21st century Classical Greek -- benefit, topic order

Book I section 13.2 lets me show how translators ruin themselves, by disrupting structures in the source document.

φαίνεται δὲ καὶ Σαμίοις Ἀμεινοκλῆς Κορίνθιος ναυπηγὸς ναῦς ποιήσας τέσσαρας: ἔτη δ᾽ ἐστὶ μάλιστα τριακόσια ἐς τὴν τελευτὴν τοῦδε τοῦ πολέμου ὅτε Ἀμεινοκλῆς Σαμίοις ἦλθεν.

You can see that the bolded word is in the -ois case. This is what Goodwin calls “benefit”; Ameinoklis built ships for the Samians. It’s another example of how case labels don’t work for every language. In Russian you would say dlya X and X would be in the genitive. In Biblical Hebrew, the preposition for benefit, l’, is also the marker for a purpose clause using an aspectless verb (formerly known as “infinitive”). And it is used in the “have” idiom, yesh l’X, which in Russian is u nego X.

Here is that note that I said showed that Thucydides edited his work at the end of the war. When he started writing, he could not know when the end of the Peloponnesian war would be. Granted that even though the war lasted 30 years, it’s a negligible percentage of 300, nearly as negligible as if the war had ended in only a couple of years as most people probably thought it would at the time. Thucydides tries to be precise, although his grammar shows he can’t be precise everywhere. I doubt he wrote this line sequentially with everything else. He was re-reading his material at the end of the war and, careful as he is, he put this note in to make sure people knew that he knew that Ameinocles didn’t build ships for the current war but for a much earlier one.

Thucydides is speaking of the Lelantine war of the 700s BCE between Miletus and Samos. Despite having the latest in military technology, the Samians lost. “Everybody knows” the Trojan War happened before that and so we are closing in on the replacement of kings by tyrants as happening before the 700s. Cypselus took power in Korinth in the 600s BCE. This is why Thucydides has to use progressive aspect in subsection 1.

The second clause in this subsection, eti d’ esti, is in topic order. Thucydides tells you the important fact and then tells you how it relates to the start of the subsection.

Topic order material is a sign of oral presentation; this is the order in which Thucydides thinks of things. Jowett the literate says “he went to Samos” first and then gives the chronological inforrmation.

This disrupts Thucydides’ well-rounded period, a term in a 1766 letter by an educated man named Beattie. Educated men were prone to copy the word formations in the Greek and Latin they studied at university, and it lead to some of those sentences in British  prose that sound so strange today because the ends of the “period” match but the middle seems to introduce something anomalous. Use of well-rounded periods was recommended in a book called Oratory Made Easy by Charles Hartley, a teacher of elocution and oratory (1870), but he also warns against too many of them because they are long sentences and tire the listener.

So Jowett’s transposition in this case is sort of a comment on the quality of his education – not up to the standards of his grandfather’s.

In subsection 4 Jowett does something even worse.

ναυμαχία τε παλαιτάτη ὧν ἴσμεν γίγνεται Κορινθίων πρὸς Κερκυραίους: ἔτη δὲ μάλιστα καὶ ταύτῃ ἑξήκοντα καὶ διακόσιά ἐστι μέχρι τοῦ αὐτοῦ χρόνου.

 ]Thucydides says that a prior war between Korinth and Kerkyraea (the significance of which will become clear in later sections) happened 260 years before tou autou khronou, before Mr. T is writing.

Jowett says it happened “about forty years later” than the Lelantine war. Tsk tsk. The math comes out the same but what Jowett does is why we are learning to read Greek for ourselves, now isn’t it?