Batteaux and 'Battoe Men':...American Colonial...Logistics in Mountain Warfare

"The point is that the traditions of the Germans were kept alive by them, and that they later surfaced. They didn't drop out of the sky, and they didn't come from the Romans...."

Certainly that is Fiske's idea. But insofar as it pertains to free "German Tribes" in Britain before the Roman withdrawal, or to Gibbon in any way supporting such an "idea", it is nonsense.

Using enemies defeated in battle either as slaves or as soldiers, farmers, and so forth was a common practice, as was relocation.

The problem came when tribes trying to invade were offered land rather than battle, and were settled as buffers against the other fiercer tribes behind them.

Much earlier, the Athenian "police force" was Scythian slaves for example. Most moderns cannot even grasp the idea of a "police force" of slaves.

As a matter of fact, there were Scythian influences upon the Greeks and in reverse, but surely not mainly derived from the "police force".

If one is going to deal with such "likelihoods", if those Vandals you excavated from Gibbon were used in any way as soldiers in Britian, their descendants are more likely to have left with the Legions than to have stayed, and one should be talking about the influence of their "free institutions" not in Britain but on the continent.

Merely by the way, my objection is to your chronology and to the locale, and Germans, who were already an integral part of the Late Empire's military, hardly needed to "surface again", since in the later Empire they were quite apparent on all levels of society.

Which is why I mentioned the law against trousers in the East.

Who really "resurfaced" in the Greek East with Christianity, for example, were the non-ruling, un-Hellenized elements and their languages, such as Syriac and Coptic, and so forth.

Best regards. S&W R.I.P.

Frankly, you really don't know much about what you are talking about in this, as far as the Roman Empire or "Germans" are concerned, and I have no more time to instruct you.

You have an original and probing mind, but not enough deep, prolonged, and close study of the Germans or ancient Rome or the primary sources or the great secondary works to generalize, especially when following such a romantic idiot as Fiske and the like on the topic.

Your statement: "The East did not respond nearly as well to the spread of Latin as did the West."?—just for example.

Come now—there was no real attempt to spread it. Quite the reverse—the Roman upper classes were almost all active "Hellenizers" and spoke and read Greek fluently. Indeed, many of them wrote nothing else in the later period, when they wished to set something down for posterity, and many spoke their own Latin with considerable less facility than Greek, much as some Russian aristocrats spoke French mainly, and looked down upon their native tongue as the Vulgate.

As did a good deal of Southern Italy, which was Greek in origin, Sicily, and stray cities like Massilia. Even the first Cato who made a great show of being against the corruption of Greek letters could read Greek and did.

As did Hannibal.

In spite of this, Latin did make small inroads, as in law, centered for example at the Law School in Berytus. And the Greeks even later translated a bit of Ovid and Virgil strictly for their "literary" merit, a unique compliment as far as I know.

Plutarch actually looked into Latin at one point, and was impressed with some of its literary strengths, but of course, the Romans actually built their "literary" language by force of will on the Greek model, while retaining its basic grammar and vocabulary.

Later figures like Libanius, for example, never bothered and even fought the spread of Latin and Latin terms in law.

But as soon as the split between East and West was final and prolonged, and though the ruling elements still called themselves "Romaioi", Latin was one of the first things to fall by the wayside.

At any rate, some have quite rightly argued that in one sense Rome was just another Hellenistic successor state—a little like the Macedonians, who were also not Greek.

Time is never wasted reading Gibbon—which is really the history of what we now call the Byzantines. His faithful mule Lenain de Tillemont takes more effort, as does mastering the sources. You might also look into Mommsen and Seeck and A.H.M. Jones for starters.

On Gibbon himself, there is a book by Jordan, Gibbon and His Empire, which you might find interesting.

As for the Vikings and English tradition in "shipbuilding", your view is also contorted. Even the British often admit they were neither Europe's best "shipbuilders" or marine cannon makers—though for a long time they mastered the tactical use of what they had at sea, and still maintain that naval tradition to a degree.

If you had spoken of sea-faring and this tradition, as opposed to "ship-builidng", you'd have a point, but mainly through the Norman Conquest, not from Anglo-Saxons or Danes or Vikings left over on the mainland, and still eating pea soup in the Orkneys.

It is not so much that the place is an island—there are many island peoples who have no real or lasting interest in sea-faring. The important point is that it was an island always closely connected to the mainland in recent historical times. But I don't expect you to follow the distinction. You'd perhaps be surprised where by far the most impressive shipbuilding facilities in the New World were through the Seventeenth Century.

Best regards. S&W R.I.P.

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