Gibbon -- the urban legend; endgame

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

21st Century Classical Greek -- a bunch of idioms

Book I section 31.  This section gets us to some speech-making that is impoprtant for the grammar. Otherwise it’s quite straightforward. Notice a couple of idioms, orgi ferontes and genitai thesthai.

τὸν δ᾽ ἐνιαυτὸν πάντα τὸν μετὰ τὴν ναυμαχίαν καὶ τὸν ὕστερον οἱ Κορίνθιοι ὀργῇ φέροντες τὸν πρὸς Κερκυραίους πόλεμον ἐναυπηγοῦντο καὶ παρεσκευάζοντο τὰ κράτιστα νεῶν στόλον, ἔκ τε αὐτῆς Πελοποννήσου ἀγείροντες καὶ τῆς ἄλλης Ἑλλάδος ἐρέτας, μισθῷ πείθοντες.

[2] πυνθανόμενοι δὲ οἱ Κερκυραῖοι τὴν παρασκευὴν αὐτῶν ἐφοβοῦντο, καί (ἦσαν γὰρ οὐδενὸς Ἑλλήνων ἔνσπονδοι οὐδὲ ἐσεγράψαντο ἑαυτοὺς οὔτε ἐς τὰς Ἀθηναίων σπονδὰς οὔτε ἐς τὰς Λακεδαιμονίων) ἔδοξεν αὐτοῖς ἐλθοῦσιν ὡς τοὺς Ἀθηναίους ξυμμάχους γενέσθαι καὶ ὠφελίαν τινὰ πειρᾶσθαι ἀπ᾽ αὐτῶν εὑρίσκεσθαι.

[3] οἱ δὲ Κορίνθιοι πυθόμενοι ταῦτα ἦλθον καὶ αὐτοὶ ἐς τὰς Ἀθήνας πρεσβευσόμενοι, ὅπως μὴ σφίσι πρὸς τῷ Κερκυραίων ναυτικῷ καὶ τὸ αὐτῶν προσγενόμενον ἐμπόδιον γένηται θέσθαι τὸν πόλεμον ᾗ βούλονται.

[4] καταστάσης δὲ ἐκκλησίας ἐς ἀντιλογίαν ἦλθον, καὶ οἱ μὲν Κερκυραῖοι ἔλεξαν τοιάδε.

The verbs I bolded in subsections 2 and 3 are different versions of the same verb. Both are personal gerundives, in base voice of course. The first is progressive conceptual, the second is imperfective eventive. What’s the difference?

The Kerkyraeans knew perfectly well that they were in the given situation, belonging neither to the Hellenic nor the Athinaian treaty. This had been true, as we will see, for some time.

The Korinthians found out what the Kerkyraeans were doing, and decided to get their own licks in.

The imperfective in subsection 3 looks weird because not only is there no sigma in it, but it also drops a nu.

Jowett misses that kratista in subsection 1 is a superlative.

Notice the hopos clause in subsection 3.

ὅπως μὴ σφίσι πρὸς τῷ Κερκυραίων ναυτικῷ καὶ τὸ αὐτῶν προσγενόμενον ἐμπόδιον γένηται θέσθαι τὸν πόλεμον ᾗ βούλονται.

“…so that not against themselves on the part of the fleet of the Kerkyraeans and those of them happening to be an obstruction, would there happen the war that they had in prospect.”

Empodion is a problem on Perseus. In the online Middle Liddell, which is a later version, empodion clearly is an obstruction.

The purpose is to keep the Athinaians from joining the Kerkyraeans against the Korinthians.

21st Century Classical Greek -- cats and dogs 2

Book I section 30.  When you mark up everything you know in this section you’ll see how far you have come in nearly two years. Keep track of the emphasis of conjugated verbs compared to use of gerundives.

μετὰ δὲ τὴν ναυμαχίαν οἱ Κερκυραῖοι τροπαῖον στήσαντες ἐπὶ τῇ Λευκίμμῃ τῆς Κερκυραίας ἀκρωτηρίῳ τοὺς μὲν ἄλλους οὓς ἔλαβον αἰχμαλώτους ἀπέκτειναν, Κορινθίους δὲ δήσαντες εἶχον.

[2] ὕστερον δέ, ἐπειδὴ οἱ Κορίνθιοι καὶ οἱ ξύμμαχοι ἡσσημένοι ταῖς ναυσὶν ἀνεχώρησαν ἐπ᾽ οἴκου, τῆς θαλάσσης ἁπάσης ἐκράτουν τῆς κατ᾽ ἐκεῖνα τὰ χωρία οἱ Κερκυραῖοι, καὶ πλεύσαντες ἐς Λευκάδα τὴν Κορινθίων ἀποικίαν τῆς γῆς ἔτεμον καὶ Κυλλήνην τὸ Ἠλείων ἐπίνειον ἐνέπρησαν, ὅτι ναῦς καὶ χρήματα παρέσχον Κορινθίοις.

[3] τοῦ τε χρόνου τὸν πλεῖστον μετὰ τὴν ναυμαχίαν ἐπεκράτουν τῆς θαλάσσης καὶ τοὺς τῶν Κορινθίων ξυμμάχους ἐπιπλέοντες ἔφθειρον, μέχρι οὗ Κορίνθιοι περιιόντι τῷ θέρει πέμψαντες ναῦς καὶ στρατιάν, ἐπεὶ σφῶν οἱ ξύμμαχοι ἐπόνουν, ἐστρατοπεδεύοντο ἐπὶ Ἀκτίῳ καὶ περὶ τὸ Χειμέριον τῆς Θεσπρωτίδος φυλακῆς ἕνεκα τῆς τε Λευκάδος καὶ τῶν ἄλλων πόλεων ὅσαι σφίσι φίλιαι ἦσαν.

[4] ἀντεστρατοπεδεύοντο δὲ καὶ οἱ Κερκυραῖοι ἐπὶ τῇ Λευκίμμῃ ναυσί τε καὶ πεζῷ. ἐπέπλεον δὲ οὐδέτεροι ἀλλήλοις, ἀλλὰ τὸ θέρος τοῦτο ἀντικαθεζόμενοι χειμῶνος ἤδη ἀνεχώρησαν ἐπ᾽ οἴκου ἑκάτεροι.

Notice the names of two seasons in the last subsection, and look up the others.

Mekhri ou is not a negation, it means “until” or, with an -on case, “as far as”.

Estratopedeuonto means to make camp.       

Go to Wiktionary and learn κρατέω. There are two forms of it in this section; you have already seen others and you will see more so now is a good time to learn it. Notice that it is one of our contract verbs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thuc. 3.116 ἔαρ “spring”; Herodotus IV 42.3 φθινόπωρον “autumn”

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.

To the PDF

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.

To the PDF.