Possibly the most important reason
for understanding aspect in classical Greek, is that it’s what the Greeks of
Thucydides’ time understood from what he wrote.
Thucydides did not write in a
vacuum. When he uses grammar, he is copying what he learned in immersion, heard
in public and in private, in the agora and the courthouse and the council
chamber. Sure, he had to learn grammar when he was growing up, as part of the trivium.
But he had the full range of expression at his fingertips, 24/7, from infancy.
Contrast that with the scholars of past times who didn’t start on Greek until
they were nearly 10 years old, spending a few hours a week in among half a
dozen other subjects and other school activities, and then just possibly going
on to work with the desperately few survivors of what we know was a much larger
corpus in what by then was a dead language, having nothing to do with their
social lives.
The result is that what the scholars
put into their papers and their grammars is based on less data and less
experience than Thucydides had to work with. Naturally the lack of data produced inaccuracies
and gaps in every work on the grammar of Classical Greek. I will also point out
signs that the post-Renaissance grammarians ignored data that their
predecessors ignored, as well as data that disagreed with their claims.
Thucydides wrote for his own class,
the class with a liberal education in the trivium and maybe the quadrivium. He had
to use grammar that presented him as an educated man, not a clod. He also had
to use language people understood, not make things up or torture the grammar
for effect. Thucydides didn’t have time to make up his own grammar. He was
active in the events he recorded. He even came down with the plague like so
many other Athenians, although he recovered, unlike Pericles. Using verbs
aspectually, not according to tense, was natural to him. He uses perfective
aspect for poetic works, not because those works are the products of past
times, but because once they were written, they became fixed in the culture
instead of being rewritten over and over. And he didn’t have to explain using “present
tense” for something that happened before he was born, because he used it for
situations and everybody in his audience understood that.
It’s easy to dismiss the idea of
aspectual verbs in classical Greek as nutty, unless you know that 21st
century scholars of Greek in Christian scripture realize that it has aspectual features.
And that ditching the half-tense, half-aspect description of Greek verbs in
favor of a completely aspectual description wipes out a lot of notes in William
Goodwin’s old-fashioned grammar, notes that nearly contradict the main points
he inherited from his sources. For example, we won’t have to explain why “aorist
tense” is used for imperatives which clearly envision future action; our
imperfective aspect is the default verb form and an imperative in any other
aspect will have special nuances.
So I’m not stepping onto uncharted
ground here. I’m pushing a concept to its limit, the way I did with Biblical
Hebrew. And it will buy you understanding of Thucydides’ material, without
stressing your memory as much as Goodwin would, because I can set down some
objective definitions and show how they relate to Thucydides’ meaning.
If you want Goodwin to look at when
I refer to it, you can bookmark or download it here:
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