21st Century Classical Greek -- parsing a section

So our first subsection is kind of long and into it, Thucydides packs why he did what he did. The first clause is pretty straightforward. Subject – verb – object. The object is even in the -ous case formerly known as accusative – but it drives the meaning of the verb in that context. When you look at lexicon entries, you have to pay attention to case indications or you may choose the wrong subentry and get the wrong verb meaning. This is part of what I call “knowing the verb”.

So the hos that comes after the comma, what does that relate to? Look up the case in the word tool if you don’t remember.

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.

Remember, you will often have to ignore the pink bar in the Word Tool. In this case, we’re going to parse through things. We’re going to ignore the pink bar as coming only from Autenreith. Those voters must have been fans of his.

Both of the top selections want hos to be in the -ous case, which means it ought to relate to ton polemon. But both of them also want it to be plural, and ton polemon is singular. So we can’t reconcile the grammar in those cases.

That leaves us with choice 3. Section A wants it to be an adverb of manner, and we’re not talking about the manner of doing something in this phrase, we’re giving facts about the war. Section B lets us use it as a conjunction to relate a fact to something else. So that’s what we want, “which they fought against each other.”

Why would Thucydides say “which they fought against each other” when he has named only two combatants? Well, remember your history. Thucydides was the child or grandchild of men who fought in the Persian War, which the Peloponnesians and Athinaians fought against the Persians. Thucydides knows that everybody in his audience knows about this war. So after bringing these two divisions of Greeks up, he says “I’m going to talk, not about that old war, but about the one they fought against each other.”

Next we have arksamenos and I said before that being in the same gender and number as Thucydides, this refers back to him. This is one of those personal gerundives that carry action as a reference, a sort of description.

Jump to kai, which is one of our syntax markers and elpisas again refers back to Thucydides’ action. It even has an -ous case object, which is part of an anti-passive. The object refers back to ton polemon; so does aksiologotaton.

Akmazontes, being plural, refers back to the Peloponnesians and Athinaians who fought the war. Notice that it is executive voice, so this was deliberate stockpiling. Also notice that akmazontes is the predicate of isan, a progressive eventive; the stockpiling required several acquisitions. Triremes were expensive armaments, and they didn’t have deficit funding in those days.

Horon refers back to Thucydides, and its object is to allo Hellenikon, which is the antecedent for ksunistamenon, and then we have these alliances divided into two parts: euthus with men and dianooumenon with de.

I am not going to go over every subsection in this detail. What we learned from this subsection is:

1)         Thucydides may start out with SVO structure, but he hangs things off it in a specific order to get his ideas across.

2)         He carries subtext in text that may seem to be redundant. There may also seem to be missing subtext that you can only get if you know Greek history.

3)         The material skips back and forth between references to the subject and to the object. The case of words can help us figure out what each phrase refers to.