But this very openness about his sourcing is often what allows us to see where his story is flawed, misguided, or outright incorrect. Gibbon makes a large and fatal error in relying on a collection of imperial biographies collectively dubbed the Historia Augusta. The collection purports to be written by six different authors, who provide a wealth of information and detail about chaotic periods with otherwise scant and fragmentary sources. Though he deploys his critical eye to describe one of these volumes as the work of a “wretched biographer,” Gibbon nonetheless uses the Historia Augusta to flesh out his story and provide colorful backstories for his characters. 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. Though many basic facts in the Historia Augusta can be independently verified, the exquisite details it contains must be read as unreliable historical fiction. Any passage in Decline and Fall found perched atop footnotes citing the Historia Augusta—and there are many—cannot be taken at face value. This is not to say that Decline and Fall is uniformly inaccurate or completely unreliable. Just that there are enough basic factual problems to give pause.
Problems of both interpretation and fact combine in Gibbon’s ethnographic depictions of various groups of people. Gibbon is a disaster on matters of cultural anthropology. Writing from his position as a European acolyte of the Enlightenment, his descriptions and characterizations are replete with various bigotries. Of the nomadic peoples of the Eurasian steppe, Gibbon says their unwillingness to settle into civilized agriculture boils down to “indolence.” He says, “The only example of their industry seems to consist in the art of extracting from mare’s milk a fermented liquor, which possesses a very strong power of intoxication.” Of the Tatars he writes that “they are an ugly and even deformed race; And, while they consider their own women as the instruments of domestic labor, their desires, or rather their appetites, are directed to the enjoyment of more elegant beauty.” Which is to say they fought wars to get hotter women. He assigns to the Jews a “narrow and unsocial spirit” and calls them “a race of fanatics, whose dire and credulous superstition seemed to render them the implacable enemies not only of the Roman government, but also of mankind.”
Even if not a single word were true, Gibbon’s prose would still be worth reading, just for the joy of reading.
Gibbon also habitually writes with misogynistic undertones—that the decline of Rome was the story of manly virtues falling into effeminate vices. In a passage explaining the decline in military prowess, he says that “the effeminate luxury which infected the manners of courts and cities had instilled a secret and destructive poison into the camps of the legion.” When describing the Gothic sacking of Rome, Gibbon writes that Alaric encouraged his men “to enrich themselves with the spoils of a wealthy and effeminate people.” Clearly Gibbon saw something damning about anything feminine-coded. Of the Empress Julia Domna, Gibbon writes that “she possessed, even in an advanced age, the attractions of beauty, and united to a lively imagination a firmness of mind, and strength of judgment, seldom bestowed on her sex.” Even in paying a woman a compliment, he can’t escape his attitude.