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.