
The country people crowd in
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ἐπίεσε δ’ αὐτοὺς μᾶλλον πρὸς τῷ ὑπάρχοντι πόνῳ καὶ ἡ ξυγκομιδὴ ἐκ τῶν ἀγρῶν ἐς τὸ ἄστυ, καὶ οὐχ ἧσσον τοὺς ἐπελθόντας.
The hardship pressed on them still harder because of the crowding of the country people into the city, and no less on those who had come in.
The hardship was made worse by the gathering of the country people into the city, and the new arrivals suffered most.
The verb epiese is from piezō, "to squeeze," so the crowding is a weight laid on top of the existing suffering: pros tōi huparchonti ponōi, "in addition to the hardship already there." The noun for the movement, xynkomidē (the old Attic spelling of sunkomidē), comes from komizō, "to carry in," and is the word for bringing a harvest under cover. Here it names people being carried in off the farms.
The last words are easy to miss: kai ouch hēsson tous epelthontas, "and no less those who had come." The verb of the sentence is not repeated, so the newcomers are made the second object of the same squeezing. They are the country families who had arrived most recently, and the next sentence says they had no houses to go to.
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