Gibbon’s quasi-mythical side

This is the sort of wild passage you’d expect to find in Herodotus rather than Gibbon, and I’m not quite sure what to make of it. On the death of the brutal Emperor Maximin:

“Such was the deserved fate of a brutal savage, destitute, as he has generally been represented, of every sentiment that distinguishes a civilized, or even a human, being. The body was suited to the soul. The stature of Maximin exceeded the measure of eight feet, and circumstances almost incredible are related of his matchless strength and appetite. We are told that Maximin could drink in a day an amphora (or about seven gallons) of wine and eat thirty or forty pounds of meat. He could move a loaded wagon, break a horse’s leg with his fist, crumble stones in his hand, and tear up small trees by the roots.”

I’m fairly good by now at detecting Gibbon’s usual signs of irony and tongue-in-cheek, and there simply aren’t any of those in the vicinity of this passage.

(ADDENDUM: The other weird thing about this passage is that it comes only at the very end of many pages on the rule of Maximin. Normally, if someone in a history were “eight feet tall,” we would expect to hear of this as a salient element of his person in the first sentence or two, not as a “by the way” point in his obituary. It’s even funnier to imagine this in the case of fiction, as if we were told only in the final Sherlock Holmes story that the detective was eight feet tall.)