κεχωρίδαται is Ionic: attested in Herodotus. See LSJ. Maybe κεχωρισται would be more Attic.
οὐ μὴ does seem strange, maybe a textual problem.
I’m not bothered too much by the lack of connective. It’s the start of a paragraph, and τουτων may provide enough connection.
Per LSJ, τὰ φιλοῦντα + ἐκθηλύνειν – φιλεω in the sense of “have a tendency to” is attested in Attic authors, and ἐκθηλύνειν is attested in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 1st Century BCE, to be sure, but a writer of good Greek with Atticizing tendencies. And of course, just because a word isn’t found in the surviving corpus of 5th-4th century Attic prose doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t Attic or was never used in some lost, genuinely “Attic” work.
So even if the Caesar translation may not be pure Attic in every detail, especially when viewed under a microscope, from the little I’ve looked at it, it seems to me respectable Greek prose in a literary register, not sub-literary Greek like the LXX or certain parts of the New Testament.
This raises the question of what is truly “Attic.” If we’re trying our hand at Greek composition, we want to make sure that every word we use, in every sense in which we use it, is attested in an Attic author. But if we’re just reading, while only texts from 5th-4th century Athenian authors are truly Attic, other texts may offer perfectly good literary Greek.
hi hylander, yep i completely agree with everything you say. does the translator write well? definitely. is it close to attested attic? yes.
but it’s not quite attested attic, based on a quick read of the first few sentences. the translator uses words not attested in attic, even where attic has attested word choices for those very concepts that the translator could have used instead – plato, demosthenes etc use words for effeminacy, whereas the word the translator chose isn’t attested in attic – instead the translator instead seems to pick words from herodotus, or from later greek, rather than from the list of books on our “attic” bookshelf. a few constructions which either seem wrong (possibly textual corruption as you say) or aren’t wrong but far less common than what attested attic more often uses, at least as far as i can tell. note however i only read 3 sentences and so this is just first impressions!
i completely agree that some of the word choices may have been attic although unattested in the texts we have. but personally i only care about attested attic - my goal is to learn attic to be able to understand the attested texts, not to use the attested texts to access what would or would not have been correct attic. that’s an interesting study but i don’t have enough time for classics to go that deep.
this looks like a great translation, and i’m interested in reading it further out of curiosity. however, if someone is looking for easier greek to practice more fluent reading, my personal preference would be to go with something from an ancient work more on the scientific side, whether or not pure attic. theophrastus is good, maths, i’m sure medical texts would be interesting too (but haven’t tried yet). unfortunately the best way to learn to read attested attic seems to be by reading attested attic - very hard.
One thing we can be absolutely certain of: whoever translated this must have lived and written at least three centuries after the classical Attic period in the 5th-4th centuries BCE. Probably much later than that, too–the late medieval/early Renaissance period.
For what it’s worth, there are two Latin introductions (with a brief article on Planudes in between). The first by the editor, Baumstark, insists that Planudes (13th c.) was the author, and that it couldn’t have been the work of Gaza (15th c.) because he thinks, relying on someone else’s (Lemaire’s) examination, that the manuscript, which is housed in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, is 200 years older. The second (beginning at p. xviii), by someone named Fladeus (apparently a student writing a dissertation), makes word for word comparisons of Book 1 with the original, pointing out that the translation is quite free in many places, really a paraphrase, and sometimes inaccurate, and points to Gaza as the author. He notes that the translator often renders as direct discourse what in the original is indirect discourse.