Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 2.54.1 · 2.54.1
Pressed from two sides
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τοιούτῳ μὲν πάθει οἱ Ἀθηναῖοι περιπεσόντες ἐπιέζοντο, ἀνθρώπων τ’ ἔνδον θνῃσκόντων καὶ γῆς ἔξω δῃουμένης.
Such was the disaster into which the Athenians had fallen, and it pressed them hard: their people were dying inside the walls, and outside, their land was being laid waste.
Word by word
The setting
Thucydides sums up the Athenian position after the plague has set in: people dying inside the walls, and the land outside being laid waste.
A note on this passage
The sentence is built as a pair of genitive absolutes, one for each side of the squeeze. Anthrōpōn … ethnēiskontōn, "people dying," is set against gēs … dēioumenēs, "land being ravaged," and the two small adverbs endon, "inside," and exō, "outside," mark the walls as the line between them. Thucydides does not add a comment on either half. The Athenians stand at the middle of the sentence, and the verb epiezonto, "were being pressed," is imperfect, so the pressure goes on while it is described.
The verb peripiptō, literally "to fall around," is the ordinary word for running into a misfortune, and the noun pathos means whatever one suffers. Together they say the Athenians had run into something that happened to them. The ravaging of the land is the Peloponnesian army's work, and the dying is the plague's, so the sentence puts a human enemy and a sickness in one grammatical frame.
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