I have a question about this excerpt. In line 3 we have
Pari animo Lacedaemonii in Thermopylis occiderunt,…
I see that pari is given as the verb pario in the 2nd sg pres imperat act in the Perseus word study tool. This makes absolutely no sense to me. I take as the ablative of par, paris so that the meaning would be “in like spirit/mind.” The comparison would thus be with the aforementioned legions who set off for a place not knowing if they would ever come back. Am I right?
Yes. If the Perseus word study tool shows only 2nd sg pres imperat act of pario as a gloss, then it is not a very reliable tool.
Thank you. Someone else on the forum said it was not reliable, but so far I have found it quite helpful. I think it works on some kind of statistical analysis to come up with the most likely form for a particular context. I do not profess to understand it.
Can I recommend the mirror of Perseus at the University of Chicago (‘Perseus under Philologic’) - the parser is much more reliable and pops up in a neat little box with a link to the Logeion entry. It predicts pari here as having a 100% likelihood of being ablative:
It takes a little while to learn how to navigate a text compared with the Tufts Perseus but it’s worth it. The word frequency tool is also much better and you can search for every instance of a particular form or lemma within a text or the whole corpus.
Thank you so much for sharing that resource. I will use it.