21st Century Classical Greek -- have, carry

Thucydides Book I section 5.1 is kind of long and has lots of words you should recognize.

οἱ γὰρ Ἕλληνες τὸ πάλαι καὶ τῶν βαρβάρων οἵ τε ἐν τῇ ἠπείρῳ παραθαλάσσιοι καὶ ὅσοι νήσους εἶχον, ἐπειδὴ ἤρξαντο μᾶλλον περαιοῦσθαι ναυσὶν ἐπ᾽ ἀλλήλους, ἐτράποντο πρὸς λῃστείαν, ἡγουμένων ἀνδρῶν οὐ τῶν ἀδυνατωτάτων κέρδους τοῦ σφετέρου αὐτῶν ἕνεκα καὶ τοῖς ἀσθενέσι τροφῆς, καὶ προσπίπτοντες πόλεσιν ἀτειχίστοις καὶ κατὰ κώμας οἰκουμέναις ἥρπαζον καὶ τὸν πλεῖστον τοῦ βίου ἐντεῦθεν ἐποιοῦντο, οὐκ ἔχοντός πω αἰσχύνην τούτου τοῦ ἔργου, φέροντος δέ τι καὶ δόξης μᾶλλον:

Go to Wiktionary and learn ekho. “Have” is a high-frequency verb in every language.

If you are in the mood, also learn fero, “carry”, and notice that while it is not marked as a suppletive, it’s a mish-mash of roots.

So Thucydides uses a bunch of progressive eventive base voice verbs conjugated in indicative modality, to show that the viking habit existed among both Hellenes and non-Hellenes, whether they lived on the mainland or in the isldands.

They were led by courageous men who made clients (in the Roman Imperial sense) out of the weak. Thucydides gives the impression that the hunter-gatherers went a-viking but, however, it doesn’t explain how there was anything for them to steal or share out to their clients. Hunter-gatherer cultures are notoriously subsistence cultures. In modern times, even if they can get farmed products, they still have a high rate of hunger.

In subsection 2 we have our first example of what the grammars call indirect speech, but which I am going to call reported speech. All the grammars say that reported speech and questions use the same tense as the original. This is another cognitive dissonance; it implies that being true to the original speech was more important than for the speaker to accurately report events. If the original speech was in present tense, “I am conquering Macedonia”, the reported speech that arrives some days later in the agora could be inaccurate, because by then the attacker could have been defeated.

But when we change to aspect, the original speech is “I am taking action to arrive at the conquest of Macedonia,” and the audience in the agora days later understand this as actions taken to create a situation, not as something that is happening at the time they hear about it. The verb does not change aspect. But the context might include expressions reflecting the time it took the messenger to get to the agora.

So what did Pheidippides really say when he got to Athins to report the victory at Marathon? We’ll never know. The story in Herodotus only covers Pheidippides asking the Spartans for help, not running to Athins and reporting a victory. The oldest surviving story about reporting to Athins is from Plutarch, 400 years later, and he gives the runner a different name. The name and story come together in a work written in the 100s CE by Lucian, a Roman from Mesopotamia. His native language was Syriac, a form of Aramaic (or rather Neo-Babylonian, giving it the 21^st century name), and his Greek was what they taught and wrote from about 65 CE to 230 CE.

All of this is a perfect example of an oral narrative and its progress through literary works. Each of these authors picked up the oral narrative and wrote down what he got. Calling them liars shows the ignorance of literate people about how oralate literature works. We used to call it ethnocentrism – when we were being diplomatic.