The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Nonfiction | Book | Adult

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-6

Chapters 7-8

Chapters 9-10

Chapters 11-12

Chapters 13-14

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Chapters 7-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 7 Summary

While admitting that the idea of a hereditary monarchy “seems to present the fairest scope for ridicule” (167), Gibbon argues it is a form of government where conflicts over the succession of the leadership are least likely to occur. He further asserts that in any country, the army is the most powerful force among the population. If there is a firmly established right to the throne that even the army must acknowledge, the risk of civil war and competing factions is reduced. No such rigid principle of legitimacy existed in the Roman Empire. Following the downfall of Alexander Severus, “no emperor could think of himself safe upon the throne, and every barbarian peasant on the frontier might aspire to that august but dangerous station” (168).

Returning to his narrative, Gibbon describes how the army hatched a plot to overthrow Alexander Severus and replace him with a “real soldier” (170), Maximin, a peasant from Thrace who became a distinguished military tribune. Alexander and his mother, Julia Mamaea, were both killed by the troops while on an army campaign in the east. Gibbon notes that previous tyrannical emperors like Caligula, Commodus, and Caracalla were “all dissolute and inexperienced youths” (171).

Maximin used violence against those who criticized him for his peasant background. He looted holy places of their valuables to pay off his fellow troops, which dismayed even them. Maximin’s enemies and the Senate chose an illustrious and elderly member of Rome’s senatorial class, Gordian, as their own candidate for emperor, a promotion that Gordian “begged with tears” (175) to be spared. Nonetheless, he was elevated to the office of emperor along with his son, the younger Gordian.

This event sparked a civil war. In one battle, the younger Gordian died in combat. After hearing the news, the elder Gordian died by suicide. Fearing that Maximin would attack and ravage Italy, the Senate selected two new emperors, Maximus and Balbinus. At the same time, a Roman mob demanded that a nephew of the younger Gordian, Gordian III, also be named emperor. Maximus and Balbinus had to agree to the crowd’s demands.

Meanwhile, Maximin tried to march his army into Italy. Facing stiff resistance at the northeastern Italian city of Aquileia, Maximin’s troops turned on him and killed him along with his son. However, the praetorian guard resented that the emperors chosen by the Senate, not by the army, were in power. Maximus and Balbinus resented each other, stopping them from presenting a united front. The two were murdered by the praetorian guard and Gordian III was acclaimed the sole emperor.

At first, Gibbon says the 19-year-old Gordian III was manipulated by a group of eunuchs, who sold administrative offices to the highest bidder. Instead, Gordian III came to rely on the praetorian prefect and “master of rhetoric” (190), Misitheus, whose daughter he married. Under Misitheus’s influence, the government functioned well, and the army was kept satisfied. After Misitheus died from either illness or being poisoned (191), an Arab man named Philip, who rose through the ranks of the army, took his place as praetorian prefect.

Soon, Philip and the army killed Gordian III and his soldiers acclaimed Philip as emperor. Philip tried legitimizing his rule by hosting the secular games, a traditional Roman festival. Gibbon adds that by Philip’s time, the imperial office was beginning to be held by non-Romans and that the old ideas of Roman liberty had been diluted as more people from the provinces came to dominate the Roman administration (194).

Chapter 8 Summary

The old Persian Empire had been destroyed by the military campaigns of Alexander the Great before the rise of the Roman Empire. Later, Persia fell under the rule of the Parthians. During Alexander Severus’s reign, the Persian Empire was resurrected by Ardshir or Artaxerxes, who overthrew the Parthians and established the Sassanid dynasty. Artaxerxes reformed the traditional Persian religion of Zoroastrianism (which Gibbon called the religion of the Magi), which was based on the teachings of the ancient prophet Zoroaster.

The basis of Zoroaster’s teachings was the conflict between the benevolent divine principle, Ormusd, and the evil, Ahriman. The teachings of Zoroaster also established a number of laws that express “a liberal concern for private and public happiness” (201). Such laws included destroying harmful animals, irrigating dry lands, and planting crops and fruit trees. However, Gibbon also asserts that Zoroastrianism became “disgraced by a mixture of the most abject and dangerous superstition” (202). As a result, the Magi—the religious elite of Zoroastrianism— began to accumulate wealth and property. Under Artaxerxes, non-Zoroastrian religions were also persecuted.

In the past, the Romans did not expand far into Persia because of the distance and the desert climate, reaching only as far as the Euphrates River (207-08). Artaxerxes wanted to recreate the conquests of the great Persian emperor Cyrus and expand into Greece and Egypt. Artaxerxes’s conquests brought Persia into conflict with Rome, placing “both nations in a long series of destructive wars and reciprocal calamities” (211). Gibbon claims that, despite Persian expansion, they lacked the technological ability at warfare the Greeks and Romans had. Still, despite the limitations Gibbon sees in them, he admits the Persian elite still had “a strong sense of personal gallantry and national honour” (212).

Chapters 7-8 Analysis

With these chapters, Gibbon begins to narrate the period historians of ancient Rome term the “Crisis of the Third Century.” During this era, there was a long series of emperors from the murder of Alexander Severus in 235 to the rise of Diocletian to power in 284. Many were elevated to the imperial office and later killed by the praetorian guard or by the legions. The Crisis of the Third Century represented the culmination of the breakdown of The Role of the Military in Political Crises. In Gibbon’s view of Augustus’s system, it was the “majesty of the Senate” (72) that served as a shield between the emperor and the army. With the political decline of the Senate and with emperors beginning to emerge outside of Rome and in the provinces, the role of the military changed from protecting the emperor to making emperors. According to Gibbon’s argument, the Crisis of the Third Century was fundamentally a crisis in political legitimacy.

After Augustus, the emperors received their legitimacy from both the Senate and the army. Once the army’s role and power were broadened, first the praetorian guard, and then the legions, learned they could withdraw their support for the legitimacy of any emperor at any time. By strengthening the military, by proving someone outside Rome could become emperor, and by tying his own legitimacy to the army and not to the Senate, Septimius Severus completely disrupted the balance Augustus had established between the army and the Senate. In fact, over the Crisis of the Third Century, the Senate and the army acted in competition in trying to elevate their own candidates for the imperial office. This problem of legitimacy would only be resolved when Diocletian reinvented the position of emperor itself, completely getting rid of the republican vestiges of the imperial office and making the emperor into a quasi-divine monarch.

Another major factor presented by Gibbon is the influence of provincials. According to Gibbon’s own ideas of The Traditional Roman “West” Versus the Corrupting “East,” the growing representation of provincial subjects of the empire within the military and the government administration weakened what Gibbon views as the innate virtues of the Romans. In his view, Rome was “confounded with the millions of servile provincials, who had received the name, without adopting the spirit, of Romans” (194, emphasis added). In this sense, the Roman Empire was a victim of its own success. It is through the provincials that political autocracy and practices like the deification of emperors spread to Italy, at least in Gibbon’s view.

When writing about the Persian Empire, Gibbon further links his image of “the East” to religion and superstition, describing the elites of the Sassanid Empire of Persia as living in the “bosom of luxury and despotism” (212). For Gibbon, the Zoroastrian religion of Persia is a prime example of how a religion may be corrupted by both a class of priests and by what Gibbon labels “superstition.” Religion is capable of being socially useful and is at its best when it fills that purpose, which is how Gibbon portrays Zoroastrianism in its early centuries.

However, once Zoroastrianism began to host a wealthy priesthood and developed “superstitious” rites and beliefs that further empowered and enriched the priesthood, it became corrupted. Nonetheless, even though Gibbon disapproves of the persecutions that took place under Zoroastrianism during the Sassanid period, he admits that Zoroastrianism served the purpose of uniting the Persians behind their empire with “religious zeal” (203). Similar assumptions about the ways religion may be corrupted by superstition and about religion as a social tool also inform Gibbon’s ideas about Roman paganism, Judaism, and Christianity.