21st Century Classical Greek -- causative and absolute

We’re working over the first subsection of Thucydides to a fair-thee-well because there’s lots of grammar in it and in particular, because it lets me destroy stuff in the old grammars. The old grammarians were hypnotized by verb morphology and virtually ignored context, and they came up with some really weird concepts as a result.

The gerundive kathistamenou in this subsection lets me pound on two of them.

Θουκυδίδης Ἀθηναῖος ξυνέγραψε τὸν πόλεμον τῶν Πελοποννησίων καὶ Ἀθηναίων, ὡς ἐπολέμησαν πρὸς ἀλλήλους, ἀρξάμενος εὐθὺς καθισταμένου καὶ ἐλπίσας μέγαν τε ἔσεσθαι καὶ ἀξιολογώτατον τῶν προγεγενημένων, τεκμαιρόμενος ὅτι ἀκμάζοντές τε ᾖσαν ἐς αὐτὸν ἀμφότεροι παρασκευῇ τῇ πάσῃ καὶ τὸ ἄλλο Ἑλληνικὸν ὁρῶν ξυνιστάμενον πρὸς ἑκατέρους, τὸ μὲν εὐθύς, τὸ δὲ καὶ διανοούμενον.

When you are in Perseus, and you click on this word, the word tool tells you it is causative.

What is being caused by the wars being a settled thing?

Nothing.

Unless you count the point when Thucydides decided to start writing.

Which is arksamenos, with “Thucydides” for its antecedent. What’s the antecedent of kathistamenou?

There isn’t one.  There’s no substantive in “genitive” singular for kathistamenou to hang from.

But if you click on euthus, the Word Tool will tell you that with a genitive gerundive, it means just as that action happens.

Now look at the LSJ entry for kathistimi.  Is “bring down” causative? No, it’s simply transitive. Is “set up” causative? It’s transitive. What about “make”, “reckon”, “get”? Nope.

Causative means to cause the execution of some action, not to execute it. The contexts cited in LSJ are not long enough to support the notion of causality. If we get to something that the word tool marks as causative, and I think the context supports that nuance, I’ll let you know.

So even if you were trying to think of kathistamenou as a genitive absolute, this dictionary entry shows you that the timing is in euthus, not in the gerundive, all the more so as the gerundive is a progressive conceptual, not a progressive eventive.

Every single grammarian of Greek has a different definition for “genitive absolute”, and one of them (Gildersleeve) copies from his own Latin grammar.  What’s more, the most comprehensible definition is in Allen and Greenough’s Latin grammar, but the Greek grammars of Smyth, Farrar, and Gildersleeve don’t agree with A&G or with each other. That’s a “fuzzy” definition. There is no objective proof that something exists unless everybody agrees on the definition of what that something is.

The next time I refer to the absolute, I will give you more information on why the absolute doesn’t exist.