21st Century Classical Greek -- where does the negation go?

I have more conditionals for you ahead, as well as posts about negation drumming into you that Goodwin’s material is in part incomplete and in part inaccurate. I am also going to blast through “final” and “purpose” clauses, reducing about a dozen pages in Goodwin to an objective statement that is shorter than some paragraphs.

Book I section 17. You should know most of the words here. Ef’ is epi; learn it.

τύραννοί τε ὅσοι ἦσαν ἐν ταῖς Ἑλληνικαῖς πόλεσι,τὸ ἐφ᾽ ἑαυτῶν μόνον προορώμενοι ἔς τε τὸ σῶμα καὶ ἐς τὸ τὸν ἴδιον οἶκον αὔξειν δι᾽ ἀσφαλείας ὅσον ἐδύναντο μάλιστα τὰς πόλεις ᾤκουν, ἐπράχθη δὲ οὐδὲν ἀπ᾽ αὐτῶν ἔργον ἀξιόλογον, εἰ μὴ εἴ τι πρὸς περιοίκους τοὺς αὐτῶν ἑκάστοις: οἱ γὰρ ἐν Σικελίᾳ ἐπὶ πλεῖστον ἐχώρησαν δυνάμεως. οὕτω πανταχόθεν ἡ Ἑλλὰς ἐπὶ πολὺν χρόνον κατείχετο μήτε κοινῇ φανερὸν μηδὲν κατεργάζεσθαι, κατὰ πόλεις τε ἀτολμοτέρα εἶναι.

Ei mi ei is not a conditional. It’s an idiom meaning “except for”, meaning that except for fighting their border wars, the tyrants didn’t do anything notable except enrich themselves and their families.

Eprakhthi comes from prasso, which does some weird things. For example, you can see here that in the passive, instead of the sigma marker of the imperfective, it’s theta in the eventive, but it’s still sigma in the conceptual. See White, page 241, section 770. In the executive, however, the two sigmas become ksi. In the progressive eventive, the sigmas become taus.

The difference between prasso and poieo is the idea of experience. You use prasso not just for the experience of the Persian war, but also in practicing a trade; it is used of practicing bribery as well.

Jowett inserts “nor” at the start of his translation that is not supported in the Greek. Thucydides says the tyrants attended to their and their families’ needs “alone”, monon. By inserting this negation, Jowett discredits the word substitution he did in section 16. Thucydides ends the phrase with malista tas poleis okoun, “mostly the cities they inhabited,” which Jowett ignores.

Jowett’s insertion of “ever” following this is also not supported in the Greek. He tranposes wording in the last sentence.

In the last line notice mite koini. Previously I called out oudeis ksunesti as a negation of an action that specified joint operations, instead of a negation of the jointness of an action. Here we have a negation of jointness, and that alone is enough to give it the “partitive” sense inherent in mi. I’ll say more about this in a month or so.

One thing this example does is nail down that the negation always appears close to what it negates. I wrote about a year ago, about negation of an adverb that Jowett attributed to the verb, producing the wrong nuance compared to what Thucydides meant. Here we see that Mr. T felt he could not use a negation and have it apply to both the adjective and verb, he had to negate both. So read carefully and don’t just assume, as Jowett consistently does, that moving the negation to where English wants it says the same thing as Thucydides meant. Jowett writes “Grenglish”.