21st Century Classical Greek -- ὥστε clauses

Book I section 12 starts with a short subsection.

ἐπεὶ καὶ μετὰ τὰ Τρωικὰ ἡ Ἑλλὰς ἔτι μετανίστατό τε καὶ κατῳκίζετο, ὥστε μὴ ἡσυχάσασαν αὐξηθῆναι.

We’ve had auksithinai before.

Learn the preposition meta. It takes all three oblique (non-oi) cases and this time the meanings vary quite a lot.

Go to the bottom of the Middle Liddell entry. Meta is also used as a prefix to verb roots. The results are very different from verb to verb. This is why you have to learn the verb, not just because the root can have a number of meanings, but also because derivatives with prefixes don’t all change meaning the same way just because they all have the same prefix.

The negation here is of isukhasasan, not auksithinai. Goodwin says this happens when a personal gerundive expresses a condition. If he means a situation, and not a conditional, that’s what we have here. LSJ gives a translation of this exact phrase in a positive statement, “by resting from war”, but we want to preserve the negation so, “so that there was no quiet for increasing,” the turmoil probably included those border wars and exiling of strongmen.

But we have something else here. Goodwin page 310, section 1449 talks about hoste clauses with almost any verb as a result clause. Since results are tied to perfective aspect, it seems natural that Goodwin’s examples use perfective aspect. But auksithinai is imperfective. What’s going on?

Well, Goodwin has an example from Demosthenes 2.26 ending in elpizete which is progressive eventive, but first, he quotes the phrase wrong. He rearranges the wording and gets the form of gignomai wrong. The real expression is hoste di’ hon ek khriston faula ta pragmata tis poleos gegonen, and gegonen is perfective.

Second, Goodwin admits that with an i.g., this equates to a purpose clause, not a result clause. Unless the i.g. is perfective, we have to be looking at a purpose clause. And in that case an imperfective is no surprise, since an imperfective, as I keep pointing out, is the default verb form.

Finally, Goodwin contradicts himself in section 1451. He is forced to admit that this type of clause, with an i.g., could be negated with either ou or mi. To him, if there’s a result, we would negate with ou; if a purpose, we would negate with mi. But that would require negating the verb; we’re negating the personal gerundive, not the impersonal.

When you read through pages 310-311, sections 1449-1460, it becomes clear that hoste can introduce a clause with any verbal form the author needs to get across the idea of either a result or a purpose, subject to all the nuances of aspect and definiteness, but always with complete certainty – no obliques or epistemics. Since we know, however, that Goodwin and his sources gloss over inconvenient truths, you should download a text version of your favorite author and use some kind of search function to see if you can find hoste used with an oblique or epistemic. If you can, no holds are barred and we can reduce three pages of material to the simple statement that hoste introduces a clause; what the clause means rests on our 21^st century paradigm of verbal nuance and on the context, but it tends to be a statement of result or purpose.

Result and purpose are two of the functions of the oblique in Biblical Hebrew. Your next question might be why does Greek also have oblique morphology. However, BH uses its aspectless form in clauses of purpose; it also has the auxiliary l’maan “for the sake of” with the aspectless form. So there is more than one way to deal with purpose and result in both ancient languages. It remains to dig deep and find out if the variation in use has a special meaning, or is  simply stylistic.