[HN Gopher] In the Ruins of Edward Gibbon's Masterpiece
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       In the Ruins of Edward Gibbon's Masterpiece
        
       Author : benbreen
       Score  : 20 points
       Date   : 2024-06-07 05:42 UTC (3 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (newrepublic.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (newrepublic.com)
        
       | sedev wrote:
       | The byline is kinda small, but it's helpful contextual
       | information that this article is by Mike Duncan, who is likely to
       | be familiar to HN readers as the guy who did the _Revolutions_
       | and _The History Of Rome_ podcasts.
        
       | AlbertCory wrote:
       | > But in the late nineteenth century, German historian Hermann
       | Dessau broke critical ground by arguing the Historia Augusta was
       | not written by six different authors over many years but was in
       | fact the work of a single anonymous hoaxster writing in the late
       | fourth century.
       | 
       | Is anyone familiar with Dessau's work? A cursory search makes it
       | look fairly obscure. "Textual analysis" seems rather like alchemy
       | to me.
        
       | quotemstr wrote:
       | > the idea of a sudden visible collapse of civilization is not
       | supported by the record
       | 
       | The idea that there was no "fall" and that late antiquity is just
       | a "transition" between arbitrary value-balanced political org
       | charts is what's not supported by the evidence. This revisionist
       | take is annoyingly common these days -- see
       | https://www.amazon.com/Fall-Rome-End-Civilization/dp/0192807...
       | for a masterful refutation and defense of the original
       | interpretation. If you look at industrial output, lead pollution
       | levels, sophistication of literary output, literacy rates, and
       | tons of other metrics, you'll see a dramatic decline around the
       | time that the Roman social order fell apart. Britain became
       | nearly illiterate. Italy was ransacked by the Gothic Wars and its
       | population collapsed. The aqueducts stopped working. The Pantheon
       | was half-buried (the front doors couldn't be opened for
       | centuries) and full of muck. It was, altogether, an absolutely
       | miserable period of history. Gibbon's history of the era is
       | masterful.
        
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       (page generated 2024-06-10 23:00 UTC)