21st Century Classical Greek -- base voice personal gerundives

There are three base voice personal gerundives in this subsection. Let’s pound home what these gerundives do.

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.

Nun … kaloumeni means “now called”. The Hellas in the middle is what the personal gerundive refers to.

This is part of a definite noun phrase, “the [region] now called Hellas.”

Notice that the timing derives from the context, that nun. The old grammars would not have called kaloumeni an “absolute” because it is in the -oi case, not an oblique case. However, they give no reason why only oblique cases could be termed absolutes. And as I already showed, things that might be absolutes don’t indicate timing because it’s present in the context, not the morphology.

As a progressive conceptual, kaloumeni means people being in the habit of calling a specific region Hellas.

And being in base voice, kaloumeni shows that the name was not deliberately adopted for the purpose of naming the region, which would be executive voice.

Oikoumeni refers to a non-deliberate settling of Hellas, as if people just spontaneously wandered into the region and settled there.

Now we have some wording which shows how the phrasing has to break out. Apoleipontes is an executive voice personal gerundive. Tin eauton apoleipontes means “each one his own [property] leaving.” Thucydides can’t be definite about any individual who did this, so he can’t use a conjugated verb.

Then biazomenoi, “constrained”, meaning nobody deliberately forced them out. In the next subseection Thucydides will talk about why people felt constrained to leave beyond the fact of tinon aiei pleionon showing up.

The entire phrase is ekastoi…biazomenoi upo, etc.

Remember, the only conjugated verb in this subsection is fainetai. All the other events, Thucydides refers to by description. He recognizes their modern effects, but he can’t conjugate his verb.

By the way, go to White, page 235, section 760 and if you didn’t already learn eautou, the real reflexive pronoun, do it now. If you did learn it, go to page 236, section 763 and learn tis, which  you have seen in tini ton barbaron. The Middle Liddell entry will show you that it’s one of the most flexible words in Classical Greek, so it’s worth learning just for itself.