21st Century Classical Greek -- conditional three

Thucydides Book I section 10.2 has another conditional that shows some of the problems with Goodwin.

Λακεδαιμονίων γὰρ εἰ ἡ πόλις ἐρημωθείη, λειφθείη δὲ τά τε ἱερὰ καὶ τῆς κατασκευῆς τὰ ἐδάφη,

πολλὴν ἂν οἶμαι ἀπιστίαν τῆς δυνάμεως προελθόντος πολλοῦ χρόνου τοῖς ἔπειτα πρὸς τὸ κλέος αὐτῶν εἶναι

(καίτοι Πελοποννήσου τῶν πέντε τὰς δύο μοίρας νέμονται, τῆς τε ξυμπάσης ἡγοῦνται καὶ τῶν ἔξω ξυμμάχων πολλῶν: ὅμως δὲ οὔτε ξυνοικισθείσης πόλεως οὔτε ἱεροῖς καὶ κατασκευαῖς πολυτελέσι χρησαμένης, κατὰ κώμας δὲ τῷ παλαιῷ τῆς Ἑλλάδος τρόπῳ οἰκισθείσης, φαίνοιτ᾽ ἂν ὑποδεεστέρα), Ἀθηναίων δὲ τὸ αὐτὸ τοῦτο παθόντων διπλασίαν ἂν τὴν δύναμιν εἰκάζεσθαι ἀπὸ τῆς φανερᾶς ὄψεως τῆς πόλεως ἢ ἔστιν.

If the city of the Lakedaimonians were destroyed, laid waste, both the temples and foundations of the buildings

[then] most, I think, would not trust [that] the power preceding [the destruction] for a long time then was commensurate with its fame…

The first two bolded verbs are epistemics. However, this is a protasis contrary to fact. Lakedaimon had never been destroyed. In that case, Goodwin (p. 296, Roman numeral II at the top of the page) wants an indicative in the protasis, not an epistemic.  Ei with the epistemic is claimed by Goodwin to be the dreaded “future less vivid”, with another epistemic in the apodosis. That’s not what the apodosis has; it’s a progressive conceptual in the impersonal gerundive, which is also bolded.

Goodwin gets around the “tense” problem in the apodosis by saying that it can have any form expressing past repetition. The progressive encodes repetition of a habit but is conceptual here, not eventive, it is from eimi, “be”, and in any case Mr. T encodes timing outside the verb morphology.

Another important point is that Mr. T does not use a "future" epistemic for something that hasn’t happened yet. He uses the more general imperfective eventive epistemic.

This is evidence that the “aorist” is not a past tense; the imperfective eventive can represent action completely without regard to timing. It parallels the Biblical ehyeh asher ehyeh encoding the eternal nature of Gd in the imperfect.

Both of Mr. T’s epistemics are passives. Thucydides is taking advantage of the intransitivity of the passive to avoid providing an agent for an action that never happened.

And the an does not introduce the apodosis. It’s an oimai, “as I suspect”.

Thucydides, in a long parenthesis following this, says that nobody would ever think the Lakedaimonians were powerfully organized anyway, because their city is so spread out. We know that Sparta had no recognizable acropolis, unlike Athens, which Thucydides says would have made striking ruins.

In fact the situation is rather like the south and the north before the American Civil War. While the south had external trade (selling cotton to England, of course), and harbors that accommodated agricultural trade, most blockade-running was small potatoes because it had to be concealed. The north had all the large harbors and they were not under attack, let alone blockaded. So aside from its own industrial superiority, the north could ship in whatever it needed.

Once the north put conscription into effect, it could draw on immigrants as well as the native born for troops. When the south lost a private or an officer, he could not be replaced. The 1862 conscription law in the south was largely ignored as a violation of states’ rights.

Likewise the Spartan “Equals” had to be born into that class and survive the brutal training program of the young. Men bunked at their mess, not at home, and the birth rate was consequently low. Men could be expelled from their mess, and were never readmitted. Losing 300 Equals in the Persian War was a severe blow. When the Athenians captured only 140 Equals toward the end of the Peloponnesian war, it crippled Sparta. There were some 5,000 Equals before the Persian War; there were only about 1000 in Aristotle’s time.