21st Century Classical Greek -- never rest on your laurels

I’ve gone about as far as I can go with syntax, because it takes a complete re-evaluation of the database to understand what writers are doing, given the new aspect paradigm and the death of old concepts (which is next week’s post).

But after I finished writing all the above posts and like Alexander, sat down weeping because there were no new worlds to conquer, I decided to do some more work. So I turned to Xenophon, a prolific prose writer.

Well.

In Xenophon Cyropaedia I 1.1 I found the bolded verb.

ἔννοιά ποθ᾽ ἡμῖν ἐγένετο ὅσαι δημοκρατίαι κατελύθησαν ὑπὸ τῶν ἄλλως πως βουλομένων πολιτεύεσθαι μᾶλλον ἢ ἐν δημοκρατίᾳ, ὅσαι τ᾽ αὖ μοναρχίαι, ὅσαι τε ὀλιγαρχίαι ἀνῄρηνται ἤδη ὑπὸ δήμων, καὶ ὅσοι τυραννεῖν ἐπιχειρήσαντες οἱ μὲν αὐτῶν καὶ ταχὺ πάμπαν κατελύθησαν, οἱ δὲ κἂν ὁποσονοῦν χρόνον ἄρχοντες διαγένωνται, θαυμάζονται ὡς σοφοί τε καὶ εὐτυχεῖς ἄνδρες γεγενημένοι. πολλοὺς δ᾽ ἐδοκοῦμεν καταμεμαθηκέναι καὶ ἐν ἰδίοις οἴκοις τοὺς μὲν ἔχοντας καὶ πλείονας οἰκέτας, τοὺς δὲ καὶ πάνυ ὀλίγους, καὶ ὅμως οὐδὲ τοῖς ὀλίγοις τούτοις πάνυ τι δυναμένους χρῆσθαι πειθομένοις τοὺς δεσπότας.

The dictionary entry is anaireo and how did that ita get there?

The clue was partly the hupo clause after it. Where have we seen that before? anybody? anybody? Bueller?

Yes, in two structures, passive and ergative. The Word Tool labels anirintai a perfective base voice in 3rd plural. But not only do we have a hupo agent, we have -oi case in front of the verb. If those were base voice objects, that shouldn't happen. So this has to be a passive construction. Well, the context looks passive -- but remember, perfective does not have true passive voice, only executive and base. So that doesn't work.

So I looked up the verb at the right side of the entry line, aireo. Guess what I found?

Aireo, like histimi, has "aor. 2", that is, an imperfective intransitive for an ergative structure. It uses that ita. There's no reason aniriintai can't be a perfective intransitive, something I found in Thucydides and which could have been a mirage.

To find two prose writers who are near-contemporaries using the same structure means that the ergative in Classical Greek is not a mirage, it's a thing.

I searched through a couple of books of Herodotus and did not find imperfective or perfective intransitive verbs with hupo. When Herodotus uses hupo with an animate agent, the verb tends to be progressive eventive, but a lot of times it’s a personal gerundive. It’s not clear why two writers immediately after his time would start using the ergative.

Never assume that you're right: keep doing your homework. But when things turn up aces, take the win and brag about it.