Knitting -- alterations

Some of you may not have been able to unsee the Fair Isle jumper I made with scraps (although I did get a compliment on it from a fellow knitter in a grocery store). 

Well, if you saw the Celtic braid sweater, you know that the sleeves were longer than the body. 

I like it that way. They come down well over my wrists and keep my arms warmer. But with the Fair Isle, I kept the sleeve and body patterns coordinated.

Then I didn't feel warm enough in it.

So here's where the alterations come in. I worked a circular needle into the bottom stitches of one part of the sleeve, unpicked the top of the next lower section, worked an additional motif into it, and knit the two parts of the sleeve back together. Here's a photo showing the circular holder worked into the sleeve.

I did this twice for each sleeve, once at the top of the black section, and once at the top of the darkest gray section. Having those different colors on either side of the dividing line made it easy to pick the sleeve apart.

And here's the reknitted black section.

One important tip. When you knit the sleeve back together, you are going to turn inside out the part of the sleeve with the holder. You're going to stick the other part inside so that right sides are together. Now the stitches on that holder are going to be twisted, but the stitches on the needles are going to be untwisted. When you knit each of two stitches together, you have to put your needle through the back loop of the twisted stitch on the holder, and through the front loop of the stitch from the other part of the sleeve, because this second stitch is NOT twisted. Knit them together, pull them both off, and then bring the previous stitch over.

So now the top part of each sleeve with the lightest gray is the same as it was, it still doesn't have that circular motif. But the sleeves are as long as I want them now, and I don't have any more of the pumpkin colored yarn, nor am I going to buy any.

Because I still have lots of scraps. I mean, I still have 18 yards of that light yellow. Since you get about 1/3 as many yards of actual stitches as you have yarn, there's 6 yards of yellow stitches. Since I size things for a 40 inch body, that's a little over 5 rounds of stitches. It would make nice sparkles, maybe two rounds each on body and sleeves. I have 25 yards of the darker yellow, or about 8 yards of stitches, or 7 rounds of stitches. So there's another Fair Isle scrap jumper in my future, without buying more yarn. 

And here's the altered jumper. 

Moral of the story: DO YOUR MATH. It won't keep you from overbuying, because it's nearly impossible to buy only the amount of yarn you need, you would have to design to the amount of yarn you're buying. BUT it will ensure that you don't have to alter something because you knitted to the wrong measurements.

21st Century Classical Greek -- where does the negation go?

I have more conditionals for you ahead, as well as posts about negation drumming into you that Goodwin’s material is in part incomplete and in part inaccurate. I am also going to blast through “final” and “purpose” clauses, reducing about a dozen pages in Goodwin to an objective statement that is shorter than some paragraphs.

Book I section 17. You should know most of the words here. Ef’ is epi; learn it.

τύραννοί τε ὅσοι ἦσαν ἐν ταῖς Ἑλληνικαῖς πόλεσι,τὸ ἐφ᾽ ἑαυτῶν μόνον προορώμενοι ἔς τε τὸ σῶμα καὶ ἐς τὸ τὸν ἴδιον οἶκον αὔξειν δι᾽ ἀσφαλείας ὅσον ἐδύναντο μάλιστα τὰς πόλεις ᾤκουν, ἐπράχθη δὲ οὐδὲν ἀπ᾽ αὐτῶν ἔργον ἀξιόλογον, εἰ μὴ εἴ τι πρὸς περιοίκους τοὺς αὐτῶν ἑκάστοις: οἱ γὰρ ἐν Σικελίᾳ ἐπὶ πλεῖστον ἐχώρησαν δυνάμεως. οὕτω πανταχόθεν ἡ Ἑλλὰς ἐπὶ πολὺν χρόνον κατείχετο μήτε κοινῇ φανερὸν μηδὲν κατεργάζεσθαι, κατὰ πόλεις τε ἀτολμοτέρα εἶναι.

Ei mi ei is not a conditional. It’s an idiom meaning “except for”, meaning that except for fighting their border wars, the tyrants didn’t do anything notable except enrich themselves and their families.

Eprakhthi comes from prasso, which does some weird things. For example, you can see here that in the passive, instead of the sigma marker of the imperfective, it’s theta in the eventive, but it’s still sigma in the conceptual. See White, page 241, section 770. In the executive, however, the two sigmas become ksi. In the progressive eventive, the sigmas become taus.

The difference between prasso and poieo is the idea of experience. You use prasso not just for the experience of the Persian war, but also in practicing a trade; it is used of practicing bribery as well.

Jowett inserts “nor” at the start of his translation that is not supported in the Greek. Thucydides says the tyrants attended to their and their families’ needs “alone”, monon. By inserting this negation, Jowett discredits the word substitution he did in section 16. Thucydides ends the phrase with malista tas poleis okoun, “mostly the cities they inhabited,” which Jowett ignores.

Jowett’s insertion of “ever” following this is also not supported in the Greek. He tranposes wording in the last sentence.

In the last line notice mite koini. Previously I called out oudeis ksunesti as a negation of an action that specified joint operations, instead of a negation of the jointness of an action. Here we have a negation of jointness, and that alone is enough to give it the “partitive” sense inherent in mi. I’ll say more about this in a month or so.

One thing this example does is nail down that the negation always appears close to what it negates. I wrote about a year ago, about negation of an adverb that Jowett attributed to the verb, producing the wrong nuance compared to what Thucydides meant. Here we see that Mr. T felt he could not use a negation and have it apply to both the adjective and verb, he had to negate both. So read carefully and don’t just assume, as Jowett consistently does, that moving the negation to where English wants it says the same thing as Thucydides meant. Jowett writes “Grenglish”.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- the ants

I am constantly impressed by how much contact Talmudic rabbis had with agriculture and their environment. A statement in Mishnah Kilayim 1:4 declaring peaches and almonds to be prohibited (the planting them together) turns out to be logical, because almonds are drupes like peaches, not true nuts like hickories, and the almond is analogous to the kernel inside a peach seed shell, the one that is supposed to dose you with laetrile (although that is not clinically supported as a cancer preventative).

It's logical because they didn't have seed stores back in those days, they had to breed their own seeds. Hybrid plants and animals are not self-reproducing in most cases; the number of female mules that are fertile is tiny. Ancient people needed to preserve reproductive capacity in domesticated plants and animals. The way to do that, was to plant in separate blocks. So there's a practical basis to the laws of kilayim that we are oblivious to because we have over a century of experience with hybrids -- which won't do us any good in a true SHTF situation because the hybrid seeds that are left will produce exactly one crop and then the only people who will eat are those preserving open-pollinated plants for seed. (rant over)

So I was listening to Babylonian Talmud Moed Katan 6b and they are talking about how to kill ants. Which is to get some soil from at least a parasang away and put it in the holes of the ants you want to kill.

This works for two reasons, one of which is stated in the gemara: ants are fiercely territorial as well as everywhere, and the soil you put in the holes likely contains ants. The strangers and natives will fight each other to the death.

The second reason is one that could only be discovered after the microscope was invented and we found out about microbes. See this paper, which suggests that ant colonies modify the soil they live in. Soil from another colony or another place will have a different microbial population. It provokes an immune response in the ants. Between the battle with the strangers and the induced disease, you can succeed in wiping out a nest.

So now let's look at Exodus 21:35, "a man's ox pushing another person's ox." I'm sure you all think I am mistranslating and I mean "goring," but that's in verses 28-32. Here the verb is not nogach but nogaf, pushing. What's the difference? Cattle push each other in a dominance display. All social animals have dominance displays. The difference is that pushing is not supposed to cause death, but stuff happens. 

But a goring ox is using its horns, and the owner is put on notice to keep it locked up. If he fails, he's in serious trouble. He ought to be put to death with his ox but he can redeem himself by a fine.

Don't ignore those bits and pieces. Do your fact-checking, sure, But don't automatically assume that just because the material is one to three thousand years old, it's nonsense.

Gibbon -- the urban legend, pt. 6

So the big thing I showed last time is that when Gibbon gave only part of the citations about the Mithridatic war, he covered up evidence that undercut his chapter 2 claim that 150,000 Romans were destroyed by Mithridates. The number was given as 80,000 by Appian, but they were not all destroyed and they could have been Bithynians, not Roman legionaries. Mithridates' army was supposed to be 250,000 strong. The whole thing looks like one of those 10x exaggerations some historians warn about, all the more so as Sulla beat Mithridates with only 25,000 veteran Roman legionaries. 

Gibbon hides more inconvenient truth in Chapter VI when he praises the victory at Narva of Charles XII, but leaves out his defeat at Poltava, after which he was forced to flee and spent years in exile in Ottoman-ruled Moldavia.

In Chapter 6 we get three things.

a) Gibbon proves he didn't read Cassius Dio because he constantly gives the wrong section number and even claims that something is in Dio that I haven't been able to find.

b) He shows he believes that Ossian was genuine. In fact he died before people started writing that James MacPherson was the actual author. There are objective tests as to whether MacPherson composed that work or it was genuinely oral in origin, in Axel Olrik's 20th century work with oral narrative traditions. This is another in a long string of "OK Gibbon wouldn't have known this but we know it now so this part of what Gibbon wrote is irrelevant."

c) I have a long footnote about Julia Domna being an Arab the same as the emperor Philip, and about his "brigandage" being an urban legend invented by a bigoted Roman writer. If you can, read Glenn Bowersock. “Roman Arabia”. Cambridge, MA, US: Harvard University Press.  https://archive.org/details/romanarabia0000bowe/page/122/mode/2up

In this chapter, Gibbon begins to inveigh against eunuchs in Roman culture. Some chapters ahead, Gibbon will write about Narses who conquered Italy for Justinian, but he was not the only eunuch with military or other power: a eunuch named Rifq took Aleppo for the Muslims. There have been other eunuch generals throughout history, along with bodyguards, prime ministers, Sima Qian the historian, Origen, and some of the Mamluk slave-soldiers of Egypt. Gibbon sees eunuchs as something worse than slaves, but I think that's just because he can't think of them without feeling the knife being taken to his own flesh. You know what I mean.

'Tany rate, the soldiers decided they didn't like Elagabalus and turned to the last of the Severans, Severus Alexander. It was a bad choice. He debased the coinage again, and his troops suffered humiliating losses to the new Sassanid dynasty, the last non-Muslim dynasty of Persia. The Praetorians murdered his advisor, jurist Ulpian, and the Germans breached the line of fortresses along the Rhine and Danube. Alexander was also assassinated. Gibbon seems to believe he was an angel, despite letting his mother run things, but there was no stopping the setting of the Severan sun. 

From here on out, an emperor might as easily be a barbarian as an Italian, and the objections to Macrinus' non-senatorial rank seem very weak. But the fact is, the army was making the emperors, not the Senate, and the turnover was too fast for the senate to keep up with. All they had was resentment.

Toward the end of this chapter, Gibbon tries to show that he understands economics. He writes about internal taxes and customs, and inheritance taxes, and confiscations of the property when somebody wrote an "unjust" last will and testament. He never talks about inflation caused by debasement of the coinage, and how the revenue suffered because of it, leading to confiscatory practices by government. His main beef with confiscation is that it proves that Roman "liberty" was declining. Again, he fails to understand the paterfamilias concept; the emperor had the right to do whatever he deemed necessary so as to pay the troops who were supposed to be defending the Rhine and Danube. 

And of course, immediately after this chapter, we get into the consequences of the plague.

To the PDF

21st Century Classical Greek -- ei mi idiom

Book I section 17. You should know most of the words here. Ef’ is epi; learn it.

τύραννοί τε ὅσοι ἦσαν ἐν ταῖς Ἑλληνικαῖς πόλεσι,τὸ ἐφ᾽ ἑαυτῶν μόνον προορώμενοι ἔς τε τὸ σῶμα καὶ ἐς τὸ τὸν ἴδιον οἶκον αὔξειν δι᾽ ἀσφαλείας ὅσον ἐδύναντο μάλιστα τὰς πόλεις ᾤκουν, ἐπράχθη δὲ οὐδὲν ἀπ᾽ αὐτῶν ἔργον ἀξιόλογον, εἰ μὴ εἴ τι πρὸς περιοίκους τοὺς αὐτῶν ἑκάστοις: οἱ γὰρ ἐν Σικελίᾳ ἐπὶ πλεῖστον ἐχώρησαν δυνάμεως. οὕτω πανταχόθεν ἡ Ἑλλὰς ἐπὶ πολὺν χρόνον κατείχετο μήτε κοινῇ φανερὸν μηδὲν κατεργάζεσθαι, κατὰ πόλεις τε ἀτολμοτέρα εἶναι.

Ei mi ei is not a conditional. It’s an idiom meaning “except for”, meaning that except for fighting their border wars, the tyrants didn’t do anything notable except enrich themselves and their families.

Eprakhthi comes from prasso, which does some weird things. For example, you can see here that in the passive, instead of the sigma marker of the imperfective, it’s theta in the eventive, but it’s still sigma in the conceptual. See White, page 241, section 770. In the executive, however, the two sigmas become ksi. In the progressive eventive, the sigmas become taus.

The difference between prasso and poieo is the idea of experience. You use prasso not just for the experience of the Persian war, but also in practicing a trade; it is used of practicing bribery as well.

Spend the rest of this week going over this section and making sure you can trace the grammar back to prior lessons.

 

Knitting -- scraps

So I dragged out a box of leftover fingering weight yarn and made five pairs of socks, and still had leftovers. Just not enough leftovers in each color to be sure I could make one-color socks.

But I had some coordinating and some contrasting colors, and here is the result.

The pattern is, use the contrasting color and the slingshot cast on for 12 stitches per needle. Increase to a total of 30 stitches per needle.  (18 rounds)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4hhxKrylOs

Add on the main color and split the 30 stitches on one needle onto two DPs. These will be used for your heel. My size is 7 1/2 so I knitted 51 rounds for the foot. 

Then I added in the contrasting color again and worked the short row heel. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZahZE4GREr0

Note that she splits the heel stitches into 3 sets, so only 10 stitches on each heel needle will get wrapped and then knit up into the gusset. The middle 10 stitches (5 per needle) remain stable the entire length of the heel, which is 40 rows, 20 under the heel and 20 behind the heel. When I did the last purl row and wrapped the end stitch on the instep, I switched back to the main color and knitted a round, flipping the wraps to the back as the video shows.

This puts me at the ankle; I knitted to round 8 in which I increased 8 stitches, and another 8 in round 17. Then I knitted the cuff as k2/p2 rib.

When you have doubts whether you have enough yarn to make a whole pair of socks it helps to have some spare needles. You use a 32 or 40 inch circular needle to work the toe, and DPs to work the rest of the sock. You should also have a 12 or 16 inch circular somewhere, which you normally use to knit sleeves and ribbed necks. Knit the sock to the end of the ankle. Now knit half of the ribbed cuff, if you think you have enough to work the other sock to the same point.

Start the other sock and knit to the same point. If you think you have yarn for 10 more rounds apiece, do that, and so on. To do this, you may have to find the inside of the first skein and use it up from both ends, but at least you won't wind up with socks with two different length cuffs. The maximum rounds in the cuff will be 39 plus the knit-off round. 

And of course with small amounts of scraps, you can work the foot and top of these socks using Fair Isle patterns, stripes, small checkerboards, etc.

There are about 222 yards of yarn in a skein of Cotton Fine. If you buy one skein of the contrasting or coordinating color, you can probably work 20 heel and toe sets so you would get 10 pairs of socks out of 10 skeins of Cotton Fine. YMMV depending on your shoe size.

If you do this with worsted weight yarn, cast on 10 stitches per needle for the toe and increase to 20 stitches per needle (20 rounds), then knit 45 rounds in the foot. The heel will be a little difficult; 20/3 is 6 with 2 extra stitches. Work your wraps over the outside 7 stitches with the center 6 stitches (3 on each heel needle) stable. Work 15 rounds in the ankle, increasing in round 7 and 15, and make the cuff 40 rounds high. 

These stitch counts should also work for DK/sport yarn; try one and if it's too tight, unravel and use the fingering stitch counts.

So here is another reason for not throwing away leftovers, even if you don't have enough to knit a top-down raglan jumper.

21st Century Classical Greek -- pros

Book I section 16. This is a shortie and I have a preposition for you to learn.

ἐπεγένετο δὲ ἄλλοις τε ἄλλοθι κωλύματα μὴ αὐξηθῆναι, καὶ Ἴωσι προχωρησάντων ἐπὶ μέγα τῶν πραγμάτων Κῦρος καὶ ἡ Περσικὴ βασιλεία Κροῖσον καθελοῦσα καὶ ὅσα ἐντὸς Ἅλυος ποταμοῦ πρὸς θάλασσαν ἐπεστράτευσε καὶ τὰς ἐν τῇ ἠπείρῳ πόλεις ἐδούλωσε, Δαρεῖός τε ὕστερον τῷ Φοινίκων ναυτικῷ κρατῶν καὶ τὰς νήσους.

Learn the preposition pros which is used with all the oblique cases. 

You saw it in 10.5 with the -ous case meaning “in relation to”.

[5] πρὸς τὰς μεγίστας δ᾽ οὖν καὶ ἐλαχίστας ναῦς τὸ μέσον σκοποῦντι οὐ πολλοὶ φαίνονται ἐλθόντες, ὡς ἀπὸ πάσης τῆς Ἑλλάδος κοινῇ πεμπόμενοι.

In 11.1, it mean “to turn to” farming to support the besiegers of Troy:

αἴτιον δ᾽ ἦν οὐχ ἡ ὀλιγανθρωπία τοσοῦτον ὅσον ἡ ἀχρηματία. τῆς γὰρ τροφῆς ἀπορίᾳ τόν τε στρατὸν ἐλάσσω ἤγαγον καὶ ὅσον ἤλπιζον αὐτόθεν πολεμοῦντα βιοτεύσειν, ἐπειδὴ δὲ ἀφικόμενοι μάχῃ ἐκράτησαν (δῆλον δέ: τὸ γὰρ ἔρυμα τῷ στρατοπέδῳ οὐκ ἂν ἐτειχίσαντο), φαίνονται δ᾽ οὐδ᾽ ἐνταῦθα πάσῃ τῇ δυνάμει χρησάμενοι, ἀλλὰ πρὸς γεωργίαν τῆς Χερσονήσου τραπόμενοι καὶ λῃστείαν τῆς τροφῆς ἀπορίᾳ. ᾗ καὶ μᾶλλον οἱ Τρῶες αὐτῶν διεσπαρμένων τὰ δέκα ἔτη ἀντεῖχον βίᾳ, τοῖς αἰεὶ ὑπολειπομένοις ἀντίπαλοι ὄντες. 

In 13.4, it meant “against”.

ναυμαχία τε παλαιτάτη ὧν ἴσμεν γίγνεται Κορινθίων πρὸς Κερκυραίους: ἔτη δὲ μάλιστα καὶ ταύτῃ ἑξήκοντα καὶ διακόσιά ἐστι μέχρι τοῦ αὐτοῦ χρόνου.

In 15.2 we had two examples with the -ous case, again meaning “against”.

κατὰ γῆν δὲ πόλεμος, ὅθεν τις καὶ δύναμις παρεγένετο, οὐδεὶς ξυνέστη: πάντες δὲ ἦσαν, ὅσοι καὶ ἐγένοντο, πρὸς ὁμόρους τοὺς σφετέρους ἑκάστοις, καὶ ἐκδήμους στρατείας πολὺ ἀπὸ τῆς ἑαυτῶν ἐπ᾽ ἄλλων καταστροφῇ οὐκ ἐξῇσαν οἱ Ἕλληνες. οὐ γὰρ ξυνειστήκεσαν πρὸς τὰς μεγίστας πόλεις ὑπήκοοι, οὐδ᾽ αὖ αὐτοὶ ἀπὸ τῆς ἴσης κοινὰς στρατείας ἐποιοῦντο, κατ᾽ ἀλλήλους δὲ μᾶλλον ὡς ἕκαστοι οἱ ἀστυγείτονες ἐπολέμουν.

Gibbon -- the urban legend, pt. 5

Last time, if you read chapter IV of Gibbon and then read my post, you were all like wtaf. Well, Gibbon may have been trying to write history as literature, but he was writing trashy literature. He used all the trashy parts of Cassius Dio, who was a contemporary of Commodus, and of Historia Augusta, which was not and is unreliable. So he came to trashy conclusions that actually had nothing to do with the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.

I get sort of ornery about tracking down quotes. So in the second post, I referred to a standing army being 1% of the population.

Gibbon has this statement at the start of chapter 5. Of course, as with the Horace quote, he gives no citation. 

The quote also appears in Federalist Papers #46 by James Madison. The Federalist Papers were published in 1787 and 1788. Gibbon published volume 1 in 1776, and James Madison is one of the last people in the world that Gibbon would have quoted. So there's an older quote that both are relying on, as Gibbon says, but neither gives a citation. 

I tracked the quote to Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Chapter I, Part I, published in 1776. But even he says that it is computed "among the civilized nations of modern Europe". So it goes back before him, and it isn't necessary to suppose that Gibbon changed his manuscript on the eve of publication, after reading Smith.

You might suspect that it's in Clausewitz' On War. It isn't. It could have been. Clausewitz was born in 1780, but he might have heard this quote thrown around. The J.J. Graham translation is at Internet Archive as one searchable volume. I tried to find the quote a couple of different ways with no luck.

https://archive.org/details/onwartrbyjjgrah00claugoog/page/n8/mode/2up

So if you succeed in finding that quote in a European work published before 1776, tell all of us.

Second, in this chapter Gibbon demonstrates ever more conclusively that what he calls the "Roman constitution" is a figment of his imagination. He is trying to make it over as a sort of fore-runner of the British constitution, but it wasn't. The emperor, beginning with Augustus, was the paterfamilias of the empire, with all the rights and privileges thereunto appertaining. There was no progressive loss of "liberty" in the sense that Britons used the word in the 1700s. 

In addition, Gibbon accuses Septimius Severus of being severe because he was brought up in camps. There are two problems with that. Gibbon is ignoring the cursus honorum which upper class Roman men went through on their way to serving in the senate. At its beginning, it consisted of serving in the army and achieving promotion as the man demonstrated ability. Gibbon is a heavy critic of patronage, which promotes people through favoritism, but at the same time Gibbon hates Severus for his demonstrated ability.

The other problem with Gibbon is that he will soon call Elagabalus effeminate for not going through the cursus honorum but growing up in Syria as a high priest and being pushed onto the throne by his mother. 

So with Gibbon, you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't, at the same time as we know that Gibbon doesn't understand the "Roman constitution" at all.

In this chapter Gibbon gives a citation that leads to destroying something he said back in chapter 2. Back when Gibbon touted the 150,000 dead at Mithridates' hand, he did not cite to Appian, another case of hiding inconvenient truths from his (uncritical) readers. Here in chapter 5 he does.

The subject is a "malicious" note that the sovereign was king in all but name, and Gibbon says this in connection with Septimius Severus. The quote is in Appian's Preface to his Foreign Wars, paragraph 6. It's not about Severus at all, it has strictly to do with Julius Caesar. The "malice", like the connection to Severus, is all in Gibbon's head.

The problem for Gibbon is that one section of Appian's work is on the Mithridatic war. In chapter III, 19, Appian discusses how the war came about. Mithridates put a puppet on the throne of Bithynia; Rome restored the rightful heir, Nicomedes, who promptly attacked Mithridates with an army intent on plunder. Nicomedes did not have Roman legions with him, but he did have Manlius Appius, the Roman ambassador to Mithridates, supposedly with 40,000 men in his force.  Appian says Nicomedes lost 10,000 dead and 300 captured out of a force of 40,000 infantry and 4000 cavalry. (The Perseus text in English is mistyped; this is what the Greek says.) The camp of Manlius was captured but Appian does not say the men were slaughtered, and he does say that Mithridates released the 300 captives from Nicomides' force. But I doubt that Manlius had a total of 8 legions with him.

I doubt it because when Sulla finally set out on his assignment against Mithridates (a couple of years late) he had 5 legions of veterans. Since Manlius was not assigned to this war by the senate, they had no opportunity to vote legions to send to him, so I doubt he had Romans with him, and I doubt that Bithynia could come up with 80,000 infantry. There's an old saying -- and if you can help me find the source I'd love it -- that in ancient enumerations, you should always divide by 10. Here's another example of why that would be true. 

Appian states that Mithridates needed 250,000 infantry and 40,000 cavalry against the Bithynians. It would be in the interest of Bithynia to exaggerate this number to account for the defeat of Manlius as well as Nicomedes. Divide all the numbers by 10, and Mithridates still has a superior force. 

What Sulla did once he got to the east, was to take one site after another back from Mithridates, who then sued for peace. I don't think that a king who started with a force of 250,000 would sue for peace to a Roman general who started with a maximum of 25,000. I think it's more likely that the non-Roman forces were comparable in number. And that's why there was no outcry in Rome in 88 BCE like there was in 9 CE when Quinctilius Varus' 3 (count 'em, three) legions were destroyed. 

But exaggerations are the stuff of urban legend, so no wonder Gibbon reports the largest number he can find. So much for his leanings toward mathematics. And so much, too, for his analysis of Sulla's funding, see page 8 of F.P. Lock's 2012 The Rhetoric of Numbers specifically directed at Gibbon's work.

https://udpress.udel.edu/book-title/the-rhetoric-of-numbers-in-gibbons-history/

By leaving out a citation to Appian in chapter II, Gibbon commits sampling bias. This has discredited scientific claims time out of mind. Just because Gibbon is writing tabloid trash doesn't mean he gets to commit sampling bias; any real mathematician would take shame to himself for doing so because he might think he had proven a theorem that is actually false.

Now that you're used to discounting what Gibbon says, because he's cherry-picking his facts or because other information contradicts him, this is a good place to look at how he says things. I've given footnotes before to "Gibbonisms" and there are several in chapter 5. If you are used to reading 18th century English literature, Gibbon's usage may not have confused you, but for everybody else, my notes might be useful.

To the PDF

21st Century Classical Greek -- a reflexive

Book I section 15. I claim that at last we have a true reflexive structure, and Jowett does not translate it that way; maybe everybody has missed it.

τὰ μὲν οὖν ναυτικὰ τῶν Ἑλλήνων τοιαῦτα ἦν, τά τε παλαιὰ καὶ τὰ ὕστερον γενόμενα. ἰσχὺν δὲ περιεποιήσαντο ὅμως οὐκ ἐλαχίστην οἱ προσσχόντες αὐτοῖς χρημάτων τε προσόδῳ καὶ ἄλλων ἀρχῇ: ἐπιπλέοντες γὰρ τὰς νήσους κατεστρέφοντο, καὶ μάλιστα ὅσοι μὴ διαρκῆ εἶχον χώραν.

[2] κατὰ γῆν δὲ πόλεμος, ὅθεν τις καὶ δύναμις παρεγένετο, οὐδεὶς ξυνέστη: πάντες δὲ ἦσαν, ὅσοι καὶ ἐγένοντο, πρὸς ὁμόρους τοὺς σφετέρους ἑκάστοις, καὶ ἐκδήμους στρατείας πολὺ ἀπὸ τῆς ἑαυτῶν ἐπ᾽ ἄλλων καταστροφῇ οὐκ ἐξῇσαν οἱ Ἕλληνες. οὐ γὰρ ξυνειστήκεσαν πρὸς τὰς μεγίστας πόλεις ὑπήκοοι, οὐδ᾽ αὖ αὐτοὶ ἀπὸ τῆς ἴσης κοινὰς στρατείας ἐποιοῦντο, κατ᾽ ἀλλήλους δὲ μᾶλλον ὡς ἕκαστοι οἱ ἀστυγείτονες ἐπολέμουν.

[3] μάλιστα δὲ ἐς τὸν πάλαι ποτὲ γενόμενον πόλεμον Χαλκιδέων καὶ Ἐρετριῶν καὶ τὸ ἄλλο Ἑλληνικὸν ἐς ξυμμαχίαν ἑκατέρων διέστη.

Let’s start with the end of the clause, up to the colon. See those two -ois singular nouns prosodo and arkhi? Those are instrumentals of an inanimate noun. It’s an animate agent that uses hupo X using the -on case.

So what happened due to the taxes and ruling of others? Money, in the -on case, which Mr. T claims is needed to have a good navy.

What does money get? Iskhun at the start of the sentence, “strength”.

Who gets the strength? Oi prosskhontes…khrimaton. Those who get money.

How do they get the money? autois, they go out and get it for themselves, usin-ois case as benefiting themselves.

And that is a true reflexive, but the gerundive is in executive voice, not middle.

So here is finally an explicit contradiction to the claim that middle voice is reflexive, and you express the reflexive in middle voice.

It’s the context, not the morphology.

DIY -- soda pop

Am I kidding? I am not. 

Why would you want to make your own soda pop? 

Well, why would you want to DIY anything?

To stay away from chemicals, for one thing. We all know that there's BPA in soda pop cans, that it affects your body, and in particular if there's citric acid in the pop. 

To get what you think you're paying for, for another. You can google this for yourself: just like Subway "tuna" sandwiches don't have tuna DNA in them, ginger ale may not have ginger in it, just "natural flavorings" whatever that means.

In the case of soda pop, there's a curve ball.

Conflict products.

Look at the ingredients for any soda pop you can think of. You'll find gum arabic. Why? because without it, the flavorings would precipitate out of the carbonated water. And we all know you can't shake up a can of soda pop and then open it without the drink showering all over you.

There's only one source of gum arabic in the world. Sudan. Gum arabic is Sudan's only export product. What do they do with it? Fund their wars. 

Why hasn't Congress banned it? because they admit that the soda pop industry would crash and burn without it.

In the olden days, you didn't need gum arabic. You went to the Soda Shoppe. The guy behind the counter would pump about 3 tablespoons of syrup into a glass and pour in the soda water, stir it up, put in a straw, and that was your soda pop. But a skinflint soda fountain owner could order the soda jerk to put in less syrup to save money. To put a consistent product into everybody's hands -- and sell far away from a central factory -- the drink had to be mixed up at the factory. They had to have something to keep the flavorings in suspension. That was gum arabic.

What do you do?

Well, you can go here and buy syrup for cola and root beer.

https://www.apexflavors.com/index

You can get these syrups at Walmart, but they buy from Apex. 

You don't need to buy the syrup from Apex. Leave the gum arabic out of this recipe (it's listed as optional anyway) and you can make your own cola syrup.

https://www.splendidtable.org/story/2011/07/01/natural-cola

Don't use the Kitchen Bouquet. Use 1/4 cup instant coffee for coloring and also for caffeine. You can also get kola nut powder at Mountain Rose Herbs; use 1/4 tsp in this recipe. 

Here's root beer:

https://honest-food.net/root-beer-syrup-recipe/

You can get sassafrass and burdock at Mountain Rose Herbs. You can also get sarsaparilla to make this:

https://www.seriouseats.com/diy-root-beer-how-to-brew-your-own-root-beer-recipe

But there's lots more to it than that. Here are some other recipes for soda pop.

https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/articles/50-homemade-sodas

Notice #41. Leave out the citrus flavors and you have ginger ale that actually has ginger in it. Ginger is known for settling the tummy; so is carbonated water. So you get a two-fer making your own ginger ale.

Now look down through and see how many of the recipes have "rose" in their name. You can make those with rosewater -- which you can get from Apex. You can also use it to make sharbat. You can also use it to make old-fashioned baked goods like Regency period rout cakes.

I haven't tried ordering from Apex yet, but they sell rosewater, for example, in 2 ounce bottles, so it ought to be possible, although with shipping fees, the price might double. It did when I ordered flour from a food service company in 2020, after it disappeared from grocery stores at the start of the pandemic cos everybody decided all at once they were stuck home and they might as well do all their own baking. Anyhoo.

Mountain Rose Herbs sells 4 ounces of dried roses for $24 so making your rose sodas out of the petals is going to be expensive anyway. I think 1/4 tsp rosewater (48 batches in a 2 ounce bottle) in your syrup recipe will work fine; that's how much they use in this recipe.

https://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/raspberry-rose-gin-rickey-359793

Now. One of the things you need to know about Apex products is that they have alcohol for a preservative. Since you have to cook your syrup and bake your goodies, the alcohol will cook off. See this sharbat syrup recipe.

https://www.food.com/recipe/lebanese-rose-drink-sharab-ward-387336

Apex sells a quart of rosewater for $33; this is a good size for making multiple batches of sharbat. 

And just for my Tribe: Apex rosewater is kosher certified. 

Now. We've all been told how high fructose corn syrup is a bad sweetener. But all sweetened drinks, diet versions included, promote diabetes and obesity according to 21st century clinical studies, so you shouldn't be drinking soda pop a lot. Try making your soda pop without a sweetener: go ahead, try it. Personally, I can't stand "fizzy lemonade" without sugar; it's too acid for me. (Come to that, grocery store lemonade also gripes my stomach...) 

So once that experiment has failed, your fall-back position is to use honey. It works in baked goods; if the recipe calls for 1 cup of sugar or less, you can use the same amount of honey. Use this recipe as an example.

https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/256384/lime-honey-soda/

Personally I don't like honey in coffee, tea, or yerba mate because it does have some flavor of its own. But it's something you can get used to, if you object to refined sugar or chemicals.

Good luck!