21 Century Classical Greek -- what the grammarians missed

Book I section 40.3 has some grammar I want to point out.

[3] οὐ γὰρ τοῖσδε μόνον ἐπίκουροι ἂν γένοισθε, ἀλλὰ καὶ ἡμῖν ἀντὶ ἐνσπόνδων πολέμιοι: ἀνάγκη γάρ, εἰ ἴτε μετ᾽ αὐτῶν, καὶ ἀμύνεσθαι μὴ ἄνευ ὑμῶν τούτους.

There are two issues here. First, examine the wording before the first comma. We have our categorical ou relating to toisde, our “benefit” -ois case, and then we have our an. Jowett translates this as a protasis, but an is supposed to mark the apodosis. So one point off there.

What Mr. T actually says is “not for those alone that you may become allies of…” The an marks off the switch in focus from “those” to “you”.

Genoisthe is the epistemic. The Korinthians don’t want the Athinaians to ally with the Kerkyraeans, and an oblique would admit that the Athinaians probably will.

Up to the colon, the Korinthians say “but [also] for us along with [“over against”] those who are part of the treaty, [you will be] enemies.”

The second issue is, do we have a conditional, “for it is necessary, if you go with them, [our] warding off them without you.”

Now, if Jowett had been smart, he would have tried to construe this as “if you go with them, then you become their allies,” which would be in line with all his other transpositions. But remember, Goodwin says that when the protasis has an indicative and there’s no evidence to contradict it, the apodosis should be a customary or repeated action or general truth.

The protasis does not express repetition; instead, we have a progressive for a situation.

There’s another problem, too. We can’t call this a “future less vivid” because that would require the protasis to be in the epistemic, but that’s in the an clause which would normally be an apodosis.

Remember, Thucydides is using grammar he learned on the street and in the literature available to him. We know that masses of Classical Greek literature have disappeared in the last 25 centuries – but to find things in Thucydides that are ignored in 25 centuries of grammar explanations, shows that 25 centuries of scholars haven’t done their job.