21st Century Classical Greek -- analyzing verbs

Section 5.3 has some other interesting grammar. 

ἐλῄζοντο δὲ καὶ κατ᾽ ἤπειρον ἀλλήλους.καὶ μέχρι τοῦδε πολλὰ τῆς Ἑλλάδος τῷ παλαιῷ τρόπῳ νέμεται περί τε Λοκροὺς τοὺς Ὀζόλας καὶ Αἰτωλοὺς καὶ Ἀκαρνᾶνας καὶ τὴν ταύτῃ ἤπειρον. τό τε σιδηροφορεῖσθαι τούτοις τοῖς ἠπειρώταις ἀπὸ τῆς παλαιᾶς λῃστείας ἐμμεμένηκεν:

Learn mekhri.

Sidiroforeisthai is a base voice (non-deliberate) progressive conceptual (habitual) i.g. It is partly nouny, “a habit of bearing arms”, as shown by the to article referring to it. Doing this among mainlanders was a relic of ancient piracy.

You might know the term sidereal as having to do with the stars. In Greek, using sidiro- in terms of weapons implies iron weapons, in what some scholars would claim is the Bronze Age. That’s based on outdated information.

About the time the Indo-Europeans started to form in Anatolia, people there were picking up meteoric iron and using it for things like personal ornaments. That’s the source of sidero- in this word.

At the same time, the copper ore they were digging and refining was mixed with iron, tin, and arsenic. Smelting it to get the copper naturally produced both tin and arsenic bronze. Part of the refuse was iron “bloom”. Ruth Russo proposes that this was used for small implements and weapons, such as iron arrowheads, and that’s how references to iron got into the Iliad. But the Iliad is a narrative with its origins in the 1100s BCE. Archaeology shows that smelted iron was already in use by 2000 BCE and that carbon steel turns up in the 1800s BCE. So the oral narrative behind the Iliad owes part of its origin to a time when both bronze and steel were in use.

Finally, let’s look at emmemeniken. All the word tool entries come from the perfective; it’s deliberate, it’s definite, but is it eventive or conceptual?

If I hold that sidiroforeisthai is its antecedent, then it has to be conceptual, which is singular.

If I hold that toutois tois ipeirotais is its antecedent, then it can be eventive, which is plural. But with the -ois case, emmeniken means be true “to X” and we are not talking about being true to the mainlanders, we are talking about being true to a custom.

That’s why you have to study the whole lexicon entry – so as not to miss details like this.