ὅτι πόλεμός ἐστι ταῖς τ' Ἀθήναις καὶ τῶν πολεμίων ἔστιν οἷς ·

Greek Learning Greek
1

This is another sentence from Rouse’s Greek Boy. I don’t understand the οἷς. Is it a relative pronoun or a demonstrative? I just can’t make out the sense. “Because there is a war against Athens and they have some enemies.” Could I take τῶν πολεμίων as a partitive genitive and translate “some enemies”? Is οἷς a kind of dative of possession. Here is the context:

πολλάκις ἀγγέλλει ἡμῖν ἄγγελος , ὅτι πόλεμός ἐστι ταῖς τ’ Ἀθήναις καὶ τῶν πολεμίων ἔστιν οἷς · ἔχομεν γὰρ πολλοὺς πανταχοῦ πολεμίους , τούς τ’ ἐν τοῖς Μεγάροις καὶ τοὺς ἐν τῇ Αἰγίνῃ καὶ τοὺς ἐν τῇ Βοιωτίᾳ πλὴν τῶν ἐν ταῖς Πλαταίαις · οἱ γὰρ τῶν Πλαταιῶν πολῖται φίλοι εἰσὶ καὶ σύμμαχοι πάλαι τοῖς Ἀθηναίοις .

2

I think basically you have this right. Here again, ἔστιν οἷς is a unit equivalent to τισίν or ἐνίοις, and ἔστιν doesn’t function syntactically as a verb. I guess you could classify the datives ταῖς τ’Ἀθήναις and ἔστιν οἷς as datives of reference or possession, or something like that. “Athens and some of her enemies are having a war.”

But I think a Greek would write τοῖς τ’Ἀθηναίοις, rather than the name of the city. I think the Greeks would think of the human inhabitants as engaging in warfare, and might even find this Anglicism somewhat ludicrous, as if the buildings marched out onto the battlefield.

3

Thank you Hylander.