21st Century Classical Greek -- textual structure and cultural background

I 3.2. is long and involved so let’s parse it out.

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.

Tounoma is an example of how an article can stick to (agglutinate with) the noun it modifies. It refers back to Hellas which, according to Mr. T, was not the name of the entire region “yet”, po.

Learn ἀλλὰ as “but, on the other hand” and άλλος, “other”.

Tou + a name in -on case is “son of.” You’ll see it a lot later when Thucydides starts naming military officers.

Learn ἐκνικάω. You may know of the goddess of Victory, Nike. You’ll see this verb a lot later to show who won what battles. I’m going to talk about it next week because of all the options in Word Tool.

If you know Greek mythology, you know who Deukalion is. In fact he unites the pre-Hellenic ethnic groups because each of them claims he landed in their turf: Mount Parnassus, Mount Athos in Chalkidiki 40 miles NW of Parnassus, Mount Othrys in Thessaly barely 20 miles north of Parnassus, or Mount Etna in Sicily, over 60 miles from Parnassus.

Mount Parnassus was sacred to Dionysus, a fitting legend for the landing place of the ancestor of the man who started making wine in Greece and who came from the wine-producing Indo-European homeland in Anatolia. Parnassus overhangs Delphi, the oracle sacred to Apollo, patron of the Pelishtim/Ahiyyawa. (This is the landing spot in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a product of the Roman Empire that nevertheless seems to have drawn on oral narratives.)  Parnassus is supposed to be where Apollo met the son of one of the nine muses and taught Orpheus to sing and play.

The Pelasgians are pre-Hellenic settlers in Greece and that makes them cognate to the Pelishet, which was their Egyptian name; they are the Pelisthim of the Hebrew Bible. The Hittites called them Ahiyyawa, the equivalent of Achaean. They were a part of the Sea Peoples, living in Krete and using Linear B for their Indo-European language which has some strong resemblances to Latin such as eko for horse (equus). This later turned into Greek hippos through something called a q/p conversion that also distinguishes Welsh from Irish.

Another part of the Sea Peoples, the Sikila, gave their name to Sicily. They and the Sherden settled around Tyre and Sidon and merged with the K’naani inhabitants to become the Phoenicians, famous in ancient times for their travels to Spain and Wales.