21st Century Classical Greek -- passive

This is I 2.6, and it has some great grammar in it.

καὶ παράδειγμα τόδε τοῦ λόγου οὐκ ἐλάχιστόν ἐστι διὰ τὰς μετοικίας ἐς τὰ ἄλλα μὴ ὁμοίως αὐξηθῆναι: ἐκ γὰρ τῆς ἄλλης Ἑλλάδος οἱ πολέμῳ ἢ στάσει ἐκπίπτοντες παρ᾽ Ἀθηναίους οἱ δυνατώτατοι ὡς βέβαιον ὂν ἀνεχώρουν, καὶ πολῖται γιγνόμενοι εὐθὺς ἀπὸ παλαιοῦ μείζω ἔτι ἐποίησαν πλήθει ἀνθρώπων τὴν πόλιν, ὥστε καὶ ἐς Ἰωνίαν ὕστερον ὡς οὐχ ἱκανῆς οὔσης τῆς Ἀττικῆς ἀποικίας ἐξέπεμψαν.

Notice the ouk elakhisto, meaning “not least”. If you have been using the translations, specifically, Jowett, he turns this backward. He does that a lot with meanings; he also moves words and clauses out of the position in which Thucydides has them. So sometimes you have to go hunting all over his version to see what Thucydides means, and it is a waste of time, as well as destroying structures Thucydides uses to make his material memorable, such as parallelism.

But that’s not what I wanted to talk about for this subsection. I want to talk about auksithinai. Translating the Word Tool labels into our schema, we have an imperfective impersonal gerundive in a passive structure. The phrase also has a negation, mi.

In a sense this is an i.g. in a result clause, and the aspect we normally use for results is perfective. However, Thucydides’ meaning required that he use an intransitive phrase – which we would also do in English – and you can’t do that in perfective aspect in a non-mai verb, unless the verb itself has an intransitive meaning.

Now let’s look at that mi. It’s used with an adjective, mi omoios. As we know, that is supposed to mean “any likeness that might have existed, didn’t exist.” If Thucydides had used ouk, that would have meant “there could have been no likeness at all.”

Continuing the theme of migrations in this section, Thucydides is specifying that population increases in Athens occurred from an influx of refugees, strongmen who were thrown out of their polises after uprisings. The unstated alternative is that the other polises replaced population some other way, such as through reproduction.

Jowett gives the impression that this influx made the Attikan population larger than other places but Thucydides is saying that the increase occurred by a different mechanism. If Jowett is considering overpopulation as a reason for sending out colonies, well, we will soon see that Thucydides fails to make overpopulation a concern when he talks about the colonies of various metropolises. In fact, colonies in Greece were much like colonies set up by Britain, a way to ensure control of resources which became a source of money in trade and taxes. Besides, I’m just about to give still another reason why Athins sent these refugees out to colonies.

Notice the superlative dinatotatoi, “the strongest”. If the refugees coming to your city-state are deposed strongmen, do you let them stay?

So the first thing the Athinaians did was grant these people honorary citizenship, politai gignomenoi, turn them into citizens. It was a two-edged sword. It kept them from feeling resentment toward Athins. It also brought them under Athins’ laws, and Athins shipped them out to colonies for the sake of the city’s peace.

Eventually Thucydides does say that the number of refugees was too much for the city to handle. That says something about how many cities hated the strongmen that ruled them.

Notice the structure of the first phrase. Thucydides brings forward paradeigma to tell his audience what this subsection is about. From that he hangs what he is giving an example of, “this claim” and says it’s ouk elakhiston, which a lot of Victorian writers could have translated as “not inconsiderable”. Now that he has raised audience expectations, he gives the topic he will use for the rest of the section, metoikias es ta alla, people expelled into other polises. Then he says that this is not the way polises outside of Attika expanded.

Then he tells why these rejects were rejects, and how they were treated in Athins.