21st Century Classical Greek -- subject of an impersonal gerundive

Book I section 13.2 gives us a good look at impersonal gerundives and I will go over what Goodwin says compared to how Thucydides uses them.

πρῶτοι δὲ Κορίνθιοι λέγονται ἐγγύτατα τοῦ νῦν τρόπου μεταχειρίσαι τὰ περὶ τὰς ναῦς, καὶ τριήρεις ἐν Κορίνθῳ πρῶτον τῆς Ἑλλάδος ναυπηγηθῆναι.

So the bolded words are imperfective eventive impersonal gerundives. The first is executive voice and the second is passive voice.

In our aspectual paradigm, these are substitutes for conjugated verbs. Further, the second one is an intransitive structure.

Note that the first one has a logical subject. It’s not a grammatical subject, despite being in the -oi case; it’s not the subject of legontai, “they say”, which is in base voice, not executive voice. The three English translations on Perseus, and the Smith translation for the Loeb Classics Library, agree that the Korinthioi didn’t say whatever it was. Legontai is an idiom for other people saying something.

So it is the Korinthians who metakheirisai’d, deliberately to bring about having ships, but Thucydides can’t be definite because he’s repeating information from up to 300 years before he was born.

When Goodwin claims that the subject of an “infinitive” is in the accusative, he’s wrong. It’s a categorical claim that only needs one contradictory example to defeat it, and that’s what we have here.

The other i.g. is passive voice and triireis is the grammatical subject and logical object. That’s two contradictory data points.