21st Century Classical Greek -- epistemic

 I told you to learn eknikao last week. Now I’m going to deal with the Word Tool  issues.

δοκεῖ δέ μοι, οὐδὲ τοὔνομα τοῦτο ξύμπασά πω εἶχεν, ἀλλὰ τὰ μὲν πρὸ Ἕλληνος τοῦ Δευκαλίωνος καὶ πάνυ οὐδὲ εἶναι ἡ ἐπίκλησις αὕτη, κατὰ ἔθνη δὲ ἄλλα τε καὶ τὸ Πελασγικὸν ἐπὶ πλεῖστον ἀφ᾽ ἑαυτῶν τὴν ἐπωνυμίαν παρέχεσθαι,

Ἕλληνος δὲ καὶ τῶν παίδων αὐτοῦ ἐν τῇ Φθιώτιδι ἰσχυσάντων, καὶ ἐπαγομένων αὐτοὺς ἐπ᾽ ὠφελίᾳ ἐς τὰς ἄλλας πόλεις, καθ᾽ ἑκάστους μὲν ἤδη τῇ ὁμιλίᾳ μᾶλλον καλεῖσθαι Ἕλληνας, 

οὐ μέντοι πολλοῦ γε χρόνου [ἐδύνατο] καὶ ἅπασιν ἐκνικῆσαι.

The Word Tool says this could be an imperative, but the context shows it can’t be that.

Or it could be an i.g. As a habit of using the name Hellene, it ought to be a progressive i.g., but the Word Tool says it’s imperfective eventive if it’s an i.g. So I don’t think that works.

The conjugated progressive conceptual would be 2nd person and that doesn’t work here.

We’re left with a 3rd singular (appropriate person and number) imperfective eventive in “optative”.

This is our third modality. It lies on the certainty vector, and its real name is epistemic. Epistemics are about the speaker’s investment in the truth of what he is saying. If he is fully invested, he uses indicative; if he’s not, he uses the epistemic. In Biblical Hebrew there are forms different from the indicative for each of certainty and uncertainty. In Greek there’s just indicative and epistemic.

Thucydides uses the epistemic for things that are possible but not probable, so this is weaker in certainty than the oblique. In some upcoming material, he will use it as a spoiler for something that turns out not to happen. 

Knowing that “Hellenes” eventually did equal “Greeks”, what is the uncertainty about the name being used for all of them? Well, look at the rest of the subsection. All the verbs after alla are gerundives. Thucydides is indefinite about all the actions, but he can be definite about what happened with the name Hellenes. He can’t be certain about all the facts however. The epistemic here closes the subsection on the same note of uncertainty as the dokei de moi that starts it. Thucydides won’t always do this, but he does it here.