionary time for Rome with only the interruption of one civil war as a blemish in terms of absolute growth. And that was an expression of political turbulence that existed... mostly because the senate kept trying to kill the emperors that they had voted powers to in the first place. The fact that all of our major extant sources were written by either senators or men of senatorial sympathy makes it too easy to blame the emperors for any political instability, but, in the first century especially, it can't be denied that the emperors are mostly reactive to the senate. You can't have a lack of docility as purely the fault of any of the Caesars in that regard. Even the crazies (using that term loosely) only got more unhinged after uncovering plots against them.

The question of adoption, however, is vital to any treatment of Gibbon's idea here, and it's simply lacking. The idea that the Antonine's adoptions were necessarily more meritocratic isn't bourne up by the fact that so many of them were childless men who then turned to either distant cousins, or, in the case of Marcus Aurelius, his own son. Augustus chose his step-son, for the lack of better options. Tiberius chose a great-nephew for lack of better options, and perhaps because he still felt bound by his adoption of Germanicus. Claudius chose Nero, which of course is murkier and it's hard to figure out what exactly was going on there. The Antonines by contrast? Nerva chose Trajan at sword-point, Trajan chose Hadrian as an accomplished relative, Hadrian chose two heirs simply for being close to him, although they died, before falling back on a cousin again. The fact that he chose Antoninus Pius as a stop-gap is exactly what Augustus tried to do with Tiberius and Germanicus. Adoption was common in the Roman upper classes and was being carried out under the Antonines for much the same reasons that they had always been carried out. Gibbon seems to have made the mistake of thinking that because the results of the second century adoptions were less turbulence that it must have been because the process was somehow different. In fact it seems more likely that the second century was more stable because the senate accepted, for the time being, that they could not get away with choosing emperors without at least the input of the army via the Domitian-Nerva-Trajan debacle.

[sToNED_CAT]

Up and down for whom though? The senatorial class? A scattered handful of equestrians? Apart from the Great Fire (outside of anybody's control) and the Year of the 4 Emperors (you can blame either Nero or the rest of the state for that one) even inside of Rome only a tiny fraction of the population ever suffered from the instability of individual rulers. And that, frankly, was also the fault of the senate for mounting endless conspiracies against the individuals emperors. The emperors responded for the cause of self-defense, sometimes more or less restrained.

Are you sure about the tiny fraction? When you read about Caligula, it seems like he was just killing a lot of people randomly, not just senators (for example during games etc.), Nero crucified huge number of protochristians after the Great Fire just to redirect popular anger away from him. Tiberius was greatly hated by common people, not just senate because of his persecutions(altough it was also because he was "miser"). Sure the effect on common folk (especially empire wide) were not as bad as since 3rd century, but not because Julio-Claudians emperors did not try.

And while the sources may be biased, again those sources are the only ones we have.

[Zocc Arris]

Are you sure about the tiny fraction? When you read about Caligula, it seems like he was just killing a lot of people randomly, not just senators (for example during games etc.), Nero crucified huge number of protochristians after the Great Fire just to redirect popular anger away from him. Tiberius was greatly hated by common people, not just senate because of his persecutions(altough it was also because he was "miser"). Sure the effect on common folk (especially empire wide) were not as bad as since 3rd century, but not because Julio-Claudians emperors did not try.

And while the sources may be biased, again those sources are the only ones we have.

The sources disagree amongst themselves about what exactly Caligula did or did not do. The surviving fragments we have from Caligula's contemporaries, Seneca or Philo say, portray him as vain, perhaps power-drunk, perhaps only having an off-kilter sense of humor. They (and others) also label him as a tyrant. And we know from fragments of his speeches that he declared hostility to the senate as a body for its role in conspiring against him. It isn't until Suetonius comes along, nearly 80 years later, that Caligula starts being described as "mad." As for Nero, it's true that there was the Christian oppression, but the Christians of that time were generally hated by the Jews, who were the only one's to have had extensive contact with them as Christians, up to that point in time. And Nero's persecution doesn't seem to have been particularly organized or long-range. That's still a pretty small population on balance. As for Tiberius, no more than 52 people were accused of treason in 20 years and at least half of those got off of the charges. Treason was also a crime that only the elite were guilty of, in practice, because the commoners didn't have any access to foment treason. The commoners disliked Tiberius mostly because he did not give them bread and circuses.

The Julio-Claudians had an effect on the common citizens, but that effect was mostly positive most of the time. Consider the accession of Claudius after Caligula's assassination. Caligula is killed by some disgruntled officers and government officials with a lot of support in the senate. His wife and child are also killed, signalling an effort to wipe out the imperial family on the part of at least some of the conspirators. The senate intended either to proclaim a new emperor amongst their ranks or return to the repbulic, there was disagreement about that. Claudius was not a serious candidate for the throne for a number of different reasons, but loyalists swept him up and he was confirmed anyway. Why? In large part because killing Caligula created nearly as many headaches as it removed. The Caesars were enomously possible in the provinces and to the common people in general who had taken the full brunt of corruption under the republic. Claudius was still a member of that family and that was what the common people wanted. Tiberius and Caligula had both been adopted into the Caesars. Claudius was the first imperator to take the name 'Caesar' because he was emperor rather than because the family had chosen him.

[Caligula_K2]

Are you sure about the tiny fraction? When you read about Caligula, it seems like he was just killing a lot of people randomly, not just senators (for example during games etc.), Nero crucified huge number of protochristians after the Great Fire just to redirect popular anger away from him. Tiberius was greatly hated by common people, not just senate because of his persecutions(altough it was also because he was "miser"). Sure the effect on common folk (especially empire wide) were not as bad as since 3rd century, but not because Julio-Claudians emperors did not try.

And while the sources may be biased, again those sources are the only ones we have.

But there are alternative forms of evidence. For example, although we get the image of Tiberius the tyrant in Tacitus and Suetonius, other sources (less fully, of course) seem to reference another tradition: That of Tiberius the Wise Man, who dispenses wisdom to common men. Meanwhile, Tacitus and Suetonius would have you believe that everyone hated Nero, but the fact that fake Neros kept on appearing in the east for another forty years (!) and gained popular support suggests that Nero's legacy was much more contested than our sources would have us believe. And we can't forget that not only were our sources "senatorial", but that they had very particular senatorial perspectives. During the reign of Trajan, for example, it became very politic to trash Domitian at the expense of the current emperor (see Pliny's Panygeric for that), and that sort of rhetoric informs many of the sources for his reign. Tacitus clearly had his own axe to grind with Domitian, but that's not surprising- he did kill some senators and also importantly gave more and more power to equestrians at the senate's expense. but Suetonius is much more neutral about him, stating that he was a good Emperor until the revolt of Saturninus, when he became more paranoid. And of course, stories became embellished as time went on- Nero going around killing people in the streets of Rome, for example, or Caligula trying to make his horse consul (which was probably a joke meant to demean the consulship, not an actual horsey consulship attempt). All of which is to say that we can't take Tacitus and Suetonius as evidence for what everyone thought about those "bad" emperors.

Edit: Zocc said it much more eloquently.

[Saci Targaryen]

Well keep in mind that Gibbon is writing this as a political commentary to be read in 18th century Britain, where you had a patronage based political system from which he had been excluded, or lost out in.

In some ways Gibbon is much closer to the world of ancient Rome than people in the developed world can be - its a world in which the weather has a vastly more significant impact on the economy than the ruler can and a world that is de facto decentralised because of the practical difficulties in involved in running anything from the capital.

History is also for Gibbon a teacher of moral lessons. So good and bad emperors are central to his project. But he is also making a point about his world. The good ruler, demonstrating their good judgement rewards and promotes those of ability (like Gibbon!) and by means of their virtue and personal attributes presides over good times. The bad ruler is the rotten apple that will spoil the barrel.

If you want something more nuanced then look towards a modern, academic historian.

I think the idea that Edward Gibbon didn't come from a privileged background is not true at all. His grandfather had been one of the wealthiest men in Britain, and even though he lost most of his assets during the South Sea bubble, he still managed to leave a sizable estate to young Edward, who attended Oxford and Lausanne universities. Gibbon was also a member of the british parliament, not because of his accomplishments as a historian or philosopher, but because of his inherited social position. Not to mention that he clearly had plenty of time to study ancient texts and write, without having to worry about mundane things such as hard labor or salary.

[Lummel]

Er sorry, I most certainly did not think that Gibbon came from an unprivileged background, and I am sorry for having given that impression! The reason why he spent so much time in Italy and devoted himself to writing his history was because he didn't make it into the top flight politically despite thinking himself worthy. His experience of British politics, which in the mid-eighteenth century is rapidly becoming Imperial politics is shaping how and what he looks at in Roman history.

The other downside of looking at Gibbon in isolation is that so much of our understanding, particularly of the economy, has been transformed by 250 (give or take) years of archaeology. The massive scale of some Roman industrial undertakings and the extent of their impact - apparently the increased arsenic and lead content is distinctive in ice core samples wasn't something that Gibbon could have anticipated from the literary sources he was dealing with.

[Saci Targaryen]

Up and down for whom though? The senatorial class? A scattered handful of equestrians? Apart from the Great Fire (outside of anybody's control) and the Year of the 4 Emperors (you can blame either Nero or the rest of the state for that one) even inside of Rome only a tiny fraction of the population ever suffered from the instability of individual rulers. And that, frankly, was also the fault of the senate for mounting endless conspiracies against the individuals emperors. The emperors responded for the cause of self-defense, sometimes more or less restrained.

The implication carried by the 5 "good" emperors is still a silly one. The first century, on balance, was a prosperous and expansionary time for Rome with only the interruption of one civil war as a blemish in terms of absolute growth. And that was an expression of political turbulence that existed... mostly because the senate kept trying to kill the emperors that they had voted powers to in the first place. The fact that all of our major extant sources were written by either senators or men of senatorial sympathy makes it too easy to blame the emperors for any political instability, but, in the first century especially, it can't be denied that the emperors are mostly reactive to the senate. You can't have a lack of docility as purely the fault of any of the Caesars in that regard. Even the crazies (using that term loosely) only got more unhinged after uncovering plots against them.

The question of adoption, however, is vital to any treatment of Gibbon's idea here, and it's simply lacking. The idea that the Antonine's adoptions were necessarily more meritocratic isn't bourne up by the fact that so many of them were childless men who then turned to either distant cousins, or, in the case of Marcus Aurelius, his own son. Augustus chose his step-son, for the lack of better options. Tiberius chose a great-nephew for lack of better options, and perhaps because he still felt bound by his adoption of Germanicus. Claudius chose Nero, which of course is murkier and it's hard to figure out what exactly was going on there. The Antonines by contrast? Nerva chose Trajan at sword-point, Trajan chose Hadrian as an accomplished relative, Hadrian chose two heirs simply for being close to him, although they died, before falling back on a cousin again. The fact that he chose Antoninus Pius as a stop-gap is exactly what Augustus tried to do with Tiberius and Germanicus. Adoption was common in the Roman upper classes and was being carried out under the Antonines for much the same reasons that they had always been carried out. Gibbon seems to have made the mistake of thinking that because the results of the second century adoptions were less turbulence that it must have been because the process was somehow different. In fact it seems more likely that the second century was more stable because the senate accepted, for the time being, that they could not get away with choosing emperors without at least the input of the army via the Domitian-Nerva-Trajan debacle.

Just a side-note on Tiberius, he was the one who had most of the imperial family assassinated, including his nephew Germaniccus, though in that he was probably being manipulated by his praetorian prefect Aelius Sejanus. I remember visiting the ruins of Tiberius' palace in Capri, feeling goosebumps in my stomach, as I l walked around imagining Tiberius and Caligula plotting Sejanus assassination on a beautiful marble garden with a scenic view of the Mediterranean: http://files3.caprionline.it/article/6081_Itinerari_giornalieri_-_L/image/2_d.20120518151501.jpg

[Antonius Pius]

Just a side-note on Tiberius, he was the one who had most of the imperial family assassinated, including his nephew Germaniccus, though in that he was probably being manipulated by his praetorian prefect Aelius Sejanus. I remember visiting the ruins of Tiberius' palace in Capri, feeling goosebumps in my stomach, as I l walked around imagining Tiberius and Caligula plotting Sejanus assassination on a beautiful marble garden with a scenic view of the Mediterranean: http://files3.caprio...20518151501.jpg

I'm not an expert on the early Principate, but are you sure that's correct and not just the bias of the sources? A lot of the supposed assasinations could be explained away be a mix of authorial bias and accident.

[Caligula_K2]

I'm not an expert on the early Principate, but are you sure that's correct and not just the bias of the sources? A lot of the supposed assasinations could be explained away be a mix of authorial bias and accident.

Exactly. Tacitus (in his very Tacitean way) doesn't confirm that Tiberius assassinated Germanicus, just insinuates it. But all anyone can say for sure is that Germanicus died of an illness in Asia, and Piso was thought by some to have poisoned him. It all fits into the imperial literary trope of the "good potential emperor" unjustly killed, to be replaced by a monster (in this case, Caligula). We see it again with Britannicus and Nero, Titus and Domitian, and earlier with Gaius and Lucius before Tiberius.

[Zocc Arris]

Just a side-note on Tiberius, he was the one who had most of the imperial family assassinated, including his nephew Germaniccus, though in that he was probably being manipulated by his praetorian prefect Aelius Sejanus. I remember visiting the ruins of Tiberius' palace in Capri, feeling goosebumps in my stomach, as I l walked around imagining Tiberius and Caligula plotting Sejanus assassination on a beautiful marble garden with a scenic view of the Mediterranean: http://files3.caprio...20518151501.jpg

Echoing the other posts above me, it's not remotely clear what involvment, if any, Tiberius had in the deaths of the Julians. Agrippa (Postumus) may have been killed on the orders of Augustus or the orders of Tiberius with or without Livia's involvment in any of those examples. He could also have been killed by accident after an attempted escape which was the official version. While this is the example that is most likely to bear Tiberius's culpability, it would still be a command more in keeping with Augustus's character and history. Still. Chalk that up against Tiberius if you want.

Germanicus? No hard evidence that he was assassinated and no hard evidence that there was meaningful friction between Tiberius and Germanicus on Tiberius's part. As for Agrippina and her elder sons, while Tiberius was certainly guilty of reacting to the reports that he gathered from the Praetorians, and the zealous urgings of the senate, that stems directly from the collusion between various other senators and the Sejanus faction. If you want to indict Tiberius for trusting Sejanus (and I would agree that whatever anyone else says about him that's a black mark) you can go ahead and do so, but I think it sensationalizes things falsely to suggest that Tiberius went around assassinating his Julian relations. Even in Tacitus's vitriolic account of those years, it would seem that the only conciliatory gestures ever made between Tiberius and the Julians were all initiated by the emperor and rejected by Agrippina.

[Saci Targaryen]

Echoing the other posts above me, it's not remotely clear what involvment, if any, Tiberius had in the deaths of the Julians. Agrippa (Postumus) may have been killed on the orders of Augustus or the orders of Tiberius with or without Livia's involvment in any of those examples. He could also have been killed by accident after an attempted escape which was the official version. While this is the example that is most likely to bear Tiberius's culpability, it would still be a command more in keeping with Augustus's character and history. Still. Chalk that up against Tiberius if you want.

Germanicus? No hard evidence that he was assassinated and no hard evidence that there was meaningful friction between Tiberius and Germanicus on Tiberius's part. As for Agrippina and her elder sons, while Tiberius was certainly guilty of reacting to the reports that he gathered from the Praetorians, and the zealous urgings of the senate, that stems directly from the collusion between various other senators and the Sejanus faction. If you want to indict Tiberius for trusting Sejanus (and I would agree that whatever anyone else says about him that's a black mark) you can go ahead and do so, but I think it sensationalizes things falsely to suggest that Tiberius went around assassinating his Julian relations. Even in Tacitus's vitriolic account of those years, it would seem that the only conciliatory gestures ever made between Tiberius and the Julians were all initiated by the emperor and rejected by Agrippina.

Well, Tiberius could have found reason to have Germanicus murdered when the legions of the Rhine declared the latter Emperor, despite the fact that he promptly refused. Later, Germanicus died claiming that he had been poisoned by the syrian governor Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso, and when Piso was called to Rome to stand trial, he mysteriously commited suicide. Ancient sources speculate that Tiberius forced Piso to commit suicide, because Piso supposedly could produce evidence against the emperor.

Dont get me wrong, I dont think Tiberius was an evil man, but he was certainly bitter, paranoid, and dangerous. By the time he had become emperor he had suffered too many humiliations at the hands of Augustus and his daugther, and was called by Tacitus the "gloomiest of man". After his son was poisoned by Sejanus, he simply withdrew to Capri, leaving the affairs of state largely to the senate.

I quite approve his characterization at the TV series "I Claudius", this episode is a must watch! http://www.youtube.c...h?v=8r_rC4R-Rag

[Lummel]

...Dont get me wrong, I dont think Tiberius was an evil man, but he was certainly bitter, paranoid, and dangerous...

I suppose this is where the historian in me speaks up and says "hey, like, that's your opinion, man" :laugh:

We don't know Tiberius, we can't know Tiberius. What we know about Tiberius is chiefly from Tacitus and Suetonius who are writing circa one hundred years after the events, bits of Dio Cassius who is writing even later etc.

How valid is the history you would write about your country's leaders one hundred years ago? What kind of biases are you likely to have about them? What kind of information are you likely to have about them? We can't answer those question definitively about our sources, we can only judge from what they have written. Tacitus is certainly grinding various axes, he has all kinds of prejudices and himself lived through Domitian's reign, Suetonius, I'm not so sure - long time since I've looked at the 12 caesars.

Anyway the long and the short of what I'm trying to say is we only know about Tiberius through our sources. But our sources are not necessarily impartial, objective or accurate. In fact we can reasonable suspect that they are not. Rather like Robert Graves "I, Claudius" they seek, consciously or unconsciously, to tell us a story.

History I suppose is never neutral, you have to be a bit suspicious or at least allow for bias just as when you read a newspaper you allow for it's editorial stance.

[Antonius Pius]

A very important point about the written sources is that they were often written by men of the senatorial class, and reflect the senators' antipathy towards the emperors, and the very system of empire, which conflicted directly with the Republican theory of equal opportunity for all senators. Careers were made by exceeding others and winning personal glory for the Republic. Caesar's control over the available senior offices (he had promised his followers those offices, so after the fighting he *had* to appoint his cronies; when he had himseld declared Dictator for life, it was clear he wasn't going away) was a major factor in his assassination: he thwarted numerous potential careers. Augustus was careful to maintain the illusion of a powerful senate. The men of the senatorial class were bred to believe they had destinies to serve the Republic, yet were unable to really get their careers going.

Also, it was a common practice for historians to literally copy others' work. This is why we still know a lof stuff from those days (for instance, Lucius Cornelius Sulla left memoires which are lost, but from Plutarch quoting them we know a lot about what was in them and we can guess at how widely read they were). But this does nothing for the credibility of other sources if we can't balance them against others from the same period.

[Lummel]

I think there is an element of that in Tacitus, 'the wrong people are in charge, it's all scheming women, and weak men being manipulated when it should be people like me wise and stoical who should be debating the issues and deciding policy openly in the senate! Not behind closed doors were all these crazy things are happening!'

[Antonius Pius]

There's quite a strong element like that in his works, about the proper way, and how it's been let slide.

His Germania is a very strong example of his morality (but otherwise completely off topic :P ),

[SeanF]

Er sorry, I most certainly did not think that Gibbon came from an unprivileged background, and I am sorry for having given that impression! The reason why he spent so much time in Italy and devoted himself to writing his history was because he didn't make it into the top flight politically despite thinking himself worthy. His experience of British politics, which in the mid-eighteenth century is rapidly becoming Imperial politics is shaping how and what he looks at in Roman history.

It's not unusual for people who are most resentful of the elite to be those who just fall outside of it.

[SeanF]

Just a side-note on Tiberius, he was the one who had most of the imperial family assassinated, including his nephew Germaniccus, though in that he was probably being manipulated by his praetorian prefect Aelius Sejanus. I remember visiting the ruins of Tiberius' palace in Capri, feeling goosebumps in my stomach, as I l walked around imagining Tiberius and Caligula plotting Sejanus assassination on a beautiful marble garden with a scenic view of the Mediterranean: http://files3.caprio...20518151501.jpg

I share your enthusiasm for Villa Jovis. But, are we sure that Tiberius assasinated Germanicus?

[SeanF]

I think there is an element of that in Tacitus, 'the wrong people are in charge, it's all scheming women, and weak men being manipulated when it should be people like me wise and stoical who should be debating the issues and deciding policy openly in the senate! Not behind closed doors were all these crazy things are happening!'

Although Tacitus himself reached the top, politically speaking.