The Archregimancy wrote:Sorry; I've only just seen this. I've been away for a few days.
Just for clarity, are you seriously arguing that the Delian League is an appropriate historical analogue for offering support Anne Widdicombe's EU Parliament speech slavery point? Or are you just making a broad rhetorical point while hoping that no one else posting in the thread is going to familiar enough with the politics of the 5th-century BC Aegean to call you up on the obvious flaws in the comparison?
It's not the first time I've noticed you doing this sort of thing. Maybe I should have said something a couple of years ago when you seemed to use Decline and Fall as a serious basis for making a point about Pertinax and British politics, rather than acknowledging that Gibbon was engaging in ideologically loaded idealised Enlightenment point-scoring that makes for great literature, but no so much a reliable guide to modern historical interpretation. Ironically, you would have been on much stronger ground citing Cassius Dio to make the original point.
But I digress.
I'll try and pay closer attention to your classical history comparisons in future.
Its a broad rhetorical point, which like you, is me being pedantic. It is well within my capacity to be completely serious and historically careful, but I find few people actually respond to me making such an effort. I would be careful with trying to awe me with the authority of your knowledge, it may be significant but I making my progress towards such heights (though I don't think I will ever be rewarded with moderatorship) and I have caught a few times you have erred.
I don't like Widdicombe particularly, most transparently because of her religion. But this thread so often turns into a very one-sided view of politics, which is why I seldom post here anymore, and I wanted to practice my rhetoric a little. Most posts here are done in a very similar way that is fast and lose with association, often misrepresenting things wilfully and deliberately: but History is your domain, which like a dragon upon its hoard, you wish to guard. If you are to offer a critique of me with respect to my rhetoric, then you are most welcome to do so to all else who fall: but I don't think either of us will trouble ourselves with such an unenviable task.
How much can you really add about the Delian League aside from Thucydides? The Parian Marble? I do study epigraphy, so its a bit immaterial (my latest project is Sanskrit and Indian monuments). I made a very specific claim that the Greeks thought the Athenian empire was a despotism/slavery, I can't imagine what you think contests this rather simple claim. And I have read ever so many histories of Greece, and their reception studies too, so I don't think there to be flaws to be found, or at least obvious ones, with such a statement. I would be interested in what you could say, but I would venture it doesn't go beyond a broad statement that the situation was specific to the time and place, and we cannot draw an exact parallel: which may be strictly true, but then we could not talk at all about history and the lessons to be drawn from it.
What are the "obvious flaws in the comparison"? You yourself have known biases in terms of your opinion of the EU, even on record as standing for a party that might have a strong opinion on it, so am I to believe your rhetoric of it being a 'good', 'just' or 'democratic' institution (arguments made ex te silentio) in turn? I may be young, but have sufficient wisdom to understand that our claims are based on fundamental values held, rather than on some objective truth.
You have a excellent memory, to your credit, and the quote, for the benefit of the reader, goes quite like this:
"Corruption is merely an accusation. The government of the Commonwealth was seen as virtuous compared to the corrupt Stuarts yet both were largely interchangeable. I am reading Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire at this moment: Pertinax despite being a perfectly upright man intent upon the public good is deposed and murdered for his efforts—this was to repeat several times in their history."
Gibbon cites his sources, and all history is an interpretation of mere facts—something I learnt when I was studying Herodotus—so by its nature subject to bias: it is a rhetorical attempt at explanation of why events have occurred as they did not an objective science, reality is not subject to such simple narratives. Whether you regard him as a good historian or not seems immaterial to me, I would say he writes a more coherent account than most modern historians who often use much the same material, and he does include copious footnotes, so I don't think of him as being to wrong in his judgement, at least on this matter. He uses Herodian, Julian, Cassius Dio and Capitolinus: none of which I have read save fragments, due to the lack of emphasis (and time) we have on late antiquity (even if it is a goal), but I will still vouch for Gibbon's authority in interpreting them well: even if it is fashionable for each generation of historian to pour cold contempt upon the last. Would you say that corruption is an accusation we can honestly know the truth of from the Ancient authors? Which was actually the subtext of my quote, that it is a rhetorical claim: therefore whatever Gibbon says is immaterial. Furthermore, I can only imagine what you think of modern reception studies, which must be 'ideologically loaded [post-modern] point scoring" to you. Can you stand, say, Mary Beard? Perhaps it would have been better, in retrospect, to have added "he says that".
Out of interest, if you have finished by now, what edition have you read? I bought the Penguin, to be efficient and for use as a reference copy. It is a long term ambition to buy an early edition: unfortunately I am currently saving for such a set of Grote.
In conclusion, I was simply writing about something I was reading at the time, with a comment made on face value; that on the Stuarts and the Commonwealth I thought was a sounder one and more relevant. I genuinely thought no-one actually read it, so I am glad on that account.
