21st Century Classical Greek -- conditional five

Thucydides Book I section 11 has another claim that lack of money was at the bottom of the problems running the Trojan War. You learned igagon and ilpizo just in time for this chunk.

αἴτιον δ᾽ ἦν οὐχ ἡ ὀλιγανθρωπία τοσοῦτον ὅσον ἡ ἀχρηματία.

τῆς γὰρ τροφῆς ἀπορίᾳ τόν τε στρατὸν ἐλάσσω ἤγαγον

καὶ ὅσον ἤλπιζον αὐτόθεν πολεμοῦντα βιοτεύσειν,

ἐπειδὴ δὲ ἀφικόμενοι μάχῃ ἐκράτησαν

(δῆλον δέ: τὸ γὰρ ἔρυμα τῷ στρατοπέδῳ οὐκ ἂν ἐτειχίσαντο),

φαίνονται δ᾽ οὐδ᾽ ἐνταῦθα πάσῃ τῇ δυνάμει χρησάμενοι,

ἀλλὰ πρὸς γεωργίαν τῆς Χερσονήσου τραπόμενοι

καὶ λῃστείαν τῆς τροφῆς ἀπορίᾳ.

ᾗ καὶ μᾶλλον οἱ Τρῶες αὐτῶν διεσπαρμένων τὰ δέκα ἔτη ἀντεῖχον βίᾳ,

τοῖς αἰεὶ ὑπολειπομένοις ἀντίπαλοι ὄντες.

Learn kantautha from the last section and autothen and entautha from this one.

Notice the oukh categorical denial of the role of small population in the mustering of troops against Troy. There were plenty of people to choose from, says Thucydides, there just wasn’t enough money to supply them. Jowett calls the problem inferiority, but that’s false unless he means inferiority to circumstances. There was nothing inferior about the numbers of population or their military skill.

Also notice the parenthetical expression using an with an indicative. Here an means “in that case” and it is negated with ouk, not mi. Building a wall is evidence showing that it is false to propose that the attackers did not win the first battle they fought, and that’s why Thucydides has dilon de at the start of the expression.

Subsection 2 has our fifth conditional.

περιουσίαν δὲ

εἰ ἦλθον ἔχοντες τροφῆς καὶ ὄντες ἁθρόοι ἄνευ λῃστείας καὶ γεωργίας ξυνεχῶς τὸν πόλεμον διέφερον,

ῥᾳδίως ἂν μάχῃ κρατοῦντες εἷλον,

οἵ γε καὶ οὐχ ἁθρόοι, ἀλλὰ μέρει τῷ αἰεὶ παρόντι ἀντεῖχον, πολιορκίᾳ δ᾽ ἂν προσκαθεζόμενοι ἐν ἐλάσσονί τε χρόνῳ καὶ ἀπονώτερον τὴν Τροίαν εἷλον. ἀλλὰ δι᾽ ἀχρηματίαν τά τε πρὸ τούτων ἀσθενῆ ἦν καὶ αὐτά γε δὴ ταῦτα, ὀνομαστότατα τῶν πρὶν γενόμενα, δηλοῦται τοῖς ἔργοις ὑποδεέστερα ὄντα τῆς φήμης καὶ τοῦ νῦν περὶ αὐτῶν διὰ τοὺς ποιητὰς λόγου κατεσχηκότος:

 

You learned ilthon and you can see that Thucydides used it because he has evidence that his protasis did not occur. He assumes that it might have been possible to ship 20 years worth of supplies into the Troad at the start.

We know better. First, every army thinks the war will be over before the next holiday, in this case either the Lesser (spring) or Greater (autumn) Eleusinian Mysteries.

Second, this is the classic long supply line that has defeated every invader since time began. The most extreme case was Napoleon’s march to and from Moscow. There’s a terrific graphic that shows how his army was melting away before he got to Russia, and then how a scorched earth policy made it impossible for more than a few thousand to survive the march back.

In fact if Homer said that the Achaeans committed piracy while besieging Troy, or practiced agriculture, I have forgotten it. Thucydides is grappling with the logistics of a siege that happened to last 20 years. That 20 years is an artifact of an oral tradition, and probably not what actually happened. Thucydides would not have realized it when he started writing; by the end of the war, with the siege, famine, and plague of Athens, he understood all too well that Troy could not have held out for 2 years, let alone 20.

Why is the number 20 is important to the oral tradition of the Iliad? The first thing that suggests itself to me is that Odysseos left his son behind an infant, but finds a grown man when he returns to Ithaka. The ten years of the Odyssey itself would not allow this to happen. Telemachus is important as Odysseos’ assistant in clearing the suitors out. The need for two nobles (and two servants) to accomplish this task is Olrik’s Law of Twins in action. This means that claims of a written origin for the Odyssey are false; it is firmly an oral tradition bound with the Iliad and even requiring the Iliad to represent part of a 20 year war, instead of a more reasonable 2 or 3 years.