21st Century Classical Greek -- faino

I’m going to start section 2, subsection 1 here a) to give you a feeling of progress; b) for another test of what you already know and c) to have you memorize an important verb.

So mark this text up in your own special way to identify words you know.

φαίνεται γὰρ ἡ νῦν Ἑλλὰς καλουμένη οὐ πάλαι βεβαίως οἰκουμένη, ἀλλὰ μεταναστάσεις τε οὖσαι τὰ πρότερα καὶ ῥᾳδίως ἕκαστοι τὴν ἑαυτῶν ἀπολείποντες βιαζόμενοι ὑπό τινων αἰεὶ πλειόνων.

Learn nun as “now”, you will see it a lot.

Click on fainetai, look it up in Wiktionary, and learn the conjugation.

Thucydides uses versions of faino a lot to say that the evidence gives such-and-such an appearance.

The first problem with Jowett’s translation is that he ignores faino most of the time, so that Thucydides comes out as more assertive than he is. Thucydides’ audience comes from his own class and they may know as much about history as Thucydides does; he doesn’t want to antagonize them by basically saying “my way or the highway”.

It’s also possible that some of them contributed information; they would be offenced if  Thucydides said something that rejected their information. Mr. T is suggesting that he had alternative evidence so they don’t get mad at him.

Now for a poke at Goodwin. Remember he wanted you to use ou to negate adjectives that are specific. What is definite about ou palai ? It’s an adverb of time. Goodwin never discusses negation of adverbs. He probably thought ou applied to oikoumeni, and that’s what 3 of the 4 online translations show.

But to show that the region was inhabited in ancient times, Thucydides deals first with whether the inhabitants lived securely, using another adverb, bebaios, and we all know that adverbs can modify adverbs. So ou palai modifies bebaios, not oikoumeni.

In English, to avoid clumsy expression, we would say “It was, seemingly, not in ancient times that the land called Hellas was securely settled.” Thucydides tells us why not and ties it into his theme of I 1.3 about what small change previous wars were. In section 7 he turns to how things changed.

While Thucydides has been chunked into sections for time out of mind, he actually writes story arcs. This first one is about 6 sections long; there will be longer ones later. It’s perfectly reasonable that translators have missed the story arcs; they didn’t even catch the relationships between subsections much. They were too focused on morphology to look at context, and this promoted word-for-word substitution, the most error-prone method of translation of all time.

The first clause is in SVO order with the only definite verb being fainetai. Everybody knows about Hellas being the name of a place and having inhabitants, but Thucydides can’t get much more definite about these issues than a gerundive.

The second clause, after alla, also fails to pin down any migrations by using a conjugated verb. Thucydides gets the idea of migrations from the notion, which he will state explicitly later, that the “Herakleides” (AKA Dorians) took over the peninsula from the prior inhabitants.

We can’t translate this subsection into English without adding conjugated verbs. This should have been a sign that the gerundives had some equivalence to verbs, but none of the old grammars give them credit for replacing conjugated verbs. As a result, nobody tried to form an idea of why the material didn’t use conjugated verbs everywhere that English would. This is another example of how scholars weren’t really reading Greek, they were reading “Grenglish”.