21st Century Classical Greek -- the rest of section 8

OK, let’s look for other interesting grammar in Thucydides Book I section 8.

καὶ οὐχ ἧσσον λῃσταὶ ἦσαν οἱ νησιῶται, Κᾶρές τε ὄντες καὶ Φοίνικες: οὗτοι γὰρ δὴ τὰς πλείστας τῶν νήσων ᾤκησαν. μαρτύριον δέ: Δήλου γὰρ καθαιρομένης ὑπὸ Ἀθηναίων ἐν τῷδε τῷ πολέμῳ καὶ τῶν θηκῶν ἀναιρεθεισῶν ὅσαι ἦσαν τῶν τεθνεώτων ἐν τῇ νήσῳ, ὑπὲρ ἥμισυ Κᾶρες ἐφάνησαν, γνωσθέντες τῇ τε σκευῇ τῶν ὅπλων ξυντεθαμμένῃ καὶ τῷ τρόπῳ ᾧ νῦν ἔτι θάπτουσιν.

[2] καταστάντος δὲ τοῦ Μίνω ναυτικοῦ πλωιμώτερα ἐγένετο παρ᾽ ἀλλήλους (οἱ γὰρ ἐκ τῶν νήσων κακοῦργοι ἀνέστησαν ὑπ᾽ αὐτοῦ, ὅτεπερ καὶ τὰς πολλὰς αὐτῶν κατῴκιζε),

[3] καὶ οἱ παρὰ θάλασσαν ἄνθρωποι μᾶλλον ἤδη τὴν κτῆσιν τῶν χρημάτων ποιούμενοι βεβαιότερον ᾤκουν, καί τινες καὶ τείχη περιεβάλλοντο ὡς πλουσιώτεροι ἑαυτῶν γιγνόμενοι: ἐφιέμενοι γὰρ τῶν κερδῶν οἵ τε ἥσσους ὑπέμενον τὴν τῶν κρεισσόνων δουλείαν, οἵ τε δυνατώτεροι περιουσίας ἔχοντες προσεποιοῦντο ὑπηκόους τὰς ἐλάσσους πόλεις.

[4] καὶ ἐν τούτῳ τῷ τρόπῳ μᾶλλον ἤδη ὄντες ὕστερον χρόνῳ ἐπὶ Τροίαν ἐστράτευσαν.

Dilou in this section is Delos, birthplace of Apollo and Artemis.

The grammar in that phrase is interesting. There’s a base voice personal gerundive followed by hupo Athinaion. Is this an ergative structure? Well, no it’s not, because Delou is in the -ous case, not the -oi case. The ergative is in the subsection after that.

Jowett reverses the sense of the first phrase which actually means “the islanders were no less pirates…”

Tode to polemo is the Megaeran war. Notice the sequence of events: Delos was cleaned up during that war, the tombs being opened (anairetheison in passive voice). The translation of the next phrase is “the dead,” but Jowett has missed the point again.

ὅσαι ἦσαν τῶν τεθνεώτων ἐν τῇ νήσῳ

You’ve seen hosai before; it means “to the extent of”. That limits which tombs were opened. It’s limited to ton tethneoton, “those slain” using a perfective verb. In this instance, only people killed in that specific war, having been buried on the spot, were exhumed and buried elsewhere. In a later section Thucydides tells how all the tombs were cleansed from Delos.

Jowett misses the distinction entirely. He says “the dead”, which could include anybody buried on Delos, no matter when their death happened, leaving you to think that the Athinaians redded out all the tombs then existing. But then you have to ask yourself a question: didn’t the Greeks cremate their dead?

It turns out that cremation was used for the great or the upper classes, and only in Athins. Cremation requires a lot of fuel, half a ton of wood per body. Athins was not well-wooded; it had to import the wood from places like Macedonia – and Macedonia did not practice cremation. So, first, when Homer emphasizes how horrified Zeus was that Hector would not be cremated, it doesn’t reflect Hellenic mores; it’s an insult to Hector’s reputation. In other words, as usual, scholars have taken a single example and pretended that it is a culture-wide phenomenon.

The existence of tombs suggests an ancient practice known in Jewish law: secondary inhumation. The dead were buried in situ; when the flesh rotted away, the family collected the bones and put them in a tribal tomb. In this section, Thucydides is probably recognizing that it’s pretty tough for a family to find out, in the fog of war, where their relatives had been buried. It was all simply left until after the war and then the Athinaians went to work.

In Book II when Thucydides gets around to the plague, he says that bodies were cremated. By this time, the Athinaians were mewed up in the city and couldn’t get out to perform initial inhumation. Tens of thousands of people were dying; carrion eaters wouldn’t touch them, says Thucydides. There was obviously only one way to deal with the corpses but, while the custom was for private funerals, desperate people threw corpses into funeral pyres they didn’t pay for. Probably nobody could sympathize with that between the plague (before the Renaissance) and the Spanish Flu epidemic. In year 2 of the pandemic I think it’s a little more comprehensible.