21st Century Classical Greek -- reflexive pronouns

In your wildest dreams, you never suspected it would take over 4 months to go through one subsection of Thucydides. Finally we are going to move on. Our next review is going to be lesson 39 and by then we will change some more terminology; it will eventually let us ignore several pages of Goodwin.

For now, take subsection 2 of section 1, Book I of Thucydides and show yourself how much you’ve learned.

κίνησις γὰρ αὕτη μεγίστη δὴ τοῖς Ἕλλησιν ἐγένετο καὶ μέρει τινὶ τῶν βαρβάρων, ὡς δὲ εἰπεῖν καὶ ἐπὶ πλεῖστον ἀνθρώπων.

So review this for what you already know:

1)         The syntax particle gar.

2)         The dative plural definite article tois, which means hellisin is dative plural.

3)         egeneto, the imperfective eventive base voice of gignomai. We can’t have executive voice here; gignomai doesn’t have one and the alternative is strict intransitivity. In the imperfective, the old grammars called this voice “middle” and defined it as reflexive. An inanimate object like kinisis can’t act reflexively.

4)         kai

5)         ton barbaron, genitive plural.

6)         hos, the relative conjunction.

7)         anthropon, genitive plural.

8)         eipein, an impersonal gerundive in imperfective eventive, executive voice.

The phrase hos de eipein means “that is to say.” The executive i.g. is used of an event which happens deliberately but cannot be pinned down to any specific person saying it, so you can’t even use a personal gerundive which requires an antecedent to match in number and gender.

Now, if you know some Greek already, you probably looked at auti and thought of a reflexive pronoun, autos. Go to White, page 235, sections 760 and 761, and memorize the reflexive and reciprocal pronouns. You will see that the reciprocal already occurred in subsection 1.

Here’s a summary of White’s description of how to use autos.

1.                  Autos o X is “X himself” plus whatever he did: “X himself executed the prisoners” as opposed to somebody else doing it. Not X executing himself (committing suicide).

2.                  However, o autos X is “the same X” or “the X I just mentioned” plus the predicate, as opposed to somebody else who might have taken the predicate action.

3.                  A 1^st singular verb plus autos in some gender is “I myself did X.”

4.                  Autos in an oblique case (not nominative) is the object pronoun or a demonstrative, auton is “them, that”.

In this subsection auti megisti is “the greatest”, with the emphasis on “the”.

But it is not reflexive. So put that to bed.

The structure of this sentence is not straight SVO.

1.                  After the S (which is what?) comes a phrase describing the S, an appositive.

2.                  After the V (which is what?) comes kai plus a new noun phrase in dative just like the end of the appositive, which means that the appositive also applies to this noun phrasse.

3.                  Hos starts an idiom, which is followed by kai again, meaning that the end of the sentence is also covered by the appositive.