Picture and Plot


Applying Greek sentence structure to English the caption under the picture reads:
The Dikaiopolis big-him stone-him lifts-he and out the-of field-of carries-he.
Sounds strange? Well, our way of saying it would have sounded just as weird to Dikaiopolis.
Dikaiopolis is named as doing something, therefore nominative (name-case):
ὁ Δικαιόπολις
 
A big stone is the object which the farmer [accuses of being in the way and then] lifts and carries out of the field; so big-him stone-him is in the "I accuse-him" case, in the accusative:
τὸν λίθον.
 
Instead of saying he-lifts, he-carries, I added the he at the end of the verb to show that the Greeks, instead of pronouns, used bits at the end of verbs (endings) to show who does what.
 
We say: out of the field, the Greeks say: out of-the of-field, or rather: out the-of field-of, i.e. use endings to convey function and therefore meaning: not only the noun (field) but also the article (the) take case endings, in this case genitive (born of, whose?).
 
Hard work digging his field with all those stones:
the oddest shaped stones   λίθοι  
on the strangest looking heap   τὸ ἕρμα
under the weirdest tree   τὸ δένδρον  .
[I hope the tree he sits under to rest for a while is, unlike the one we see here, more leafy and therefore better suited for giving him shade. It gives shade, in Greek, will be σκιὰν παρέχει.
Surely this tree doesn't give shade, σκιὰν οὐ παρέχει.].
Small wonder he gets tired or sick
the Greeks say: 'he tires' or 'he sickens': κάμνει
He gets very tired = he tires very much: μάλα κάμνει
And does a lot of moaning and groaning στενάζει πολύ,  what with big stones, long days and hot sun beating down on him. He must heave a sigh of relief when, τέλος δέ, the sun finally sets.