21st Century Classical Greek -- partitive genitive?

Let’s look at this phrase which does not use noun cases quite as you might expect.

Ἕλληνος δὲ καὶ τῶν παίδων αὐτοῦ ἐν τῇ Φθιώτιδι ἰσχυσάντων, καὶ ἐπαγομένων αὐτοὺς ἐπ᾽ ὠφελίᾳ ἐς τὰς ἄλλας πόλεις…

Why do we have ton paidon in the -on case? This is a compound subject and in most languages the whole thing would be in nominative case.

I don’t have a serious answer for you but I am guessing that this is something very familiar in French and Russian: the partitive. French has a very sketchy declension structure and does the partitive periphrastically; Russian has a special -u suffix for partitive.

Goodwin calls it the partitive genitive and the notion is that it’s a part taken out of a mass. So possibly not all of the sons of Hellen, but part of them, had their strength in Phthiotis.

You couldn’t prove it by Greek mythology. One of Hellenos’ sons was the ancestor of the “Dorians” about whom I’ll say something later. Another was Aeolus, who gets credit for another ethnic people that contributed to Greek stock. The third was the father of the “Achaeans” whom I discussed a couple of weeks ago, and the Ionians – which is actually another version of “Achaean” according to Linear B texts found in Krete. But the king of Phthiotis was the grandson of Zeus and his father was the king of Aegina. Keep that in mind for next week.

Now notice that iskhusanton is labeled an executive voice personal gerundive. When you look at the dictionary definition, it’s descriptive, which ought to be intransitive. Remember that personal gerundives describe an action happening. So this is almost doubly descriptive. Its antecedent is ton paidon, as you can tell from the identical adjectival endings.

Epagomenon also has ton paidon as its antecedent and now the problem is that there’s an object to this participles, autous. But autous doesn’t agree with epagomenon in case; it’s the -ous case. Why? I don’t know. None of the grammars discuss this. Nobody looked at it closely enough. If I had more examples of it, I would make a suggestion. If any Greek geeks are reading this blog, go back over any material you have read carefully (like to write a thesis) and see what you come up with.