Questions, Chase and Phillips Lesson 7

[whsiv]

I've decided to pick up my old college textbook (Chase and Phillips) and work on my Greek again. Alas, it's not all smooth sailing. I am having trouble with the sentences below.

(Reading 7.11) ὁ χρόνος ἐστὶν ἐν ὧ καιρός, καιρὸς ἐν ὧ χρόνος οὐ πολύς. Time is when there is a critical time, a critical time is when there is not much time. I guess I'm understanding ἐν ὧ as a dative of time expression... but that may be far-fetched.

(Review Exercises (7.2) οὐ δίκαιοι ἀλλὰ ἄδικοι ἦσαν οἱ δικασταί, ὥστε τοὺς πολίτας μὴ πιστεύειν τοῖς λόγοις. Not just but unjust were the jurors, so that the citizens did not trust their words. I don't understand why τοὺς πολίτας is accusative. I know in my translation I have used it as if it were the nominative subject, but it's clearly not in the nominative case.

Thanks.

[whsiv]

For the second sentence, it is looking like the accusative τοὺς πολίτας is in fact the subject of the infinitive verb. I think what threw me off here was that we're not dealing with indirect statement (where I would expect to see the accusative / infinitive subject), but we're dealing with a result clause.

[mwh]

The first sentence is pretty close to gibberish (as is all too often the way with textbook sentences), and you do as well as can be done with it. I suspect they intended εν ω to have ο χρονος (and then καιρος) as its antecedent, Time is that in which there's a kairos (a critical moment, an opportunity), a kairos is that in which there's not much time. Your own translation "when" is perfectly fine. I don't have the book so I can't check just what they were after (other than the distinction between xronos and kairos, obviously!).

2nd sentence, you are right. wste regularly takes accusative and infinitive (neg. μη). This is sometimes referred to as the "natural" result, as distinct from the "actual" result that would be expressed by wste + finite verb (neg. ou), ωστε οι πολιται ουκ επιστευον τοις λογοις. It's a subtle distinction hard to get across in English. With the inf. as here, the jurors' behavior was such as to induce citizens not to trust their words (whether they actually did or not, but presumably not). With the indic, stress is laid on the fact that they did not trust them. Τhe textbook must cover this.

Hope this helps.