How does taking ἀντιτείχισμα here as “buttressing” or “buttressing wall” sound?
My thinking is like this… The earthworks that they had thrown up were not right round the city, but in places, presumably with the engines of war behind or near them. At those points, the citizens of the town buttressed the city walls. So, what had originally been chose as points of weakest defence, became strong enough to withstand attacks. Etymologically, the ἀντι- of ἀντιτείχισμα might seem too go with the χῶμα, but I think it is a fixed part of the meaning of the word ἀντιτείχισμα “something placed against the wall”, not “a wall over against the χῶμα (or whatever else is mentioned in a passage)”. There was a gap between the earthworks and the city wall (τεῖχος).
A commentary on the Greek in Modern Greek by Christo Papanastasiou explains the situation as τὸ μηνοειδὲς τεῖχος. Presumably he has read that straight from Procopius into Thucydides. In the Thucydidean story, however, there doesn’t seem to have been preparatory work and the distance between the wall and the earthwork seems to have been small.
Modern Greek definitions are given in different contexts as
Neither of which refer to a second wall separated from the first, but rather in terms of it providing some support to another structure.
While your suggestion is interesting, I have some problems with it. One needs to interpret 2.77 in the light of what has been said about the various works in 2.75-76. Firstly, only one enemy χῶμα is mentioned, not ‘earthworks’ at various points around the city. In response to this, the Plataeans first construct a makeshift superstructure upon the city wall, to oppose the mound as it grows higher; subsequently, they cease work on this, and start constructing a crescent-shaped (μηνοειδὲς) wall, projecting inwards from their main city wall. The idea is that if, by means of the χῶμα, the enemy succeed in penetrating the city wall, they will, at that point, find themselves confronting another, inner defensive wall; moreover, because of the crescent shape of the latter, they would come under attack from defenders on both ‘limbs’ of the crescent, and increasingly so as they approached the crescent’s ‘apex’.
It is, I think, to this crescent-shaped inner wall (and, possibly, also to the initial superstructure on the city wall) that τὸ ἀντιτείχισμα at the start of 2.77 is referring. The τὸ implies that what is mentioned here has been referred to before, and as far as I can see there has been no previous mention of any ‘buttressing’ all around the city wall.
I’m also not clear why you think that Papanastasiou ‘has read that [μηνοειδὲς] straight from Procopius into Thucydides’, since, as I’ve pointed out, the descriptor μηνοειδὲς has in fact been used by Thucydides himself in 2.76.
This, at any rate, is how I interpret the passage; does anyone else have a view?
I agree with John. This passage needs to be read in the context of what went before, and John has laid it out. μηνοειδὲς is “moon-shaped”, i.e., “crescent.”
Coming back to this, as I’m not frequently on Textkit, what I’m wondering is whether if a reader who understands the broader Greek language brings an understanding of ἀντιτείχισμα as “buttressing” to the text, would it stand in the context?
All I can say is that I don’t think anyone who has attentively read 2.75-6 would take ἀντιτείχισμα in 2.77 in the way you’ve suggested. Even if the word could bear that meaning in other contexts, it clearly does not do so here; as Qimmik and I have said, one cannot read 2.77 in isolation from what precedes, and to me it seems pointless to attempt to do so.
