mwh thanks for picking up my error on κἂν. I have amended my post so that others are not misled.
I do read with the metre and am grateful for your commentary. I think it is also important to think about entrances and exits and the stage picture (and costumes and music…). Ajax is to be performed rather than to be simply silently read. It does take an effort to attend to all these things and the syntax too.
A couple of quick notes. Forgive the dogmatism.
23 ισμεν γαρ ουδεν τρανες. Not only is τρανες an adjective, it’s an adjective used as an adjective, as adjectives always are. We might want to render it adverbially in English (but I don’t see why, in this instance) but that doesn’t make it adverbial.
And though we might think of ουδεν τρανες as a direct object, it’s actually an internal accusative (“We have no clear knowledge”).
Similarly with e.g. τοσοῦτον ἔχθος ἐχθαίρω σε. εχθος is an internal accusative (a “cognate” one in this instance), σε is the external accusative (aka direct object), as Paul said. It’s an extremely common construction, and there’s nothing adverbial about any of it.
27 αὐτοῖς ποιμνίων ἐπιστάταις. On the idiom see Smyth 1525. 'Nuff said.
“Ajax is to be performed rather than to be simply silently read.” I’m not sure I go along with this. Given that we can’t watch the original performance, we can only re-imagine it, however imperfectly, on the basis of the text and what we know of performance circumstances. We can and should do that. I enjoyed the two performances of the Ajax that I’ve seen (especially a very powerful updated one by the American Repertory Theater), but I was very conscious of their being nothing like Sophocles. Agreed it should be read aloud rather than silently. (I confess I usually read silently myself, but I vocalize internally.) I feel I get closest to the play by reading it and reconstructing it in performance to the best of my ability in my head (even though that risks slowing it down unduly and losing a sense of the pacing, which is so very important).
In my “meter” posts I mention entrances and stage action and music. I haven’t mentioned that all the parts were played by male actors wearing masks and swapping roles, but such things are all part of the integrated imagined experience.
I do hope this thread is going to be able to get beyond the first few lines!
Forgive the dogmatism.
Seems appropriate given the hunting metaphors of the opening.
Yes τρανες is clearly an adjective I got it into my head that it was a neuter acc and therefore an adverb and stopped thinking. Thanks for clarification on αὐτοῖς ποιμνίων ἐπιστάταις.
“Ajax is to be performed rather than to be simply silently read.” I’m not sure I go along with this. Given that we can’t watch the original performance, we can only re-imagine it, however imperfectly, on the basis of the text and what we know of performance circumstances.
Of course we cannot watch “the original performance” but that is true of all theatrical performance. Even if it is filmed we can only watch someone else’s (the video director’s) view. All I intended to say was that must not lose sight of the performative aspects. I had in mind two things. First the sterile debate about whether Senecan drama is “closet drama” which seems to me to founder on unexamined ideas of what “performance” means. More directly on the “performance” of Greek Tragedy whilst it is interesting to hypothesise about the circumstances of first productions we shouldn’t allow that “to control” (to borrow your terminology) our understanding. It is a long standing source of quite violent disagreement in the operatic world about how bound a director ( a comparatively new invention) should be by the contingent circumstances of first productions. Recently at Covent Garden the audience has been very vociferous in shouting their disapproval at what is seen as a betrayal of the “composer’s intentions”. That at least one composer, Michael Tippet, is on record saying that he hoped others would discover in his operas ideas and stagings which he hadnt been aware of should be a sufficient counterweight to this kind of determinism.
I have never seen Ajax but the plays I have seen in London tend to be adaptations (almost rewritings using basic elements of the plot) more than translations. This quotation from a review of Medea approvingly provides a rationale: “But the play’s tragic force emerges strongly and the production’s climax seems better suited to modern tastes than Euripides’ original.” I do feel that audiences are short changed because the original unadapted texts do still have something to say directly to us. For all their shortcomings the annual student productions in Ancient Greek give signal service.
I have seen the bacchae at Epidauros but I think that must have been in Modern greek. However “authentic” the much changed theatre might have been the audience, in large part foreign tourists (and a huge number of dragooned school children getting their compulsory dose of “culture”) was probably as far away the earliest audience as can be imagined. Staging the performance at night introduced an unwarranted note of romanticism, refiguring the actual landscape. Conversations overheard on the bus back to Nafplion provided evidence of how this production had been received in entirely contrary ways.
So… Yes I will try to press on (and hope others continue to contribute) but Finglass provides such a rich resource that chasing up his references is time consuming. I have also been looking at Vernant and Vidal-Naquet amongst others. This week I am at Glyndebourne twice and at the opera tonight. I will post what I can. (No doubt it would have been better to have posted about the text instead of this post but its done now.)
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Here are some brief notes on the remainder of O.'s speech. The grammar seems straightforward but there are textual problems.
28-35
Finglass prints τρέπει direct turn instead of νέμει deal out (he says it more properly means allot which is inappropriate here)
μόνον is predicated on Ajax at 47,294, 467,796, 1283 the repeated use suggest a fundamental characteristic.
ἐκπέπληγμαι it is not that O. is astonished but he is as it were thrown off course, off the trail.
Finglass prints ὅπου not ὅτου. Jouanna (1977) advocates ..ὅτου ( “I cannot work out who the tracks belong to”) on the grounds that it marks O.’s reluctance to blame A. in the absence of proof. But O. is tracking A. alone even though he is not certain of his guilt. So he prefers ὅπου “I cannot work out where he is.”
Lets have an end to discussion on interlinears. its all been said ad nauseam. Specifically I, mwh and Hylander said what we thought here. There really isnt anything to be gained from prolonging the agony and I wont be saying anymore about it.
In regard to ὑπεζύγην, I know that its form is passive; but what I wonder is, does it function deponently, or is it a true passive?
Maybe its more important to think about the paradox of O. submitting himself willingly to the yoke (F. says yoking metaphors imply external compulsion.) "O.'s submission shows “that there could be no clearer contrast with the wildness , self-suffiency, arrogance and unruliness of Ajax”.
- Do the words, “πηδῶντα πεδία,” function as I have supposed, “πεδία” being the neuter accusative plural of “πεδίον,” and functioning as an adverb?
Accusative of extent of space travelled?
“reported to me and declared what he saw. Then immediately I rush upon his track, and sometimes I follow his signs, but sometimes I am bewildered, and cannot read whose they are.”
See my post on textual problem. I think its more “some features i can make out, some not” rather than a temporal antithesis.
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@MarkAntony,
As Mr Derouda said, you ask some good questions, but I’m afraid no-one has the time or the energy or the patience to read through them all, let alone answer them. So such responses as you get may not be altogether satisfactory. I think you might get better responses if you limited yourself to a few things that you find especially problematic, and took fewer pains to explain yourself.
To deal with two of your queries at random.
μονον in 29 is an adjective, acc. of μονος, not the adverb (“only”). Ajax was alone (as he will continue to be!), unaccompanied (except by his sword!). You shouldn’t have had any hesitation on this point, especially since you reproduce Jebb’s translation.
οὐκ ἔχω μαθεῖν ὅτου: The ὅτου is governed by μαθειν, “I can’t learn whose (they are).” (ὅτου gen. of ὅστις, indirect question).
ουκ εχω with infin. means “I’m unable to,” “I don’t have the ability to.” You arrived at a correct understanding of it, but it’s wrong to think of εχω as having “a sort of implied direct object.” It’s simply a matter of how εχω can be used, which doesn’t correspond to English use of “have.”
Here as elsewhere your difficulty seems to stem from “literal” translation of individual words into English, when you’d do better to observe Greek usage.
You may wish to explain how you went wrong, but I’d urge you to resist that impulse.
One thing you’ve clearly been having difficulty with is internal accusatives, as in ἡμᾶς τῆσδε πρᾶγος ἄσκοπον ἔχει περάνας and other phrases you’ve mentioned, such as ὁ πόλεμος ἀείμνηστον παιδείαν αὐτοὺς ἐπαίδευσεν (I infer you’ve consulted Smyth). In these two cases you have an external accusative too (ἡμᾶς and αὐτούς).
Again, what’s thrown you off is the English translation. English doesn’t have the Greek construction. You have to learn to think of πρᾶγος and παιδειαν as internal to their verbs. E.g. παιδείαν ἐπαίδευσεν means “it gave an education” (lit. “it education-educated”—this kind of internal acc. is a “cognate” acc.) while αὐτοὺς ἐπαίδευσεν means “it educated them.” In Greek you can have both at once.
I hope this helps you come to terms with internal accusatives. You’ll meet plenty more.
@seneca
I am interested in a political interpretation of the play. How heroic values and extraordinary men can be accommodated or incorporated within the democratic polis. Do those that cannot change have to perish?
Naturally people like Ajax can’t be accommodated within the democratic polis, when they couldn’t even be accommodated within the archaic distinctly non-democratic society portrayed by Homer and Sophocles.
This is perhaps a cheap answer to an important (Knox-influenced?) question, which I would reconfigure simply as How to interpret the Ajax?, and I hope we can all engage with it. But maybe we should read the play first?
I envy you at Glyndebourne.
I’m taking time out for a while.
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I admire you energy, Mark Anthony! Here’s my attempt to answer your questions.
σοι “for you” here means something like “for your information” – like you might say “Now that’s some pretty awesome music for you!” in English, where “for you” really means something like “You should know that…”
ποίμναις isn’t an adjective, it’s the dative plural of the noun ποίμνη.
This is a quite common use of ὡς – it means something like “as if”, or perhaps “with the purpose of”. “Was this plan as if against the Greeks”. “When he attacked the flocks, did he do it as if he were attacking the Greeks/thinking that he was attacking the Greeks?”
φρενῶν isn’t a verb but the genitive plural of φρήν “mind” (but perhaps originally “lung”, although mwh will have none of it…!). “With what boldness and recklessness of the mind?”
Yes. This sort of thing should be quite easy to check in a dictionary – which one are you using?
Line 50, “καὶ πῶς ἐπέσχε χεῖρα μαιμῶσαν φόνου;” “How, then, did he restrain his hand when it was eager for murder?” I have rendered this: “πῶς καὶ How indeed ἐπέσχε (aor.) did-he-shut-up χεῖρα (fem.) [his]-hand φόνου from-murder, μαιμῶσαν (part. pres. fem. acc., accusative absolute) it-[the hand]-being-eager-for-[it]?”
ἐπέσχε “stopped, halted, checked”.
Both are grammatically correct, but scholars like Jebb who were extremely fluent in Greek often had a hunch as to which construction sounded better, and was, in his/her opinion, the one that was probably the one intended by the author, given that it was written in a certain period, in a certain genre etc. If you read a text with several commentaries, you’ll often notice that the commentators often disagree with each other and vacillate between two or several interpretations. Sometimes you can follow a scholarly debate going on for 200 years, with each commentator disagreeing with the previous scholar, thinking that it was the earlier fellow who was right!
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True, that wasn’t a very helpful reply. What I meant is that it’s not a very common word, and for that reason the dictionary entry is short – LSJ’s (Liddell-Scott-Johnson’s large dictionary, not the “Intermediate” one known as Middle Liddell – which one do you use? In book format, online version or smartphone app?) entry on στρατηγίς actually cites this passage: “πύλαι the door or entrance of the general’s tent, S.Aj.49”. Interpreting an entry like this one is quite straightforward, and especially when we’re dealing with an much-read text like Sophocles, when the dictionary will often actually cite the passage at hand. On the other hand, it is much more difficult to use a dictionary on very common words like ὡς, because they are so long. So the point of my remark was that it’s easy to find help with uncommon words in a dictionary, less so with common ones.
Btw, after posting I checked Finglass on ἐπέσχε χεῖρα μαιμῶσαν φόνου – he seems to prefer your interpretation, but thinks the other one is also possible. Exactly as I said – these debates go on for centuries!
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The Perseus word study tool is notoriously very unreliable – I use it myself, but very, very cautiously. The tool in TLG (https://stephanus.tlg.uci.edu/) is probably better, but I haven’t used it much, as I’m so used to Perseus.
For dictionaries, I usually use an iPhone app called Logeion, which has LSJ, Middle Liddell plus other dictionaries all in the same package. They also have an online version you can use. You can also use LSJ on TLG.
But you should know that LSJ is exhaustive to the point of being impractical. It’s often difficult to find what you’re looking for. Most of the time you’re probably better off with Middle Liddell, which is more concise. If you feel like you need more help with all these reading aids, maybe you might start a new thread. Other people might find it useful as well.
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I don’t know about the dative noun business – in the traditional lingo of classical studies, as far as I know, I don’t think you would usually say that a dative noun functions as an adjective. But whether linguists might say something like that I cannot tell. Perhaps it would be better to avoid saying that anyway, since someone (like me!) can get confused.
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