Gibbon -- the urban legend, pt. 11

So we just got through another ethnic disquisition that proves you should never rely on what Gibbon says about ethnic groups. This will happen again in a few chapters, and if you have been doing the reading I told you about many moons ago, you'll understand why you should skip this upcoming chapter.

For now, we have another example of Gibbon's sampling bias to deal with.

He has had a chance for four chapters now, to discuss the effects of the Antonine and Cyprian plagues on Rome, when a quarter of the population was wiped out each time, a generation or so apart. You can understand the effects if you know anything about the Black Death. There was a demand for higher wages by a smaller pool of employees. This didn't really matter at first, because the lower population meant a glut of goods on the market. These were contrary influences on inflation. 

One paper compares the Black Death to the aftermath of WWI, which of course means after the Spanish flu epidemic. The insane spending of Caracalla and the crazed behavior during the "Decian persecution" mirror persecutions during the Black Death and the behavior of people inheriting everything when their families were wiped out, as well as the jazz age and stock market madness of the 1920s. Population displacement changed the nature of whole regions, similar to the refugees of WWI and the 3rd century migrations of Germanic tribes -- who would have found more opposition if it hadn't been for the plagues.

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/213206

The outcry over the Germanic invasions of the Roman Empire is not an absolute complaint about what happened. It's more like what I saw on Twitter when the pandemic hit in 2020: "what more can happen?" and then we would find out and somebody would post the news story saying with flat irony, "2020, the year that keeps on giving."

Proscriptions and murderous rampages against people of senatorial rank left high government offices -- up to and including priesthoods -- gasping to be filled. Promotion of "barbarians" to positions as high as emperor were related to the 3rd century population crash and displacement. 

And the environment was ripe for people to say, "the gods have forsaken us," and turn to another way of religious thought. It's a no-brainer that this was an opportunity for Christianity to fill the gap. It was useless for Diocletian to try and turn back the clock by some persecutions. He even undercut his own efforts to prop up the old Roman religion, when he abandoned the west to its own devices.

Gibbon had access to plenty of material about the Black Death. He ignored the Black Death until it was time to bring it up, at the end of his work. He never thought back to see that he had ignored a fundamental influence on Roman Imperial culture, any more than he bought a clue about inflation after Adam Smith's work was published. (There's no evidence Gibbon read Wealth of Nations.) He kept on collecting his tabloid trash. 

To the PDF

21st Century Classical Greek -- Book I section 23

Book I section 23.

τῶν δὲ πρότερον ἔργων μέγιστον ἐπράχθη τὸ Μηδικόν, καὶ τοῦτο ὅμως δυοῖν ναυμαχίαιν καὶ πεζομαχίαιν ταχεῖαν τὴν κρίσιν ἔσχεν. τούτου δὲ τοῦ πολέμου μῆκός τε μέγα προύβη, παθήματά τε ξυνηνέχθη γενέσθαι ἐν αὐτῷ τῇ Ἑλλάδι οἷα οὐχ ἕτερα ἐν ἴσῳ χρόνῳ.

[2] οὔτε γὰρ πόλεις τοσαίδε ληφθεῖσαι ἠρημώθησαν, αἱ μὲν ὑπὸ βαρβάρων, αἱ δ᾽ ὑπὸ σφῶν αὐτῶν ἀντιπολεμούντων (εἰσὶ δ᾽ αἳ καὶ οἰκήτορας μετέβαλον ἁλισκόμεναι), οὔτε φυγαὶ τοσαίδε ἀνθρώπων καὶ φόνος, ὁ μὲν κατ᾽ αὐτὸν τὸν πόλεμον, ὁ δὲ διὰ τὸ στασιάζειν.

[3] τά τε πρότερον ἀκοῇ μὲν λεγόμενα, ἔργῳ δὲ σπανιώτερον βεβαιούμενα οὐκ ἄπιστα κατέστη, σεισμῶν τε πέρι, οἳ ἐπὶ πλεῖστον ἅμα μέρος γῆς καὶ ἰσχυρότατοι οἱ αὐτοὶ ἐπέσχον, ἡλίου τε ἐκλείψεις, αἳ πυκνότεραι παρὰ τὰ ἐκ τοῦ πρὶν χρόνου μνημονευόμενα ξυνέβησαν, αὐχμοί τε ἔστι παρ᾽ οἷς μεγάλοι καὶ ἀπ᾽ αὐτῶν καὶ λιμοὶ καὶ ἡ οὐχ ἥκιστα βλάψασα καὶ μέρος τι φθείρασα ἡ λοιμώδης νόσος: ταῦτα γὰρ πάντα μετὰ τοῦδε τοῦ πολέμου ἅμα ξυνεπέθετο.

[4] ἤρξαντο δὲ αὐτοῦ Ἀθηναῖοι καὶ Πελοποννήσιοι λύσαντες τὰς τριακοντούτεις σπονδὰς αἳ αὐτοῖς ἐγένοντο μετὰ Εὐβοίας ἅλωσιν.

[5] διότι δ᾽ ἔλυσαν, τὰς αἰτίας προύγραψα πρῶτον καὶ τὰς διαφοράς, τοῦ μή τινα ζητῆσαί ποτε ἐξ ὅτου τοσοῦτος πόλεμος τοῖς Ἕλλησι κατέστη. [6] τὴν μὲν γὰρ ἀληθεστάτην πρόφασιν, ἀφανεστάτην δὲ λόγῳ, τοὺς Ἀθηναίους ἡγοῦμαι μεγάλους γιγνομένους καὶ φόβον παρέχοντας τοῖς Λακεδαιμονίοις ἀναγκάσαι ἐς τὸ πολεμεῖν: αἱ δ᾽ ἐς τὸ φανερὸν λεγόμεναι αἰτίαι αἵδ᾽ ἦσαν ἑκατέρων, ἀφ᾽ ὧν λύσαντες τὰς σπονδὰς ἐς τὸν πόλεμον κατέστησαν..

Krisin from krisis is what it looks like, the basis for English crisis.

In subsection 2 there are two hupo X phrases. They are not ergatives; the verbs are in passive voice.

In subsection 4 Jowett mistranslates lusantes as “violating” when it means more like ignoring. Luo has a lot of different uses so it’s no wonder that White uses it as his paradigm for the most frequent verb conjugation.

From what Thucydides says, you can see that this entire section was added at the end of the war. It contrasts the two hammer blows at the Persians, with the many years of the Peloponnesian war, and all the calamities suffered while it went on: earthquakes, eclipses, and finally the plague.

Why does Thucydides attribute the war to Spartan fear of Athinaian growth? They were the Spartans! In the times of Mr. T’s father, 300 of them had stood off an entire Persian army!

I said in a prior post that the Spartans had only so many of these elite troops to call upon, and they did not replace themselves efficiently. The entire cult seemed designed to reduce the numbers. The Spartans didn’t think of things in these terms, but they had every reason to fear Athinaian growth because Athins did not have to keep a standing army to keep their colonies in line, while the Spartans had to control a growing population of Helots and other subjugated peoples. Rome kept a standing army to protect its borders. They created whole legions out of barbarians, acculturated them, granted them citizenship, and created military colonies for the retirees. This is what turned Roman conquests into the Latinate countries of Europe, and Germanic countries into the Holy Roman Empire, after the Catholic Church replaced Roman power structures in the west.

Another comparable situation is that of Jews and Samaritans. Jews accept converts, both men and women. Samaritans apparently don’t accept converts; only in the 21^st century, when their numbers reduced below about 1000, did they agree to accept women who were not born Samaritans, on condition that the women observe all Samaritan customs.

The Spartans didn’t acculturate and enable their slaves; they didn’t accept people from other Greek city-states into their “messes” or adopt children. At last the Romans forced them into the Achaean League and they disappeared into history.

21st Century Classical Greek -- Book I section 22, cats and dogs

Book I section 22. This is the section where, based on what he just said about people who may be misrepresenting their roles in previous wars, Thucydides admits that he made up some of the speeches in his book. He wasn’t there. Different people told conflicting stories about what was said as well as what was done. Mr. T finally threw in the towel and said what he thought people would say under the circumstances. This is the origin of all those speeches in later history books, especially when written by people who weren’t born until centuries after the events.

καὶ ὅσα μὲν λόγῳ εἶπον ἕκαστοι ἢ μέλλοντες πολεμήσειν ἢ ἐν αὐτῷ ἤδη ὄντες, χαλεπὸν τὴν ἀκρίβειαν αὐτὴν τῶν λεχθέντων διαμνημονεῦσαι ἦν ἐμοί τε ὧν αὐτὸς ἤκουσα καὶ τοῖς ἄλλοθέν ποθεν ἐμοὶ ἀπαγγέλλουσιν: ὡς δ᾽ ἂν ἐδόκουν ἐμοὶ ἕκαστοι περὶ τῶν αἰεὶ παρόντων τὰ δέοντα μάλιστ᾽ εἰπεῖν, ἐχομένῳ ὅτι ἐγγύτατα τῆς ξυμπάσης γνώμης τῶν ἀληθῶς λεχθέντων, οὕτως εἴρηται.

[2] τὰ δ᾽ ἔργα τῶν πραχθέντων ἐν τῷ πολέμῳ οὐκ ἐκ τοῦ παρατυχόντος πυνθανόμενος ἠξίωσα γράφειν, οὐδ᾽ ὡς ἐμοὶ ἐδόκει, ἀλλ᾽ οἷς τε αὐτὸς παρῆν καὶ παρὰ τῶν ἄλλων ὅσον δυνατὸν ἀκριβείᾳ περὶ ἑκάστου ἐπεξελθών.

[3] ἐπιπόνως δὲ ηὑρίσκετο, διότι οἱ παρόντες τοῖς ἔργοις ἑκάστοις οὐ ταὐτὰ περὶ τῶν αὐτῶν ἔλεγον, ἀλλ᾽ ὡς ἑκατέρων τις εὐνοίας ἢ μνήμης ἔχοι.

[4] καὶ ἐς μὲν ἀκρόασιν ἴσως τὸ μὴ μυθῶδες αὐτῶν ἀτερπέστερον φανεῖται: ὅσοι δὲ βουλήσονται τῶν τε γενομένων τὸ σαφὲς σκοπεῖν καὶ τῶν μελλόντων ποτὲ αὖθις κατὰ τὸ ἀνθρώπινον τοιούτων καὶ παραπλησίων ἔσεσθαι, ὠφέλιμα κρίνειν αὐτὰ ἀρκούντως ἕξει. κτῆμά τε ἐς αἰεὶ μᾶλλον ἢ ἀγώνισμα ἐς τὸ παραχρῆμα ἀκούειν ξύγκειται.

Remember how quoted speech has to mimic the aspect of the original? Well, we will find Thucydides using modality in his speeches, but since he’s not actually quoting people, modality also reflects what Thucydides thinks the original speaker would have said.

Bolded material:

1.         Mello plus an imperfective conceptual impersonal gerundive occurs in both subsections 1 and 4.

2.         διαμνημονεῦσαι, an imperfective eventive gerundive, “exactly remembering” the words.

3.         Did I have you learn en? It is used only with the -ois case. Go learn it.

4.         At the end of subsection 4 Thucydides brings in the concept I referred to a long time ago, about writing, not for a competition, but for eternity.

Also learn allothen, pothen, othen, and autothen.

Gibbon -- the urban legend, pt. 10

Up to now I have been telling you that you are better off reading the primary documents than Gibbon, with the caution that Cassius Dio, Herodian, Historia Augusta, and Lives of the Emperors, are the source of Gibbon's tabloid trash.

Here I have to tell you something different. Chapter 10 is about the Goths, and Gibbon refers to Cassiodorus and Jordanes, and then even Gibbon warns you that Cassiodorus, deliberately or to get pay or promotion, whomped up the Gothic past into something great and glorious, while Jordanes is an abbreviated version of Cassiodorus. 

Cassiodorus also lived about 200 years after the Goths and Vandals invaded the empire; his great-grandfather fought the Vandals, his grandfather was an ambassador to Attila the Hun, and his father worked first for Odovacer and then for Theodosius the Great, both "barbarians" to Gibbon. So you would think he would have access to primary information and not have to whomp anything up.

But his Historia Gothica survives only in Jordanes' abridgement (so Gibbon didn't know what he was talking about because he never read Cassiodorus), and Jordanes is wrong. The Getae and Goths were two separate peoples. The Getae were related to the non-Germanic Thracians and spoke Dacian; the Goths were a Germanic people and spoke a clearly Germanic language. While Gibbon believes the Germans originated in the Baltic region, old ideas that Thraco-Dacian was related to Baltic languages are no longer considered acceptable.

The story Jordanes tells brings the Goths from Scandinavia south to the Vistula River in what is now Poland. They lived near the Sarmatians, Veneti, and Scyths at different times; Thucydides writes that the Getae of Thraco-Dacia lived "next to the Scythians" and were recruited to fight in the Peloponnesian War in Book II chapter 96, but this is about 500 years too early for the Goths. The Goths helped form the Chernyakhov culture that stretched from the Danube to the Don and impacted the Roman Empire in 238 CE.

If you want to know about the real Goths, ignore Gibbon's appendix. You know by now that there are over 200 years of later research, and that Gibbon relies on unreliable authority and can't resist the chance for a slur. 

On the Vistula, the Goths became part of the Iron Age Wielbark culture. 

1) Remember from a previous post that they could bring knowledge of ironworking with them from Scandinavia. 

2) The Wielbark culture was agricultural, not a bunch of savage plunderers and pastoralists; 

3) it lay on the Amber Road from the Baltic; amber could fetch any price you liked in any place you sold it so these people were not at all impoverished. 

Wielbark may have spoken a Baltic language, which may have hybridized with Gothic; it moved into the region of the Przeworsk culture which may have used an early Slavic language and is related to the Vandals -- thus showing another problem with Gibbon who claims these were allied to the Goths. They were in conflict with each other, and this may have prompted the Vandal migration south and east into Hungary.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325973847_Przeworsk_culture_society_and_its_long-distance_contacts_AD_1-350/link/5b311a21a6fdcc8506cc9761/download

Part of the mixup might be that both the Goths and the Vandals were Arian Christians when they converted, not Athanasian. Athanasius won the final battle. The Arians ruling Rome eventually converted over, but they didn't like it. What is important is that the Vandals went to Spain, made it Christian, then were driven out by the Visigoths and made North Africa Christian.

Interestingly, female line DNA testing supports the idea that the Goths brought their women from Scandinavia. In other words, unlike some migrations, they didn't arrive as hunters or traders and settle down and marry. They migrated in families. They moved around a lot, including to the southeast toward the steppes, but their main center was at Maslomecz, and when the migrants came back to it, they brought maternal DNA from the southeast. Having a main center provided high cohesion despite the out-marriages. This is why the Goth language is internally consistent and doesn't show signs of creolization, unlike English.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-43183-w

Then Gibbon mixes contexts again. The Edda is Norse. Not Gothic, Norse. Based on an oral tradition, it was recorded in medieval times as a collection of poetry, and in Snorri Sturlason's famous edition of the prose history. The Gothic sagas are separate, and there is an additional Norse saga dealing with the collision between the Goths and Huns. The Edda is clearly Norse in culture with tales of Odin; the Goths had Gapt who was the ancestor of the Amali dynasty. The Norse and Goths are different cultures.

Norse culture had significant Celtic underpinnings, as you may guess from the similarity of Norse and Celtic intertwined graphics. The Hallstatt and La Tene Celtic cultures spread from modern Austria to, of course, modern Ireland and their descendants left DNA all over Britain; even in the southeast, which was Saxon after it was Roman, up to 50% of DNA is Celtic. The Hallstatt culture existed on the west bank of the mouth of the Vistula while the Goths lived south and east of there.

https://journal.fi/scripta/article/view/67183

Gibbon tries to make it seem as if, once the Goths broke Valens at Adrianople, the other eastern cultures realized they had a chance for easy pickings. This assumes that the Goths promulgated the information. It's unrealistic. The Huns attacked the Goths for being in their way during a westward migration, not to get the Goths out from between them and Rome. The waves of people fleeing west were trying to get away from the Huns -- yet the Huns negotiated peace with Rome and Attila the Hun was sent to Rome for his education at the age of 12, in exchange for the Huns bringing up Flavius Aetius. The two of them met in battle on the Catalaunian Plains, pausing the invasion but not stopping it. The following year Attila sacked Aquileia.

As always, if you want a history of Germanic tribes, don't read Gibbon: a) use 20th and 21st century sources, preferably from a university press or something you find on Researchgate; b) check their bibliographies and think twice if they reference Gibbon; c) make sure they use archaeological material, not just classical authors.

To the PDF

21st Century Classical Greek -- "due and owing" nuance of impersonal gerundive

Book I section 21.

ἐκ δὲ τῶν εἰρημένων τεκμηρίων ὅμως τοιαῦτα ἄν τις νομίζων μάλιστα ἃ διῆλθον οὐχ ἁμαρτάνοι, καὶ οὔτε ὡς ποιηταὶ ὑμνήκασι περὶ αὐτῶν ἐπὶ τὸ μεῖζον κοσμοῦντες μᾶλλον πιστεύων, οὔτε ὡς λογογράφοι ξυνέθεσαν ἐπὶ τὸ προσαγωγότερον τῇ ἀκροάσει ἢ ἀληθέστερον, ὄντα ἀνεξέλεγκτα καὶ τὰ πολλὰ ὑπὸ χρόνου αὐτῶν ἀπίστως ἐπὶ τὸ μυθῶδες ἐκνενικηκότα, ηὑρῆσθαι δὲ ἡγησάμενος ἐκ τῶν ἐπιφανεστάτων σημείων ὡς παλαιὰ εἶναι ἀποχρώντως.

[2] καὶ ὁ πόλεμος οὗτος, καίπερ τῶν ἀνθρώπων ἐν ᾧ μὲν ἂν πολεμῶσι τὸν παρόντα αἰεὶ μέγιστον κρινόντων, παυσαμένων δὲ τὰ ἀρχαῖα μᾶλλον θαυμαζόντων, ἀπ᾽ αὐτῶν τῶν ἔργων σκοποῦσι δηλώσει ὅμως μείζων γεγενημένος αὐτῶν.

In subsection 1, heuristhai followed by de could be a substantive, because it is a base voice impersonal gerundive in perfective conceptual. Note that this cannot be reflexive as Middle Liddell wants you to think because that’s what they say “middle voice” is, but it possibly refers to a discovery to which ancient and obvious signs lead, and not something deliberately sought out.

Jowett wants you to think of it as making up one’s mind to come to a given conclusion; he is misled by the idea that this would be the reflexive middle voice.

The other possibility is something I mentioned before for the i.g. It means a sort of command to be kept because it is due and owing. In our context here, it would mean telling people that once they have studied the data sufficiently, they are bound to come to specific conclusions. This repeats the concept in the first part of the subsection, that those who take into account the grounds on which Thucydides bases his opinion, will not go wrong in agreeing with his conclusions.

Mendel Beilis -- Why not Knives?

I was just rereading The Anvil, my "murder mystery" version of the research I did into the Mendel Beilis trial.  And I had another a-ha moment, like the one I had while reading a Sholem Aleichem novel, that led to one of the posts.

The issue is this. Andrey is dead. On March 26, 1911, the day before his funeral, the government has two medical examiners performing a second autopsy. (The first was done on March 22 and didn't point to ritual murder, so it was useless to the government.) And one of the things the two examiners did, was insert shvaiki into the wounds to see if they would fit. 

On day 20 of the trial, the autopsy reports were read out. Both of them refer to slits cut in the body, which certainly should have suggested knives to anybody who was on the ball.

On day 22 of the trial, one of the medical examiners who is testifying (on government pay, the three defense medical experts refused even repayment of their expenses), says that shvaiki were bought in the bazaar and tested with the wounds. He says this as coming from one of the medical examiners who worked on March 26, 1911. 

That's all they say about testing the wounds.

A shvaika is a leather-working tool generally used to punch holes. 

There is no discussion in the transcript about buying various knives to test. Just a shvaika. This smells. It smells of the murderers telling somebody in the government what they did and what they used to commit the murder. 

In fact by the time I finished the translation, I suspected that A. V. Vygranov, ostensibly assisting the police, was in tight with Vera Cheberyak. I suspect it even more now; I believe Vera boasted to him about murdering Andrey, and he helped her cover things up in March, and misled people looking into the murder, like journalist Brazul-Brushkovsky. 

So, given what Vygranov knew, I suspect he gave the M.E.s shvaiki saying they came from the bazaar. The tool wound up in a drawer in the M.E.s' office. The March 26 M.E. made several statements that showed he was a numbskull, including admitting that he never looked at the corpse. So the idea that he would question where the shvaika really came from doesn't wash. He didn't have that many brain cells.

And in August 1911, sure enough, shvaiki turned up among evidence found on one of the hills of Kiev. This evidence turned out to have been planted -- and to have nothing to do with the case. The clothing in the plant was not Andrey's, although people were supposed to conclude that it was.

The shvaiki in that find belonged to a man dragged into the case specifically to say that they were his tools. People were supposed to conclude that he was in on the murder -- although testimony suggests that he wasn't Jewish, such as his argument with attorney Shmakov about Purim. This material was planted by a stool pigeon known to Polishchuk, one of Nikolay Krasovsky's "assistants". The other "assistant" was Vygranov, and the transcript shows he was active for at least a year after he was "disgraced" and Krasovsky quit the police.

So the government knew about the use of at least one shvaika in the murder, and they made damned sure the M.E.s knew about it, and that Krasovsky got some as part of the evidence in the case. And then their paid M.E. claimed that they were not stabbing tools in the legal definition of such weapons, the point apparently being that you couldn't say Andrey was stabbed. Which is just nuts. 

And the government did have a knife to talk about. Krasovsky turned up a knife with a reddened blade. He found this on the Zaitsev factory grounds, where the government pretended that the murder had taken place. But it was found near the hut of a Christian who lived on the grounds, and the government didn't want to try a Christian, they wanted to try a Jew. So it was just too damned convenient that the government already knew about the use of a shvaika. And also conveniently, they never called "hut-man" to testify.

Now. The reason for this panto was to prove ritual murder, which is the lie that Jews slaughter children for their blood. Jewish kosher slaughter requires a knife. Given that the government faked witness testimony, forged documents, and planted evidence, why didn't it use the knife and claim that it was dropped near the hut to cover up for the Jews? I don't know. It's not like they were all cooperating to purposely stage the stupidest trial they could. It's more like Vygranov had such a cynical view of police and judicial operations, he did everything he could to make them look like idiots. It didn't take much effort with some of them, as the transcript shows.

I know what you're going to say. Two of the murderers besides Vera were still alive, and they testified at trial. Not because the government wanted them to. The government staged an elaborate hoax and pretended at trial that a robbery gave the murderers an alibi. If the murderers stuck to that during the trial, and refused to answer any questions that might incriminate them (which was their right), then there's no problem.

And in fact, nobody asked them about the shvaiki when Singaevsky and Rudzinsky testified on day 18. Not even to say, "Do you know what a shvaika is?" So there was never a chance of self-incrimination. Why the government was so hung up on the shvaiki that it couldn't just present one more piece of fake evidence, we'll never know. 

You can say all you want that I'm making a megillah out of this one statement. The entire case is like this, however, one piece of nonsense after another in the testimony. 

The fact is that Vera Cheberyak and her cohorts murdered Andrey in revenge, believing that he had known about their plans for a robbery and squealed to police.

21st Century Classical Greek -- Goodwin's proposed periphrastic

Book I section 21.

ἐκ δὲ τῶν εἰρημένων τεκμηρίων ὅμως τοιαῦτα ἄν τις νομίζων μάλιστα ἃ διῆλθον οὐχ ἁμαρτάνοι, καὶ οὔτε ὡς ποιηταὶ ὑμνήκασι περὶ αὐτῶν ἐπὶ τὸ μεῖζον κοσμοῦντες μᾶλλον πιστεύων, οὔτε ὡς λογογράφοι ξυνέθεσαν ἐπὶ τὸ προσαγωγότερον τῇ ἀκροάσει ἢ ἀληθέστερον, ὄντα ἀνεξέλεγκτα καὶ τὰ πολλὰ ὑπὸ χρόνου αὐτῶν ἀπίστως ἐπὶ τὸ μυθῶδες ἐκνενικηκότα, ηὑρῆσθαι δὲ ἡγησάμενος ἐκ τῶν ἐπιφανεστάτων σημείων ὡς παλαιὰ εἶναι ἀποχρώντως.

[2] καὶ ὁ πόλεμος οὗτος, καίπερ τῶν ἀνθρώπων ἐν ᾧ μὲν ἂν πολεμῶσι τὸν παρόντα αἰεὶ μέγιστον κρινόντων, παυσαμένων δὲ τὰ ἀρχαῖα μᾶλλον θαυμαζόντων, ἀπ᾽ αὐτῶν τῶν ἔργων σκοποῦσι δηλώσει ὅμως μείζων γεγενημένος αὐτῶν.

In subsection 1, Jowett again transposes material. Thucydides is rehashing his issues about evidence using some of the same words: out of those who find evidence and thinking the same as what came to me, they would not be wrong.

He again uses a perfective hymnikasi, for what the poets said.

He says trust neither the poets nor the historians, who speak to please and whose work nobody can validate.

Then he does an important thing.

Remember some time back, I reported Goodwin’s contention that in quoted speech, an plus a progressive conceptual impersonal gerundive is a periphrastic progressive eventive impersonal gerundive. There is no morphological progressive eventive i.g.

There is also no morphological progressive eventive oblique modality. Here Mr. T has an polemousi with a progressive conceptual oblique modality. What if this is a periphrastic progressive eventual oblique modality?

Oblique it has to be; Thucydides is certain that he talked to men about wars that were fought. He knows that he heard at best exaggerations, and possibly outright lies. That means that some of the men he talked to may have claimed to be in the wars, but were invalided out so early they missed the bulk of the action. So he’s not going to claim certainty that everybody he talked to did much fighting.

This is an event, not a situation or habit. If there is such a thing as a periphrastic p.e. oblique, it’s not discussed in the old grammars, like a lot of other things that only pop out when you clear away the deadwood. Here’s a chance for some of you to earn your chops by reading a lot of Greek prose and look for other such structures, then see if the context supports that they are this new thing. But again, the idea that a periphrasis can change one aspect/flavor into another is not possible with our objective definitions.

I’ll take up what an really does much later in this series.

Notice that dilosi at the end is an imperfective conceptual oblique modality, our re-definition of the “aorist subjunctive”.

DIY -- Ozark clabbered cheese

Damn. It's spring, you're house-cleaning, and you just found a jug of milk in the fridge with an expiration date so long ago, there are chunks in the milk.

Don't throw it away! Some cow worked long and hard to produce that milk. Do you also have sour cream in the house or, what's better, do you drain the whey off your chained yogurt to make a sour cream equivalent? Then you are golden.

You will need a strainer, some butter muslin, salt, and a pot big enough to hold your clabbered milk.

Here's the link with the recipe.

Notice that your clabbered milk should have been raw at the start, and your jug no doubt came from a store. If it's ultra-pasteurized, fuhgeddaboudit. You can't make this with ultra-pasteurized milk.

Raw milk is illegal in my state. That still gives me three choices: the normally pasteurized milk in my local small business; lightly pasteurized milk at a store 5 miles away; or a dairy about 100 miles away.

The Amish use yogurt to make hard cheese. Goldie's recipe sounds like it will be cheddary. You can also make buttermilk cheese by draining out the whey and salting it, and you could also try this; it's a mesophilic culture like what you need for cheddar cheese. Try it both ways and see which you like.

If the milk is old and a little smelly but not necessarily chunky, make your own queso blanco. This is a lot like making paneer, but the queso blanco recipe calls for changing pressure on the cheese, for which you need a cheese press. You don't need that for paneer, just fill the pot you used to heat the milk at least half full of hot water, to soak the crust off the bottom; put it on top of the wrapped curd package for 40 minutes.

You can hardly go wrong with these three options. You'll avoid food waste, and paneer is hugely expensive.

Does it annoy the hell out of you that so much whey goes down the sink? Well, in Victorian and earlier novels you may have come across the term "white wine whey". You can use that whey to make a drink. There's lots of nutrition in that whey, and this recipe was used to make a medicinal drink.

Notice that any time you heat milk to a certain point, you can add something acidic like white wine and make it curdle. But if you don't want to pour off all that whey (and you have a little Viking in you), here's a recipe for blaand.

Gibbon -- the urban legend, pt. 9

Our issue last time was that Gibbon knew nothing about the archaeology of Mesopotamia and therefore nothing about the ethnology. It was all 50 years and more in the future when he died. Since science has moved on (as it always does), his pages on Mesopotamia are worthless.

The same thing applies in chapter IX. This is about the regions from which the Goths, Vandals, Huns, Alans, Avars and, later, the Vikings came. Gibbon supposes that, without "civilization", Germans could have no politics. I have almost no footnotes in this chapter because it's a waste of your time. Gibbon knew nothing about the history or prehistory of the Goths and his ignorance of the habits of social animals allows him to use all the slurs he wants.

Gibbon admits that there were individual leaders among these peoples and can name some -- Hermann, Alaric, Attila, and so on. You don't get leaders without agreement from the polity, and that means there's politics going on.

Gibbon was unaware that all mammals who live in groups have hierarchies and ways of determining which animal is where in the hierarchy. In the Bible when it discusses cattle as pushing or goring (Exodus 21:35), it distinguishes between cattle establishing their position in the hierarchy, or cattle trying to injure each other. Pick your favorite mammal that lives in groups and google it with "hierarchies" and see what you find.

Gibbon thought of politics as something that happens only in a "civilized" culture with "monumental buildings" and "advanced" technology. Nowadays, politics is defined as a way of getting things accomplished and dealing with the ups and downs of social interaction. In other words, establishing and dealing with human hierarchies and how they interfere with or promote the aims and goals of a given human endeavor.

So in the modern sense, it's impossible for any human culture not to have politics, because all of them have hierarchies who have to be taken into account when the culture is in operation.

Then Gibbon gets into the idea of "savages" having a history. Every culture has its history of how its various customs came into existence. Until the culture develops or adopts writing, this history has to be transmitted by word of mouth. It is phrased in words that the culture defines, and this phraseology is only understood by the transmitting culture. The history is passed as stories of ancestors; their behavior in the stories is always an example of how to behave, and it is expressed by their actions, not by descriptions of the ancestors. The narratives are usually short and contain stylistic elements that are easy to remember as well as entertaining and instructive about cultural mores or events.

This is the field of Axel Olrik's Principles for Oral Narrative Research. In the previous centuries, oral narratives like the ones collected by the Brothers Grimm were relegated to children's stories, and people who didn't live in the Jewish culture were starting to say the same thing about the Bible, which is a record of the Jewish oral tradition. Orthodox and Chassidic Jews never said such a thing, because they were educated to see how scripture played out in the Jewish law they lived by every day. At any rate, when Tolkien has a character say that old tales reflect things that were once important for the wise to know, he is expressing one of Olrik's basic principles, whether he knew it or not. (I doubt he read Olrik, because Principles was available only in Danish until 1992.)

Oral traditions the world over coordinate with a culture's laws. Axel Olrik and later Roger Abrahams both knew that the Fjoort of Africa had a strong tradition of oral narratives, and Abrahams knew that if they sat in judgment, they rehearsed numerous stories. He didn't understand why, but I do, because in writing Narrating the Torah, I realized that stretches of legalistic material are always followed by a narrative that isn't comprehensible without the legal verbiage. The narrative is a case study related to the laws. In Numbers, there is a cluster of three narratives, all case studies on slander, the point of which is that no matter who is slandered or who does it, the slanderer is punishable. If you can figure out what narratives I'm talking about, let me know. For the Fjoort, the narratives they recited taught the members of the court what law applied to the case.

But when you get into applying some other culture's stories to your own history, that happens in a literate environment, not an oral one. The original oral narratives of the Welsh said what their history was. For Geoffrey of Wales to say that "Britain" derives from "Brutus" and Caesar's assassin was an ancestor of the Welsh, is strictly literate.

So there's no question but that the Germanic peoples had an oral tradition that taught each generation how to behave, and Gibbon's sneer at their "lack of letters" gives us one more chapter that we can safely ignore because cultural studies have moved on and Gibbon is outdated.

When it comes to claiming that northern Europeans didn't mine metals, that's as outdated as everything else. Copper mining in Salzburg, when it was pre-Celtic, dates to 3500 BCE, at the same time as such mining was going on in Mesopotamia. Copper in Mesopotamia was found in ores that also contained iron, and the same is true in Salzburg. 

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ernst-Pernicka/publication/227604333_Prehistoric_copper_production_in_the_Inn_Valley_Austria_and_the_earliest_copper_in_central_Europe/links/5abf5431aca27222c757fb6b/Prehistoric-copper-production-in-the-Inn-Valley-Austria-and-the-earliest-copper-in-central-Europe.pdf

Welsh copper in tools and other products, has been tracked to the Baltic up to 1400 BCE and also shows up in Scandinavia. You could almost say that northern Europe was awash in metals long before there was a Rome.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-50213846

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0219574

And ironworks dating before 1000 BCE (before Rome was founded) have been found in Sweden. The implications for ironworking farther south at this time are obvious.

http://www.fiskecenter.umb.edu/Staff/Steinberg/Viking08/Readings/Stenvik2003.pdf

Finally, we have Waldgirmes.

Waldgirmes has a stone-built city center that has been dated to the Augustan period. It is not west of the Rhine or in Gallia. It is east of the Rhine in "Greater Germania".  Almost all that remains of it now that is visible at ground level, is a forum. From Waldgirmes, soldiers and traders could travel by boat to places like Castra Vetera. It was abandoned when Varus lost his three legions, after which the Watch on the Rhine and Danube was established.

This is an indication that Rome was not running an economy. It couldn't. There was no concept of profiting from the resources of a given place. There was only squeezing money out of the population in sales and taxes. If Rome had been interested in exploitable resources, they would have tried to find out where amber came from. The myths about its origins reported by Ovid, among others, show how clueless people were, until Pliny the Elder showed that it washed up on the shores of Germany. Well, Pliny died during the Vesuvius eruption in 79 CE, decades after Waldgirmes was abandoned. If Varus had known what Pliny found out, Waldgirmes would have been a teeming metropolis enriched by the amber trade, the way Syria was enriched because it was the western terminus of the Silk Road. 

There was enough civilization among the Germans to a) create a complicated alliance to destroy Varus' forces and b) make it worthwhile to plan for a series of cities east of the Rhine, which never came off because Augustus realized he had pushed his boundaries a bridge too far.

So again, you'd be better off spending your time finding and reading modern archaeology on Scandinavia, the Baltic, and East of the Rhine, than reading Gibbon.

To the PDF.

21st Century Classical Greek -- know

Book I section 20 is a little long. Let’s see if there’s anything new and fun in it. Once you’ve marked everything you understand, of course.

 τὰ μὲν οὖν παλαιὰ τοιαῦτα ηὗρον, χαλεπὰ ὄντα παντὶ ἑξῆς τεκμηρίῳ πιστεῦσαι. οἱ γὰρ ἄνθρωποι τὰς ἀκοὰς τῶν προγεγενημένων, καὶ ἢν ἐπιχώρια σφίσιν ᾖ, ὁμοίως ἀβασανίστως παρ᾽ ἀλλήλων δέχονται.

[2] Ἀθηναίων γοῦν τὸ πλῆθος Ἵππαρχον οἴονται ὑφ᾽ Ἁρμοδίου καὶ Ἀριστογείτονος τύραννον ὄντα ἀποθανεῖν, καὶ οὐκ ἴσασιν ὅτι Ἱππίας μὲν πρεσβύτατος ὢν ἦρχε τῶν Πεισιστράτου υἱέων, Ἵππαρχος δὲ καὶ Θεσσαλὸς ἀδελφοὶ ἦσαν αὐτοῦ, ὑποτοπήσαντες δέ τι ἐκείνῃ τῇ ἡμέρᾳ καὶ παραχρῆμα Ἁρμόδιος καὶ Ἀριστογείτων ἐκ τῶν ξυνειδότων σφίσιν Ἱππίᾳ μεμηνῦσθαι τοῦ μὲν ἀπέσχοντο ὡς προειδότος, βουλόμενοι δὲ πρὶν ξυλληφθῆναι δράσαντές τι καὶ κινδυνεῦσαι, τῷ Ἱππάρχῳ περιτυχόντες περὶ τὸ Λεωκόρειον καλούμενον τὴν Παναθηναϊκὴν πομπὴν διακοσμοῦντι ἀπέκτειναν.

[3] πολλὰ δὲ καὶ ἄλλα ἔτι καὶ νῦν ὄντα καὶ οὐ χρόνῳ ἀμνηστούμενα καὶ οἱ ἄλλοι Ἕλληνες οὐκ ὀρθῶς οἴονται, ὥσπερ τούς τε Λακεδαιμονίων βασιλέας μὴ μιᾷ ψήφῳ προστίθεσθαι ἑκάτερον, ἀλλὰ δυοῖν, καὶ τὸν Πιτανάτην λόχον αὐτοῖς εἶναι, ὃς οὐδ᾽ ἐγένετο πώποτε. οὕτως ἀταλαίπωρος τοῖς πολλοῖς ἡ ζήτησις τῆς ἀληθείας, καὶ ἐπὶ τὰ ἑτοῖμα μᾶλλον τρέπονται.

Subsection 2 has a very confusing statement about the Harmonios and Aristogeiton situation. It doesn’t get any clearer when you check out the references in the related Wikipedia articles, but that’s what Thucydides is talking about. Probably everything that got on the record was transmitted orally, and that’s not the most reliable source of information, as Mr. T is saying in this section.

Look up οἶδα in Wiktionary and learn it. What you “know” about this verb is going to depend on whether you downloaded LSJ from online, because the LSJ on Perseus is totally blank. Middle Liddell has vastly more information. Some supervisor didn’t realize that the person keying in the LSJ data hadn’t done their job. Notice that proeidotos later in this section is based on oida.

Also notice oiontai in subsection 3, from oiomai. The point of using a -mai verb, instead of using prooida again, is the evaluation ouk orthos.