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CHAPTER LXXXV

μὲν ἔκπεμψις—cf. i. 73, μὲν πρέσβευσις...ἐγένετο. μέν finds its apodosis in line 6, or possibly in line 12, εἰ δὲ χρόνῳ κ.τ.λ. in the latter case being parenthetical.

τὴν αἰτίαν—cf. Shilleto on i. 23, αἱ ἐς τὸ φανερὸν λεγόμεναι αὶτίαι, which he renders ‘the openly alleged recriminatory charges’, αὶτία being not merely a cause, but a ground of complaint put forward as a cause: cf. ch. 86, 21, ἐγκλήμασι. ὲπαληθεύουσα—so viii. 52, τὸν λόγον ἐπηλήθευσεν.

προείπομενii. 8 (of the Lacedaemonians), προειπόντων ὅτι τὴν Ἕλλαδα ἐλευθεροῦσιν.

ἐπήλθομεν—‘came to’, not necessarily in a hostile sense: cf. ἐπίω, line 22.

ἀπό—‘arising from, grounded on’. —‘in accordance with which, by which’.

μηδεὶς μεμφθγ̂ͅ—for the mood and tense used in prohibitions, see Goodwin, § 86.

ὅτε παρέσχεν—impers. ‘when a chance offered’: i. 120, εὖ παρασχόν, neut. partcp. used abs.: so v. 14, καλῶς παρασχόν: vi. 86, παρασχήσειν ἀμύνασθαι.

τῇ ἀποκλῄσει—‘I wonder at’, dat. with θαυμάζω expressing the ground or cause, a very rare construction: in vii. 63, there is a dat. with the passive ἐθαυμάζεσθε, ‘you were admired by reason of’, but it is not an analogous instance, though so cited by editors. We have a better illustration in iii. 97, τῇ τύχῃ ἐλπίσας. The gen. μου corresponds to the acc. with the verb=‘the exclusion of me from your gates’: cf. vi. 101, αὐτοὺς ἀποκλῄσασθαι τῆς διαβάσεως.

οἰόμενοί τε—the sentence presents two irregularities of construction with τε. The first τε and καί couple παρὰ ξυμμάχους ἤξειν and βουλομένοις ἔσεσθαι, ‘we thought that you were our allies in feeling, and would welcome us when we came’. The second τε connects κίνδυνον ἀνερρίψαμεν with πᾶν τὸ πρόθυμον, the sense being ‘we ran the risk of marching into Thrace, and are now showing all zeal on your behalf’. διὰ τῆς ἀλλοτρίας ἰόντες is explanatory of κίνδυνον: after this the participial construction is continued and παρεχόμενοι written instead of παρεχόμεθα. This explanation gives the most forcible sense, but it is of course a possible view that τε and καί simply connect the two participles. τε is bracketed by Poppo and Krüger and omitted by Classen.

τῇ γοῦν γνώμῃ—‘at least in feeling’ with ξυμμάχους. βουλομένοις ἔσεσθαι—sc. our coming: for dat. cf. ch. 28, 27.

ἀνερρίψαμεν—ch. 95, 6: in v. 103 without an acc. τοῖς ἐς ἅπαν τὸ ὑπάρχον ἀναρριπτοῦσι, ‘those who stake their all on the cast’: this is a metaphor from dice. In iii. 38, αὐτὴ τοὺς κινδύνους ἀναφέρει, is ‘takes on herself the risks’: and this may be the meaning of Aesch. Sept. 1028, κἀνὰ κίνδυνον βαλῶ. For pres. form ῥιπτέω see Lid. and Scott.

παρεχόμενοι—‘showing’, on our part: see note on ch. 64, 2: cf. infr. line 24.

ἐν νῷ ἔχετε—‘purpose, intend’: ch. 8, 24. δεινὸν ἂν εἴη—less direct than the ind.; the speaker hopes for better things.

οὐ μόνον ὅτι—so Plat. Symp. 179 B, οὐ μόνον ὅτι ἄνδρες ἀλλὰ καὶ γυναῖκες: in ii. 97 we have οὐχ ὄτι...ἀλλ᾽ οὐδέ. οὐχ ὅπως...ἀλλά is far more common. ἐπίω does not here imply hostile approach, and we might expect the accusative rather than the dative: cf. v. 110, ὄσους μὴ Βρασίδας ἐπῆλθεν, ‘if Brasidas failed to visit any’.

δυσχερὲς ποιούμενοι—‘taking it ill’, i.e. refusing to listen to us: cf. δυσχεραίνω: neither the adj. nor the verb is used elsewhere by Thucydides. In the next clause with εἰ, Brasidas quotes the objection which would be urged, ‘that you refused to receive me’: cf. ch. 122, 21.

παρεχομένους—see ch. 64, 2.

τὴν αἰτίαν—probably used with the same force as in line 3, the sense being ‘I shall not be able to satisfy men that I am come, as I profess, to deliver them from Athens’. Others take it ‘I shall not be able to give a credible reason for your rejection of me’. πιστήν is of course pred. ‘so as to gain belief’. ἀλλ᾽ —either (1) ‘but (I shall be thought) either etc.’, where we must supply the sense from the context, or perhaps take αἰτίαν ἔξω again in a different connexion and meaning=‘I shall incur the imputation’: or (2) after neg. ἀλλ᾽ taken together=‘except’, explaining αἰτίαν, i.e. this will seem the only possible reason. This latter view necessitates taking αἰτίαν in the second and less forcible of the two senses given above, and also does away with the parallelism ἐπιφέρειν, ...ἀφῖχθαι. I therefore incline to (1).

ἄδικον—‘no true freedom’; this point is discussed in the following chapter. ἐπιφέρειν—lit. to bring to or upon, more than to proffer: so ch. 87, 10: iii. 56, in a bad sense, δουλείαν ἐπέφερεν βάρβαρος.

τὰ πρὸς Ἀθηναίους—acc. of ref. as in ch. 108, 7.

καίτοι—Brasidas first rebuts the imputation of weakness. The Athenians had already refused to encounter him at Nisaea, and they could only send an inferior force now.

στρατιᾷ γε τῇδ᾽—Poppo observes on the absence of the article with τῇδε that it gives the pronoun an adverbial force, =‘I have here an army which the Athenians refused to face’: so ii. 74, ἐπὶ γῆν τήνδε ἤλθομεν, ἐν , ‘we now invade a land in which’, etc. This statement, as well as the words πλέονες ὄντες, is untrue. Besides his own troops Brasidas had a large force of allies before Nisaea, and was superior in numbers to the Athenians; see note on ch. 73, 24.

ὥστε οὐκ εἰκός—instead of saying that the Athenians would certainly not attack Brasidas with an inferior force such as they could send by sea, the speaker says that such a force would not be equal to the army at Nisaea, leaving the hearers to draw the conclusion.

νηΐτῃ—adj. ii. 24, ἢν νηΐτῃ στρατῷ ἐπιπλέωσι. Here one manuscript has στρατῷ before αὐτούς, which would give an identical construction, dat. of the force employed. If we do not adopt the transposition, στρατῷ or the like must be understood from what follows. Arnold proposes to omit the words τῷ ἐν Νισαίᾳ. So Rutherford, who reads νηίτην...στρατὸν ἰσοπαλῆ.

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hide References (19 total)
  • Commentary references from this page (19):
    • Aeschylus, Seven Against Thebes, 1028
    • Plato, Symposium, 179b
    • Thucydides, Histories, 1.120
    • Thucydides, Histories, 1.73
    • Thucydides, Histories, 2.24
    • Thucydides, Histories, 2.74
    • Thucydides, Histories, 2.8
    • Thucydides, Histories, 2.97
    • Thucydides, Histories, 3.38
    • Thucydides, Histories, 3.56
    • Thucydides, Histories, 3.97
    • Thucydides, Histories, 5.103
    • Thucydides, Histories, 5.110
    • Thucydides, Histories, 5.14
    • Thucydides, Histories, 6.101
    • Thucydides, Histories, 6.86
    • Thucydides, Histories, 7.63
    • Thucydides, Histories, 8.52
    • Thucydides, Histories, 1.23
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