21st Century Classical Greek -- negation and aspect

I am skipping section 14 because about the only thing in it is that we have our first perfective eventive, ekektinto. Book I section 15, on the other hand, lets us examine more negatives to see what is going on.

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.

Ouk elakhistin is an idiom, “not least” those who got rich got not the least of the strength (but Thucydides punts on whether they had the most).

Oudeis ksunesti does negate an imperfective; of the earliest wars was a joint war. Here Mr. T can negate an action.

Ouk eksisan uses a derivative of eimi “be” in an eventive. So you know eimi and you know this isn’t imperfective. What does it mean to negate a progressive? “They did not repeatedly or habit-formingly…”  Which is exactly what Thucydides is saying in subsection 2; the habit was for each polis to fight for itself against another polis encroaching on its borders. In the clause here beginning with kai, Thucydides is talking about attacking foreigners on their own turf, ep’ allon. That’s the habit they didn’t have. It continues in oud’ au autoi…epoiounto.

Goodwin never gets to the point of asking why, in a past situation, negations wouldn’t just all use “aorist”. He doesn’t have a listing in the index under aorist for negations. Under imperfect (tense), he points to sections that differentiate between aorist and imperfect; those sections don’t discuss negation. There’s no such reference under pluperfect or perfect.

Goodwin’s claims about the difference in use of the various eventives or perfect (which he considers a past tense) are wholly subjective.

The aspectual paradigm gives us objective reasons for using eventives, both positive and negated. Biblical Hebrew also puts across different nuances depending on which aspect is being negated, and also on what is used to negate it.

Now that the eventives show such clear differences under negation, I’ll scope for conceptual differences.

I'm just saying -- know what the PFAS you're talking about

There was a recent dustup on a community Facebook page over PFAS. I contributed, because the original post said "don't drink the water" and I was able to google evidence that this was unrealistic because 2/3 of Americans have PFAS in their water supply, and bottled water has it too.

The other problem with the original post is that PFAS don't just come in water. You can put a dent in PFAS if you avoid all toiletries -- cosmetics, shampoos, nail polish, and eye makeup. If you're not going to do that, you're going to wash PFAS into your water supply. (I haven't worn makeup in decades and I use an herbal mask on my hair.)

PFAS are in waterproof and stain-resistant fabrics. Your athletic wear and things you use in the kitchen are likely in this class. Wear natural cottons when exercising or doing dirty work; look for something that doesn't unravel in chlorine bleach, or find a way to bleach them in the sun.

Speaking of the kitchen, that non-stick cookware may use PTFE, a PFAS. There are ways to keep food from sticking to cookware. For one thing, when the cooking is almost done, put in a little water, put the lid on the pan, and turn the burner off. For another, most parchment paper is free of PFAS and I use it to bake bread so the pan doesn't get bread baked onto it.

Any plastics can be hiding PFAS. You have to cook from scratch at home to avoid them, and you can't use meal kits like Blue Apron. Even cardboard french fry boxes have PFAS in them; take-out food is a major source of PFAS. Plastics used to package cooking ingredients may contain PFAS; buy things that come in metal or glass containers.

And look at plastic storage in your house. It's not enough to replace ziploc bags by durable washable plastic dishes (that may also survive nuking). You have to know if those dishes contain PFAS. The queen of plastic dishes, Tupperware, makes a number of product lines and some of them have PFAS in them. Steamable vegetable packaging can contain PFAS; so can microwavable packaging on frozen dinners. On the bottom of plastic dishes is a number indicating the class of plastic it contains; only use things with 2, 4, or 5 -- and even those are "safest" not "safe". Replace plastic with glass storage or metal with a tight-fitting lid.

Your dish detergent and laundry detergent could contain PFAS, especially those laundry pods. Up to 75% of those plastics winds up in our water supply.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffkart/2021/08/08/study-says-up-to-75-of-plastics-from-detergent-pods-enter-the-environment-industry-says-they-safely-biodegrade/

I switched to fair trade castile soap nearly a decade ago for both dishes and laundry, except for the shampoo I use for my hand knits which contains tea tree and lavender oils. Understand: there is a difference between detergents and soaps. What I use is a real soap, not a detergent. And it seems to cut grease better than detergents, which is important for me because I do a lot of India-style recipes with turmeric. For scrubbing, use baking soda which is also non-scratch and deodorizes things. This limits your exposure to PFAS to what might be in the steel wool pads you use for charred-on food. And if you know what you're doing (see above) you won't get charred-on food in the first place.

I also use castile soap for general cleaning, like scrubbing carpets or floors. You can even use it in your hair, with a rosemary tea chaser to make your hair soft. Soaps are notorious for drying your skin; I have a pure aloe lotion with chickweed infusion and lavender essential oil that I make up at home; all the ingredients are famous for being good to your skin.

It's also true that there are carcinogens in commercial detergents, particularly 1,4-dioxane. So by ditching them, you get a two-fer.

https://www.newsday.com/news/health/dioxane-household-products-contaminant-1.19725580

Finally, dryer sheets. I stopped using them years ago. I spent $13 on a set of six woolen dryer balls; four of them have never left the box. I use two balls per load; they beat your things soft. They are naturally unscented but you can put drops of essential oils on them for fragrance; some essential oils like lavender have a reputation for being anti-microbial. 

And you probably want to get rid of carpet, especially (see above) if it is stain resistant. The crawling baby can pick up PFAS on his hands and then, we all know kids put their hands in their mouths. 

The OP on Facebook reposted with a header about how EPA is starting -- STARTING -- to look at making industry report on PFAS. You don't have to wait for that. You can vote with your $$$$. You can contact the makers of the products you ditch and tell them you ditched their product because of PFAS. You can post on social media about products that contain PFAS.

In the meantime, use the EPA site to find products to replace your PFAS.

https://www.epa.gov/saferchoice/products

Where this all started, was with somebody ringing alarm bells without providing a course of action to take. When you find that going on, you know that the alarmist hasn't done their homework. There might really be something worth getting alarmed about, but do your homework and make sure you know what to do about it. 

What's more, the OP wanted government to do something about PFAS. Well, the government is incapable of doing anything permanent as long as you and I keep dumping PFAS into our water supply or landfill. 

I'm just saying....

Gibbon -- the urban legend pt. 4

So in case you missed it last time, Gibbon knows nothing about Roman government, suppresses inconvenient truths, and contradicts himself within the length of a page.

This week I open up with something common since the printing press: the falsehood that just because somebody put it into print, it was influential .In a world that generates a Terabyte of data per day, we have to admit that almost none of it will remain in circulation in 5 years, except for the urban legends.

So Gibbon starts chapter 4 with Commodus and there are two things wrong with it.

First, he assumes that all his sources must be accurate. In the 21st century, Nero's reputation is being rehabilitated by pointing out that the Flavians who followed him had a vested interest in destroying Nero. 

The same is true for Commodus, with one curve ball high and outside.  The Antonine plague was on during Commodus' life; it killed 2,000 a day in the city of Rome during his reign. Overall mortality was a quarter of the empire's population. There were two wars going on at the same time. Turn around and look at the behavior of Rudy Giuliani, once "America's mayor" and later a Trumpist at risk of losing his law license due to supporting fraudulent election claims. The behavior of Commodus becomes very understandable in this light; Commodus only lived 31 years, just 10 years longer than the period from 911 to the Covid pandemic, and under similar stresses.

Second, Gibbon talks of Commodus learning from the reigns of Nero and Domitian what NOT to do as emperor. This assumes that the gossipy works of Tacitus and Suetonius were in the Antonine palace library. It also assumes that the Stoic philosopher Marcus Antoninus had his son's tutors base their curricula on historical works instead of the same old standards like Homer, Vergil, and whatever philosophers were in "print" (OK manuscript but you get my point).

Far too many writers seem to think that written material is both available to and accessed by everybody who reads. Universities were turning out clergy in Gibbon's time, and taking on upper class men so they could meet future pastors and maybe, through patronage, give them a living. If you weren't keeping the terms of the university -- if you were just a janitor, say -- you couldn't access these libraries. If you lived near a Stately Mansion, you had to run tame in that mansion to access its libraries. Otherwise you had to have the money to subscribe to a bookseller's or circulating library. And then you had to choose works of history or philosophy, instead of plays, poetry, travels or -- gasp -- novels. You have free access to literature through a local library. You also have Internet access to almost all the surviving Greek and Roman literature, plus literature from all over the world. Think about book choices by your family and friends, and you will realize that Gibbon's assumption is humbug.

Marcus Antoninus would have appointed Stoics as his son's tutors. The Stoics would not have taught, for example, Aristotle, that writer so crucial to the later Christian Church. In fact Aristotle's scorn for non-Greeks and frank definition of one-man rule as kingship, would have offended Augustus, for example, who was trying so hard not to be king. Commodus had a positive example in his own father's life; Marcus wanted Commodus to learn to think, not just copy or avoid previous rulers' behavior. 

And now for more evidence that historians may undercut their own credibility. In this chapter Gibbon discusses one of those military problems that he recently denied happened. Soldiers were deserting and taking to plunder. The gossipy Historia Augusta never says why but here's a suggestion. In the very first year of his solo reign, Commodus debased the coinage. Heckel's notes for a class given by the Federal Reserve discusses inflation as a cause of the fall of the Roman Empire and specifically notes this debasement.

Inflation would have reduced the buying power of the soldiers' pay, and they didn't take it lying down. They deserted and turned to robbery. Gibbon mentions one specific robber who even planned to assassinate Commodus and take over. He was betrayed by an accomplice. Gibbon puts the problem down to "negligence of the public administration," neither he nor the Historia having any more intelligent suggestion to make.

Why would Commodus debase the coinage? If you think he wanted the gold and silver to spend on his own lifestyle, well, remember, Commodus is supposed to be this horrible selfish person with no respect for anything. He could have plundered temples all over the empire and melted down statues or at least melted the gold and silver off of them, to get what he wanted. According to Suetonius such things happened under Augustus (chapter 73); Nero (chapter 32); and Galba (chapter 5). So much for Commodus learning from previous emperors or from Suetonius.

Why Commodus would need the money for expenses rests on Historian's Fallacy.

Today, if we provide goods and services, we expect to get paid for them. We can take somebody to court for failure to pay. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, we could get the sheriff to auction off the debtor's goods to get a return. Debtors could also go to prison for non-payment.

Even if this could happen in the Roman Empire, we all forget one thing. By the reign of Commodus, there was no representative assembly any more. Taxation without representation? Don't make me laugh! Commodus did not have to rule by consent of the governed. He was the emperor. He could confiscate property without submitting his claims to a court. He didn't have to pay his bills. The idea of coinage being a tool of the state is nonsense in a state with an absolute head who doesn't have to get permission from a representative assembly to use the coinage. Coinage is a convenient way of exchanging goods and services that leads to the credit economy where business doesn't have to be done face to face. But before there's a credit economy, it's a lot easier to move around a couple of denarii than it is to move around two cows or a cow and two sheep or whatever.

Now, if you said Commodus didn't want to give up gold or silver to the Treasury to do the minting, that's another thing. That's the act of a stupid twat. Whoever spends that gold or silver coinage gets less for his money, and the person he buys from can show a lower outflow on his tax return, and object that he shouldn't have to pay as much in taxes. And even if the government disagrees and confiscates the right amount of coins anyway, those coins are debased. The taxes flowing into the Treasury aren't worth as much as before the debasement. The Treasury can't buy as much for its money as it could before debasement -- and if the government wants to maintain the inflow of goods and services, they have to confiscate the goods and non-pay the services.

Well, within two years this debasement caused military desertions all over the empire, and the deserters turned to plunder so they could survive. This is a downward spiral that the Federal Reserve agrees is one cause of the decline of the Roman Empire. Eventually the coinage is worth nothing and the providers of goods and services refuse to accept them. Then you have to go back to the barter system unless you are one of the people high in government with authority to confiscate.

But as I said last time, Gibbon and his contemporaries would never see it this way, despite Gibbon waving the flag of "liberty". Still less would prior generations understand what was going on. So nobody can give us a real picture of why Commodus debased the coinage, except that he was a stupid twat.

Now, in chapter 40 about about Justinian, Gibbon will talk about people shaving or clipping coins (although this comes from the highly suspect Anecdota which were attributed to Procopius). This was pretty dangerous. Once debasement began, coin clipping yielded less precious metal and so that stopped being attractive.

Kevin Butcher says there were almost no sources for people to go to in the 1700s and 1800s, once they understood economics better and went looking for information specifically on Rome. That's another case of Historian's Fallacy. The publication of Wealth of Nations (1776) didn't mean that prior generations or civilizations knew what an economy was or how it worked, so why would they write in terms Smith used? 

Kevin Butcher, Debasement and the decline of Rome.

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/classics/intranets/staff/butcher/debasement_and_decline.pdf

Matthew Heckel, Inflation and the Fall of the Roman Empire

https://www.stlouisfed.org/~/media/education/lessons/pdf/inflation_and_the_fall_of_the_roman_empire.pdf?la=en

Gibbon was not aware of economics as a banking issue, only as an issue of ownership of real and private property. That is how people of Gibbon's class thought. Banking was a necessary evil, you had to pay your rents into some safe place , but you were hindered by bankers' complaints about overdrafts if you "spent your money like a gentleman" on horses, gaming, mistresses, and fine dining. So Gibbon was incapable of realizing that the problem with Commodus wasn't his crazy behavior while suffering from PTSD; it was his stupid idea of debasing the coinage.

To the PDF

21st Century Classical Greek -- mi verbs

Book I section 13.6 lets me start a topic that most of the grammars leave until last, which is a real shame.  

καὶ Ἴωσιν ὕστερον πολὺ γίγνεται ναυτικὸν ἐπὶ Κύρου Περσῶν πρώτου βασιλεύοντος καὶ Καμβύσου τοῦ υἱέος αὐτοῦ, τῆς τε καθ᾽ ἑαυτοὺς θαλάσσης Κύρῳ πολεμοῦντες ἐκράτησάν τινα χρόνον. καὶ Πολυκράτης Σάμου τυραννῶν ἐπὶ Καμβύσου ναυτικῷ ἰσχύων ἄλλας τε τῶν νήσων ὑπηκόους ἐποιήσατο καὶ Ῥήνειαν ἑλὼν ἀνέθηκε τῷ Ἀπόλλωνι τῷ Δηλίῳ. Φωκαῆς τε Μασσαλίαν οἰκίζοντες Καρχηδονίους ἐνίκων ναυμαχοῦντες:

Anethike is a prefixed form of the verb τίθημι, so copy that and paste it into Wiktionary to see the conjugation.

Tithimi, “put, place”, like histimi, has an intransitive imperfective eventive (“second aorist”). The two belong to a subclass of non-mai verbs called -mi verbs. Eimi, both “be” and “come, go”, belong to this group, although they don’t have the i.i.e.

Another -mi verb is δίδωμι, “give”. It has an i.i.e. as well.

Do you notice anything about the -mi verbs? Their meanings are some of the most frequently used in any language.

They also conjugate differently from most verbs. Where have you seen this phenomenon before?

Well, if you have studied other languages, like I have, you know that these simple words are classed as “irregular” in most languages. Personally, I feel as if they are the most ancient, and the speakers of languages just sort of made up how to say words, until the number of words they used had multiplied so much they started copying conjugations instead of making up new ones.

Learn tithimi and didomi and notice the other similarities with histimi. You can apply these similarities to other -mi verbs – although not to “be” and “come, go” as you already know from learning them.

And remember, these verbs that have the i.i.e. may show up in ergative structures. When you find one with an agent expressed as hupo X where X is in the -on case, look at it carefully for a logical object in the -oi case. And let me know if you find them.

I can’t say that only -mi verbs have i.i.e.s. If you already knew Greek, you may know whether it’s true or not.

The old grammars mostly leave -mi verbs until last, as if they’re too hard to learn. Being high-frequency and quite regular within their own province, -mi verbs should be addressed early on. And that’s why I’m doing them now, a little over a year into the posts – there are lots to come.

Notice the reference here to Cambyses, son of Kuros, who sponsored the building of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. Some people claim that Judaism didn’t exist until the time of Cambyses, which begs the question what religion was practiced in the Second Temple in the time of Kuros.  The claim fails the Test of Occam’s Razor, however, due to the reference to Israel as an ethnic group on the Merneptah stele of 1220 BCE, and those pigless highland settlements of the 1100s BCE; if you ignore part of the data (a fallacy called sampling bias), you fail the Test.

21st Century Classical Greek -- impersonal gerundive subject in -oi case!

Book I section 13.2 gives us a good look at impersonal gerundives and I will go over what Goodwin says compared to how Thucydides uses them.

πρῶτοι δὲ Κορίνθιοι λέγονται ἐγγύτατα τοῦ νῦν τρόπου μεταχειρίσαι τὰ περὶ τὰς ναῦς, καὶ τριήρεις ἐν Κορίνθῳ πρῶτον τῆς Ἑλλάδος ναυπηγηθῆναι.

So the bolded words are imperfective eventive impersonal gerundives. The first is executive voice and the second is passive voice.

In our aspectual paradigm, these are substitutes for conjugated verbs. Further, the second one is an intransitive structure.

Note that the first one has a logical subject. It’s not a grammatical subject, despite being in the -oi case; it’s not the subject of legontai, “they say”, which is in base voice, not executive voice. The three English translations on Perseus, and the Smith translation for the Loeb Classics Library, agree that the Korinthioi didn’t say whatever it was. Legontai is an idiom for other people saying something.

So it is the Korinthians who metakheirisai’d, deliberately to bring about having ships. When Goodwin says that the subject of an “infinitive” is in the accusative, he’s wrong.

Smyth allows as how the subject of an infinitive can be in the -oi case but he has requirements, none of which apply here:

1)         The subject of the infinitive is also the subject of a conjugated verb in the same sentence. We don’t have any conjugated verbs here.

2)         The i.g. is substantivized with an article in an oblique case (not -oi). The definite articles in this sentence have noun complements; the i.g.s are not substituting for nouns, they are substituting for conjugated verbs.

Smyth deals with this subject in section 1973 on page 439; his discussion of the -ous subject of an i.g. is in section 936 on page 260. This is one of the many pitfalls of the old grammars: segregating information that should be addressed in the same place, even if that means repeating information. And, as I said, neither of these conditions applies to 13.2.

The other i.g. is passive voice and triireis is the grammatical subject and logical object.

DIY -- healthier and still delicious

I love to play with my food. Once I got my new toy and could bake again, I started doing some research on the web.

We all need more whole grains in our diet. What if it could be delicious?

In anything you bake, you can substitute whole wheat flour for white, cup for cup. There's even a butter cake recipe out there which uses all whole wheat flour. Add in some dried fruit and chopped nuts, and you can hardly get a healthier snack. Take anything you bake and start by replacing half the white flour with whole wheat. When you're used to it, go a little further, until you're using all whole wheat flour.

But wait, it gets better. In anything you make (not just bake), you can substitute plain fat-free yogurt cup for cup for milk, sour cream, heavy cream, and even butter. I use it instead of sour cream and buttermilk in ranch dressing. I used it to make a peanut butter frosting for the whole wheat cake.  It's great for things with baking powder in them, where you might normally use buttermilk to activate the baking powder. 

So here is a pan of scones, made with yogurt instead of milk. (Although I did use butter for shortening.) Looks nice and brown while it cools on the range top. I didn't cut the scones out into rounds. I cut a plus sign, then a circle, then outside the circle I cut the quarter moons in half. 

And here's some taken out of the middle. See how nice and fluffy it looks? (The little dark things are currants, I had part of a bag to use up.) Scones are another thing you can put dried fruit into, although if you want to use anything larger than a raisin you ought to chop it up. You can also put in carob morsels or chopped nuts, or a tablespoonful of some kind of extract like maple. I have seen recipes with icing but I won't be doing that. The beaten egg glaze on the top is traditional and adds protein.

You can also make these gluten-free. They use baking powder, not yeast, so they will rise even without gluten.

Remember, buy the right yogurt and you can incubate more from a bottle of milk. I have a dehydrate feature on my toy that is perfect for incubating yogurt.

Now. My toy includes air frying. Here's how you make that healthy. For both veggies and nuggets, use batter. Use a fat-free batter. Find a recipe for General Tso's chicken, leave out the garlic and soy sauce from the batter, use whole wheat flour not white, and add whatever seasoning you like. I have dozens of them, berbere and balti, cajun and Italian. Roll your bits in the batter and pop into your air fryer. Less fat, tastes great.

Play with your food!

Gibbon -- the urban legend pt 3

The last post was about how urban legends never update their information. During their life, they may acquire greater exaggeration because that's exciting and promotes transmission. But it's too boring to go back and try to correct the falsehoods they contain, and the corrections never catch up with the urban legend in the minds of people who love urban legends. That's why urban legends persist despite the best efforts to debunk them.

This time, we're up to chapter 3 of Gibbon which has one major fault. Gibbon describes the early empire as sowing the seeds of decline. It's not true; everything that grows has a decline at some point. Human cultures are no different from human beings in that way. What Gibbon says about the start of the decline is a classic example of misunderstanding or willfully misinterpreting his sources, one of the features of urban legends that contributes to their falseness.

Gibbon's description is something I've seen before: a pretense that Gibbon's description is accurate. Where I've seen it before is in the behavior -- or at least statements -- of the prosecution in the Mendel Beilis trial. The prosecutors pretended that they were working under a system similar to that in Britain or even the U.S. While Tsarist Russia adopted the 1813 nullum crimen principle, in fact Beilis was tried in 1913 for a "murder out of religious fanaticism" charge that was wiped out of the criminal code in 1906. Much to the chagrin of the Black Hundreds and in particular civil prosecutor Aleksey Shmakov. It's possible that Andrey Yushchinsky's death was whomped up into a federal case so as to justify passing a new law criminalizing this charge. But the evidence was all forged, the testimony perjured; the jury knew it by day 8 of a 34 day trial, and Beilis was acquitted specifically on that charge (though the bigoted urban legend pretends otherwise).

Gibbon is falsifying his testimony as to Roman government. He continues his pretense that Rome had a free constitution in the same terms as Britain of his own times, and provided liberty in the same terms. No doubt this is what has led the Online Library of Liberty to host his text, and they operate under a similar misapprehension. I talked about this in a footnote to chapter 1 but let me say it here. 

In Gibbon's time, liberty as opposed to non-liberty was the freedom to enjoy one's property without fearing that government would confiscate it without justification. This was the difference between the Stuart monarchies, and the Glorious Revolution followed by the Hanoverians.

Nevertheless, Gibbon was a friend of Lord North, the prime minister at the time of the American Revolution. Not only did the colonists have no representation in Parliament, but they -- and Britons who supported them -- were prosecuted for sedition. But Gibbon had a horror of real democracy and it shows throughout his work.

Gibbon's government was a thing of patronage, privilege, and jobbing. Gibbon got into Parliament for St. Germains, a rotten borough (nobody lived there so he represented no actual Britons) in Cornwall, under the patronage of the 1st Baron Eliot, Edward Craggs-Eliot. Eliot only needed Gibbon to pass legislation; Gibbon never made a speech or did anything noteworthy. Again, Alexander Wedderburn's patronage named Gibbon to the Board of Trade when Gibbon's finances were shaky. Gibbon had ignored Eliot; he lost his patronage -- and his parliamentary seat and position at the Board.

But Gibbon is hypercritical of patronage, privilege and jobbing in the Roman Empire. He pretends that Augustus destroyed a free government with real elections, when the Roman Republic was run by the patricians and equites. When it degenerated into the civil war between Sulla and Marius, the stage was set for somebody to use the army for a takeover. Julius Caesar got the blame and was assassinated. Revenging him, Octavian made it possible to actually run the unwieldy structure that Rome had become after conquering western Europe and northern Africa. Northern Africa, including Egypt, was crucial to feeding an Italy that dispossessed farmers in favor of slave labor, pushing lots of people into the cities where they might not be able to make a living wage. Getting food to these people required big government. The upper classes were too busy fighting their rivalries to provide big government. 

Idle hands also were lent to crime. Gladiatorial games would distract the jobless population, but gladiatorial games were expensive; good gladiators needed good training, good food, housing, and a little cash for drink and prostitutes because gladiator survival rates meant they were not good marital prospects. It took big government to run good gladiatorial games. In the 1984 version of Last Days of Pompeii, when the nouveau riche candidate tries to buy votes by paying for games, that's one of the most realistic things in the whole miniseries.

What's more, the experience of the social war showed that if you tied your allies up in your armies, you could move them where they were no danger to Rome. If they rebelled or disobeyed, they were subject to death under military discipline. This set the stage for putting the "barbarians" of conquered territory into legions that were sent far from their homes to serve and, upon retirement, settle. 

This all rested on Augustus making himself paterfamilias of the empire, instead of just the head of the senate. Whatever the paterfamilias ordered, the familia had to do. He even had the right to sell his children into slavery. Once the Emperor was a Christian, his troops and population were highly motivated if not required to follow suit. When Constantine supported the Council of Nicaea in 325, it was a foregone conclusion that the outcome would become the law of the Empire.

Gibbon writes about the concept of paterfamilias, He shows that he knows Augustus took on this role. But even after chapter 2, he continues to argue that his own attitudes toward government applied to the Roman Republic and were suppressed by Augustus in the Roman Empire. 

There's a disconnect there, which I describe as "the left side of the brain is not talking to the right side." I've known people trained in a given field who, when they leave the office, leave behind everything they learned and do the exact opposite in their personal life, with the same outcome their training prevents for their employer. I've known scientists go haring off after unproven concepts in a field not their own; Linus Pauling is probably the most famous example. I've known people with college educations falling for every urban legend they meet up with, because they simply have no critical thinking facility outside their own field.

In this chapter Gibbon tells outright lies about what was going on in the empire. He claims that all was peace with the exception of the Year of the Four Emperors, until 192 CE. His sources would have showed him differently. He either suppressed an inconvenient truth, or he didn't read the sources that give the information, as I have said before. I'll say more about this a couple of posts from now.

Gibbon is writing about a culture he does not live in. He can't use his sources adequately -- some he can't access at all. And he makes up his mind as to what he thinks, rejecting all information suggesting that he's wrong, some of which he actually records. 

There is more ahead and I will keep posting. But as a spoiler, I recommend you start reading my blog of urban legends about Judaism. Then when you get to the point where Gibbon is what they call "not even wrong", you will understand why I would say that.

If you want to know about Roman government, especially the history of it, you are better off reading

Abbott, Frank Frost (1901). A History and Description of Roman Political Institutions. Elibron Classics  https://ia800309.us.archive.org/18/items/historydescripti00abbouoft/historydescripti00abbouoft.pdf

To the PDF