ἐλθὼν δ᾽ ὁ Ξενοφῶν ἐπήρετο τὸν Ἀπόλλω τίνι ἂν θεῶν θύων καὶ εὐχόμενος κάλλιστα καὶ ἄριστα ἔλθοι τὴν ὁδὸν ἣν ἐπινοεῖ καὶ καλῶς πράξας σωθείη. Do the present participles θύων καὶ εὐχόμενος mean that he had to repeat his prayers an sacrifices from time to time on his way? I think this understanding is wrong, however, why not θύσας καὶ ἐυξάμενος?
Do the present participles θύων καὶ εὐχόμενος mean that he had to repeat his prayers an sacrifices from time to time on his way? I think this understanding is wrong,
Why? In effect: “which god should he cultivate with prayers and sacrifices as he proceeds on his way?”
can it also mean something like: he asked Apollo, praying to what god ( meaning at that moment, ie., at the beginning of the journey), he would be able to accomplish the road…
In effect: “which god should he cultivate with prayers and sacrifices as he proceeds on his way?”
That wasn’t intended to be a literal translation of the whole sentence – just an attempt to capture the sense of the present participles – but i think it was confusing.
Translating the entire sentence into English is tricky because the indirect question that is central to his inquiry can’t be literally translated as a participle. Something like: “he asked which gods he should cultivate [along the way] with prayers and sacrifices so as to complete the expedition he was considering as well as possible and come back safe and sound after having done well.”
this ‘along the way’ baffles me, couldn’t it just mean ’ at the moment of starting the journey?’
couldn’t it just mean ’ at the moment of starting the journey
I think that would be aorist. The present participles, I think, refer to the continuing cultivation of the god, and the aorist optatives look to the end result.
The reason why I m trying to discuss this issue is that I have found in old German grammars (Kruger, Kuhner, etc) that the imperfect of the verbs that are usually translated as aorists ( like ἔπεμψα)etc., is explained not as nowadays, for instance, in Smythe, or the Cambridge Grammar, as due to the uncertainty of the final outcome (and Jean Humber’s Syntaxe joins them in this), but due to the fact that some verbs, like to send, to order, etc, and even καθηζεμαι, intrinsically indicate the verbal idea only without paying attention to the aspect, they call these verbs aspectless. Emil Chorny, whose Greek Grammar written in Russian (published 1889) is in fact a rich digest of the best German Greek grammars available at the time, quite elaborates upon this point adducing examples both from Russian and Church Slavonic. According to his view, the participles in the passage of Anabasis discussed, might be probably viewed as aspectless.
If the participles are aspectless, indicating simply the idea of the verb (as the Russian imperfective sometimes does), that certainly wouldn’t imply that the actions of praying and sacrificing occur before the expedition. To the contrary, it would simply mean that the action were to occur, and not necessarily just once, and I think that the idea of continuing and repeated actions could still be relevant. I don’t think it makes much difference whether you call them aspectless or imperfective here.
But I’d also be wary about applying Russian or OCS – or for that matter English – aspectual distinctions to ancient Greek.
In Greek, the aorist is the stem that is unmarked as to duration – “un procès pur et simple, abstraction faite de toute considération de durée . . . .” Chantraine, Morphologie historique du grec, p.155. The gnomic aorist