I read this sentence this morning. First time through, I thought somebody had torched a ship. Second time through, the first mistake I caught myself making was misreading νεὼς. There was no way the genitive of ναῦς could work here and then I remembered that νεὼς is an Attic form for ναός. So now I knew that a temple had been burnt, what? Hold on, there’s a definite article, so it’s not just a temple, it’s the temple of Athena in Phocaea. So now I figured it probably meant that the following year an arsonist had set fire to the temple, guessing that πρηστήρ is probably an arsonist, thinking the word probably came from ἐνέπρησα. But then, I thought πρηστῆρος ἐμπεσόντος looks like a genitive absolute, so it could possibly mean “since an arsonist attacked, the temple caught on fire”. That seemed a very awkward way of expressing an act of arson, so finally I looked up πρηστήρ in the LSJ to find that what I thought was a logical guess turned out to be rather wrong. πρηστήρ turns out to be a hurricane attended by lightning, so the temple caught fire during a lightning storm (when lightning struck it) . And here I was thinking some shady provocateur had slipped in and torched the place.
I think the point is clear. Without grammatical triggers and checking my guesses in a dictionary, I would have completely misread the meaning of this sentence. In order to correctly deduce the correct meaning of this sentence, I needed to:
understand the attributive position of the article
recognise the genitive absolute construction
know the declension of ναῦς and the Attic form of ναός (νεώς)
know the formation of the aorist passive of a compound verb.
recognise the genitive of Time (τοῦ δ᾽ ἐπιόντος ἔτους)
This is not a difficult sentence by any means, but for an intermediate reader and especially for a beginner, there are still a couple of potential pitfalls. So I’m not quite ready to resist going to the LSJ or Smyth or the CGCG when in doubt. As Seneca says, the formal grammatical study required to understand literary texts goes without saying. That does not mean that one must read a dictionary or a grammar as though it were another textbook in order to learn the language, but there must be sufficient instruction in the language in order to know when one has understood and when one has not and when there is doubt, that one has enough knowledge to ask the right questions; otherwise, even a grammar or dictionary will be useless. Comprehensible input may be a possible method for learning a modern language but I remain unconvinced that it can work in Ancient Greek or Latin, for that matter. That is not to say that I would discourage reading and learning from context. But whether one is guessing or logically deducing, there will always be a need for confirmation.
EDIT: I see Seneca and Joel have posted while I was composing my little story, but I think it’s instructive, so I’ll post it.
Very nice. Question: do you think your apprecation and understanding of the text was enhanced by first attempting to work through it without aids? I know in my experience it’s often the “face-palm” moments that I learn the most from.
Absolutely! One very important benefit to first working through the text without any aids is that you discover what you don’t know! It also forces you to remember and use what you’ve already learnt. Having said that, it should come as no surprise that I treat every reading session as a learning/review opportunity. I certainly take pleasure in getting something right the first time, but if it happens too often, then I’m not learning and it’s time to “level up”. My goal is to be able to read the more difficult authors, poets, and playwrights, such as Thucydides, Sophocles and Aeschylus with just occasional reference to lexica and grammars. That means I’ve got a lot to learn to make that happen.
Did it burn down, or was it blown down (ie., ἐμπρήθω, not ἐμπίμπρημι)?
The description/etymology from Aristotle is meteorological nonsense: Ὅταν δὲ κατασπώμενον ἐκπυρωθῇ (τοῦτο δ᾿ ἐστὶν ἐὰν λεπτότερον τὸ πνεῦμα γένηται), καλεῖται πρηστήρ· συνεκπίμπρησι γὰρ τὸν ἀέρα τῇ πυρώσει χρωματίζων.
The LSJ “with lightning” statement for a πρηστήρ is also unlikely for a real hurricane.
Of course, Xenophon wouldn’t have seen it happen, so it’s one question as to what actually happened, and another about what he thought he was describing.
[On ἐμπρήθω, compare ἐμφυσάω Job 4:21 LXX, where the translator replaced the Hebrew image of a tent collapsing with ἐμφυσάω.]
From some of the other entries in the LSJ I got the impression that πρηστήρ was either a meteorological phenomenon that produced lightning or it was the lightning being produced by the phenomenon. Here’s the whole entry:
2 ὀμμάτων ἄπο αἱμοσταγῆ πρηστῆρε ῥεύσονται κάτω two jets of blood, E. Fr. 384.
II pair of bellows, πρηστῆρος αὐλός Placit. 2.20.1, 2.25.1: pl., A.R. 4.777.
III pl., veins of the neck when swollen by anger, Poll. 2.134, Hsch.
IV a kind of serpent, whose bite is poisonous, Dsc. 4.37, Philum. Ven. 19, Ael. NA 6.51.
Note the citation from Theophrastos: πρηστῆρες καὶ κεραυνοί Thphr. Ign. 1.
I would interpret this to mean lightning and thunderbolts.
Or Herodotus 7.42: βρονταί τε καὶ πρηστῆρες ἐπεσπίπτουσι (thunder and lightning)
Although hurricanes are primarily known for their winds, the term describes an intense low pressure system and the weather associated with it, including the potential for thunderstorm development. An area of severe thunderstorms can have hurricane force winds associated with tornadoes and microbursts, but their defining feature is lightning. I guess there is such a thing as a “medicane”, but they’re quite rare. Catching fire from a lightning strike seems a more likely occurrence and something that happens in Greece with amazing regularity in the summer.
The value of secondary literature can be illustrated in the following note (my underlining) on page 207 of the notes in Liba Taub, Ancient Meteorology, London, 2003:
“The use of the term prester(πρηστήρ)is not straight forward. It is defined in LSJ as ‘hurricane or waterspout attended with lightning’ on the basis of its usage in several of the texts considered here: Aristotle Meteorology 371a16, Epicurus ‘Letter to Pythocles’ (Diogenes Laertius 10.105), Lucretius 6.424, 445. As Furley (1955) 368–9 pointed out, the author of On the Cosmos seems to use it to refer to a sort of whirlwind and also a kind of thunderbolt, while for Aristotle, in the Meteorology (371a15), the term seems to be associated with fire (as a fiery whirlwind). Sedley (1998a) 158–9 and 182 defines prester as waterspout (treated by Lucretius after thunderbolts and before cloud), and he considers the order in which it is discussed as indicating Theophrastus’ influence. Traditionally, the prester was considered to be fiery (coming from above), but Theophrastus included it under the heading of winds (Meteorology/Metarsiology [13] 43–54, in Daiber (1992)), and in On Winds 53, Theophrastus seems to use the term to describe a waterspout; I thank Marlein van Raalte for her help here.”
A dictionary is a starting point which can lead us to other sources. Better than staring at the word and trying to figure it for ourselves.
Thank you, Seneca! Someone’s burning the midnight oil! Aristotle’s description of a “fiery whirlwind” (tornado with lightning?) isn’t that far off the mark or for that matter Theophrastus’ waterspout. Both are produced by thunderstorms.
But if it’s πρηστήρ from “πρήθειν”, it’s a phenomenon of wind, not of fire, and would presumably be used to describe any storm with a visible spout (compare Il.16.350). In fact, here is Ctesias who explicitly confirms this (speaking of tornadoes, I guess, though it is all nonsense as any sort of description of monsoon-ridden India’s weather patterns):
Given the information presented so far, it’s fairly clear that the ancients used πρηστήρ and πρήθω to signify either a wind event or fire (lightning). I think a case can made for either phenomenon. I’m still betting that in the case of the Xenophon’s temple, it caught fire from a lightning strike as it’s a more likely occurrence. From Ctesias’ description of Indian weather patterns, it would seem he’s not familiar with India’s monsoon season, which is odd because I would think ancient visitors would have made their journeys in the summer.
Here is where waterspouts occurred along the coast of the Med. in a representative year (2002).
I think that the dictionaries, with their literary bias, are quite misleading about what coastal Med. dwellers were describing with πρηστήρ, and have made something sometimes attendant (lightning) into something integral, due to poetic descriptions like Hesiod’s (though there πρηστῆρες ἄνεμοι might best be taken as “tornado winds” or some such?) and some of the pseudo-science in the meteorological literature.
As a side note, I live in another part of the world where we get this sort of weather event: the Great Lakes region of the US. We have tornado sirens all around, and you watch the weather reports before heading out on the boat. On dry ground, the threat is the wind destroying houses, not the lightning.
I’d have to agree that wind damage is the major danger in populated areas with moist climates. In arid climates like those of California, Australia, Greece and Western Turkey, however, wildfires are a constant danger in the summer. Aside from that, I don’t know enough about ancient architecture to determine how resistant a marble temple with a wooden roof would be to a tornado. If it was an open structure, there would be no pressure differential stressing the building, so I suspect the temple would have remained intact, perhaps losing its roof. If it was constructed from wood, it would certainly be less resistant. In any event, given the ambiguity in the language and the fact that Xenophon was not an eyewitness (he was still living in Athens at the time), we’ll probably never know whether the temple was destroyed by fire or a tornado. Anyway, Livy’s waiting for me, so it’s back to Hannibal’s adventures in Southern Italy.
