21st Century Classical Greek -- Goodwin's proposed periphrastic

Book I section 21.

ἐκ δὲ τῶν εἰρημένων τεκμηρίων ὅμως τοιαῦτα ἄν τις νομίζων μάλιστα ἃ διῆλθον οὐχ ἁμαρτάνοι, καὶ οὔτε ὡς ποιηταὶ ὑμνήκασι περὶ αὐτῶν ἐπὶ τὸ μεῖζον κοσμοῦντες μᾶλλον πιστεύων, οὔτε ὡς λογογράφοι ξυνέθεσαν ἐπὶ τὸ προσαγωγότερον τῇ ἀκροάσει ἢ ἀληθέστερον, ὄντα ἀνεξέλεγκτα καὶ τὰ πολλὰ ὑπὸ χρόνου αὐτῶν ἀπίστως ἐπὶ τὸ μυθῶδες ἐκνενικηκότα, ηὑρῆσθαι δὲ ἡγησάμενος ἐκ τῶν ἐπιφανεστάτων σημείων ὡς παλαιὰ εἶναι ἀποχρώντως.

[2] καὶ ὁ πόλεμος οὗτος, καίπερ τῶν ἀνθρώπων ἐν ᾧ μὲν ἂν πολεμῶσι τὸν παρόντα αἰεὶ μέγιστον κρινόντων, παυσαμένων δὲ τὰ ἀρχαῖα μᾶλλον θαυμαζόντων, ἀπ᾽ αὐτῶν τῶν ἔργων σκοποῦσι δηλώσει ὅμως μείζων γεγενημένος αὐτῶν.

In subsection 1, Jowett again transposes material. Thucydides is rehashing his issues about evidence using some of the same words: out of those who find evidence and thinking the same as what came to me, they would not be wrong.

He again uses a perfective hymnikasi, for what the poets said.

He says trust neither the poets nor the historians, who speak to please and whose work nobody can validate.

Then he does an important thing.

Remember some time back, I reported Goodwin’s contention that in quoted speech, an plus a progressive conceptual impersonal gerundive is a periphrastic progressive eventive impersonal gerundive. There is no morphological progressive eventive i.g.

There is also no morphological progressive eventive oblique modality. Here Mr. T has an polemousi with a progressive conceptual oblique modality. What if this is a periphrastic progressive eventual oblique modality?

Oblique it has to be; Thucydides is certain that he talked to men about wars that were fought. He knows that he heard at best exaggerations, and possibly outright lies. That means that some of the men he talked to may have claimed to be in the wars, but were invalided out so early they missed the bulk of the action. So he’s not going to claim certainty that everybody he talked to did much fighting.

This is an event, not a situation or habit. If there is such a thing as a periphrastic p.e. oblique, it’s not discussed in the old grammars, like a lot of other things that only pop out when you clear away the deadwood. Here’s a chance for some of you to earn your chops by reading a lot of Greek prose and look for other such structures, then see if the context supports that they are this new thing. But again, the idea that a periphrasis can change one aspect/flavor into another is not possible with our objective definitions.

I’ll take up what an really does much later in this series.

Notice that dilosi at the end is an imperfective conceptual oblique modality, our re-definition of the “aorist subjunctive”.