21st Century Classical Greek -- some more idioms

Book I section 50. I was going to do several sections in one post but then I found a number of things I thought you ought to know about.

τῆς δὲ τροπῆς γενομένης οἱ Κορίνθιοι τὰ σκάφη μὲν οὐχ εἷλκον ἀναδούμενοι τῶν νεῶν ἃς καταδύσειαν, πρὸς δὲ τοὺς ἀνθρώπους ἐτράποντο φονεύειν διεκπλέοντες μᾶλλον ἢ ζωγρεῖν, τούς τε αὑτῶν φίλους, οὐκ ᾐσθημένοι ὅτι ἥσσηντο οἱ ἐπὶ τῷ δεξιῷ κέρᾳ, ἀγνοοῦντες ἔκτεινον.

[2] πολλῶν γὰρ νεῶν οὐσῶν ἀμφοτέρων καὶ ἐπὶ πολὺ τῆς θαλάσσης ἐπεχουσῶν, ἐπειδὴ ξυνέμειξαν ἀλλήλοις, οὐ ῥᾳδίως τὴν διάγνωσιν ἐποιοῦντο ὁποῖοι ἐκράτουν ἢ ἐκρατοῦντο: ναυμαχία γὰρ αὕτη Ἕλλησι πρὸς Ἕλληνας νεῶν πλήθει μεγίστη δὴ τῶν πρὸ αὑτῆς γεγένηται.

[3] ἐπειδὴ δὲ κατεδίωξαν τοὺς Κερκυραίους οἱ Κορίνθιοι ἐς τὴν γῆν, πρὸς τὰ ναυάγια καὶ τοὺς νεκροὺς τοὺς σφετέρους ἐτράποντο, καὶ τῶν πλείστων ἐκράτησαν ὥστε προσκομίσαι πρὸς τὰ Σύβοτα, οἷ αὐτοῖς ὁ κατὰ γῆν στρατὸς τῶν βαρβάρων προσεβεβοηθήκει: ἔστι δὲ τὰ Σύβοτα τῆς Θεσπρωτίδος λιμὴν ἐρῆμος. τοῦτο δὲ ποιήσαντες αὖθις ἁθροισθέντες ἐπέπλεον τοῖς Κερκυραίοις.

[4] οἱ δὲ ταῖς πλωίμοις καὶ ὅσαι ἦσαν λοιπαὶ μετὰ τῶν Ἀττικῶν νεῶν καὶ αὐτοὶ ἀντεπέπλεον, δείσαντες μὴ ἐς τὴν γῆν σφῶν πειρῶσιν ἀποβαίνειν.

[5] ἤδη δὲ ἦν ὀψὲ καὶ ἐπεπαιάνιστο αὐτοῖς ὡς ἐς ἐπίπλουν, καὶ οἱ Κορίνθιοι ἐξαπίνης πρύμναν ἐκρούοντο κατιδόντες εἴκοσι ναῦς Ἀθηναίων προσπλεούσας, ἃς ὕστερον τῶν δέκα βοηθοὺς ἐξέπεμψαν οἱ Ἀθηναῖοι, δείσαντες, ὅπερ ἐγένετο, μὴ νικηθῶσιν οἱ Κερκυραῖοι καὶ αἱ σφέτεραι δέκα νῆες ὀλίγαι ἀμύνειν ὦσιν.

τῆς δὲ τροπῆς γενομένης may make you think of “tropics” and in a way that’s correct. The tropics are where the sun holds its course. This is different from but related to tropos in section 49, the custom of doing things in war. In a military context, tropo means turning your back on an enemy and fleeing so, “the flight [of the Kerkyraeans] taking place…”

Look at …τῶν νεῶν ἃς καταδύσειαν… Why the epistemic? Surely the ships had been destroyed. The issue is who destroyed them? The previous section makes clear that the large number of ships in a cramped space made it impossible for the damaged ones to get clear and possibly save themselves. Any given ship might have been the victim of attackers from its own side, which had been sent crashing into it while trying to flee the enemy.

The phrase after that uses an intransitive imperfective eventive with an impersonal gerundive complement. Goodwin has no discussion about such a structure; LSJ has an example from Thucydides Book 2 section 65.10, again with an i.g. complement, …ἐτράποντο … ἐνδιδόναι. Etraponto has an object in the -ous case each time, so these are not ergative structures. I’m continuing on with Thucydides to see if I can find other examples of this and what the nuance might be.

Subsection 1 has τούς τε αὑτῶν φίλους, the friends of them, and in subsection 3 καὶ τοὺς νεκροὺς τοὺς σφετέρους ἐτράποντο, they turned to their own dead. Auton and sfeterous both refer to the Korinthians who are the subject of each sentence, but the relationship seems to be closer in the second case.

If you didn’t learn pleo last week, you should learn it this week because of all the related verbs in section 50, which I underlined.

Now I have a Victorianism to explain which has warped ideas about what the Bible says and which Jowett of course pursues to his destruction.

… ἔστι δὲ τὰ Σύβοτα τῆς Θεσπρωτίδος λιμὴν ἐρῆμος…

He translates this as a desert harbor. Say what?

Well, any uninhabited place, or any place intermittently inhabited, is deserted by fixed settlers. That doesn’t mean it’s a hot sandy waste. That just means nobody lives there. Erimos means desolate, and also solitary, and from that comes the medieval word eremite and the English word hermit. Hermits don’t all live in hot sandy regions, but some of the earliest Christian hermits were Egyptians (forebears of the Coptic church) who had access to such places beyond the floodplain of the Nile.

When your Bible translation talks about the Sinai as a desert, you think of the Sinai as it is today. Archaeology, paleontology, and paleoclimatology give a very different picture up to the Roman period; the modern Libyan desert could never have supported the city of Carthage that the Romans destroyed and later rebuilt. Don’t fall for this “false friend”.

Look up ἐπεπαιάνιστο in subsection 5. The Paean was first addressed to healer gods and was a choral song. As a victory over illness or injury, it became a military victory song and seems to also have been something like the cadence used in military training school marches or the soldiers’ songs described in Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Finally, it seems to have been used to inspire troops before a battle.