21st Century Classical Greek -- mello/elpizo

Thucydides Book I section 10.4 has another idiom for you to learn.

πεποίηκε γὰρ χιλίων καὶ διακοσίων νεῶν τὰς μὲν Βοιωτῶν εἴκοσι καὶ ἑκατὸν ἀνδρῶν,

τὰς δὲ Φιλοκτήτου πεντήκοντα, δηλῶν, ὡς ἐμοὶ δοκεῖ, τὰς μεγίστας καὶ ἐλαχίστας: ἄλλων γοῦν μεγέθους πέρι ἐν νεῶν καταλόγῳ οὐκ ἐμνήσθη.

αὐτερέται δὲ ὅτι ἦσαν καὶ μάχιμοι πάντες, ἐν ταῖς Φιλοκτήτου ναυσὶ δεδήλωκεν:

τοξότας γὰρ πάντας πεποίηκε τοὺς προσκώπους. περίνεως δὲ οὐκ εἰκὸς πολλοὺς ξυμπλεῖν ἔξω τῶν βασιλέων καὶ τῶν μάλιστα ἐν τέλει,

ἄλλως τε καὶ μέλλοντας πέλαγος περαιώσεσθαι μετὰ σκευῶν πολεμικῶν,

οὐδ᾽ αὖ τὰ πλοῖα κατάφαρκτα ἔχοντας, ἀλλὰ τῷ παλαιῷ τρόπῳ λῃστικώτερον παρεσκευασμένα.

Mellontas is a personal gerundive (executive voice) from mello, which takes a complement in an imperfective conceptual impersonal gerundive. Peraiosesthai is, of course, in base voice.

Mello can mean everything from intent the whole way up to a certainty, and it’s the last one in this case: to supply the Achaeans at Troy, there would have to be fleets of the small piratical craft going back and forth from Crete or the Peloponnese with rations and weapons to replace those used up.

The important thing is to realize that mello is a spectrum, and you have to examine the context to see if the text is at one extreme or the other, or somewhere in the middle which has the nuance of a probability.

Another idiom that takes this i.g. is elpizo; learn that rather than mello. We’ve had elpizo before. Wiktionary is deficient; it has the modern Greek only, and only executive voice. Use the LSJ entry:

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=e%29lpi%2Fzw&la=greek&can=e%29lpi%2Fzw0&d=Perseus:text:1999.04.0057:entry=e)lpi/zw&i=1#lexicon