21st Century Classical Greek -- perfective!

Book I 3.3 is another long section to parse out.

τεκμηριοῖ δὲ μάλιστα Ὅμηρος: “the best evidence is Homer” (notice that this is an equational clause with no verb for the copula)

πολλῷ γὰρ ὕστερον ἔτι καὶ τῶν Τρωικῶν γενόμενος  “for much later yet, the Trojan [War] happening…”

οὐδαμοῦ τοὺς ξύμπαντας ὠνόμασεν, οὐδ᾽ ἄλλους ἢ τοὺς μετ᾽ Ἀχιλλέως ἐκ τῆς Φθιώτιδος,

οἵπερ καὶ πρῶτοι Ἕλληνες ἦσαν, “the whole had no name, except that those with Achilleos from Phthiotis, who were the first Hellenes…”

Δαναοὺς δὲ ἐν τοῖς ἔπεσι καὶ Ἀργείους καὶ Ἀχαιοὺς ἀνακαλεῖ. “Danaans in the epics and Argives and Achaeans was the name…”

οὐ μὴν οὐδὲ βαρβάρους εἴρηκε διὰ τὸ μηδὲ Ἕλληνάς πω,  “not truly [that there] was no barbarian but because there was no Hellene yet…”

ὡς ἐμοὶ δοκεῖ, ἀντίπαλον ἐς ἓν ὄνομα ἀποκεκρίσθαι. “as it seems to me, oppositely by name to be set apart.”

Yes, that’s Homer in that first line. Thucydides knows that his audience of educated men have Homer at their fingertips. Nowadays we would cite to Herodotus, if he said anything about the Trojan war that we could use at a place like this, but for Mr T, Herodotus was not hallowed by time, being only a couple of decades older than Thucydides. Herodotus also drew on Homer so Thucydides, even if he had read Herodotus, would have gone for the writer both of them accepted as an authority.

Learn polus from which we get pollo here; see White, page 230, section  753. You might as well learn megas while you’re there.

Click on apokekristhai. Just from inspection you know it’s an impersonal gerundive in base voice. The word tool will tell you it’s “perfect tense”; that means it goes in our perfective conceptual slot in our aspect table. The -ke- is the reduplication used in Attic Greek in perfective aspect. It does not appear in any other Greek dialect.

The use of perfective aspect is to talk about something with permanent results. In this case, the distinction between Greek and barbarian persisted to Thucydides’ time. He regards the distinction as something that simply came about, instead of being deliberately adopted.

Modern archaeology tells us that “Achaeans” is a version of Ahiyyawa, the Hittite name for the people who were not autochthonous Cretans but lived in the Palace Culture and went a-viking around 1200 BCE. To the Egyptians, this same people were known as Peleshet, and they are listed on Ramses III’s Medinet Habu inscription about the Sea Peoples. If you’re wondering why that looks so much like Pelishtim in Biblical Hebrew, well, yes, they are the same people. Their immersion in Kretan culture led to Linear B being their writing system, until they settled on the west coast of the Mediterranean and learned Ugaritic cuneiform. About 1180 BCE, they helped destroy Ugarit.

“Danaans”, on the other hand, refers to an element of the Sea Peoples listed as Denyen on Ramses III’s inscription. Other elements were the Sikila, the Sherden (Sardinians), Weshesh (Oscians), and Teresh (Etruscans). The Sikila and Sherden settled north of the Pelishtim and, with the indigenous people, formed the Phoenicians.

Argos was inhabited by “Pelasgians”, showing that the Peloponnese adopted and adapted the Egyptian Peleshet. By Homer’s time, the term “Cretan Iaones” was also used and invocations are made to Pelasgian Zeus in the Iliad. The original god of the Peleshet/Ahiyyawa, however, was Apaliunas (Apollo), according to a reference in one of the Hittite letters that dates before the destruction of Wilusa (Ilion, Troy) by the Sea Peoples.