οὐκοῦν οἴει ἐν πάσῃ ἀπορίᾳ ἂν αὐτὸν ἔχεσθαι
is ἔχεσθαι mid or pass?
Passive is a straightforward mental image to me, middle not really.
Also LSJ classes all these sorts of uses as passive at the end of its ἔχω.A.I.8 “of Habits, States, or Conditions…” section. It parallels it with things like “ὑπὸ πυρετοῦ ἐχομένῳ” which must be passive.
Thinking about this some more, there is the weirdness about passive use of middle aorist ἐσχόμην, σχόμενος generally. Here it is in this same idiom.
Plato: ἀπορίᾳ οὖν σχόμενος ὁ Προμηθεὺς ἥντινα σωτηρίαν τῷ ἀνθρώπῳ εὕροι…
All of these “middle as passive” uses in the LSJ seem to have this same sort of feel. I think it might be possible to translate them all as middle like this:
ἀμφὶ δέ τοι τῇ ἐμῇ κλισίῃ καὶ νηῒ μελαίνῃ
Ἕκτορα καὶ μεμαῶτα μάχης σχήσεσθαι ὀΐω.
Middle: Hector will stick in place
ἀλλά ποθι σχήσεσθε καὶ ἐσσύμενοί περ Ἄρηος.
You’ll stick in place
θαλερὴ δέ οἱ ἔσχετο φωνή
And his sturdy voice stuck
ἐν τέλεϊ τούτῳ ἔσχοντο
The two stuck/rested there in death
And so on…
For these habit/state/condition, the middle image could be translated more middle/active with: “hold still in perplexity” or similar.
I think this must be middle, because the construction “to have (the ability)” or “to know how” is even more common with active forms, as when Socrates imagines himself in a similar situation in his next response: οὔτε τὸ ἀληθὲς ἕξω εἰπεῖν (ἐάν τις φῇ…). It’s not uncommon to have variation in voice like this, because middle forms mark some interest on the subject’s part, while active forms are really unmarked, and don’t strictly indicate whether or not the subject has an interest in the action.
We’re usually taught that the middle voice is a third option intermediate between the “normal” active and passive, but in Classical Greek the real opposition is between active and mediopassive, and the passive is just a subset of the middle where the subject has zero agency. The parent language had no passive morphology, and in Greek it developed rather late in the aorist and finally in the future, but was still mostly expressed in middle forms either interpreted by context or when the agent was indicated by ὑπό +gen. In fact the middle forms span a huge range, from active with a mild interest, to a more serious benefit from the action, to direct reflexivity, to agentless passives. The active forms are like unmarked versions of the agentive middle forms and the passive forms are (late) versions of the agentless middle forms. So in general it’s best to interpret middle forms as middle voice unless passivity is clear from the context or an agent is actually expressed.
I think that you may wish to look more closely at that ἐν πάσῃ ἀπορίᾳ, which I believe takes us to a slightly different construction from the one that Plato introduced just before.
Earlier it was: τί ἂν οἴει ἐν τούτῳ τῷ κακῷ ἀποληφθέντα ἰατρὸν ἔχειν εἰπεῖν; This is the normal “have (the ability)” construction.
However, this is different: οὐκοῦν οἴει ἐν πάσῃ ἀπορίᾳ ἂν αὐτὸν ἔχεσθαι ὅτι χρὴ εἰπεῖν; Something like: Don’t you think that he’ll be in much doubt about what he must say?
This construction is described as passive in the LSJ with several examples (though see my argument for a middle interpretation above):
Pass., ἔχεσθαι κακότητι καὶ ἄλγεσι Od.8.182; κωκυτῷ καὶ οἰμωγῇ Il.22.409; ὀργῇ Hdt.1.141; νούσῳ Hp.Epid.5.6; ἀγρυπνίῃσι Hdt.3.129; ὑπὸ πυρετοῦ Hp.Aph.4.34; ὑπὸ τοῦ ὕδρωπος Id.Prorrh.2.6, ἐν ἀπόρῳ Th.1.25; ἐν συμφοραῖς Pl.R.395e.
One of the examples in Plato (quoted by me above, but not LSJ) was an aorist form (σχόμενος), and which takes us into the following (perhaps shaky) LSJ claim of a passive middle form:
aor. 2 Med. in pass. sense, ἐσχόμην Il.17.696, al., Hdt.1.31 (σχέτο Il.7.248, 21.345), part. σχόμενος Od.11.279, prob. in Isoc.19.11, (κατα-) Pi.P.1.10, Pl.Phdr.244e, Parth.33.2 (s.v.l.)
That’s a fair point! I’m not sure there’s a significant difference between “to be in doubt” and “to not know” though, and they seem to bleed together both in this passage and in the LSJ categories. Compare the example listed in A.III.2 from Xenophon: οὐκ ἔχων ὅτι χρὴ λέγειν. That seems almost synonymous with ἐν πάσῃ ἀπορίᾳ ἐχόμενος ὅτι χρὴ λέγειν. In any case, I was really only commenting on the middle voice, and it seems like we agree on that if I understand you right. I think what I said about the middle voice supports your translations of the middle forms in those examples.
Well, I do have a hard time seeing them as the same, since ἐν ἀπορίᾳ ἔχεσθαι is kind of absolute. It makes sense on its own and the verb takes no object. With οὐκ ἔχων ὅ τι χρὴ λέγειν, the ἔχων takes an object, and “οὐκ ἔχων” by itself is not complete.
Absolute examples of ἐν ἀπορίᾳ ἔχεσθαι:
Antiphon: ἐν πολλῇ ἂν ἔχεσθαι ὑμᾶς ἀπορίᾳ
Plato: ἐν πάσῃ ἐχομένη ἀπορίᾳ
Lysias: τὸ ὑμέτερον πλῆθος ἐν ἀπορίᾳ ἐχόμενον
Also, very close is the frequent absolute usage of ἀπορίᾳ (with or without ἐν) and εἶναι:
Plato: ἐν ἀπορίᾳ εἰμὶ τί δεῖ αὐτοῖς χρήσασθαι
Notice the indirect question there. It didn’t have to retain the direct interrogative, and could as well have been ὅ τι instead of τί, and would then have been exactly the same as our example here.
If these ἔχεσθαι forms took an object, then yeah, it would be very simple proof of middle, not passive. But while I think that the LSJ may be wrong here, It would be surprising to see them getting it quite that wrong.
I only called ἐν ἀπορίᾳ ἔχεσθαι “kind of absolute” above, and that’s because ἀπορία can take a genitive object. So maybe someone can argue that ὅτι is attracted from ὅτου. I dunno. And it doesn’t really bear on the middle/passive question.