Optative in Htd. 3.75.1

[Mitch]

...μετὰ δὲ ὡς ἐς τοῦτον κατέβη τελευτῶν ἔλεγε ὅσα ἀγαθὰ Κῦρος Πέρσας πεποιήκοιι...

Why is ποιεω in the optative?

[mwh]

ἔλεγε ὅσα ἀγαθὰ Κῦρος Πέρσας πεποιήκοι

ἔλεγε is a past tense. That puts the subordinate clause into secondary sequence; and verbs in secondary sequence are liable to become optative. (They don't have to, but they often do.) It's a very important syntactical principle.

Ιn primary sequence—if the main verb was not ἔλεγε but λέγει—this would be λέγει ὅσα ἀγαθὰ Κῦρος Πέρσας πεποίηκε (indicative, not optative).

There’s another instance a little later in the chapter: καὶ δὴ ἔλεγε τὸν μὲν Κύρου Σμέρδιν ὡς αὐτὸς ὑπὸ Καμβύσεω ἀναγκαζόμενος ἀποκτείνειε (“he said that he himself had killed Smerdis”): ἀποκτείνειε instead of ἀπέκτεινε.

[Mitch]

Thanks much appreciated Michaal. I've finished careful reading of the phonology/morphology chapters of CGCG and have been slowly plowing through the chapters on syntax when I hit this example in section 30.9 of chapter 30 Cases. So I jumped ahead and did find info on primary/secondary sequence and how optative is typically used in several kids of subordinate clauses when the primary (matrix) clause is in secondary sequence, but then I hit a wall when I tried to understand what *kind* of subordinate clause is in this example. The index says the definite relative pronoun οσος is used in relative clauses, so is ὅσα ἀγαθὰ Κῦρος Πέρσας πεποιήκοι then a relative clause?

Or is ὅσα used as an *adjective* here to modify ἀγαθὰ as in "how many good things" or "how much good"? No, wait, that can't be right, can it, since there are *two* predicates here, the superordinate (matrix) predicate ἔλεγε and the subordinate predicate πεποιήκοι, so ὅσα ἀγαθὰ Κῦρος Πέρσας πεποιήκοι *must* be a subordinate clause, right? But what *kind* of subordinate clause is it? CGCG describes about a dozen categories of subordinate clauses, but I can't seem to grok which category this particular example fits into.

(My problem, which is probably common to most English speakers here in Canada, is that we were never really taught grammar properly in junior high school :-P)

[mwh]

You’re about there I think Mitch. ὅσα is a relative adjective, modifying ἀγαθά. It’s the correlative of τόσα (which in prose however is more likely to be τοσαῦτα) “so many” or “so big.”

E.g. “Everything I’m telling you is true” ἅπαντα ὅσα σοι λέγω ἁληθῆ ἐστί (~ ταῦτα ἅ σοι λέγω “What I’m telling you”)
“How much of what I’m saying is false? Just so much.” πόσα ὧν λέγω ψευδῆ ἐστί; τοσαῦτα δή.

But at the same time we’re free to see ὅσα as functioning much as ὁπόσα would, introducing an indirect question or exclamation (like Latin quot), “how many good things.”