This is from a passage in Reading Greek 2nd ed. 19F. The text is from Herodotus 1.44.1
ὁ δὲ Κροῖσος τῳ θανάτῳ τοῦ παιδὸς συντεταραγμένος μᾶλλον τι ἐδεινολογέετο ὅτι μιν ἀπέκτεινε τὸν αὐτὸς φόνου ἐκάθηρε:
I understand the sense, but I am not sure of the role of τι. All I can find in LSJ is A.II.11.c “somewhat, in any degree…” Is that it? That he complained somewhat more loudly as the man whom he had purified was the very one who killed his son.
If you look up μάλα you will find Comp. μᾶλλον and under 1. “μᾶλλόν τι somewhat more”.
Sometimes its the other word (ie the word it is linked to) you have to look up not the word itself.
Found it! Thank you so much, Seneca. That is very helpful.
Not “the man whom he had purified was the very one who killed his son” but rather “the man who killed him was the one whom he himself had purified." αυτος is Croesus, not Adrastus. It sharpens the irony.
It is a little surprising that the subject of ἀπέκτεινε isn’t expressed somehow before being referred to by τὸν. It’s obvious because of context, but it feels somehow awkward. Why isn’t it ὅτι μιν ἀπέκτεινε οὗτος τὸν αὐτὸς φόνου ἐκάθηρε?
That would be stylistically gauche. It would clutter the sentence, perfectly formed as it is. Much better without a demonstrative.
The stylistic comment is fair. But look very carefully at that ὅτι:
ὁ δὲ Κροῖσος τῷ θανάτῳ τοῦ παιδὸς συντεταραγμένος μᾶλλον τι ἐδεινολογέετο ὅτι μιν ἀπέκτεινε τὸν αὐτὸς φόνου ἐκάθηρε
Something like: “But Croesus, stirred up by the death of his boy, made somewhat greater plaint that he was killing him, the one he himself had purified.”
However, you (properly) say that you want the emphasis to go this way in your earlier post: “the man who killed him was the one whom he himself had purified." Your emphasis is obviously right, as it far better motivates the “μᾶλλον τι”, pointing the ὅτι to the “who” and not the simple action, and would explain the imperfect over the aorist. But to get to your emphasis, it needs the subject of ἀπέκτεινε brought into the foreground somehow.
Still, maybe the vivid imperfect ἀπέκτεινε brings the subject into the foreground all by itself? Compare to “ἐτίκτε” in Euripides, “was the mother of”, nearly a (plu)perfect. Ie., here “was the killer of.” Also compare imperfect ἔπεμπε in some of Herodotus’ story passages.
Are you serious, or just trying to drag out the discussion? The notion that απεκτεινε is not to be read as aorist but as imperfect is absurd, quite out of the question.
Yes, I’m serious.
You’re right about the ἀπέκτεινε being aorist, now that I look up the forms. Strike that part of my argument, please.
It’s not so much a matter of form as a matter of sense. And you appear to be taking μιν as reflexive, referring to Croesus himself. (Your translation, when you were taking απεκτεινε as imperfect, was Croesus “made somewhat greater plaint that he was killing him.”) Tense aside, that would be a bad misreading. μιν refers to his son. He’s the one that was killed, not Croesus!
An incidental grammatical point to note is that the enclitic (μιν) attaches itself to οτι rather than to απεκτεινε.
And you appear to be taking μιν as reflexive, referring to Croesus himself.
No. I know the story. Not prettying up the somewhat awkward pronoun/subject identification here was part of the point. Lacking the demonstrative, only the context tells us who “he…him” is.
Any special meaning of μιν’s enclitic accentual attachment to ὅτι is a bit beyond me, I’m afraid. It’s often fronted, and will come after things like καί or δέ, more often than not.
(Should I say “towards the front” instead of “fronted”? μιν doesn’t come first, of course.)
There’s nothing at all “awkward” about it, in context. And a demonstrative would spoil it rather, as I thought you’d acknowledged.
No more from me. Satis superque.
I did some half-hearted Google Books searching to see if this has been discussed elsewhere, but all I found was a top hit for a single note from William Neilson where he gives a literal translation, showing that he sees exactly the same emphasis that I did as written:
“…That the person had killed him (his son), whom he (Croesus) had purified from murder.”
But again, the narrative would better support an emphasis such as mwh gives in his paraphrase:
“the man who killed him was the one whom he himself had purified"
Or Godley in his Loeb:
“because the killer was one whom he himself had cleansed of blood”
The only difficultly being that the Greek’s emphasis goes as Neilson has it, not mwh or Godley’s Loeb. Notice also, that my English version above, basically the same as Neilson’s, but without the (his son) and (Croesus), immediately confused mwh as to whom was being referred to. There is an awkwardness here, and “style” isn’t the answer, imo.