21st Century Classical Greek -- the rest of the structure

So I said that Thucydides goes back and forth between two topics. Is there a pattern?

Here’s the markup of the structure of the first clause. Subject – verb – object. Let’s look at the references to Subject and object.

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.

Now look at akmazontes. I can’t relate it to the original subject or to allo Hellinikon to any of the previous verbal forms. The gerundive is the predicate of isan and to allo is the object of horon. What’s more, the subject of isan is something else in the sentence.

So now I’ll mark that subject, amfoteroi. You know what grammar isan is, so you know that this is an equational clause. Hoti starts a new clause, with its own subject.

At the end, when it goes back to Thucydides’ perception of the alliances, it refers to Hellenes. Now, aren’t all the Greeks Hellenes? Well, yes, and it’s also true that Athins and Attika were on Peloponnesian soil. What Thucydides has in mind are a) the Peloponnesian treaty of which Athins was a member; and b) the fact referred to later (it’s part of the cause of the war) that some polises had not signed the treaty.

Sometimes there’s almost as much information in what Thucydides doesn’t say, as in what he does say.

Two high-frequency grammar points in this subsection.

The -on case phrase is a noun modifying another noun. Every language does this. It’s called s’mikhut (construct state) in Hebrew and idafa in Arabic (ezafe in Persian).

After the secondary subject amfoteroi is a phrase in -ois case. This is the instrumental case for an inanimate object. The instrumental of an animate object is hupo plus the -on case; this also marks an agent in a structure none of the old grammars cover and which I will come to later.