Gibbon -- the urban legend, pt. 12

Last time was another case of Gibbon ignoring a crucial factor in history, disease and the way it changes a culture by redefining "normal". This time he goes on with his tabloid trash and misses another important clue.

He's right about one thing. Bet you never thought I would say that! After 250 CE it didn't matter what the nature of the emperor was, how he got to the throne or how he reigned. This ought to be a warning against one-man rule but it never has been.

The point is that one-man rule only works if he can get and keep the majority of the population behind him. Getting, yes. Keeping, no. There's no such thing as freezing a social order anywhere at any time. There's no such thing as permanent order. There is always something going on somewhere that is going to impact a frozen social order, smashing it.

Gibbon knew this. He knew about the Roman slave wars, social wars, civil wars, Caesar and Augustus. He hated Augustus' government because it showed that Gibbon's "free constitution" destroyed itself in Rome, in the civil wars, and he hated Augustus for replacing it, even though it was the only way to keep Rome alive.

So he skips over pretty much everything and claims that the Antonines were the pattern government for Rome, and he ignores that they were emperors in the Augustine mode, and what happened after the Antonine plague, and what happened after debasement of the coinage, and so on.

When Gibbon gets to chapter 12, the army has been in charge of picking emperors for nearly 200 years, longer if you consider Vespasian the first in line. There is no such thing as one-man rule, there's just whoever the army is backing at the moment. If you have paid attention to history since about 1955, this is a pattern you have seen. The old leader is called corrupt and oppressive, the army throws him out, and whoever gets put on top spends a while there and then gets thrown out in turn. Unless somebody is spending massive bucks to keep him there, usually to get access to important resources.

In a true representative government, there is always a path for a peaceful transition of power. In a nation with freedom of speech and a right peaceably to assemble and petition leaders, there's no excuse for political coups. But Gibbon refuses to admit a) that such was not the case in the Roman Republic, and b) that it is exactly what the Americans eventually put in place. Britain followed suit in the 1800s with the abolishment of rotten and pocket boroughs, repeal of the Test and Exclusion Acts, and the extension of the franchise. That became the British constitution. Gibbon must have been turning over in his grave.

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21st Century Classical Greek -- quoted speech

Book I section 25.  Learn the verb πολιορκέω, besiege. There were lots of sieges in the war. Also learn πέμπω,  send, which is high-frequency anywhere and used as a paradigm for the conversion of pi to psi in the imperfective; it is quite regular otherwise.

γνόντες δὲ οἱ Ἐπιδάμνιοι οὐδεμίαν σφίσιν ἀπὸ Κερκύρας τιμωρίαν οὖσαν ἐν ἀπόρῳ εἴχοντο θέσθαι τὸ παρόν, καὶ πέμψαντες ἐς Δελφοὺς τὸν θεὸν ἐπήροντο εἰ παραδοῖεν Κορινθίοις τὴν πόλιν ὡς οἰκισταῖς καὶ τιμωρίαν τινὰ πειρῷντ᾽ ἀπ᾽ αὐτῶν ποιεῖσθαι. ὁ δ᾽ αὐτοῖς ἀνεῖλε παραδοῦναι καὶ ἡγεμόνας ποιεῖσθαι.

[2] ἐλθόντες δὲ οἱ Ἐπιδάμνιοι ἐς τὴν Κόρινθον κατὰ τὸ μαντεῖον παρέδοσαν τὴν ἀποικίαν, τόν τε οἰκιστὴν ἀποδεικνύντες σφῶν ἐκ Κορίνθου ὄντα καὶ τὸ χρηστήριον δηλοῦντες, ἐδέοντό τε μὴ σφᾶς περιορᾶν φθειρομένους, ἀλλ᾽ ἐπαμῦναι.

[3] Κορίνθιοι δὲ κατά τε τὸ δίκαιον ὑπεδέξαντο τὴν τιμωρίαν, νομίζοντες οὐχ ἧσσον ἑαυτῶν εἶναι τὴν ἀποικίαν ἢ Κερκυραίων, ἅμα δὲ καὶ μίσει τῶν Κερκυραίων, ὅτι αὐτῶν παρημέλουν ὄντες ἄποικοι:

[4] οὔτε γὰρ ἐν πανηγύρεσι ταῖς κοιναῖς διδόντες γέρα τὰ νομιζόμενα οὔτε Κορινθίῳ ἀνδρὶ προκαταρχόμενοι τῶν ἱερῶν ὥσπερ αἱ ἄλλαι ἀποικίαι, περιφρονοῦντες δὲ αὐτοὺς καὶ χρημάτων δυνάμει ὄντες κατ᾽ ἐκεῖνον τὸν χρόνον ὁμοῖα τοῖς Ἑλλήνων πλουσιωτάτοις καὶ τῇ ἐς πόλεμον παρασκευῇ δυνατώτεροι, ναυτικῷ δὲ καὶ πολὺ προύχειν ἔστιν ὅτε ἐπαιρόμενοι καὶ κατὰ τὴν Φαιάκων προενοίκησιν τῆς Κερκύρας κλέος ἐχόντων τὰ περὶ τὰς ναῦς (ᾗ καὶ μᾶλλον ἐξηρτύοντο τὸ ναυτικὸν καὶ ἦσαν οὐκ ἀδύνατοι: τριήρεις γὰρ εἴκοσι καὶ ἑκατὸν ὑπῆρχον αὐτοῖς ὅτε ἤρχοντο πολεμεῖν)

Paradoien is an imperfective eventive executive uncertainty epistemic. This is not a conditional sentence, it’s a specific question, and ei, as I said before, should be translated “whether”, not “if”.

Our indirect question uses an “aorist”, although it is obviously about a future event and therefore using a past tense is nonsense. If you try to say that it’s in the past of Thucydides and his writing, I can counter with the fact that it’s clearly in the future of the people doing the speaking and Goodwin and others agree that the indirect speech should use the same tense as the original speech.

Aspectually, the Epidamnians are asking for an answer about an event that they are not sure will happen. Calling this a “future less vivid” assumes that it is a conditional, which is not correct. Calling it a future at all is a cognitive dissonance with its being in aorist tense.

Goodwin gets wrapped around the axles about “unreal conditions” but gives no examples. He refers to earlier sections about suppositions contrary to fact, which are conditionals. He is also misled by the concept of “future less vivid” which his sources tack onto “optative”.

The Epidamnians are asking should they deliberately do something without any certainty that the oracle will tell them to do it. They use the default aspect, imperfective eventive, to focus on the deed regardless of whether it has permanent results. Thus the reported speech could be using the same grammar as the original speech, without creating cognitive dissonance.

21st Century Classical Greek -- tell me how you want it

Book I section 24.

Ἐπίδαμνός ἐστι πόλις ἐν δεξιᾷ ἐσπλέοντι ἐς τὸν Ἰόνιον κόλπον: προσοικοῦσι δ᾽ αὐτὴν Ταυλάντιοι βάρβαροι, Ἰλλυρικὸν ἔθνος.

[2] ταύτην ἀπῴκισαν μὲν Κερκυραῖοι, οἰκιστὴς δ᾽ ἐγένετο Φαλίος Ἐρατοκλείδου Κορίνθιος γένος τῶν ἀφ᾽ Ἡρακλέους, κατὰ δὴ τὸν παλαιὸν νόμον ἐκ τῆς μητροπόλεως κατακληθείς. ξυνῴκισαν δὲ καὶ Κορινθίων τινὲς καὶ τοῦ ἄλλου Δωρικοῦ γένους.

[3] προελθόντος δὲ τοῦ χρόνου ἐγένετο ἡ τῶν Ἐπιδαμνίων δύναμις μεγάλη καὶ πολυάνθρωπος:

[4] στασιάσαντες δὲ ἐν ἀλλήλοις ἔτη πολλά, ὡς λέγεται, ἀπὸ πολέμου τινὸς τῶν προσοίκων βαρβάρων ἐφθάρησαν καὶ τῆς δυνάμεως τῆς πολλῆς ἐστερήθησαν.

[5] τὰ δὲ τελευταῖα πρὸ τοῦδε τοῦ πολέμου ὁ δῆμος αὐτῶν ἐξεδίωξε τοὺς δυνατούς, οἱ δὲ ἐπελθόντες μετὰ τῶν βαρβάρων ἐλῄζοντο τοὺς ἐν τῇ πόλει κατά τε γῆν καὶ κατὰ θάλασσαν.

[6] οἱ δὲ ἐν τῇ πόλει ὄντες Ἐπιδάμνιοι ἐπειδὴ ἐπιέζοντο, πέμπουσιν ἐς τὴν Κέρκυραν πρέσβεις ὡς μητρόπολιν οὖσαν, δεόμενοι μὴ σφᾶς περιορᾶν φθειρομένους, ἀλλὰ τούς τε φεύγοντας ξυναλλάξαι σφίσι καὶ τὸν τῶν βαρβάρων πόλεμον καταλῦσαι.

[7] ταῦτα δὲ ἱκέται καθεζόμενοι ἐς τὸ Ἥραιον ἐδέοντο. οἱ δὲ Κερκυραῖοι τὴν ἱκετείαν οὐκ ἐδέξαντο, ἀλλ᾽ ἀπράκτους ἀπέπεμψαν.

Learn the difference between pro, “before”, in subsection 5, which is used only with the -on case, and pros, “in the direction of”, in section 16.1, which is used with all the oblique cases.

The bolded words represeent a situations Goodwin does not discuss. To him, mi is used with “infinitives” or “subjunctives,” not with indicative conjugated verbs, unless in a final clause preceded by ina, opos, etc. That’s not what we have here.

This phrase is a quasi-command or imperative. As such, it is a modality called deontic; the world is not as one would wish and a deontic attempts to make it that way or expresses a wish to make it that way. Biblical Hebrew has both in several different grammars: the volitive for wishes; imperatives from an authority to a reliable person for immediate action; commandments to regulate social behavior; and the aspectless verb (“infinitive”) for on-demand actions that are due and owing under the circumstances, especially capital punishment.

Goodwin discusses deontics (although not under that name) in sections 1342ff, starting on his page 287.  He gets around to our usages here in section 1351, but we have not just an indicative, we have an impersonal gerundive.

Goodwin gets around to this use of the i.g. in section 1536, page 329. He does not list it in the commands section of his index, or in the infinitive section. You pretty much have to memorize all of Goodwin, including his confusing or misleading or downright false material, to find this explanation.

Perioiran is a progressive conceptual i.g. standing for a habit that should not be allowed to continue. Later we have ksunallaksai, an imperfective eventive i.g., thus an action to be taken. Why not an imperfective conceptual for the action to be taken?

Because that’s not what the imperfective conceptual i.g. is for. It’s for the complement of a verb like mello or elpizo. The imperative in Biblical Hebrew looks like a “future” in Mishnaic and Modern Hebrew, but in Biblical Hebrew it’s a form of the imperfect.

Also, this command is not in perfective. The command refuses to take into account the result. It only requests action.

This is a case where a tense description of Greek creates cognitive problems; if we were still thinking of “aorist, a past tense”, the command would make no sense because the action hasn’t happened yet. But since it’s imperfective, there’s no cognitive problem, besides the fact that at least one other language does the same thing. And in fact, subsection 7 shows us that the Kerkyraeans refused to act.

Illyria is the Balkan states region. Illyria is the Greek name for a multi-ethnic region and the names the peoples used for themselves have not survived.

In subsection 2 we see the seeds of the opening conflict of the Peloponnesian war. Kerkyraea itself was a colony of Korinth, and although it founded its own colony, a Korinthian led the expedition. But when troubles came, the city sent to Kerkyraea, not Korinth, and thereby hangs the tale.

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.

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