21st Century Classical Greek -- conditional 2

So OK once again I'm posting Monday night instead of Tuesday morning. I'll be skipping next week.

Thucydides Book I section 10 starts with a conditional.

καὶ ὅτι μὲν Μυκῆναι μικρὸν ἦν,

ἢ εἴ τι τῶν τότε πόλισμα νῦν μὴ ἀξιόχρεων δοκεῖ εἶναι,

οὐκ ἀκριβεῖ ἄν τις σημείῳ

χρώμενος ἀπιστοίη μὴ γενέσθαι τὸν στόλον τοσοῦτον ὅσον οἵ τε ποιηταὶ εἰρήκασι καὶ ὁ λόγος κατέχει.

The fact that Mukinai was small

[is] that if it seems not now considerable among the towns of this time,

[nevertheless] it is not precise that whatever indications [we have],

proclaim that we might doubt that the expedition was not as great as the poets say or assertions extend to.

Dokei einai is an idiom for “seem”. It is a progressive conceptual, in line with the habit or condition of seeming not to be large compared to other towns of Thucydides’ time. In fact, Mukenae was razed during the Persian war. It revived slightly and had a theatre for a while, but by Roman times it was nothing but a tourist stop to see the sad fate of Agamemnon’s city.

This structure isn’t in Goodwin’s classification. It’s a present general supposition, that Mukenae seems small to everybody, but it uses neither ean nor the oblique. By having ei, it ought to be a particular supposition that implies nothing as to its fulfillment. However, anybody could go to Mukenae and see that it’s not as big as other cities, or they may have gone there in the past, or they may have seen it being razed. This is what Thucydides knows, as opposed to speaking directly to some specific person in his audience about the size of Mukenae. So once again, we have a fuzzy category that gives us no help.

In the non-an apodosis, Thucydides uses an epistemic since he is not signing up that we should doubt the poets’ estimate of the size of Agamemnon’s fleet. So he has the fact that Mukenae is small, but he is arguing against mistrusting the poets. He can’t force his conclusion on his listeners, he is saying things change over time. People in his audience may be old enough to remember Mukenae before it was razed. Goodwin points to this kind of structure starting on page 303, section 1421, but he’s only talking about the forms used and does not relate what he says to his original categories. So even if the categories were useful, Goodwin does not apply them to every conditional construction, and that’s a terrible oversight. It’s kind of like not relating the rare earths to their electron configurations.

If you have read the Catalog of Ships in Book II of the Iliad, you know that 29 leaders contributed ships to the total of 1,186.

Scholars who don’t understand oral traditions cast doubt on this total. From the time that the Peleshet/Ahiyyawa destroyed Wilusa, about 1190 BCE, until the accredited time of Homer’s work, as late as 600 BCE, the Peleshet/Pelasgians, who had been part of the Palace Culture in the Peloponnese, were joined by the Denyen (also listed on Ramses III’s Medinet Habu inscription listing the Sea Peoples), the Aeolians and Boeotians, and the Dorians as founding ethnic groups of the Greeks. The last in particular were known as the Herakleidae and possibly represent the spread of the Hellenic language, replacing the Pelasgian dialect for which Linear B was the script.

It is perfectly reasonable that as new populations entered the Peloponnese, whether from the north or from Egypt, as they came to consider themselves one people they all began adopting the oral narrative that was the basis for the Iliad. They added themselves to the Catalog of Ships. This has its analog in the fact that Deukalion and Pyrrha, who survived the flood, are said to have landed on four distinct peaks in Greece: Mount Parnassus, Mount Athos in Chalkidiki 40 miles NW of Parnassus, Mount Othrys in Thessaly barely 20 miles north of Parnassus, or Mount Etna in Sicily, over 60 miles from Parnassus.

Mount Parnassus was sacred to Dionysus, a fitting legend for the landing place of the ancestor of the man who brought wine grapes to Greece. It has its own flood story in which howling wolves save the citizens from the flood. It overhangs Delphi, the oracle sacred to Apollo. (This is the landing spot in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a product of the Roman Empire that nevertheless seems to have drawn on oral narratives.)

Chalkidiki was part of Macedonia, which was supposed to have been founded by Argives.

Thessaly was the homeland of the Hellene Achilleos and the Herakleides or Dorians who brought Hellenic Greek to the Peloponnese.  

The Sea Peoples who settled Sicily adopted the flood narrative and notice that Sicily was part of the Greek oekumene long before “Homer”. But Homer is a convenient name to attach to the consolidated Troy narrative, even if he was a live person.

Notice once again the perfective conceptual eirikasi referring to what the poets wrote as done with, a persistent result.