οἳ δ’ οὔποτ’ ἐλπίσαντες
It looks like expectation would be a reasonable gloss here. ἐλπίσαντες is negated, so we have a scenario where things have not turned out according to expectation. It isn’t perfectly clear what was expected but Smyth’s translation …
… or they who, beyond their hope, have reaped a rich harvest of possessions
… makes it sound like there expectations were of a positive sort. — I have not reached this point in the text (Thucy. 3.70.6 discussion!) — Looking at LSJ the expectations appear to get the positive/negative coloring from the co-text, the ἐλπίς word group being used in a neutral manner.
In the NT I haven’t encountered a negative co-text where ἐλπίς is related to anything feared or dreaded. Louw & Nida[1] don’t show any semantic domain that would support a neutral concept like expectation. Doubtless some English translation must have used that word for some instance of the ἐλπίς word group. But I don’t think NT ἐλπίς is a neutral word.
My post was somewhat unclear. I think ἐλπίσαντες has a somewhat positive sense here and that’s why I called it NT-like. I think οἳ δ’ οὔποτ’ ἐλπίσαντες means “they, never even hoping for it” i.e. something “beyond reasonable hope” or “more than they hoped for”.
I was wondering if there was something going on here on a larger scale, whether this ἐλπίς “texture” means anything.
I just checked back in LSJ for the ἐλπίς verb-noun word group. My speculation relative to a purely neutral sense in the earlier literature does not seem to be supported by the evidence. It seems that expectation is only one semantic component of ἐλπίς. Fear of or desire for the object of this expectation is not a notion that can be completely separated from the word.
Denniston-Page (D-P) parse the awkward protasis joining ἐκ θεῶν to the verb εἶργε, prevent by divine decree. I suppose that is possible. Lattimore puts it up front: “Had the gods not so ordained that fate should stand against fate…” and C. Collard appears to hang it on μοῖρα "… one man’s status in life set by heaven preventing … " which is similar to Smyth “And unless one fate ordained of the gods restrains another fate … .” All three of these renderings avoid making ἐκ θεῶν an adverbial, though Lattimore might be understood that way since he opens up with a subordinate participle clause, a contextualizer of sorts. It looks to me like Lattimore makes ἐκ θεῶν qualify the entire protasis not just the verb.
These are the most literal translations I have on hand. The others were very free. When the going gets tough, the translation gets loose.