21st Century Classical Greek -- suppletives

Go through Book I, 3.4, and mark all the things you have learned about.

οἱ δ᾽ οὖν ὡς ἕκαστοι Ἕλληνες κατὰ πόλεις τε ὅσοι ἀλλήλων ξυνίεσαν καὶ ξύμπαντες ὕστερον κληθέντες οὐδὲν πρὸ τῶν Τρωικῶν δι᾽ ἀσθένειαν καὶ ἀμειξίαν ἀλλήλων ἁθρόοι ἔπραξαν. ἀλλὰ καὶ ταύτην τὴν στρατείαν θαλάσσῃ ἤδη πλείω χρώμενοι ξυνεξῆλθον.

Now click on that last word, ksunekshlthon, and then click on “Middle Liddell” to see the dictionary entry.

At the top it says “Dep.”

This is an abbreviation for “deponent”, a Latin term for a word that doesn’t have an “active” voice, as if it were defective somehow.

When you look at the top of the box, you see sunekserkhomai; it’s a -mai verb. All -mai verbs are marked deponent in the dictionary.

But Thucydides is not evaluating the going or coming out accompanied by somebody. Khromenoi describes the action of a sort of oracle proclaiming it was time for the Greeks to learn to be good sailors. In a sense, the Greeks were fated to become good sailors.

Now copy sunekserkhomai, paste it into Wiktionary, and get rid of the two prefixes so that all you have left is erkhomai. Now hit enter. Make sure you have the page for Ancient Greek that has Usage Notes in the middle. This describes what erkhomai really is: not a deponent, but a suppletive.

A suppletive uses different roots in different parts of its conjugation. This page lists the various roots, some of which look like abbreviations of others.

Erkhomai isn’t really a -mai verb in the sense of having no executive voice. It’s a suppletive with executive voice in those parts of the conjugation which it borrows from non-mai roots. This is that exception I told you about a long time ago, to the distinction between -mai and non-mai verbs.

Learn erkhomai and also learn eimi, “come, go” (you already learned eimi “be”). There’s another important verb in this subsection, epraksan from prasso, but only learn that if you have some brain cells left when you’ve learned the other two.

Thucydides’ last point about the Hellenes not working together for common goals, is that they had to learn seamanship before they could engage in the Trojan War. We all know that the siege of Wilusa took 20 years, which is not exactly a sea engagement. What does Thucydides mean? We won’t find that out until section 11.