Knitting -- around the worsted corner

I'm late with this because it took me so many attempts to get something right. Well, almost.

Many years ago I showed you short rows for taking a border or edging around the corner of a piece of lace. And I warned you that there would be a pucker at the corner. It's  almost unnoticeable in fingering or lace weight yarn, but you'll see it in worsted.

There are two ways to get around that. One is to work the basic motif of say the edging for as long as the edge of what you're already done, joining it on step by step, and then at the corner, cast on and work one more motif. Now work down that motif to the edge of what you are joining to, and continue on around. This is great for squares and it even works on triangles. Here's a "hap" (work) shawl in Unst Print of the Wave with a Catspaw border that does just that. The orange diamond is around that extra motif.

However, the edging (another Unst motif) doesn't work that way; at the point of the triangle, there's a swallowtail. What I did was work the edging to the end of the side, then cast on and start the new side separately.

With a rectangular border, you can mitre the border sides. This is best worked from a pattern which will tell you what to do where. There's one in my ancient Bantam Encyclopedia. But I wasn't satisfied with that, and that's what took me so long to work out; how to do it with a generic border or edging. In fact what I worked out probably would work with Joanne's edging, which you saw in a video on one of my posts. I won't send you back there; the camera work gave me nausea. Ask me if you want my version of her edging.

I did this with the same border I used above, catspaw. I did K1, P1 (a seed stitch boundary) for 11 stitches for two rows, worked K1, P1, the 7 stitches of the motif, P1, K1 for all 6 rows of the motif, so, one catspaw. The last row is knit since we're doing garter stitch.

Use a thumb cast on to add 3 stitches, turn, knit back, attach bottom free stitch of motif to first stitch. * Turn, kx, YO, k1, YO, kx. Turn, knit back, join, and repeat from *. The value of x is whichever row you are on for adding a YO, whether the first time or the 9th time as in my case. You will eat up one stitch from the first motif each row when you knit back to it. 

These instructions will get you better results than in the picture. I was joining on the right side of the fabric at the first motif, which is on the right side of the photo; you can see the ridge. Joining on the wrong side will put that ridge on the wrong side of the border.

Because I had that seed stitch border, I had to do one special thing. When I had two stitches left on the first motif, and I had put in the last YOs, instead of knitting back, I turned, and did P1/K1 back. Then I ate up the next to last stitch of the first motif. 

Then I turned, K2, PSSO to join the last stitch, P1, PSSO, K1, PSSO, P1, PSSO and so on until I got to the free end where the next motif would go

You won't have to mess with the K1/P1 stuff if you don't have that seed stitch border. You'll just join to the next to last stitch of your first motif, turn, join in the last stitch, and K/PSSO to the free end.

Pick up the stitches (11 in my case) on the other side of the mitre and work your motif for the length of the border on that side. 

You can also make all the pieces of your lace separately and join them together. Here are two ways to do that.

Russian graft:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8dNYTMJYq0

Kitchener stitch. This is good to learn because it is useful for closing the toes of top-down socks and the underarms of raglan sweaters. Make sure you work it from the RIGHT SIDE of what you're making.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOFcIiDg_hI

The same master knitter has two videos for joining parts that starts with a provisional cast-on that stabilizes the start of the border. Notice the sling-shot cast-on she uses for the provisional. This is like the cast-on for toe-up socks but they are not identical.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K79jDBulQ5k

This is her video about what to do when you get back to your provisional cast-on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwB51y5-S7w

21st Century Classical Greek -- purpose clauses

Book I section 19.

καὶ οἱ μὲν Λακεδαιμόνιοι οὐχ ὑποτελεῖς ἔχοντες φόρου τοὺς ξυμμάχους ἡγοῦντο, κατ᾽ ὀλιγαρχίαν δὲ σφίσιν αὐτοῖς μόνον ἐπιτηδείως ὅπως πολιτεύσουσι θεραπεύοντες, Ἀθηναῖοι δὲ ναῦς τε τῶν πόλεων τῷ χρόνῳ παραλαβόντες πλὴν Χίων καὶ Λεσβίων, καὶ χρήματα τοῖς πᾶσι τάξαντες φέρειν. καὶ ἐγένετο αὐτοῖς ἐς τόνδε τὸν πόλεμον ἡ ἰδία παρασκευὴ μείζων ἢ ὡς τὰ κράτιστά ποτε μετὰ ἀκραιφνοῦς τῆς ξυμμαχίας ἤνθησαν.

The pages of Goodwin that I’m going to demolish this week are 290-294, sections 1362-1380.

Classical Greek has a number of words that introduce clauses expressing purpose or motive: ina, hos, hopos, and in poetry, ofra.

Goodwin divides these into hopos and all other, and he labels the “all other” as “final clauses”.

Of courses, that’s a cognitive dissonance. He cites to Xenophon’s Anabasis III 2.27, and the phrase he gives is not final for the subsection, nor final in the sentence. So we’re going to forget about the label “final clause”. We’re going to label it by its function, “purpose clause”.

Second, pages 293-294, sections 1378-1380, discuss use of mi with verb categories. We know that verb categories are a mirage which ignores that verbs may have one meaning falling into the given category, but several meanings that don’t.

We know that mi as a negation creates a non-categorical class, “such that (whatever options exist) X is not one the one that comes about”. By definition, a negation has a partitive nuance, that’s why ekho and eimi take the (partitive) genitive under negation.

Mi is also how you negate a hopos clause, linking all purpose clauses regardless of the introductory particle.

It is natural that purpose clauses should use the oblique or the epistemic because “so that” means there’s some uncertainty about whether the purpose will be carried out. The problem is, what Goodwin relates the non-indicative to. In the Xenophon citation, there are two possible verbs for the purpose clause to hang off of.

…δοκεῖ μοι κατακαῦσαι τὰς ἁμάξας ἃς ἔχομεν, ἵνα μὴ τὰ ζεύγη ἡμῶν στρατηγῇ,…

Goodwin concentrates on the verb that the purpose clause follows, which is progressive conceptual. But it is not the verb that the purpose clause relates to, which is imperfective eventive. The having draft animals does not have the purpose that they not control the army’s movements. The destroying the draft animals has the stated purpose. In fact ekhomen is a subordinate clause modifying tas amaksas, which is the object of katakausai.

So there’s no relationship between the flavor of an indicative verb, and the verb of a purpose clause. The verb of the purpose clause relates to what the speaker thinks of the probability that the clause is (or will be) true.

Goodwin claims that final clauses can use indicative when there is evidence that it depends on an act known not to have taken place. This should sound familiar; we use the indicative in the protasis of a conditional if we have evidence that it did not take place. Goodwin uses examples that are explicitly negated (with mi). Again, if you know that something did not happen, you can be certain that the purpose for doing it fell to the ground, which calls for indicative modality.

Then Goodwin goes into hopos clauses, which he wants to label “object clauses”. The only thing he says about them is that hopos is used with those mirage verb categories. His examples should have included the same section of Anabasis as before:

τοῦτο δὴ δεῖ λέγειν, ὅπως ἂν πορευοίμεθά τε ὡς ἀσφαλέστατα καὶ εἰ μάχεσθαι δέοι ὡς κράτιστα μαχοίμεθα….

“…how we should purpose that we might march, so as to most safely, and if fighting might most strongly, fight…”

Poreuoimetha is, of course, an epistemic.  Goodwin says that the “future optative” can substitute for the “future indicative” but with our more scientific, better defined terms, we know that’s false. The speaker is looking for suggestions on how to accomplish something. Goodwin might want this to be called an object clause, having it depend on legein, but the speech has the purpose of  providing suggestions. So the concept of the object clause is another mirage.

Purpose clauses don’t change function because of the particle that introduces them, or because of the sequence of words in the sentence, or because in some contexts the preceding verb has certain meanings. So I’ve pared four pages of Goodwin down to a single paragraph.

I’m sorry this post is so long but I hope you think it was worth it to find out that, once again, Goodwin is

1) misanalyzing his material (hanging clauses off the wrong antecedent);

2) failing to realize that there are citations that discredit his claims; and

3) chasing mirages.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- aggadah as oral tradition

So bit by bit I'm going through the Williamson Talmud and I get to this. We started on daf 3b with Mosheh saying the firstborn would die k'chatsot, "about midnight"; we have drilled down through aggadah about David and the lyre that used to wake him up at midnight to study Torah, and now we back out to where Mosheh says his thing. And the discussion is, of course Mosheh knew exactly when midnight was, so why did he say "about".

Mar [bar Rav Ashi] says, "Lest Pharaoh’s astrologers err and say: Moses is a liar. Mar said: teach your tongue to say: I do not know, lest you become entangled in a web of deceit."

At the start of this section, I wrote a note to myself that the exact point of midnight can’t be known to mortals, only to Gd, but my rationale was different from Mar's. I went with the archaeology: Pharaoh's waterclock might have been running fast because the water had leached away some of the clay around the hole, and when he thought midnight had passed, and all the firstborns were alive, he would have said Mosheh lied, if Mosheh had said "at midnight". 

For Mosheh to lie is important: it would mean he was a false prophet, punishable by death, see Deuteronomy 13:2-6. In fact, for Mosheh to lie is so important that the Samaritans rewrote their Pentateuch.

Samaritan Pentateuch seems to regard Deuteronomy as the most authoritative book in chumash. In Deuteronomy, Mosheh says things that are clearly related to earlier events that, in particular, should have come up in Exodus. Whenever this happens, SP copies the wording of Deuteronomy into the appropriate place in Exodus. It keeps Mosheh from looking like a liar. 

SP retains some of the variants that were put in the Cave 4 genizah at Qumran, which was founded in Hasmonean times. What follows Exodus 18:24 is one example, and it is also copied from Deuteronomy (middle of 1:9-18). Long before any of the surviving Samaritan manuscripts were produced (from 1000 CE to the middle of the Renaissance), SP inherited methods of keeping Mosheh from looking like a liar, that are not consistent with an oral tradition. But nothing in Deuteronomy deals with the meaning of k’chatsot so the Samaritans never had anything to put into Exodus, even if they wondered about the “about”. 

Meanwhile, 22 centuries before Olrik documented the features of Danish oral narratives, Jewish mainstream experts rejected material they didn't know was evidence of literate operations, and preserved the Jewish canon in a format that they didn't know reflected all the features of an oral tradition. IOW there was no way for them deliberately to produce something that paralleled Olrik's finding. It's just that they knew what was canon and what was not, and it turns out that canon is a record of an oral tradition.

During the oral transmission of the tradition, any hint that Mosheh lied would have been dealt with in its place, not by a far distant part of the tradition. The Israelites would have been right to try and execute him on the grounds that his prophecies a) contradicted Torah, b) did not happen, or c) did not happen on schedule. That would have been the denouement of the narrative containing the thing Mosheh said that was the lie. This is a classic epic law of using vivid action to illustrate a point .Separating the denouement from the rest of the narrative would doom the narrative to languishing into at best a survival. Torah records no such trial; Mosheh either was not suspected or was not convicted of being a false prophet, or the denouement got separated from the rest of the narrative and disappeared. 

There are good reasons why Torah would never have brought up the astrology thing. Some are due to the format of oral narratives, and Jewish narratives in particular. Torah tells about three (magic number) times that Pharaoh's magicians mimicked Mosheh's miracle. The fourth time is the killer; in Jewish oral tradition, the fourth of anything is always a step too far and it is minimized or the fourth thing is a failure. "Israel" would have been a fourth patriarch so it is minimized as Yaaqov's other name. Rachel was the fourth mother of the Israelites and she died. There are three main prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel); Zechariah may be the longest of the others, but he is a fourth and a step too far, and his book is combined among the Trey Asar with Obadiah, the shortest of all. I comment on other examples in Narrating the Torah. The fourth attempt of Pharaoh's magicians fails.

Five is another magic number. Pharaoh's magicians are mentioned a fifth time, in connection with the fiery boils, but they do nothing in that episode, and we get a rational cause: they too are afflicted.

Six is not a magic number in Jewish oral tradition. There were not six and only six days of creation; there was no "hexateuch". There is no sixth reference to Pharaoh's magicians.

There's no opportunity for a seventh appearance to which the sixth would have led. Seven is Gd's number: seven days of creation including Shabbat, seven pairs of animals suitable for sacrifice in the ark, seven branches on the candlestick. To keep "seven" from being associated with Pharaoh's magicians, a sixth and seventh episode would have been suppressed, even if they had occurred.

And of course divination is prohibited to Jews so there's no sense bringing it up in connection with the Exodus.

Mar's tiny narrative here about Pharaoh’s astrologers is manifestly how an oral tradition could deal with the possibility of Mosheh being a liar. Mar (bar Rav Ashi) lived in the 400s CE, right in the middle of when Talmud was being recorded. Everybody was doing political astrology, from the Sumerians in the 3000s BCE down to Johannes Kepler in the 1600s CE; his laws of planetary motion came from crunching (with the help of Napier's brand-new logarithms) the massive database compiled by Tycho Brahe to use in casting horoscopes. Not knowing about archaeology, Mar naturally turned to astrology as an explanation.

Mar’s comment never would have been part of canon because telling that tiny narrative doesn't fit in with the epic laws that the rest of the canon has so many strong examples of. The idea that aggadah is a tradition remembered from as far back as the Exodus, works when we have an aggadah that does not disrupt the normal features of an oral tradition; disruptive aggadot would have been forgotten because they didn't use the format that promotes memorization. The aggadah are an oral tradition all their own, and the ones that survived did so because they did not contradict Torah, even if they offer a different take on its meaning. 

Oh, by the way, I put a comment on the Wikipedia article about Mar; seems the Jewish Encyclopedia authors didn't discuss everything attributed to Mar, most notably this quote, when they claimed that he didn't do aggadah. Sampling bias will destroy your credibility every time, it shows you didn't do your homework. This is one of many reasons why studies done before there was an Internet, are not necessarily reliable, especially when it comes to the humanities. Too few scholars could afford the travel and living expenses to make exhaustive studies of all the relevant  material. If somebody else had already accessed it, the later writers saved themselves time and money by just incorporating the older results. It was bad work but nobody called them on it because everybody was doing it. When your academic advisor lets you off the hook doing your homework, stop for a moment and think. Your advisor is making things easier on theirself by making things easier on you, not helping you do good work. Is that how you want future scholars to remember you?

Gibbon -- the urban legend, pt. 8

So by this point, you are reading Gibbon because I am ignoring all his tabloid trash and only writing about new issues he raises. Last time it was another example of how early sources are unreliable, specifically Eusebius.

This time I have to arraign Gibbon's understanding of the Bible. He starts with Assyria here but, as you know, Assyria mainly shows up in the Bible late in Kings and Chronicles. Gibbon ignores everything before that. He probably is pretending that having been raised an Anglican, and having converted to Catholicism and back again, he is perfectly skeptical about everything in the Bible. He probably disagrees with Archbishop Ussher that there was a millennium and a half before Assyria conquered the northern kingdom in the Holy Land. There's a reason for this -- Ussher was archbishop in the Irish church and, like many Englishmen of his time, Gibbon was prejudiced against the Irish. It will come out again in a later chapter.

Second, Gibbon identifies the Parthians with the Syrians, but we now know that this is not the case. The Arsacid empire was founded by an elected ruler of the Parni, one of the three tribes composing the Dahae. Supposedly the Dahae killed Cyrus the Great, but this comes from Berossus the Historian and we know it might be untrue; he lived in the 200s BCE and Cyrus died in the 500s BCE. An inscription of Khshayarsha from the 400s says the Dahae lived next to the Saka. Both fought Alexander at Gaugamela. Gibbon is getting his claim from Strabo, who seems to be the last reference to the Dahae.

The Scythians or Saka had their high point in the 400s BCE but by Strabo's time lived strictly in the Crimean peninsula. They were defeated by Mithridates and disappeared from literature, except for a loss to Tiberius Plautius Silvanus Aelianus before 100 CE. They settled down, assimilated, and founded a capital called Neapolis, which the Goths destroyed in the 300s CE.

Gibbon then goes into a disquisition on the Magian and Zoroastrian religions which has to be discounted in favor of less pejorative reports by people who have actually read surviving texts like the Zend Avesta in the Avestan language. This is a case of refusing to rely on commentaries, knowing that the people who wrote them probably didn't read the primary documents. So that makes 7 pages of chapter 8 that you can ignore. If you want to know about these religions, go to some scholarly site and find the translations of the material that is available on the web.

We get a hint that Gibbon was clueless about geography when he names both the Tigris and the Euphrates as boundaries of the early Sassanian empire. These two rivers have always been more or less close together. There would thus be a narrow tract between them that stretches up to the modern Aras River in Armenia, then to the Amu Darya which rises in the Pameer Mountains at Afghanistan, and finally to the Indus in northern India. If, however, we eliminate the Tigris as a boundary, there's a solid sweep of land from the Euphrates north and east.

It is also nonsense for Gibbon to talk of a want of fresh water for agriculture with all these mighty rivers being part of the empire. The famous bread and beer culture of Mesopotamia in the 2000s BCE developed on irrigated land. You can hardly grow a population in a subsistence economy without mechanized agriculture, if you lack fresh water. But under Ardashir, canals were built that simultaneously allowed irrigation and internal transportation.

The empire accessed the Persian Gulf on the south, leading to the Gulf of Oman.  It probably used the same harbors that, in the 3000s BCE, allowed traders from India to build settlements where they grew the cucumbers that they eventually brought to Mesopotamia as seed along with spices. From then on, the Akkadians had pickles to go with their beer, bread, and cheese. Gibbon didn't know about this, because none of his sources wrote about ports like Konarak or Gwadar Bay.

The archaeology of Mesopotamia really starts with Henry Layard, who proved, some 50 years after Gibbon died, that the city-state of Nineveh existed. It's another case of not blaming Gibbon for what he couldn't have known, but also recognizing that if we want the truth about Persia, we can't use Gibbon for a source because he writes out of ignorance and prejudice.

Zend-Avesta Vendidad: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.164086

Zend-Avesta part 2: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.283887

Zend-Avesta Part 3: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.283888

The Bundahishn: http://www.avesta.org/mp/grb.htm

These books are also part of the Sacred Books of the East series edited by Max Muller.

To the PDF

21st Century Classical Greek -- hopos

Book I section 19. This is short but has a couple of new grammar points in it.

καὶ οἱ μὲν Λακεδαιμόνιοι οὐχ ὑποτελεῖς ἔχοντες φόρου τοὺς ξυμμάχους ἡγοῦντο, κατ᾽ ὀλιγαρχίαν δὲ σφίσιν αὐτοῖς μόνον ἐπιτηδείως ὅπως πολιτεύσουσι θεραπεύοντες, Ἀθηναῖοι δὲ ναῦς τε τῶν πόλεων τῷ χρόνῳ παραλαβόντες πλὴν Χίων καὶ Λεσβίων, καὶ χρήματα τοῖς πᾶσι τάξαντες φέρειν. καὶ ἐγένετο αὐτοῖς ἐς τόνδε τὸν πόλεμον ἡ ἰδία παρασκευὴ μείζων ἢ ὡς τὰ κράτιστά ποτε μετὰ ἀκραιφνοῦς τῆς ξυμμαχίας ἤνθησαν.

Hupoteleis ekhontes forou are polises paying tribute. This is what Mr. T negates, instead of the verb higounto, the progressive eventive for something they would have repeated for each ally, creating a habit that they would have continued after the Persian war.

Learn sfisin as a real reflexive:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%83%CF%86%CE%B5%E1%BF%96%CF%82

Sfeis always emphasizes its antecedent, while himeis is a 1^st person plural and humeis is 2^nd person plural, in a non-emphatic sense. The phrase sfisin autois monon shows that the Lakedaimonians were not about to let any of their allies degenerate into this freedom nonsense, and that is one of the causes of the Peloponnesian war.

Look up politeusousi in the word tool; it has four options. Let’s see if we can straighten them out, and the word hopos is going to help us. When you look it up in Wiktionary, you see that it can be either an adverb or a conjunction. LSJ and Middle Liddell tend to treat it as a conjugation in one entry and use a separate one for the adverb. I think we’re pretty safe with a conjunction here, because it helps us figure out what politeusousi is.

The options are personal gerundive, imperfective conceptual indicative, and imperfective conceptual oblique. I already said that I had moved this oblique over into the conceptual column to regularize the conjunction paradigms. The personal gerundives are also in imperfective conceptual. The point is that this is what the Spartans wanted from their oligarchs, whether they got it or not. It can hardly be indicative, therefore. It’s more likely to be oblique.

Goodwin has a Greek index, and you would think he would include hopos there with hos, but he doesn’t, so once again he lets us down. We have to guess what the function might be. Let’s start with the morphology, and Goodwin does have an index entry for future with hopos, in an object clause. See 292, section 1372.

So he says an object clause has to do with a projected result, and that suits imperfective conceptual. He says the verb should either be indicative or epistemic. He says the epistemic should have a prior eventive verb, and then he refers us to a prior section, 1392.

And 1392 discusses the “original purpose” of a person. Look at section 1395; it says an oblique should come after conceptuals, and epistemics after eventives. BUT farther back, 1366 says the indicative follows hopos mostly in poetry. Goodwin does not refer to this in his index under “future with hopos”.

Now go to section 1370 where Goodwin admits that Thucydides and his contemporary Herodotus use oblique in this situation far more then examples like Homer and Xenophon.

Why?

“Why” is a very dangerous question to ask in discussing grammar, but let’s go back to our definitions. Oblique is something more likely to happen; epistemic is something nobody believes will happen. Let’s see if we can find Xenophon using hopos with an epistemic.

So I got out my search engine with the keywords Perseus Xenophon ὅπως.  I got Cyropaedia 1.6.2.:

…ὅπως μὴ δι᾽ ἄλλων ἑρμηνέων τὰς τῶν θεῶν συμβουλίας συνιείης,…

As you know by the iota in sunieis, this is indeed an epistemic. What is he saying? Kuros’ father says “I had you taught to be your own soothsayer so that you wouldn’t have to rely on others for your omens.” This is a father talking to his son, and we know kids don’t always take advantage of what their parents do for them, even if the parent explains the reason.

Homer has it in Odyssey, 11.480,

ὅπως Ἰθάκην ἐς παιπαλόεσσαν ἱκοίμην.

Odysseos has sacrificed to the dead using Circe’s instructions. The ghosts are coming to drink the blood and Odysseos wants to save it for Teiresias the soothsayer to find out, “how to get to rocky Ithakos.” The crew has already suffered a number of catastrophes; it’s not at all certain they’ll ever get back. If Homer had intended to give a spoiler, he failed; but as a good dramatist, he doesn’t want to ruin his narrative tension.

Now back to oblique, in Herodotus 3.40.4 with Ionian hokos instead of hopos:

…τοῦτο ἀπόβαλε οὕτω ὅκως μηκέτι ἥξει ἐς ἀνθρώπους:…

This is advice from Amasis to Polycrates to “throw away” whatever gives him most pleasure “so that no man [ever] sees it.” There’s always a chance somebody will come upon it, but Amasis is saying do your best to prevent that, so that the gods don’t get jealous of you.

So Thucydides uses an oblique, not just because he’s Mr. T, but because he knows how much the Spartans wanted to succeed – and he knows more of the events after this point than the Spartans did at the time.

Once again, on page 291, in section 1370, Goodwin misattributes usage – to authorship instead of context -- because he doesn’t know what we know now about how the classical authors used Greek.

And this is your chance to find hopos with the other non-indicative in the author that Goodwin thinks doesn’t use it that way, to prove that I’m wrong and it is a matter of authorship not context. Good luck.

21st Century Classical Greek -- diastaien

Book I section 18.

[2] δεκάτῳ δὲ ἔτει μετ᾽ αὐτὴν αὖθις ὁ βάρβαρος τῷ μεγάλῳ στόλῳ ἐπὶ τὴν Ἑλλάδα δουλωσόμενος ἦλθεν. καὶ μεγάλου κινδύνου ἐπικρεμασθέντος οἵ τε Λακεδαιμόνιοι τῶν ξυμπολεμησάντων Ἑλλήνων ἡγήσαντο δυνάμει προύχοντες, καὶ οἱ Ἀθηναῖοι ἐπιόντων τῶν Μήδων διανοηθέντες ἐκλιπεῖν τὴν πόλιν καὶ ἀνασκευασάμενοι ἐς τὰς ναῦς ἐσβάντες ναυτικοὶ ἐγένοντο. κοινῇ τε ἀπωσάμενοι τὸν βάρβαρον, ὕστερον οὐ πολλῷ διεκρίθησαν πρός τε Ἀθηναίους καὶ Λακεδαιμονίους οἵ τε ἀποστάντες βασιλέως Ἕλληνες καὶ οἱ ξυμπολεμήσαντες. δυνάμει γὰρ ταῦτα μέγιστα διεφάνη: ἴσχυον γὰρ οἱ μὲν κατὰ γῆν, οἱ δὲ ναυσίν.

[3] καὶ ὀλίγον μὲν χρόνον ξυνέμεινεν ἡ ὁμαιχμία, ἔπειτα διενεχθέντες οἱ Λακεδαιμόνιοι καὶ Ἀθηναῖοι ἐπολέμησαν μετὰ τῶν ξυμμάχων πρὸς ἀλλήλους: καὶ τῶν ἄλλων Ἑλλήνων εἴ τινές που διασταῖεν, πρὸς τούτους ἤδη ἐχώρουν. ὥστε ἀπὸ τῶν Μηδικῶν ἐς τόνδε αἰεὶ τὸν πόλεμον τὰ μὲν σπενδόμενοι, τὰ δὲ πολεμοῦντες ἢ ἀλλήλοις ἢ τοῖς ἑαυτῶν ξυμμάχοις ἀφισταμένοις εὖ παρεσκευάσαντο τὰ πολέμια καὶ ἐμπειρότεροι ἐγένοντο μετὰ κινδύνων τὰς μελέτας ποιούμενοι.

Epikremasthentos is a personal gerundive in passive voice. The -e- in the ending is your clue.

If this was executive voice, it would be -a-, -o-, or -u-.

And of course in base voice there’s a -men- before the personal ending.

Notice all the gerundives of both types in section 2. Thucydides signs up to the Lakedaimonians leading the effort, but he uses gerundives about the Athinaians leaving their polis and taking to their ships, until he gets to nautikoi egenonto. That’s what he really cares about, not the other actions.

The next bit of subsection 2 is difficult.

ὕστερον οὐ πολλῷ διεκρίθησαν πρός τε Ἀθηναίους καὶ Λακεδαιμονίους οἵ τε ἀποστάντες βασιλέως Ἕλληνες καὶ οἱ ξυμπολεμήσαντες.

So we have “not long after revolted, against both Athinaians and Lakedaimonians, those Hellenes who revolted against the King (of the Persians) and those who fought on the same side (as the Athinaians and Lakedaimonians).”

From subsection 3, καὶ τῶν ἄλλων Ἑλλήνων εἴ τινές που διασταῖεν uses an epistemic for “whichever of the other Hellenes who set apart.” That’s if you go by the edition of Middle Liddell on Perseus.

There’s a later edition available free on-line, I think it’s on Internet Archive. You can set bookmarks for the alphabetical divisions, making lookup easier. You can also get Big Liddell (LSJ). You can search both of them in English, which I sometimes do when looking for various verbs with similar translations.

At any rate, when you notice that diistimi is based on histimi, you should suspect that it could have an intransitive imperfective eventive. The updated LSJ says so.

So is this an ergative? No. We don’t have an agent in hupo X, we have tines…ton allon Hellenes,  “whichever of the other Hellenes”. Thucydides is not trying to say, as with Minos, that somebody would have done this deliberately, it just turned out that it was Minos. He’s saying more like, since there were sides to take, they could have been taken in any direction.

In general, calling the “second aorist” an intransitive imperfective eventive gets around giving you the misconception that it shows up only in ergative structures. It can be used any time Mr. T needs something less transitive than the plain imperfective eventive, but still wants to get across the nuance of something being done deliberately, with a nuance that it was fated.

And while Thucydides does not sign up to a certainty about exactly which Hellenes had differences with each other, besides the Athinaians and Lakedaimonians, and reinforces it with ei tines pou, he is still definite about the alliance, the dissensions, the preparedness or at least training for war, and the experience gained by the grandfathers that the sons would put to use in Thucydides’ time.

Gibbon -- the urban legend, pt. 7

Last time Gibbon proved he didn't understand the issues of debasement of the coinage or of the inflation that goes with it.

This time he starts off by condemning every form of government on earth, including democracy. Remember, he was a friend of Lord North, and he probably hated the way the Americans were rebelling against him. So basically, since the Romans had tried everything, and now they were down to a series of warlords, that spelled the end of the empire.

And of course what we get for a series of emperors, is the European bigotry that says if your ancestors were X, you have the bad qualities that bigots ascribe to them. Well, the first emperor, Maximin, descended from the Goths and Alani, and his father was -- wait for it -- an accountant! And he didn't work for Haft Accountemps, he worked in the governor's office!

Well, not quite. Maximin came too early in the empire for his father to be a Goth, but the Historia Augusta wouldn't know that, having been written around the time of the Gothic invasion by somebody who didn't really know anything about history. 

So this is another chapter full of tabloid trash. And here we come to a claim made by Eusebius.

Before you get excited, let me tell you one of Eusebius' stories. He claimed that Philo of Alexandria and Peter met in Rome.

Not even close. Philo died soon after his embassy to Caligula, to keep a statue of the emperor from being put up in the Second Temple in Jerusalem. He wrote about this; he also wrote a pamphlet against Flaccus who attacked Jews for not worshipping Caligula as a god. But Philo was dead by 50 CE, and Peter went to Rome where he was crucified in Nero's reign -- which did not start until 54 CE. 

Eusebius, like all the other historians of past ages except maybe Thucydides and Xenophon, reported stories that sounded good, but weren't necessarily based on eyewitness evidence, documents or oral traditions. In his History of the Church, Book II, chapter 17, point 1, Eusebius doesn't say for himself that Philo and Peter met, he says it's something he heard. Obviously this is an urban legend. Why would Eusebius say that?

Well, he was a Greek geek. He had read a work in Greek that was attributed to Philo. But nobody who was an educated, practicing Jew would have written the work, which was supposedly about Judaism. It isn't. It's a Neoplatonic tract grafted onto Judaism. There are scores of more or less gross errors and misinterpretations; I've read it, that's how I know. Eusebius also thinks that Philo's work agrees with Christianity. And he thought that Peter had influenced Philo to write that way. But since "Philo" didn't know anything about Judaism, and neither did Eusebius know enough to detect the errors, we have a comedy of errors here.

So when, in Book VI chapter 28, Eusebius says that there were Christians in the household of Maximin's predecessor Alexander, we have to ask some questions. If Maximin persecuted Alexander's household because of the Christians in it, how did he know they were there to begin with? If Christianity was persecuted at the time, how did their security precautions fail so badly that Maximin knew about them? If their security was that bad, how did Alexander not know about them and take measures, if there was a general persecution of Christians on at the time? How does Eusebius, born 30 years after Maximin's death, know that Maximin singled out the Christians instead of just killing everybody who might be loyal to Alexander? 

Again, you would like sources from close in time to an event, to know what they're talking about. But over and over we find out that the writers of antiquity did not follow the rules we would like to set for historiography today. Expecting any such thing from them is a case of the Presentism Fallacy.

To the PDF

21st Century Classical Greek -- time words

Book I section 18.1.

ἐπειδὴ δὲ οἵ τε Ἀθηναίων τύραννοι καὶ οἱ ἐκ τῆς ἄλλης Ἑλλάδος ἐπὶ πολὺ καὶ πρὶν τυραννευθείσης οἱ πλεῖστοι καὶ τελευταῖοι πλὴν τῶν ἐν Σικελίᾳ ὑπὸ Λακεδαιμονίων κατελύθησαν (ἡ γὰρ Λακεδαίμων μετὰ τὴν κτίσιν τῶν νῦν ἐνοικούντων αὐτὴν Δωριῶν ἐπὶ πλεῖστον ὧν ἴσμεν χρόνον στασιάσασα ὅμως ἐκ παλαιτάτου καὶ ηὐνομήθη καὶ αἰεὶ ἀτυράννευτος ἦν: ἔτη γάρ ἐστι μάλιστα τετρακόσια καὶ ὀλίγῳ πλείω ἐς τὴν τελευτὴν τοῦδε τοῦ πολέμου ἀφ᾽ οὗ Λακεδαιμόνιοι τῇ αὐτῇ πολιτείᾳ χρῶνται, καὶ δι᾽ αὐτὸ δυνάμενοι καὶ τὰ ἐν ταῖς ἄλλαις πόλεσι καθίστασαν), μετὰ δὲ τὴν τῶν τυράννων κατάλυσιν ἐκ τῆς Ἑλλάδος οὐ πολλοῖς ἔτεσιν ὕστερον καὶ ἡ ἐν Μαραθῶνι μάχη Μήδων πρὸς Ἀθηναίους ἐγένετο.

Learn epeidi, husteron, and idi which are all time expressions. Also learn etos, year.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%BC%94%CF%84%CE%BF%CF%82

ὑπὸ Λακεδαιμονίων κατελύθησαν

is not an ergative structure but straight intransitive; the conjugated verb is in passive voice.

The grammar of the first subsection is confusing, isn’t it?

ἐπειδὴ δὲ οἵ τε Ἀθηναίων τύραννοι καὶ οἱ ἐκ τῆς ἄλλης Ἑλλάδος ἐπὶ πολὺ καὶ πρὶν τυραννευθείσης οἱ πλεῖστοι καὶ τελευταῖοι πλὴν τῶν ἐν Σικελίᾳ ὑπὸ Λακεδαιμονίων κατελύθησαν (ἡ γὰρ Λακεδαίμων μετὰ τὴν κτίσιν τῶν νῦν ἐνοικούντων αὐτὴν Δωριῶν ἐπὶ πλεῖστον ὧν ἴσμεν χρόνον στασιάσασα ὅμως ἐκ παλαιτάτου καὶ ηὐνομήθη καὶ αἰεὶ ἀτυράννευτος ἦν: ἔτη γάρ ἐστι μάλιστα τετρακόσια καὶ ὀλίγῳ πλείω ἐς τὴν τελευτὴν τοῦδε τοῦ πολέμου ἀφ᾽ οὗ Λακεδαιμόνιοι τῇ αὐτῇ πολιτείᾳ χρῶνται, καὶ δι᾽ αὐτὸ δυνάμενοι καὶ τὰ ἐν ταῖς ἄλλαις πόλεσι καθίστασαν), μετὰ δὲ τὴν τῶν τυράννων κατάλυσιν ἐκ τῆς Ἑλλάδος οὐ πολλοῖς ἔτεσιν ὕστερον καὶ ἡ ἐν Μαραθῶνι μάχη Μήδων πρὸς Ἀθηναίους ἐγένετο.

Athinaion modifies turannoi.

Kai through Hellados also modifies turannoi, the tyrants in the other Hellenes.

Epi polu kai prin turanneutheisis means for the most part even before taking over, meaning in Athens.

Oi pleistoi is most of the tyrants.

Kai teleutaioi plin tov en Sikelia is the last tyrants to rule, except the ones in Sicily (who stayed in power)

The next part through the end of the parenthetical phrase tells how the Lakedaimonians put down tyrants

ὑπὸ Λακεδαιμονίων κατελύθησαν (ἡ γὰρ Λακεδαίμων μετὰ τὴν κτίσιν τῶν νῦν ἐνοικούντων αὐτὴν Δωριῶν ἐπὶ πλεῖστον ὧν ἴσμεν χρόνον στασιάσασα ὅμως ἐκ παλαιτάτου καὶ ηὐνομήθη καὶ αἰεὶ ἀτυράννευτος ἦν: ἔτη γάρ ἐστι μάλιστα τετρακόσια καὶ ὀλίγῳ πλείω ἐς τὴν τελευτὴν τοῦδε τοῦ πολέμου ἀφ᾽ οὗ Λακεδαιμόνιοι τῇ αὐτῇ πολιτείᾳ χρῶνται, καὶ δι᾽ αὐτὸ δυνάμενοι καὶ τὰ ἐν ταῖς ἄλλαις πόλεσι καθίστασαν), μετὰ δὲ τὴν τῶν τυράννων κατάλυσιν ἐκ τῆς Ἑλλάδος οὐ πολλοῖς ἔτεσιν ὕστερον καὶ ἡ ἐν Μαραθῶνι μάχη Μήδων πρὸς Ἀθηναίους ἐγένετο.

Thucydides believed that until the time of the Hellenes (AKA Dorian invasion, AKA return of the Herakleides), Lakedaimon was mostly uninhabited. 21^st century digs into the Palace Culture turned up documents in Linear B that refer to the Lakedaimonians. However, Linear B records an Indo-European language already akin to Greek. Since we haven’t deciphered Linear A, the premier language of the Palace Culture, we don’t know if it documents residents of Lakedaimon.