Gibbon -- the urban legend, pt. 14

So last time I said that Diocletian would have been a fool to split the empire if he couldn't feed the eastern part, and he probably couldn't feed it from Africa because of the Vandals. But the existing structure of tax payment in kind from eastern provinces like Bithynia made an eastern empire viable.  

And now we get into a new round of history being written by the victors, and probable demonization of previous competitors. The emperor that Diocletian left on the eastern throne was greedy and murderous, cruel and lustful. According to Constantine's press machine. His father Constantius, emperor in the west, was nearly a saint and was married to one. When Galerius died and the throne passed to Licinius, things got worse in the east, while the disgruntled Maxentius who thought he was going to be caesar in the west, got a well-deserved drubbing.

But this time, when the Praetorian Guards declared for Maxentius, they lost. Maxentius committed a stupid error, having the Tiber river at his back when Constantine attacked. Maxentius was facing north; Constantine had just travelled south on the Via Flaminia to reach the Tiber.

Constantine, facing south, could easily look up and see the sun, as the legend indicates. Why he would see a cross is unknown. But this story first appears in Eusebius, and we know from a few posts ago that Eusebius was capable of making things up to suit himself. 

In fact, Constantine was a devotee of Sol Invictus, like many of his troops. Sol had been an official god since the reign of Aurelian, one of Gibbon's heroes; the temple was dedicated 25 December 274 CE. The last surviving inscription to Sol was made in 387 CE, and he was still worshipped in the time of St. Augustine. Constantine's triumphal arch lines up with the sun and carries three reliefs of Sol. Constantine did not convert from this religion until 337 CE.

So when Constantine looked up at the sun, he did not see a cross. He was making a last prayer to Sol Invictus to win the battle for him, and it worked.

And the rest is sort of history: the founding of Constantinople; the union of the two empires; their disunion under Valentinian I; the beginning of persecution under Theodosius II.

What -- wait, what?

And here is the chapter of Gibbon that you can basically ignore: chapter 15. It is nothing but ignorance and slurs. It's also an introduction to the hypocrisy in chapter 16, where Gibbon pities and sympathizes with the Christians for doing what he slams the Jews for doing in chapter 15, and for the same reasons. If you did not read my blog using the link I gave before, here it is again. It has a lot of entries; most of the posts are about the length of one page in MS Word. If you want to know something about Jews, read my blog, not Gibbon.

Under Theodosius II Jews were kicked out of the army and out of civil office, except as tax collectors. Tax collectors who fell short had to make up the shortfall out of their own pockets. Jews could not buy slaves but could trade in them. Jews could not build new synagogues. Luckily, Jews can pray anywhere, and say all the prayers if only they can get ten men together. 

Under Justinian I new restrictions were enacted: in North Africa their synagogues were confiscated; they could not testify to the detriment of Christians in court; Torah readings in Hebrew were prohibited, they had to be in Greek, Latin, or some other language and in Greek, they could be the [horrible] Septuagint or Aquila's translation; Jewish courts were basically prohibited because the Mishnah was prohibited and it was the basis for the Gemara.

The Wikipedia article on Gibbon calls him dispassionate. I challenged it for a citation. Nobody who reads Gibbon can call him dispassionate unless they are a hypnotized fan. His attitudes were shared by some contemporaries, and for this reason people will say "but he didn't know he was anti-Semitic." My answer is, sneers and hate speech are not dispassionate; Gibbon may have drunk in hate with his mother's milk, but his isolated life and study cut him off from associating with people who might have taught him differently. Or not; it depends on how obstinately he clung to his hate speech, which at some point would have led to being isolated again because nobody wanted to be around him. His anti-semitism is a corollary to his appetite for tabloid trash among his sources, ignoring large issues that ancient sources do address.

It's another reason why Gibbon is an urban legend. He goes for the excitement, the exaggeration, the stirring of passions. He's more of a historic novelist than a historian. It just so happens that too many of his readers don't have the critical thinking skills or education to catch him out.

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21st Century Classical Greek -- caveat on translation

Book I section 29.  

Κορίνθιοι δὲ οὐδὲν τούτων ὑπήκουον, ἀλλ᾽ ἐπειδὴ πλήρεις αὐτοῖς ἦσαν αἱ νῆες καὶ οἱ ξύμμαχοι παρῆσαν, προπέμψαντες κήρυκα πρότερον πόλεμον προεροῦντα Κερκυραίοις, ἄραντες ἑβδομήκοντα ναυσὶ καὶ πέντε δισχιλίοις τε ὁπλίταις ἔπλεον ἐπὶ τὴν Ἐπίδαμνον Κερκυραίοις ἐναντία πολεμήσοντες:

[2] ἐστρατήγει δὲ τῶν μὲν νεῶν Ἀριστεὺς ὁ Πελλίχου καὶ Καλλικράτης ὁ Καλλίου καὶ Τιμάνωρ ὁ Τιμάνθους, τοῦ δὲ πεζοῦ Ἀρχέτιμός τε ὁ Εὐρυτίμου καὶ Ἰσαρχίδας ὁ Ἰσάρχου.

[3] ἐπειδὴ δ᾽ ἐγένοντο ἐν Ἀκτίῳ τῆς Ἀνακτορίας γῆς, οὗ τὸ ἱερὸν τοῦ Ἀπόλλωνός ἐστιν, ἐπὶ τῷ στόματι τοῦ Ἀμπρακικοῦ κόλπου, οἱ Κερκυραῖοι κήρυκά τε προύπεμψαν αὐτοῖς ἐν ἀκατίῳ ἀπεροῦντα μὴ πλεῖν ἐπὶ σφᾶς καὶ τὰς ναῦς ἅμα ἐπλήρουν, ζεύξαντές τε τὰς παλαιὰς ὥστε πλωίμους εἶναι καὶ τὰς ἄλλας ἐπισκευάσαντες.

[4] ὡς δὲ ὁ κῆρύξ τε ἀπήγγειλεν οὐδὲν εἰρηναῖον παρὰ τῶν Κορινθίων καὶ αἱ νῆες αὐτοῖς ἐπεπλήρωντο οὖσαι ὀγδοήκοντα (τεσσαράκοντα γὰρ Ἐπίδαμνον ἐπολιόρκουν), ἀνταναγαγόμενοι καὶ παραταξάμενοι ἐναυμάχησαν:

[5] καὶ ἐνίκησαν οἱ Κερκυραῖοι παρὰ πολὺ καὶ ναῦς πέντε καὶ δέκα διέφθειραν τῶν Κορινθίων. τῇ δὲ αὐτῇ ἡμέρᾳ αὐτοῖς ξυνέβη καὶ τοὺς τὴν Ἐπίδαμνον πολιορκοῦντας παραστήσασθαι ὁμολογίᾳ ὥστε τοὺς μὲν ἐπήλυδας ἀποδόσθαι, Κορινθίους δὲ δήσαντας ἔχειν ἕως ἂν ἄλλο τι δόξῃ.

In subsection 3, the bolded phrase is reversed in Jowett. That only works if you happen to have a written map with all the place names marked on it – or if the landmark has been torn down. Which is how things were in Jowett’s time. Thucydides’ audience knows where the temple of Apollo is, and Mr. T uses that to mark where the mouth of the gulf is.

Jowett also completely misses the phrase about the Korinthians getting men for the ships while he does translate the one for the Kerkyraeans in subsection 4. And he drops the phrase in subsection 3 about getting the new ships ready for sailing; he concentrates on repairs to the old ships.

Thucydides has a spoiler at the start of subsection 5 that Jowett once again transposes later in the sentence.

Jowett adds a phrase to subsection 5 about “forming line” which is not in Thucydides. Smith also has it in the Loeb version. It is at the end of subsection 4, another case of transposition.

At a party, one of the guests asked another who was Russian, what translation of Tolstoy the latter would recommend. The Russian said why would I read a translation when I can read Russian.

If you want to see what the writer really said, you need to be able to read the source document. A translation will never do it. Possibly not even some of those critical editions, which may be more concerned with where the text came from that with what it means.

21st Century Classical Greek -- conditional seven

Book I section 28.  This is kind of long but first check out how much you recognize, and then I’ll get into the two bolded bits.

ἐπειδὴ δὲ ἐπύθοντο οἱ Κερκυραῖοι τὴν παρασκευήν, ἐλθόντες ἐς Κόρινθον μετὰ Λακεδαιμονίων καὶ Σικυωνίων πρέσβεων, οὓς παρέλαβον, ἐκέλευον Κορινθίους τοὺς ἐν Ἐπιδάμνῳ φρουρούς τε καὶ οἰκήτορας ἀπάγειν, ὡς οὐ μετὸν αὐτοῖς Ἐπιδάμνου.

[2] εἰ δέ τι ἀντιποιοῦνται, δίκας ἤθελον δοῦναι ἐν Πελοποννήσῳ παρὰ πόλεσιν αἷς ἂν ἀμφότεροι ξυμβῶσιν: ὁποτέρων δ᾽ ἂν δικασθῇ εἶναι τὴν ἀποικίαν, τούτους κρατεῖν. ἤθελον δὲ καὶ τῷ ἐν Δελφοῖς μαντείῳ ἐπιτρέψαι.

[3] πόλεμον δὲ οὐκ εἴων ποιεῖν: εἰ δὲ μή, καὶ αὐτοὶ ἀναγκασθήσεσθαι ἔφασαν, ἐκείνων βιαζομένων, φίλους ποιεῖσθαι οὓς οὐ βούλονται ἑτέρους τῶν νῦν ὄντων μᾶλλον ὠφελίας ἕνεκα.

[4] οἱ δὲ Κορίνθιοι ἀπεκρίναντο αὐτοῖς, ἢν τάς τε ναῦς καὶ τοὺς βαρβάρους ἀπὸ Ἐπιδάμνου ἀπαγάγωσι, βουλεύσεσθαι: πρότερον δ᾽ οὐ καλῶς ἔχειν τοὺς μὲν πολιορκεῖσθαι, αὐτοὺς δὲ δικάζεσθαι.

[5] Κερκυραῖοι δὲ ἀντέλεγον, ἢν καὶ ἐκεῖνοι τοὺς ἐν Ἐπιδάμνῳ ἀπαγάγωσι, ποιήσειν ταῦτα: ἑτοῖμοι δὲ εἶναι καὶ ὥστε ἀμφοτέρους μένειν κατὰ χώραν, σπονδὰς δὲ ποιήσασθαι ἕως ἂν ἡ δίκη γένηται.

Subsection 2 is a classic conditional with both protasis and apodosis. 

The protasis uses a conjugated progressive conceptual indicative verb but not in executive voice; it’s in base voice. This is something the Kerkyraeans don’t want to hear about, and it hasn’t happened yet, so why would it not use imperfective conceptual?

The apodosis does not have an, it is ithelon dounai, the Kerkyraeans were willing to submit the case to a court. The conjugated verb is in progressive eventive indicative executive voice. This would be a deliberate act.

The complement of ithelon is verb is an impersonal gerundive but although it is something that has not happened yet, it is in imperfective eventive in executive voice.

This is another terrific example of how the tense structure creates cognitive dissonance. But even aspectually, it looks a little strange.

The point of the apodosis seems to be, “any time you’re ready, this is what we’ll do.” And the i.g. expresses the action they are going to do once it becomes due and owing (i.g.).

This conditional seems to fall into Goodwin’s category of a supposition with no implications about the result. So the Kerkyraeans are just running this up the flagpole to see who salutes.

The two uses of an later in the subsection are both “such X as [happens]” but they are more than that; they point to a change of focus. I’ll give some lessons on this later but the point is, in the first place, that the Kerkyraeans call on the Korinthians to agree to some other of the Peloponnesian polises to judge the case, and the Kerkyraeans agree to such judgment as those other of the Peloponnesian polises hand down.

In subsection 5, notice:

…καὶ ὥστε ἀμφοτέρους μένειν κατὰ χώραν…

Months ago I pointed out that Goodwin wants this to be an expressed condition to which the material shows the result. It’s not what we have here. The truce and decision-making are not conditional upon everybody staying where they are. This hoste clause is just one option for what to do while settling the case without going to war.

So here’s another gap in Goodwin which hasn’t been documented either

a) because people’s brains were too full of useless categories to pick it out;

b) because no prior scholar documented it and nobody was willing to stick their necks out; or

c) because people saw it through the eyes of what had already been written and failed to see that it was a different thing altogether, something I call “polarized brain cells”.

Gibbon -- the urban legend, pt. 13

In this chapter, Gibbon starts out with his tabloid trash again. You do not get to be dux in a Roman province without training hard for 40 years and you don't get to be named chief of the elite cavalry by the emperor, in the environment of the empire at this time, without substantial patronage. The idea of the little slave boy that rose to be emperor is one of those popular urban legends about leaders, and it suits what Eutropius kept saying, Romans overcome their problems. So it's a theme, not a truth; the technical term is that Eutropius is tendentious, and writes to suit his tendency.

Gibbon sneers at Diocletian because he's not the stuff Gibbon would make a hero of.

With a plague devastating Rome to the tune of 2,000 people a day, Diocletian decided to make sure disorder did not get out of hand, and sent in Maximian who was nothing if he was not a soldier. But Maximian's career took a downturn about 290 CE and he fell afoul of Constantine's rising star, eventually committing suicide on the latter's prompting.

Diocletian lost Britain, a major source of silver and tin. The Roman lifestyle in Britain carried on for about another century in high density populations, but when the port of London was abandoned, traders hesitated to go the long way to the Cornish ports and imports slowed down. A hundred years later the Saxons re-developed London starting at Aldwich, and traded all around the eastern part of the island. Contrary to the preferred story of the later Victorians, their Germanic relatives did not take over a deserted island. The high percentage of Celtic DNA even in London argues against that, and in the 400s Irish priests restored learning to Europe. Of course, Gibbon would ignore this, sharing the English prejudice against the Irish, all the more so as this was a Catholic revival. St. Columba of Ireland worshipped according to the Welsh rite. 

Finally, Diocletion split the empire. You can't say there was no going back after that. There was already no going back to anything, least of all to Gibbon's Roman Republic. Diocletian institutionalized abandonment of the west to the Germanic migrants, that's all. So you have to ask yourself, with the Vandals swanning around North Africa, what did the eastern empire do for grain?

Diocletian did two things about that. First, he increased irrigation, in the Levant, for one example. Ruling from Nicomedia, he had enough nearby grain production not to miss Egypt so much. Diocletian could do this because he confiscated uncultivated land from the rich and gave it to the government to operate. And he built reservoirs for bringing irrigation water to these lands.

https://scriptaclassica.org/index.php/sci/article/download/3399/2927

The second is, he created serfdom. That's basically what his coloni were. Serfs. After nationalizing land that the rich owned but did not cultivate, Diocletian not only needed to staff the agriculture, but also to stop all this nonsense about the peasantry rising from their class through patronage or whatever, and eventually being rich enough for a seat in the senate or on the throne.

After Diocletian, the marginal areas where he established irrigated fields were again abandoned. From 330 CE on, taxes paid in kind from Asia (Minor) and Bithynia would have gone to the eastern empire while Rome bought grain from the Vandals. And Diocletian's capital, Nicomedia, was already part of a large trade region, including fertile areas in the east, that had been paying taxes in kind for 200 years. Constantine's shift to Byzantium made transportation of grain from these regions easier because it came across the Black Sea, not across roads threatened by migrants.

https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/bitstream/handle/10036/3713/GuneyH_TPC.pdf?sequence=3&isAllowed=y

It's not enough to say that Diocletian wanted at least part of the empire to not be invaded every few years. There would have been no Constantinople, except that Diocletian knew something about logistics, such as that his eastern domain could not survive without food. The pre-existing tax-in-kind setup was perfect to feed his empire.

What's more, this is why Gibbon is wrong about eunuchs. Everybody who talks about eunuchs says the same thing: they have no motive for grabbing gold because they have no heirs. Well, they have no genetic heirs, but can they make a will and testament? And if they can and do bequeath their gold to somebody, a) who better than the government and b) why wouldn't the government say no, you can't do that, it's ours, if they did bequeath it to somebody else. China was different; Cao Cao was not a eunuch, but he was adopted by a eunuch of the name of Cao, and that got him into the upper echelons of China's court. 

But in the Roman world, a will could be set aside because it did not exist on the grounds of piety, and there is nobody who owes piety to a eunuch, nor could siblings get more than 1/4 of the amount in the will if they challenged it.

https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/secondary/SMIGRA*/Testamentum.html

So whatever the Roman government paid to eunuchs who were either officials or non-slave servants, it came back to the government, which can't be said of the possessions of people who can have children. Them you have to grind it out of with taxation, and that is exactly what Diocletian and those after him did.

And then again, there's that logistics thing. Eunuchs have no genetic families to feed. The grain coming into Nicomedia or Constantinople went 1) to the throne; 2) to the court, many of whom were eunuch officials or servants; 3) to paying customers like merchants, who earned the money by trading from the Black Sea across the Mediterranean, and who also employed eunuchs; 4) to the coloni who raised the grain and other food.

So basically, eunuchs are a benefit not a drag, and the government doesn't care how much gold its eunuchs pile up because all it has to do is make laws to confiscate it when they die. 

And never underestimate greed. Though they have it but for their lifetimes, people who have no genetic heirs will not avoid accumulating wealth because of that. It's the cha-ching factor, the odometer rollover factor. Although at some point it becomes simply a number instead of the ability to do what you want, the lack of genetic heirs does not stop people from accumulating wealth. Modern examples include David Geffen, Giorgio Armani, the founder of Aldi markets who bought out the American Giant food stores, and so on. In a past age or in some parts of modern society, people may acquire wealth for their children, but it's not universal. It probably never has been.

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21st Century Classical Greek -- conditional six

Book I section 27.  This is a good time to talk about “false friends”.

Κορίνθιοι δ᾽, ὡς αὐτοῖς ἐκ τῆς Ἐπιδάμνου ἦλθον ἄγγελοι ὅτι πολιορκοῦνται, παρεσκευάζοντο στρατείαν, καὶ ἅμα ἀποικίαν ἐς τὴν Ἐπίδαμνον ἐκήρυσσον ἐπὶ τῇ ἴσῃ καὶ ὁμοίᾳ τὸν βουλόμενον ἰέναι: εἰ δέ τις τὸ παραυτίκα μὲν μὴ ἐθέλει ξυμπλεῖν, μετέχειν δὲ βούλεται τῆς ἀποικίας, πεντήκοντα δραχμὰς καταθέντα Κορινθίας μένειν. ἦσαν δὲ καὶ οἱ πλέοντες πολλοὶ καὶ οἱ τἀργύριον καταβάλλοντες.

[2] ἐδεήθησαν δὲ καὶ τῶν Μεγαρέων ναυσὶ σφᾶς ξυμπροπέμψαι, εἰ ἄρα κωλύοιντο ὑπὸ Κερκυραίων πλεῖν: οἱ δὲ παρεσκευάζοντο αὐτοῖς ὀκτὼ ναυσὶ ξυμπλεῖν, καὶ Παλῆς Κεφαλλήνων τέσσαρσιν. καὶ Ἐπιδαυρίων ἐδεήθησαν, οἳ παρέσχον πέντε, Ἑρμιονῆς δὲ μίαν καὶ Τροιζήνιοι δύο, Λευκάδιοι δὲ δέκα καὶ Ἀμπρακιῶται ὀκτώ. Θηβαίους δὲ χρήματα ᾔτησαν καὶ Φλειασίους, Ἠλείους δὲ ναῦς τε κενὰς καὶ χρήματα. αὐτῶν δὲ Κορινθίων νῆες παρεσκευάζοντο τριάκοντα καὶ τρισχίλιοι ὁπλῖται..

Your first reaction to the bolded word in subsection 1 was probably “angels? What – wait, what?”

When I took French in high school back in the dark ages, our teacher made a point of talking to us about “false friends”, words that look familiar but don’t mean what they mean in English. It’s kind of like N’Oleans beignets being like doughnuts, and French beignets being more like fritters.

It’s not just French and English however; some words in French have look-alikes with widely different meanings in Spanish. And a bilet in Russian might be a pawn ticket, instead of a ticket to an event, a love letter, or a formal invitation.

Aggeloi are messengers and from this everything else follows.

If you are reading Greek and you come across something that looks familiar from English, but you don’t know why it’s there because the meaning works out really strange, you are probably looking at a false friend. Always check the lexicon.

If you didn’t already learn παρασκευάζω, learn it now.

In subsection 1

…εἰ δέ τις τὸ παραυτίκα μὲν μὴ ἐθέλει ξυμπλεῖν,…

lies across the boundary between a reported question and the protasis of a conditional. Notice the progressive indicative which means the people making the proclamation believed that some Korinthians would not be willing to serve in the actual army but would want to participate in some other way.

If we continue to think of this as “present tense”, we have a present tense for a future action. As a progressive conceptual, however, it expresses the situation of the people who want to go or not. Notice that the expressed condition is not wanting to go; wanting to go has already been addressed by the proclamation.

In subsection 2 we have:

…εἰ ἄρα κωλύοιντο ὑπὸ Κερκυραίων πλεῖν…

If we look at this as a conditional, the protasis has an epistemic, meaning that the Korinthians didn’t really believe the Kerkyraeans would sail out to hinder them. The hupo kerkyraion might make you think it’s ergative, but the verb is not in executive voice. It’s also in progressive aspect, despite referring to a future action, and all the ergatives we have seen used an intransitive imperfective eventive.

Knitting -- using up yarn

So I have yarn from a project to make myself some fine-gauge cotton sweaters for warm weather, and turtlenecks to wear under them in cool weather. And I had leftovers from the ones I already made, so I did this:

Yes, the patterns are identical. Both of them work pretty well, but the one with the tan background (the seller calls it parchment) shows all the subordinate colors better IMHO. (p,s, it's a sweater, I photo'd the back to make clear that the patterns are the same.) The black, brown, navy and dark green don't show well against the hollyberry background. On the other hand, I was going to use a sort of pale lilac for one of the light colors and it was invisible with the tan so I used something else.

The star motif is my creation; the other motif is from Mary McGregor's publication of the Robert Williamson 1920s Fair Isle motifs that he collected from the women he sold yarn and things to.

I used the tan sweater to practice Continental hold. You need it in Fair Isle designs to hold one of the colors, usually the non-background color. But when I tried to purl in only one color using Continental, my left hand always cramped up. I'm much better at it now.

I wore the red jumper to go to and from the auto shop on a day when it was 40s and strong breezes. I often use the tan sweater to warm my feet if I decide not to wear socks. I want to unravel the neck rib and add some rows to it that the jumper has. But I have other leftovers to use up.

The persistence of bad information

So there's a fun video on Youtube about how Krakatoa destroyed the world in 535 CE. Unfortunately, the video was made in 1999 and we have learned a lot since then, so it becomes just another urban legend. 

The eruption definitely happened and it definitely was as severe as they say. Its results no doubt included the oldest recorded episode of bubonic plague. But we learned in, for example, 2012, that syphilis existed in Pompeii before the Vesuvius eruption, and in England in the 1200s CE. The Columbian origin of syphilis was invented by Jean Astruc in the 1700s. His other claim to infamy is inventing Documentary Hypothesis, which has a zero probability of being true due to false facts and fallacies of logic. You can read about that here. So people may have been getting bubonic plague for centuries, it's just that its symptoms were not recorded or at least not recorded well enough to recognize. 

One of the pieces of information used in the video is the Grail story from France, to suggest that England was devastated. The Grail story cited is from the 1200s CE French Vulgate cycle. All 8 volumes are available in facsimile on Internet Archive, in the early French in which they were written. Is it reliable?

If this were a record of an oral tradition, it would have examples of what Axel Olrik documented in Principles for Oral Narrative Research, about which I wrote here. One of Olrik’s findings is that oral traditions always begin from a cultural or historical reality. Written material – not so much. There are examples of Olrik's principles in the Jewish Torah, the Mahabharata, the Popul Vuh, the Romance of Three Kingdoms, as well as Africa's Mwindo epic and Sumerian mythology, Greek mythology and the fairy tales collected by the Grimm brothers.

The French Vulgate starts out as a representation of part of Christian history. By the 1200s, it could have copied from older written works. It could also contain elements of French Christian oral tradition. The repeated sets of threes at the start of the first volume point that way; so do the repeated sets of threes at the start of the Chinese Romance of Three Kingdoms.

But the Vulgate brings in a character missing from the Welsh Triads with their references to Arthur’s court. Lancelot has no origin in the Triads. He is in the Vulgate so as to be the greatest knight in the world in the material sense, only to be overthrown by his son Galahad who is greater in a moral sense. The point of Galahad’s superiority is that he gets to see the Grail, a Christian concept. There’s more resemblance in this to the Aeneid, a work invented in writing by Vergil to connect the Aeneas of the Iliad’s Troy, with Roman Romulus and Remus, and their political heir Augustus.  Whatever oral elements exist in the Vulgate, they represent a) examples of Olrik's principles and therefore they are not culture-specific; b) French Christian culture not British Christian culture; and c) medieval culture, not the culture of 7 centuries earlier. So we can't use the French Vulgate as evidence for the supposed destruction of British and Irish culture in the 500s CE, after which the Anglo-Saxons took over.

What evidence exists for a disaster in Britain in the 500s CE? How do we identify a population collapse or bottleneck? One way is through DNA. For example, the Jewish and Samaritan kohens who are descended in the male line from Aharon, the brother of Moshe, really do have a solid male DNA relationship that is unique. There is no such DNA evidence for Levites not descended from Aharon. The reason is easy to see. Kohens cannot marry widows or divorcees, meaning that the children of their wives are their children. The other Levites could have married widows or divorcees who were pregnant by their former husbands, no matter what precautions were taken.

At the time of filming, and even more so when Keys was doing his research, DNA analysis was in its infancy. The human genome project started in 1990 and was completed in 2003. Only after that could the data be analyzed to identify human populations and their migrations. The facts show that in London, up to 50% of men have Y-chromosome DNA that is Celtic, and of course it is better than 75% in Ireland. That means a population of Celtic males from west (with higher percentages) to southeast. The old supposition that in the 500s, the Anglo-Saxons nearly wiped out the British, who retreated to Wales, doesn’t hold water. The percentage is lower in the east due to immigration, but it should be much closer to zero if the Celtic population there was wiped out.

In the east of England, in the Anglo-Saxon settlements, there are also Celtic material remains. It’s either a sign of peaceful trade or of peaceful coexistence. The latter leads to the lower but well above zero percentage of male Celtic DNA in London.

What probably happened was that British settlement habits were decentralized. You’ll understand this better when I tell you that in the U.S. in 1800, 95% of residents were rural, not urban. That’s 14 centuries after the Roman withdrawal from Britain, at a time when the U.S. was putting up monumental buildings for our new government.

In Britain in the 500s CE, centers included Roman fortifications, but they were visited by traders more than they were settled by the British, and the settlers had no reason to stay once the Romans withdrew. Bath as a center of Roman culture did not long survive the Roman withdrawal, showing that the British had no nostalgia for Roman culture and did not consider centralization important even after a couple of centuries of experience. Nor did they acquire the habit of monumental building from the Romans; they got it from Christianity. The Canterbury cathedral was built in 507 – before the “British devastation” while the Anglo-Saxons were still mostly pagan.

The "Celts being wiped out" urban legend no doubt has a number of roots. One is Augustine's mission to Christianize the Anglo-Saxons. Britain and Ireland had been Christian for a century or so, but the Saxons in Germany remained pagan until Charlemagne converted them by force. 

It’s not possible that Pope Gregory didn’t know about the Christians in Britain, Ireland and Scotland. Sending Augustine to convert the Anglo-Saxons does not require that the British had been wiped out. They were already Christian and Gregory didn’t have to worry about them, unless he objected to them not forcing conversion on the Anglo-Saxons. Whoever started the myth of “Celts being wiped out,” however, all the scribes in England had to stick to that story. 

That myth stroked the egos of the Victorians, who were ruled by Germans. England was bigoted against Catholicism in general and the Irish in particular. It would have been an inconvenient truth that at the same time as Augustine's mission to England, Irish (and Scots) missions to Europe brought with them copies of Christian texts that had survived in Ireland but disappeared from Europe during the pagan invasions. These missions went on for half a century after the "catastrophe" supposedly wiped out pre-Saxon culture in the British Isles. Travel requires a reliable source of food at every point along the road; it's called logistics, and missions don't work in a devastated landscape that can't support its own inhabitants, in the same way as Napoleon's forces dwindled to relatively nothing on the retreat from Moscow over land subjected to a "scorched earth" policy.

There’s also material evidence of population in Britain. Before the Anglo-Saxons revived London as a port, trade was still coming in at Cornwall, the most important Celtic port on the island, with access to the western mines. Through this port, no doubt, came the African red slip ware found in British sites that date to the time that the Celts supposedly fled to the Welsh mountains. ARSW was a luxury product. Somebody had the money to buy it in the middle of the "catastrophe". This was an opening for the bubonic plague to reach England from Byzantium. Not from Europe, where the Roman Empire was in freefall. From Africa; the plague started in Ethiopia.

Since the Celts were not wiped out, there’s no reason to suppose that plague reached the British Isles during the “catastrophe”. We’ll need actual plague victims for that. The French Vulgate claims of devastation are an exaggeration, possibly modeled on the jeremiads in the Pentateuch. France itself didn’t undergo devastation.

The video tries to claim that France and Spain formed at this time due to the effects of the catastrophe. What we currently know about France and Spain of the 500s supports no such claim. The Frankish kingdom under the Merovingians had its capital at Paris at this time. There is no chronological coordination between their decline and the Krakatoa eruption, and in any case the Capetians were there to take up the slack. Likewise in Spain the Arian Visigothic kingdoms were in full swing. They tried to invade Africa, although they failed. 

The video ignores China except to say they were glad to see the Avars migrate west and bother somebody else (Byzantium). The final collapse of the Han Dynasty occurred in the 380s CE, over a century before the eruption. If the "catastrophe" was as bad as Keys wants us to think, China might have stayed split into the Northern and Southern Dynasties for 300 years. It didn't. The Mandate of Heaven passed, and the Sui Dynasty formed by the 590s CE. It was a natural and normal event captured in the aphorism at the start of the Romance of Three Kingdoms: 话说天下大势，分久必合，合久必分,the general trend is that what is divided tends to unite; once united, it tends to divide.

The video never mentions India, which is a hell of a lot closer to Krakatoa than England. The decline at the end of the Gupta period coordinates with the attacks of the Alchon Huns and the way they damaged trade outside the subcontinent. Buddhism suffered a decline due to persecution. There was also a horrible flood -- not after the desiccation caused by the eruption, but almost at the time the eruption occurred -- in the Bihar region that was a mainstay of the Gupta empire. If nobody has looked for evidence of the Krakatoa eruption in India, it's possibly because there are strong reasons for why the Guptas fell, independent of the eruption.

Ignoring India is an example of the fallacy of sampling bias. When you commit sampling bias, you fail the Test of Occam's Razor and your conclusions cannot be accepted.

Sure, there is evidence of volcanic eruptions. There is evidence in Ireland of the Thera eruption of 1628 BCE that devastated Minoan culture on Thera and Palaikastro, which were some 160 kilometers apart. (Ireland is over 4,000 kilometers from Thera.) There could be deposits from an eruption of the 530s CE – but not of Krakatoa.

What did happen, then? Well, look at the fact that two of the biggest cities in the world suffered depopulation at the time. But you can't blame it all on Krakatoa. Keys did not know about Ilopango, in El Salvador, which was much closer to Teotihuacan than Krakatoa was. The data on Ilopango mostly was published after 2000. Ilopango would have had a much worse effect on Teotihuacan than Krakatoa, but Keys wouldn't have known about that, nor would it have been reflected in the video. There is, however, a different Youtube video that covers it. 

If there's ash in Ireland from 535 CE give or take, it is more likely to have an Ilopango chemical signature than a Krakatoa one, although El Salvador is almost twice as far from Ireland as Thera is. Probably it was darker or the sunsets were redder and the temperatures cooler than before the two eruptions, more so than what happened in the 1880s after the smaller Krakatoa eruption. But it didn’t wipe out the Celts.

So there's a double reason why the 500s CE was such a bad time in human history, but it doesn't add up to global collapse of civilization. Keys could only claim what he did because of something I talk about on my Gibbon thread. You always have to look at the provenance of the information and then see if there's later information available. If you don't, you're going to fall for claims that have been overturned, or even fall for an urban legend that you can't disbelieve because you don't know enough.