21st Century Classical Greek -- more on obliques

Book I section 35. Now the Kerkyraeans deal with the treaty violation issue.

λύσετε δὲ οὐδὲ τὰς Λακεδαιμονίων σπονδὰς δεχόμενοι ἡμᾶς μηδετέρων ὄντας ξυμμάχους:

[2] εἴρηται γὰρ ἐν αὐταῖς, τῶν Ἑλληνίδων πόλεων ἥτις μηδαμοῦ ξυμμαχεῖ, ἐξεῖναι παρ᾽ ὁποτέρους ἂν ἀρέσκηται ἐλθεῖν.

[3] καὶ δεινὸν εἰ τοῖσδε μὲν ἀπό τε τῶν ἐνσπόνδων ἔσται πληροῦν τὰς ναῦς καὶ προσέτι καὶ ἐκ τῆς ἄλλης Ἑλλάδος καὶ οὐχ ἥκιστα ἀπὸ τῶν ὑμετέρων ὑπηκόων, ἡμᾶς δὲ ἀπὸ τῆς προκειμένης τε ξυμμαχίας εἴρξουσι καὶ ἀπὸ τῆς ἄλλοθέν ποθεν ὠφελίας, εἶτα ἐν ἀδικήματι θήσονται πεισθέντων ὑμῶν ἃ δεόμεθα.

[4] πολὺ δὲ ἐν πλέονι αἰτίᾳ ἡμεῖς μὴ πείσαντες ὑμᾶς ἕξομεν: ἡμᾶς μὲν γὰρ κινδυνεύοντας καὶ οὐκ ἐχθροὺς ὄντας ἀπώσεσθε, τῶνδε δὲ οὐχ ὅπως κωλυταὶ ἐχθρῶν ὄντων καὶ ἐπιόντων γενήσεσθε, ἀλλὰ καὶ ἀπὸ τῆς ὑμετέρας ἀρχῆς δύναμιν προσλαβεῖν περιόψεσθε: ἣν οὐ δίκαιον, ἀλλ᾽ ἢ κἀκείνων κωλύειν τοὺς ἐκ τῆς ὑμετέρας μισθοφόρους ἢ καὶ ἡμῖν πέμπειν καθ᾽ ὅτι ἂν πεισθῆτε ὠφελίαν, μάλιστα δὲ ἀπὸ τοῦ προφανοῦς δεξαμένους βοηθεῖν.

[5] πολλὰ δέ, ὥσπερ ἐν ἀρχῇ ὑπείπομεν, τὰ ξυμφέροντα ἀποδείκνυμεν, καὶ μέγιστον ὅτι οἵ τε αὐτοὶ πολέμιοι ἡμῖν ἦσαν, ὅπερ σαφεστάτη πίστις, καὶ οὗτοι οὐκ ἀσθενεῖς, ἀλλ᾽ ἱκανοὶ τοὺς μεταστάντας βλάψαι: καὶ ναυτικῆς καὶ οὐκ ἠπειρώτιδος τῆς ξυμμαχίας διδομένης οὐχ ὁμοία ἡ ἀλλοτρίωσις, ἀλλὰ μάλιστα μέν, εἰ δύνασθε, μηδένα ἄλλον ἐᾶν κεκτῆσθαι ναῦς, εἰ δὲ μή, ὅστις ἐχυρώτατος, τοῦτον φίλον ἔχειν.

Subsection 2 has an oblique areskitai.  In the Middle Liddell entry, part III points out that this verb is used to represent a political party voting on a resolution to do something or not. Jowett’s “pleases” is at the top of the entry, but LSJ points to this specific section as an expression of the will of a representative body. You also have the an flipping the focus of areskitai elthein from those being voted for (opoteros) to those doing the voting.

Subsection 3 almost seems to have a conditional, ei plus an imperfective conceptual in base voice, and in the counterpoint clause eirksousi in the imperfective conceptual oblique. On the face of it, this would be one of Goodwin’s conditionals implying nothing about its truth, and he allows for the i.c. in the protasis but only if it is like a promise. That’s not the case here, the Kerkyraeans are saying something more like, when they’re doing this they’re prohibiting us from trying to do something similar to protect ourselves. The subsection closes with another i.c. about the Korinthians unjustly accusing Athins of being unjuct if they were to help the Kerkyraeans.

Jowett moves the opening clause from subsection 5 into the end of subsection 4 which, again, destroys Thucydides’ style. From polla de on is an introduction in subsection 5 to what Mr. T says in subsection 5. Jowett treats it as a summary of everything before subsection 5, which it is not, because prior to subsection 5 the Kerkyraeans have shown the dark side of what is going on, not the advantage helping them would be to Athins.

21st Century Classical Greek -- review 3

Believe it or not, counting reviews, I’ve posted 100 articles on this subject. It’s a terribly long time since I did a review, but here are some important points.

On conditionals, we’ve destroyed what Goodwin wrote. His categories and “future more/less vivid” are copied from Latin studies. They don’t reflect what really happens in Classical Greek and our aspect and modality definitions work far better.

On reported speech, the grammarians’ claims – that it uses the same verb forms as the original speech – work only when you talk about the aspect of verbs, not when you talk about the tense of verbs.

On purpose clauses, we’ve destroyed the distinction between object and final clauses, particularly pointing out that “final” is a meaningless label because such clauses aren’t necessarily at the end of a sentence.

We’ve identified a structure none of the grammarians talk about, the ergative, and the three values of transitivity in Classical Greek:

a)         intransitive passive;

b)         intransitive executive with the i.i.g that is the ergative;

c)         transitive using executive or base voice.

We discussed negation showing the gaps in the old grammars.

We’ve shown that there really is a “due and owing” quasi-imperative use of the impersonal gerundive, and that it tracks with a similar use in Biblical Hebrew.

And I showed how the “boss of Balliol College” was a lousy translator and didn’t understand what Thucydides was saying. His negations are in the wrong place; he moves things around destroying perfectly valid structures. I have gotten to Book III of Thucydides. Jowett does even worse there than he does in Book I, including moving text from one chapter to another. It’s so bad that on Perseus, they won’t give you Jowett on a subsection basis, only on a chapter basis, and in the case I just mentioned, Jowett screws that up. So it’s a good thing we’re learning to understand Thucydides and not Jowett, isn’t it.

Pretty good for only two years of work. 

Knitting -- the yoke's on me

So these tops started with a normal fingering-weight jumper and took some detours.

So the purple one was the first; the yoke is the Selbu Rose and yeah, it didn't turn out very well.

The light blue one turned out pretty well, it's a Fair Isle motif.

The green one uses a vine pattern that I used on a sleeveless top years ago.

The red one has a Fair Isle motif that didn't come out well because I was using up leftovers.

And the dark blue one still needs to have its underarms worked shut; that motif comes from a pattern on DROPS.

I might be making a black one; it will use the Fana star.

I have matching sweaters to wear with all of these so they are good for all but the coldest parts of the year, and for that I have long-sleeve turtlenecks.

Cable on your 300 stitches or whatever to your size 3 24-inch circular needles for the hem and work K2/P2 rib for 8 rounds.

Knit 102 rounds, marking your underarms, center front and back every 10 rounds. (That's why I use yarn. It's lighter and less fiddly and you can still get an accurate count of the rounds you've done.) Stop 7 stitches short of the left underarm and put the next 14 stitches on a holder. (p.s. I usually have the left side of tops where the yarn tail is from cabling on.)

Cable on 108 stitches to a size 3 16-inch circular needle and work 8 rounds of rib. Then work 42 rounds, marking the underarm. In round 43, work past the underarm marker for 7 stitches and put 14 stitches of the underarm on a holder. Then knit the sleeve onto your 24-inch circular needles and knit to 7 stitches short of the other underarm marker, putting the next 14 stitches on a holder.

Work the other sleeve and knit onto the needle with your body. Knit 4 more rounds without decreasing.

On round 5 above the underarm, knit up to the last 3 stitches before the sleeve. K2TOG, K2, slip stitch, K1, PSSO. Knit to 3 stitches short of the other side of the sleeve, slip stitch, K1, PSSO, K2, K2TOG. Knit to other sleeve and repeat.

On round 6 knit to the sleeve, K1, slip stitch, K1, PSSO and repeat in reverse at the other side of the sleeve. Do the same for the other sleeve. For the rounds up to the motif, you will decrease every row in each sleeve.

Now you have a choice. On round 8 and every third round, you can K2TOG before and after the sleeves like you did on round 5, as well as doing the decrease on EVERY round on the sleeves. 

Or you can wait until round 10 and every fifth round to do the K2TOG. 

At some point you have to plan your yoke. I recommend that the yoke motif be no more than 15 stitches high. The highest ones I used were 13. Once you know how wide the motif is, you know how many stitches you need in the last round before you start working it. 

So the motif on the dark blue top is 15 stitches wide to allow for a stitch between motifs, and 13 high. It could have been 15 if I had worked a white round before and after but I didn't.

I worked 41 rounds above the underarms. In round 42, I worked K3, slip, K1, PSSO. Then I had 15x plus 2 stitches, and I decreased by those 2 stitches on opposite sides of the first round of the motif.

When I was done with the motif I had 255 stitches.  The neck is 132 stitches around. I had to take out 123 stitches. On round 56 I switched to a 16-inch circular needle and worked K3, slip, K1, PSSO, which got me down to 191 stitches. Round 57 was plain knitting. Round 58 was a repeat of round 56 and left me with 143 stitches.

I worked a mid-back elevation in round 59: K14, wrap, turn, P28, wrap, turn, K47, wrap, turn, P66, wrap, turn, K85, wrap, turn, P94, wrap, turn, and knit to end of round.

Work round 60 above the armpit taking out stitches if you are still not down to 132.

Work 6-8 rounds k2/p2 rib for the neck. Close the armpits using kitchener stitch from the outside and weave in your tag ends.

If you want long sleeves, you could work a round of your motif above the cuffs if you can fit at least two repeats in the stitches there.

This is sort of like the faux set-in sleeves I did for the Breton jumper, but it decreases faster so you don't have to take out as many stitches once you finish the sleeves. 

21st Century Classical Greek -- a contrast between certainty and definiteness

Book I section 34.  The Kerkyraeans continue to put their case.

‘ἢν δὲ λέγωσιν ὡς οὐ δίκαιον τοὺς σφετέρους ἀποίκους ὑμᾶς δέχεσθαι, μαθόντων ὡς πᾶσα ἀποικία εὖ μὲν πάσχουσα τιμᾷ τὴν μητρόπολιν, ἀδικουμένη δὲ ἀλλοτριοῦται: οὐ γὰρ ἐπὶ τῷ δοῦλοι, ἀλλ᾽ ἐπὶ τῷ ὁμοῖοι τοῖς λειπομένοις εἶναι ἐκπέμπονται.

[2] ὡς δὲ ἠδίκουν σαφές ἐστιν: προκληθέντες γὰρ περὶ Ἐπιδάμνου ἐς κρίσιν πολέμῳ μᾶλλον ἢ τῷ ἴσῳ ἐβουλήθησαν τὰ ἐγκλήματα μετελθεῖν.

[3] καὶ ὑμῖν ἔστω τι τεκμήριον ἃ πρὸς ἡμᾶς τοὺς ξυγγενεῖς δρῶσιν, ὥστε ἀπάτῃ τε μὴ παράγεσθαι ὑπ᾽ αὐτῶν δεομένοις τε ἐκ τοῦ εὐθέος μὴ ὑπουργεῖν: ὁ γὰρ ἐλαχίστας τὰς μεταμελείας ἐκ τοῦ χαρίζεσθαι τοῖς ἐναντίοις λαμβάνων ἀσφαλέστατος ἂν διατελοίη.

The first conjugated verb in this section is in oblique modality. Why? You should know by now.

The Kerkyraeans use a personal gerundive about a mitropolis treating a colony well. They’re not pointing to any specific colony that honors a mitropolis that treats it well. It’s an introduction to the contrast with how Korinth has treated Kerkyraea. The estrangement is expressed in a conjugated verb, than which it gets no more definite, no more certain, but it is not in executive voice, so the estrangement was not a deliberate act of Kerkyraea, and Korinth has no business punishing people if their acts are not deliberate. In fact, this situation being Korinth’s fault, Korinth cannot be justified for attacking Kerkyraea.

Jowett translates douloi as “servants” but the Kerkyraeans are actually claiming that the Korinthians are treating them like slaves, or at best like people who have contracted out their services exclusively to one employer. The latter is cognate to the concept of the eved in the Bible.

Subsection 2 comes out too wordy in Jowett; Thucydides is more elegant. “that injustice is patent: submitting the case about Epidamnus rather to war than to impartiality being willing to submit the claim.”

Jowett’s translation of the final statement is terrible. It’s “he who changes his purposes the least out of the habit of obliging others takes the steadiest [road] if he would habitually accomplish [his ends].”

Notice that final epistemic, conjugated in progressive conceptual.  On the one hand it’s definite; on the other it’s uncertain. The parallel of the two progressives is lost in both Jowett and Smith. But then they believed in tenses and knew nothing about aspect.

The Kerkyraeans have two more arguments to make, and then we will get to the Korinthians’ objections. It’s an interesting contrast in style and grammar.

21st Century Classical Greek -- oblique use

 Book I section 33.  The Kerkyraeans continue to put their case.

‘γενήσεται δὲ ὑμῖν πειθομένοις καλὴ ἡ ξυντυχία κατὰ πολλὰ τῆς ἡμετέρας χρείας, πρῶτον μὲν ὅτι ἀδικουμένοις καὶ οὐχ ἑτέρους βλάπτουσι τὴν ἐπικουρίαν ποιήσεσθε, ἔπειτα περὶ τῶν μεγίστων κινδυνεύοντας δεξάμενοι ὡς ἂν μάλιστα μετ᾽ αἰειμνήστου μαρτυρίου τὴν χάριν καταθήσεσθε: ναυτικόν τε κεκτήμεθα πλὴν τοῦ παρ᾽ ὑμῖν πλεῖστον.

[2] καὶ σκέψασθε: τίς εὐπραξία σπανιωτέρα ἢ τίς τοῖς πολεμίοις λυπηροτέρα, εἰ ἣν ὑμεῖς ἂν πρὸ πολλῶν χρημάτων καὶ χάριτος ἐτιμήσασθε δύναμιν ὑμῖν προσγενέσθαι, αὕτη πάρεστιν αὐτεπάγγελτος ἄνευ κινδύνων καὶ δαπάνης διδοῦσα ἑαυτήν, καὶ προσέτι φέρουσα ἐς μὲν τοὺς πολλοὺς ἀρετήν, οἷς δὲ ἐπαμυνεῖτε χάριν, ὑμῖν δ᾽ αὐτοῖς ἰσχύν: ἃ ἐν τῷ παντὶ χρόνῳ ὀλίγοις δὴ ἅμα πάντα ξυνέβη, καὶ ὀλίγοι ξυμμαχίας δεόμενοι οἷς ἐπικαλοῦνται ἀσφάλειαν καὶ κόσμον οὐχ ἧσσον διδόντες ἢ ληψόμενοι παραγίγνονται.

[3] τὸν δὲ πόλεμον, δι᾽ ὅνπερ χρήσιμοι ἂν εἶμεν, εἴ τις ὑμῶν μὴ οἴεται ἔσεσθαι, γνώμης ἁμαρτάνει καὶ οὐκ αἰσθάνεται τοὺς Λακεδαιμονίους φόβῳ τῷ ὑμετέρῳ πολεμησείοντας καὶ τοὺς Κορινθίους δυναμένους παρ᾽ αὐτοῖς καὶ ὑμῖν ἐχθροὺς ὄντας καὶ προκαταλαμβάνοντας ἡμᾶς νῦν ἐς τὴν ὑμετέραν ἐπιχείρησιν, ἵνα μὴ τῷ κοινῷ ἔχθει κατ᾽ αὐτοὺς μετ᾽ ἀλλήλων στῶμεν μηδὲ δυοῖν φθάσαι ἁμάρτωσιν, ἢ κακῶσαι ἡμᾶς ἢ σφᾶς αὐτοὺς βεβαιώσασθαι.

[4] ἡμέτερον δέ γ᾽ αὖ ἔργον προτερῆσαι, τῶν μὲν διδόντων, ὑμῶν δὲ δεξαμένων τὴν ξυμμαχίαν, καὶ προεπιβουλεύειν αὐτοῖς μᾶλλον ἢ ἀντεπιβουλεύειν.

The opening phrase basically means, let yourselves be persuaded that this is a finer opportunity than many of the rest… Jowett misses the nuance of persuasion entirely.

The bolded phrase in subsection 2 is not really a conditional. It’s the ei tis idiom I talked about before. Click on hin after the ei and you will see that it’s not from eimi, it’s a pronoun.

Notice the purpose clause in subsection 3. The verbs are, first, a progressive eventive indicative ekhthei, which ought to be something there is evidence against, if this is the main verb of the clause. It is not. The mi negation applies to stomen; The phrase using ekhthei actually is adverbial for the manner in which or the reason for which stomen happens.

Stomen is an imperfective conceptual oblique in executive voice; the Kerkyraeans use oblique to promote this projected action. Amartosi is the same thing. This is the second thing that the Kerkyraeans want to promote: allied, the two polises can hit Korinth before Korinth can act. Jowett misses this concept of striking first, which Thucydides repeats at the start of subsection 4.

The obliques in this section talk about very real possibilities if either Kerkyraea or Athins tries to stand alone against such powerful polises. Sparta can get at them by land, Korinth by sea. It’s a double whammy.

21st Century Classical Greek -- negating the conceptual

Book I section 32.  This is one of Thucydides’ made-up speeches. He already told his audience that he would be doing this. The grammar he uses has to offset their scepticism and he does so, in part, by catering to what they know actually happened.

‘Δίκαιον, ὦ Ἀθηναῖοι, τοὺς μήτε εὐεργεσίας μεγάλης μήτε ξυμμαχίας προυφειλομένης ἥκοντας παρὰ τοὺς πέλας ἐπικουρίας, ὥσπερ καὶ ἡμεῖς νῦν, δεησομένους ἀναδιδάξαι πρῶτον, μάλιστα μὲν ὡς καὶ ξύμφορα δέονται, εἰ δὲ μή, ὅτι γε οὐκ ἐπιζήμια, ἔπειτα δὲ ὡς καὶ τὴν χάριν βέβαιον ἕξουσιν: εἰ δὲ τούτων μηδὲν σαφὲς καταστήσουσι, μὴ ὀργίζεσθαι ἢν ἀτυχῶσιν.

[2] Κερκυραῖοι δὲ μετὰ τῆς ξυμμαχίας τῆς αἰτήσεως καὶ ταῦτα πιστεύοντες ἐχυρὰ ὑμῖν παρέξεσθαι ἀπέστειλαν ἡμᾶς.

[3] τετύχηκε δὲ τὸ αὐτὸ ἐπιτήδευμα πρός τε ὑμᾶς ἐς τὴν χρείαν ἡμῖν ἄλογον καὶ ἐς τὰ ἡμέτερα αὐτῶν ἐν τῷ παρόντι ἀξύμφορον.

[4] ξύμμαχοί τε γὰρ οὐδενός πω ἐν τῷ πρὸ τοῦ χρόνῳ ἑκούσιοι γενόμενοι νῦν ἄλλων τοῦτο δεησόμενοι ἥκομεν, καὶ ἅμα ἐς τὸν παρόντα πόλεμον Κορινθίων ἐρῆμοι δι᾽ αὐτὸ καθέσταμεν. καὶ περιέστηκεν ἡ δοκοῦσα ἡμῶν πρότερον σωφροσύνη, τὸ μὴ ἐν ἀλλοτρίᾳ ξυμμαχίᾳ τῇ τοῦ πέλας γνώμῃ ξυγκινδυνεύειν, νῦν ἀβουλία καὶ ἀσθένεια φαινομένη.

[5] τὴν μὲν οὖν γενομένην ναυμαχίαν αὐτοὶ κατὰ μόνας ἀπεωσάμεθα Κορινθίους: ἐπειδὴ δὲ μείζονι παρασκευῇ ἀπὸ Πελοποννήσου καὶ τῆς ἄλλης Ἑλλάδος ἐφ᾽ ἡμᾶς ὥρμηνται καὶ ἡμεῖς ἀδύνατοι ὁρῶμεν ὄντες τῇ οἰκείᾳ μόνον δυνάμει περιγενέσθαι, καὶ ἅμα μέγας ὁ κίνδυνος εἰ ἐσόμεθα ὑπ᾽ αὐτοῖς, ἀνάγκη καὶ ὑμῶν καὶ ἄλλου παντὸς ἐπικουρίας δεῖσθαι, καὶ ξυγγνώμη εἰ μὴ μετὰ κακίας, δόξης δὲ μᾶλλον ἁμαρτίᾳ τῇ πρότερον ἀπραγμοσύνῃ ἐναντία τολμῶμεν..

Jowett transposes phrases in subsection 1. What’s the difference? The Kerkyraeans open with information common to all their speakers: yes, we have no treaty with you and we agree that’s a reason not to listen to us. It disarms criticism. What’s more, Thucydides speaks of great benefits exchanged first, a lesser level than a treaty, but Jowett’s transposition reverses them. This is another example of Jowett’s ignorance of good rhetoric.

Anadidaksai has multiple possible assignments in the Word Tool. The important one is the imperfective eventive impersonal gerundive. You have to choose this because of deisomenous, making this a phrase of obligation.

The negations in subsection 1 use mi for a partitive sense, out of all the benefits and alliances that exist, none exist of which Kerkyraea either takes advantage or has membership. The nouns are in -on case due to negation of existence.

The conditional at the end of subsection 1 goes like this: If we should be unable to establish our case, then we should not be angry at our failure [to get the help we want].

Goodwin wants mi plus an oblique to mean “lest something happen”. That’s not what we have here. This is a straight negation of an action, with the action in imperfective conceptual executive voice. Then it is followed by mi plus an impersonal gerundive in progressive conceptual in base voice. This is a result clause for a negated situation.

I have been searching for negated conceptuals and they work out in a very straightforward way. The Kerkyraeans negate a future event, and the result of the negation is a negated situation.

Notice the perfective at the start of subsection 3 for a fixed custom; it uses a conjugated verb. The Kerkyraeans don’t intend to form alliances with anybody and everybody. Their presentation to the Athinaians is quite different.

In Jowett’s translation, the text from “inconsistent” to the end of his subsection 3 actually appears at the start of subsection 4 in Thucydides. This is another problem with translations and it also shows up in the Bible. The Kerkyraeans state the problem with what they are doing. Thucydides explains why they say so in subsection 4. Jowett disrupts the parallelism of subsection 4 to subsection 3.

Jowett’s changes in material from one subsection to the next is so common that Perseus will not give you his translation for individual subsections, like they do for Hobbes and the other English translation. They only give you Jowett’s translation for whole sections. I would tell you to use the Loeb edition that is free online, but the Perseus word tool is too useful. And I want you to see just how bad a translation can be – and understand that this is the boss of Balliol college who did this hatchet job.

Gibbon -- the urban legend; endgame

So I have spent all these posts trash-talking Gibbon. Even if we make allowances for what he could never have known, his premises were all false either because he ignored facts or because he committed fallacies, or because he lied about primary sources because he could not access them.

There's no sense dragging you through the rest of Gibbon's work. You have the basic facts.

1) Gibbon uses a limited set of primary sources that are incomplete, tendentious, and even fictive, and he reports their trash talk to you. You can't be sure he cites to the right places; you can't be sure he's reporting them accurately; you can't be sure he's including important information that they discuss. You would have to learn the source languages, like Greek and Latin, for that. You've seen Gibbon pretend to know Avestan literature; he also pretends that he knows Jewish scripture (Hebrew, Aramaic) and Muslim scripture (Arabic). Why read somebody who knows he can deceive you because you don't know enough to catch him out?

2) The ancient sources that have survived, especially the Latin sources like Suetonius and Augustan History, talk trash because that's what survives. More sober works that held closer to the truth were boring. Nobody was willing to pay the high price of having copies made. The same thing operates in the 21st century. The reason it's so hard to catch up with urban legend and debunk it, is that the truth is boring. Nobody wants to hear it, especially people who don't know enough to understand the truth, and those are the people most likely to fall for urban legends anyway.

3) Gibbon is going to trash talk even when he doesn't have a source that backs him up. Also, he will report what he thinks are truisms that have sources, but because his self-education was sketchy (and skechy), he can't give the citations some of his contemporaries could roll off their tongues. When Gibbon falsifies the history of the Irish and the Scots, it's based on prejudice. You have the opportunity to know things Gibbon doesn't. You can find reports online, of the DNA studies that refute him. You have the radiocarbon dates and other archaeology that shows how much culture dates centuries before he thought it did. Why spend time reading Gibbon?

4) Modern sensibilities have demonized writings from times when certain things were taken for granted in specific cultures and subcultures. That's a case of the presentism fallacy. We have to confront hate speech, especially when the author is pretending to be a scholar. Gibbon engages in hate speech and, like most bigots, misrepresents the cultures he hates. Why waste time on that?

I don't recommend that you go on reading Gibbon. I can't recommend that you read "history" at all. Too many historians don't have a 360-degree perspective, don't understand anything outside of sources that may be fictive, can't write anything that doesn't support their own preferred viewpoint, or can't avoid fallacies. 

Too much "history" ignores DNA results, radiocarbon testing, the modern understanding of the roots of populations (such as the NE Anatolian homeland of the Indo-European people, and the pre-Indo-European migrations from NE Anatolia to Britain and the Basque region). If people ignore history, Gibbon gives them an excuse because of the example he has set for his successors. 

What were the reasons for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire?

1) First, foremost, and without a doubt, inevitability. As I said at the start, the Chinese of the Warring States period recognized that every political union divides up at some time, and that after some period of time, it is found useful to create a new political union.  Any accurate timeline of history will repeat the pattern of union followed by disunion. As far as historical unions go, the Western Empire had pretty good innings: nearly 500 years. The Egyptians, from unification to the first interregnum, had about 900 years of dynasties. To be specific, there were 7 or 8 dynasties, each lasting some 100 years.

2) Size. Once the borders were pushed away from Italy in order to protect Italy, nothing could prevent the collapse. With the communications and transportation of the time, it was impossible for any emperor to micromanage the empire. It's an issue of what space experts call "elsewhere"; there is always a lag time in communications between the ground station and the space station for relativistic reasons.

Emperors had to allow a good deal of autonomy to legionary chiefs because, even with the postal system, their "elsewhere" was so long. When the generals got bad news from back home, they started seeing their legions as a form of Praetorian Guard, the body that selected by acclamation all the emperors between Caligula and Constantine. The size of the territory and population, the need for the governor-general to get his troops to Rome to make his election stick, and to fight off competition on the way, made such takeovers harder in the early years of the empire. But the Thirty Tyrants period was almost a foregone conclusion based on the size of the empire.

3) Economics. This includes both inflation due to debasement of the coinage, and effects of the two plagues which reduced inflation due to population crashes. Add in the disruption of trade routes due to military rebellions and various westbound migrations, and you have a recipe for instability that can't help but destroy a nation, let alone an empire. 

When Roman cities turned into city-states or regions controlled by fortresses, coinage became less relevant because barter was less inconvenient. The governor-general's authority became more important; the emperor's authority decreased. That was the seed from which fiefdoms like the German principates grew.

4) Diocletian. When barbarian invasions made Europe too unstable, Diocletian withdrew to the east, sending Europe into free-fall. He institutionalized the split. It made no difference for Constantine to defeat Maxentius in the west; after the devastation of the Antonine and Cyprian plagues, the west did not have the manpower to stand up to the Goths, Vandals, and other successive hammerblows. It was a foregone conclusion that Constantine would rule from the east, where the empire lasted an additional thousand years, but with the Muslims nibbling away at it after the 600s CE.

What did Christianity have to do with it? Not much. It provided an answer to the question "why have the gods forsaken us?" It began to thrive in the west once Diocletian moved the capital east; he obviously didn't care or didn't foresee that this would give Christians, persecuted in the east, somewhere to escape to and thrive.  Constantine came two generations later.

After Constantine supported the ecumenical councils, the church became part of the political hierarchy and could homogenize western and eastern culture. And true to the Chinese aphorism, it eventually split. Until the First Crusade, the Church built Europe by stabilizing monarchies. Close contact with the east, its trade and riches, eventually made monarchies independent of the Western Church, and its split was pretty much inevitable from that point, Martin Luther or no Martin Luther.

By the time Charlemagne was anointed as Holy Roman Emperor, the pagan Roman Empire was known only to those who could actually read -- mostly clergy -- and could spare time from subsistence activities and prayer to read. Government along Roman lines never reappeared; every new empire had to roll its own on the basis of whatever culture that empire sprang from. Gibbon's appeal to Roman Republican principles meant nothing to the average citizen of Britain in the 1700s CE; they wanted a constitutional monarchy, liberty in the sense of no alienation of property without due process, and a livelihood. 

Learning from history was never a feature of the Roman Empire; it never was a feature of government after that. When something bad enough happened, institutions were put in place to deal with the aftermath. Within a hundred years and usually by 75 years later, everybody who had suffered and survived to build the new institutions, was dead. A new generation arose "who knew not Joseph", and the whole thing started again in a different form. The same thing happens on a smaller scale inside every human institution, on a 15-year what I call "stupidity cycle", which I've seen in operation everywhere I've worked and everywhere I've lived.

Understanding history is crucial to understanding why things are the way they are where you are. But just like the Bible, history is going to be taken by different people to agree with themselves and their desires and goals. Don't expect more of history than other people -- or you -- are willing to put into it.