21st Century Classical Greek -- perfective passive

Thucydides I 2.2 is another long piece of text. What is its structure?

τῆς γὰρ ἐμπορίας οὐκ οὔσης, οὐδ᾽ ἐπιμειγνύντες ἀδεῶς ἀλλήλοις οὔτε κατὰ γῆν οὔτε διὰ θαλάσσης,

νεμόμενοί τε τὰ αὑτῶν ἕκαστοι ὅσον ἀποζῆν

καὶ περιουσίαν χρημάτων οὐκ ἔχοντες οὐδὲ γῆν φυτεύοντες,

ἄδηλον ὂν ὁπότε τις ἐπελθὼν καὶ ἀτειχίστων ἅμα ὄντων ἄλλος ἀφαιρήσεται,

τῆς τε καθ᾽ ἡμέραν ἀναγκαίου τροφῆς πανταχοῦ ἂν ἡγούμενοι ἐπικρατεῖν,

οὐ χαλεπῶς ἀπανίσταντο, καὶ δι᾽ αὐτὸ οὔτε μεγέθει πόλεων ἴσχυον οὔτε τῇ ἄλλῃ παρασκευῇ.

1)         The antecedent for the bolded gerundive is the hekastoi of the preceding subsection. Note oud’ negating the deliberate habit of mixing with each other, as well as the ouk negating the existence of trade, and oute…oute, “neither…nor” relative to land and sea.

2)         The next clause has its own subject, again, hekastoi, with nemomenoi as the verb substitute, which is at the start, not the middle. That makes this a verbal clause, parallel to verbal sentences in Arabic and Biblical Hebrew. Why the verbal expression is at the start, instead of the middle, I don’t know but this is something to watch out fot to see if Thucydides has specific habitual uses for it.

3)         periousian has a pink bar in the word tool for the -ous case, but the ouk ekhontes says that it’s an -on case object of negated possession.

4)         All the negations in this subsection use forms of ou not mi. Thucydides is negating whole classes, not parts that might or might not exist. This first clause is SVO but the clause after oude is OV.

5)         The clause that ends in afairisetai starts with adilon. In the lexicon, the first subentry is wrong for the context. You want the next thing down. It reflects uncertainty, and that almost requires an oblique which, nevertheless, is conjugated and therefore definite.

6)         The bolded conjugated verb is progressive eventive, formerly known as “imperfect tense”, and is not interrupted by any other action. Note the negation applies to khalepos, the adverb. It does not negate the removal, it negates the nature of the removal, like ou palai which we had previously.

In the next to last phrase, click on higoumenoi. This has a non-mai counterpart in ago. However, when you study the verb higeomai, you find that the lexicon entry is incomplete. All the meanings require the -ois or -ous case, and we have nouns and adjectives in the -on case. But they are inanimate nouns and they can’t fit with part II of the lexicon entry.

The meaning that we want to fit into this place is “anywhere that they were led,” and this is allowed with a -mai verb. But Wiktionary claims that there’s only a middle-passive or base voice in progressive conceptual. It shows the same thing for perfective.

Now think about it. Progressive and perfective have no passive in non-mai verbs. What the Wiktionary entry shows us is that there’s also no separate passive morphology in -mai verbs for progressive and perfective. The base voice and passive are identical in -mai verbs.

One more clue. In the word tool, click on LSJ and go down to IV where it says “pf. in pass. sense.” Without knowing it, LSJ also says that this -mai verb has no separate spelling for passive voice that can be distinguished from base voice.

So when I said some time ago that progressive and perfective non-mai verbs have no passive morphology, it was an incomplete statement. In -mai verbs, they also have no passive morphology.

How do you distinguish the voice?

It’s the context. If the context is intransitive, you must have a passive voice verb. Otherwise you have base voice.

And that’s why the old grammars cripple modern readers. They don’t tell you how to tell what voice you have when the morphology is all the same, because they recognize only morphology, not context, as the driver of meaning.

So in this context we’re perfectly safe with a passive translation.