21st Century Classical Greek -- commentaries

I apologize for being late with this, I had some financial stuff to do this morning. NEhoo.

Book I section 51. I’m going to focus on subsection 4 here to give you reasons not to trust commentaries. Period.

ταύτας οὖν προϊδόντες οἱ Κορίνθιοι καὶ ὑποτοπήσαντες ἀπ᾽ Ἀθηνῶν εἶναι οὐχ ὅσας ἑώρων ἀλλὰ πλείους ὑπανεχώρουν.

[2] τοῖς δὲ Κερκυραίοις ἐπέπλεον γὰρ μᾶλλον ἐκ τοῦ ἀφανοῦς οὐχ ἑωρῶντο, καὶ ἐθαύμαζον τοὺς Κορινθίους πρύμναν κρουομένους, πρίν τινες ἰδόντες εἶπον ὅτι νῆες ἐκεῖναι ἐπιπλέουσιν. τότε δὲ καὶ αὐτοὶ ἀνεχώρουν: ξυνεσκόταζε γὰρ ἤδη, καὶ οἱ Κορίνθιοι ἀποτραπόμενοι τὴν διάλυσιν ἐποιήσαντο.

[3] οὕτω μὲν ἡ ἀπαλλαγὴ ἐγένετο ἀλλήλων, καὶ ἡ ναυμαχία ἐτελεύτα ἐς νύκτα.

[4] τοῖς δὲ Κερκυραίοις στρατοπεδευομένοις ἐπὶ τῇ Λευκίμμῃ αἱ εἴκοσι νῆες αἱ ἐκ τῶν Ἀθηνῶν αὗται, ὧν ἦρχε Γλαύκων τε ὁ Λεάγρου καὶ † Ἀνδοκίδης ὁ Λεωγόρου †, διὰ τῶν νεκρῶν καὶ ναυαγίων προσκομισθεῖσαι κατέπλεον ἐς τὸ στρατόπεδον οὐ πολλῷ ὕστερον ἢ ὤφθησαν.

[5] οἱ δὲ Κερκυραῖοι (ἦν γὰρ νύξ) ἐφοβήθησαν μὴ πολέμιαι ὦσιν, ἔπειτα δὲ ἔγνωσαν: καὶ ὡρμίσαντο.

In 51.4, Jowett commits another one of his transpositions that disrupts Thucydides’ structure. Having told how both fleets retreated, Mr. T sends the Kerkyraeans to camp in Leukimmi, saying that 20 ships were left of what the Athinaians sent. Then Thucydides tells who commanded this squadron. Putting the names first as Jowett does, would confuse T’s audience. They want to know what happened more than they care who did it.

Now look at the two daggers in subsection 4. They mark a name and in Perseus, you can look at Marchant’s notes and see what they mean. They set off a name about which there is some uncertainty. Marchant claims that the orator of a similar name would have mentioned his grandfather as being involved in this battle. That rests on a couple of bad assumptions.

The most important bad assumption is that we have all the work that the orator produced. We don’t have all the work of the more-famous Aeschylus, for example; we have about 10% of his lifetime output.

The other bad assumption shows up a lot in scholarly work. It’s called the Presentism Fallacy; the scholar assumes that the work he is studying would have in it all of the information the scholar would have put into it if he had written that work. The same thing happens in Bible scholarship, and the reason is probably the same.

Scholars want the Bible to record specific things, but they are working from a literary standpoint and the Tannakh, at least, is a record of an oral tradition. It is formatted in ways that coordinate with Axel Olrik’s principles. It is also a Jewish work, and some of its mid-level structures show up in Mishnah and Talmud, the latter of which is also the record of an oral tradition. The scholars who are dissatisfied with the gaps in the Bible are mostly Christians who want the Tannakh to cater to them, when Christianity was neither born nor dreamed of between 4000 BCE and the end of the Babylonian Captivity.

An orator by definition works in the oral environment, not the literary environment. He is going to format things in a way suitable for his audience, as I have already shown Thucydides does. He is going to follow Axel’s law of parsimony, and avoid tiring his audience out with things not relevant to the point at hand. He can also avoid information he reasonably expects his audience to have, so he doesn’t offend them by talking down to them. We’ve seen this, too, in Thucydides.

Remember long ago when I referred to Hartley’s work on oratory and avoiding tiring the audience with rounded periods that produce long sentences? In Hartley’s environment, orators wrote their work out at full length to make sure they included pertinent quotations and then they memorized what they wrote to use in their presentations – or they flat out read from their written work. That’s the background of Marchant’s fallacious claim. It’s not how Thucydides worked, and it’s not necessarily how the orator of the same name worked.

Marchant also weasel-words his discussion of the inscription. There is no link to this inscription on Perseus; there is no citation in Marchant’s note, to a work that gives the text. We don’t know what it actually says. We don’t know from Marchant’s note whether any work discusses how such inscriptions relate to what various authors have said about the Peloponnesian War. There is a parenthetical “see crit. Note” but when we click “focus” to see Marchant’s work, there still is no link to any information supporting Marchant’s claims.

In fact Marchant’s work is not available on the Internet, except for Perseus. And Marchant’s work is strictly a commentary on the wording of Thucydides. It is not possible to follow up his claims. I know of commentaries, the claims in which can be followed up and proven false; I destroy two of them on my Fact-Checking blog.

Of course, it’s possible that Thucydides got this name wrong. However, he and not the orator lived in the generation when the war happened, and there’s also the possibility that the inscription is wrong, depending on when it was made and who paid for it. But due to Marchant’s sloppy fallacious work, we can’t tell.

But given the problems – gaps, inaccuracies, bad citations, false claims – in books that only deal with Greek grammar, it shouldn’t be a surprise that people writing commentaries would do even worse. And if you read what I wrote on the Fact-Checking thread, you shouldn’t be surprised that the same thing happens in commentaries on Greek literature.