Xenophon:
καὶ γὰρ αὐτὸ τοῦτο οὗπερ αὐτὸς ἕνεκα φίλων ᾤετο δεῖσθαι, ὡς συνεργοὺς ἔχοι, καὶ αὐτὸς ἐπειρᾶτο συνεργὸς τοῖς φίλοις κράτιστος εἶναι τούτου ὅτου αἰσθάνοιτο ἕκαστον ἐπιθυμοῦντα.
In one place word order was especially problematic for me. Putting ἕνεκα next to φίλων invites one to link to to and this is especially so in that the genitive that ἕνεκα actually relates to is οὗπερ. φίλων is separated from the verb it actually relates to ( δεῖσθαι) by ᾤετο.
Wouldn’t a more neutral word order be this?
καὶ γὰρ αὐτὸ τοῦτο οὗπερ ἕνεκα αὐτὸς ᾤετο φίλων δεῖσθαι, ὡς συνεργοὺς ἔχοι, καὶ αὐτὸς ἐπειρᾶτο συνεργὸς τοῖς φίλοις κράτιστος εἶναι τούτου ὅτου αἰσθάνοιτο ἕκαστον ἐπιθυμοῦντα.
Even with that all sorted out I am still a little uncertain. This is my current translation:
for even in relation to the very thing on account of which he felt his lack of friends that he should have collaborators so too he strived to be the best collaborator to his friends (of-this) of whatever he should perceive each to desire.
Two questions:
I now think that the “the very thing on account of which” (αὐτὸ τοῦτο οὗπερ αὐτὸς) relates to his need for collaborators. Is that correct?
Why τούτου ὅτου? Wouldn’t ὅτου its own convey what ever just as well?
. . . the very thing on account of which he thought he needed friends, [namely], so that he would have collaborators – he himself also tried to be the most effective collaborator for his friends for that which he perceived each one to want/be desirous of.
Yes, you’re right. This is a “general” relative clause, as ὅτου and the optative indicate.
I think that fronting αὐτὸς immediately after the relative οὗπερ and before the postposition ἕνεκα puts greater on αὐτὸς, which is balanced by his friends’ need for him as collaborator: the very thing that he himself thought he needed friends for, namely, to have collaborators. . . , he himself also tried to be the most effective collaborator for his friends for whatever he felt each of them was desirous of.
I wouldn’t think of this as a less “natural” word order–the word order as it stands is what came naturally to Xenophon. Nor can the sentence be modified to “remove” the anacolouthon: again, that’s just the way Xenophon expressed himself.
καὶ γὰρ αὐτὸ τοῦτο οὗπερ ἕνεκα αὐτὸς ᾤετο φίλων δεῖσθαι, ὡς συνεργοὺς ἔχοι, καὶ αὐτὸς ἐπειρᾶτο – we expect a transitive verb after this, a verb for which αὐτὸ τοῦτο would be the direct object, something like “he tried to accomplish for his friends”, but instead X. switches to "he tried to be the most effective collaborator for his friends . . . "
συνεργὸς takes a genitive complement: "collaborator of whatever . . . ", i.e, "collaborator for obtaining whatever . . . "
δεῖσθαι here is best translated “need,” not “lack.”
What I said was neutral not natural word order. It follows that as Xenophon was a native speaker that what he wrote was natural but if word order is being used to stress something then my expectation would be that there is a order of words that an Ancient Greek would choose if he did not want anything to have salience.
That is surely even more true of an anacolouthon. To say that there is an anacolouthon means a divergence from expected syntax in that the sequence is a little disjointed. That surely does imply that there is a way Xenophon could have expressed the same general sense without an anacolouthon. To understand the choices Xenophon made do we do not need be aware of the more obvious choices that he did not make? Also for me as a beginner, with as yet weak grasp of the more standard forms I feel the need to know what more conventional forms are when I am reading sentences that don’t stick to them.
Okay that’s my defense for asking the questions. You have gone a considerable way to answering them. Thanks
Most of this seems to have been cleared up but it might be helpful daivid if you learn that ἕνεκα is usually postpositive ie that it comes after the word it refers to. Hylander mentions that it is postpositive but I thought I would highlight it. Here is what Smyth 1665 says :
a. ἕνεκα and χάριν (usually) and ἄνευ (sometimes) are postpositive. The retention of the postpositive use of περί may be due to the influence of ἕνεκα. In poetry many prepositions are postpositive.
To say that there is an anacolouthon means a divergence from expected syntax in that the sequence is a little disjointed. That surely does imply that there is a way Xenophon could have expressed the same general sense without an anacolouthon. To understand the choices Xenophon made do we do not need be aware of the more obvious choices that he did not make?
Also I am not sure you have grasped what anacoluthon is. Here I think it is a rhetorical device and it means that the grammatical construction changes from what a reader might have assumed when starting out reading the sentence. It requires some fluency to spot this and beginners are always foxed by it. Again Smyth (3004-8) is helpful on this here. It might seem disjointed to us but to a Greek it would seem a quite normal device (although possibly surprising) as it does when employed by English speakers. You need to understand that it is a rhetorical effect. We all use anacoluthon frequently when speaking for good and bad reasons!
I wouldn’t view the anacoluthon here as any kind of rhetorical device, and I don’t think Xen’s readers would either. It seems entirely natural, as his syntax shifts slightly as the sentence goes along. As Hylander put it, “the word order as it stands is what came naturally to Xenophon.”
I did know this but I also have heard that it sometimes isn’t. I don’t read fast enough to get a feel for whether that is “so rare that it might as well be never” or “fairly often”. And so when the word order means I can see no genitive to the immediate left the siren call of the genitive to the right wins out.
I do get that to an Ancient Greek the syntax is perfectly natural - so much so that were we to have an Ancient Greek native speaker as a member s/he would be at a loss to explain why it is fine and why anything I would produce if I were to try the same thing isn’t. And until I get to understand why they will continue to trip me up.
Having said that having just spent half and hour staring at it, the sentence now makes absolute sense. The infinitive which ἐπειρᾶτο requires is εἶναι which has the subject “συνεργὸς τοῖς φίλοις κράτιστος” and that in turn could be replaced by αὐτὸ τοῦτο from the first half.
Hence the bare skeleton is καὶ γὰρ αὐτὸ τοῦτο ἐπειρᾶτο αὐτὸ τοῦτο εἶναι. meaning For in relation to the very object he tried to be the very object. The actual sentence is what you get when you flesh it out to convey something more useful.
Except I can no longer see any anacoluthon at all. So I must have gone wrong somewhere.
I wouldn’t view the anacoluthon here as any kind of rhetorical device, and I don’t think Xen’s readers would either. It seems entirely natural, as his syntax shifts slightly as the sentence goes along. As Hylander put it, “the word order as it stands is what came naturally to Xenophon.”
My starting point was my experience of hearing in classes people misunderstanding what an anacoluthon was, characterising it as some sort of grammatical inconsistency which need to be corrected or ironed out rather than a common feature of Greek . Daivid’s suggestion that something could be done to the text to “normalise” it to remove the anacoluthon (even though we are to understand he wants to do this in his head or by reading rather than formal textual amendment) reminded me of this.
I read all of Xenophon as a piece of rhetoric. So the various devices he uses which form part of his style are all elements of his rhetorical practice. His (at times disarming) simplicity has parallels with the effect achieved by Lysias in On the Murder of Eratosthenes. What you consider “entirely natural” I think is the effect of rhetoric rather than evidence of its absence.
As you would expect I think " and I don’t think Xen’s readers would either" is a bold claim. But rather than press you on that I will merely observe that we (including Daivid) are readers of Xenophon and that our reception of this text also matters just as much as an appeal to other “supposed readers” whom we are not able to interrogate.
I posted a link to Smyth which lists several examples of anacoluthon which he describes thus: “Anacoluthon is sometimes real, sometimes only slight or apparent. It is natural to Greek by reason of the mobility and elasticity of that language; but in English it could not be tolerated to an equal extent because our tongue—a speech of few inflected forms—is much more rigid than Greek.” While I have problems with the way in which this is expressed, for example, in that it makes no allowance for the register in which Greek texts are written and that he like you slips in an unexplained “natural”, at least it clearly expresses that Greek has to be taken on its own terms and not to be imagined as some form of coded English. We have had enough experience of that to last another lifetime!
Except I can no longer see any anacoluthon at all. > > So I must have gone wrong somewhere.
Daivid doesnt Hylander’s post make the anacoluthon clear?
καὶ γὰρ αὐτὸ τοῦτο οὗπερ ἕνεκα αὐτὸς ᾤετο φίλων δεῖσθαι, ὡς συνεργοὺς ἔχοι, καὶ αὐτὸς ἐπειρᾶτο – we expect a transitive verb after this, a verb for which αὐτὸ τοῦτο would be the direct object, something like “he tried to accomplish for his friends”, but instead X. switches to "he tried to be the most effective collaborator for his friends . . . "
In a word no. I read thru that carefully and I posted what I came up with. True, εἶναι is not a transitive but I don’t see why that makes a difference here. I do get that anacoluthon is not a mistake on the part of Xenophon. But Smyth says " is inadvertent or purposed deviation in the structure of a sentence ". “Deviation from what?” seems a perfectly valid question to ask and don’t think I will understand this sentence until I can find an answer to this. The explanation as to why that question should not be answered seems to be that that would be correcting Xenophon and implying he had made mistake. Not at all. Unless someone can answer that question they can not understand the freedom that Xenophon is taking advantage of. I can’t help feeling that anyone who doesn’t feel that question to be appropriate has a sufficient grasp of Greek that they already know the answer.
I, however, don’t.
PS In attempting to reply to your post I clicked the wrong button and edited it instead. I apologize if I have failed to put it back to how it was before.
Daivid - if I may be permitted to try to explain, the point is that, in the second half of the sentence, the structure changes from what one would have expected on the basis of its first half.
When reading the first half of the sentence, one naturally (I would say) expects that αὐτὸ τοῦτο will be the object of the second half - in other words, as Hylander has said, that the sentence will run something like:
‘And that very thing on account of which he thought he needed friends, … that is what he tried to accomplish for his friends.’
However, despite having ‘set up’ this expectation by means of αὐτὸ τοῦτο, the sentence does not continue in this way; instead, a fresh construction is started, which one would not have expected from the sentence’s opening. The αὐτὸ τοῦτο is lost sight of, and the words ‘he himself also tried to be the most effective collaborator …’ are effectively an independent statement, which could stand in its own right; it does not follow on ‘naturally’ as the expected conclusion to the first part of the sentence.
Unsurprisingly, there are examples of this sort of thing in Thucydides, one of which I could exhume for you if it would help.
Do you mean something like:
καὶ γὰρ αὐτὸ τοῦτο οὗπερ ἕνεκα αὐτὸς ᾤετο φίλων δεῖσθαι, καὶ τοῦτο αὐτὸς ἐπειρᾶτο τοῦτο παρέχειν τοῖς αὐτοῦ φίλοις.
This of course would not really be what he intended to say which might be why he resorted to anacoluthon.
EDIT
Actually maybe it is just possible to keep the full sense without an anacoluthon:
καὶ γὰρ αὐτὸ τοῦτο οὗπερ ἕνεκα αὐτὸς ᾤετο φίλων δεῖσθαι, ὡς συνεργοὺς ἔχοι, καὶ τοῦτο αὐτὸς ἐπειρᾶτο τοῦτο παρέχειν τοῖς αὐτοῦ φίλοις ὤν συνεργός αὑτοῖς.
I stress that I do not think that it is more correct to be without an anacoluthon.
It goes without saying that anything I come up with that is likely to be poor Greek but I can grasp that even were a native Ancient Greek speaker to rewrite Xenophon to avoid an anacoluthon the result would be as likely to be awkward rather than an improvement. It’s just this is an exercise I need to do to understand in what the anacoluthon lies.
Daivid, you’re misunderstanding “deviation” in Smyth’s definition. An anacolouthon is not a deviation from some normative sentence structure–it’s a deviation in the sense that the structure of the sentence changes mid-stream.
Here, the sequence αὐτὸ τοῦτο οὗπερ ἕνεκα αὐτὸς ᾤετο φίλων δεῖσθαι, ὡς συνεργοὺς ἔχοι doesn’t fit syntactically into the main clause of the sentence, καὶ αὐτὸς ἐπειρᾶτο συνεργὸς τοῖς φίλοις κράτιστος εἶναι τούτου ὅτου αἰσθάνοιτο ἕκαστον ἐπιθυμοῦντα. αὐτὸ τοῦτο is just a dangling accusative (or nominative) that doesn’t get attached as a complement to anything as the main clause proceeds. X. changes the structure mid-stream. There’s no normative sentence that underlies this.
For what it’s worth, (I’m not sure it’s saying anything new), Mather & Hewitt have here:
αὐτὸ τοῦτο: has no construction as the sentence stands; ὡς ἔχοι is in apposition with it. Translate, and for this very reason for which he thought he himself needed friends – namely, that he might have coworkers, – he, too, on his part, tried to be for his friends a most efficient coworker, etc.
and Goodwin & White:
αὐτὸ τοῦτο οὗπερ ἕνεκα, κ.τ.λ.he tried to secure for his friends that very object for which he thought that he needed friends himself – viz. that he might have co-workers, – he tried (I say) also on his own part to be a most vigorous co-worker with his friends, etc. αύτὸ τοῦτο would naturally have been the object of some verb like πράττειν after ἐπειρᾶτο, but for this simple αὐτὸ τοῦτο πράττειν the amplified expression συνεργὸς … εἶναι … ἐπιθυμοῦντα was substituted, to express the same idea more fully. Cf. ἃ … καίουσιν in iii 5.5
there we find
…in both cases a more definite expression (here καίουσι) is substituted by anacoluthon for a more general one like ποιοῦσι.
I do understand that but I still would like to know what you would get if the sentence did not deviate but continued in a way that involved no deviation.
This I can’t get my head around. My brain can’t grasp what a dangling accusative means unless I can see what it would look like if it weren’t. I have made the attempt to rewrite it (καὶ γὰρ αὐτὸ τοῦτο οὗπερ ἕνεκα αὐτὸς ᾤετο φίλων δεῖσθαι, ὡς συνεργοὺς ἔχοι, καὶ τοῦτο αὐτὸς ἐπειρᾶτο τοῦτο παρέχειν τοῖς αὐτοῦ φίλοις ὤν συνεργός αὑτοῖς.) and it would really help to know whether that does avoid a dangling accusative or whether it is completely wrong.
There is a shade of color that most English speakers see as orange and most (all?) French speakers see as rouge. I once missed a train because I was frantically looking for a red thing to stamp my ticket - it never occurred to me that all the orange things were intended. Despite this both English and French speakers will agree on what is cardinal rouge/red.
If an English speaker is shown that shade of orange an is told it is rouge it is not unreasonable to then ask ‘what is cardinal rouge’."
Mather & Hewitt didn’t help at all but Goodwin & White is very helpful though it will still need a lot of thought before I get it.
The anacolouthon doesn’t have a “meaning” in and of itself–it’s simply a syntactic discontinuity.
Try this rough effort at English translation:
And the reason why he thought he needed friends himself, namely, to have collaborators–well, he himself also tried to be the most effective collaborator for his friends in obtaining for them what he saw each of them wanted.
The main clause leaves "the reason why . . . " dangling, with no relation to the main clause. The anacolouthon doesn’t have a “meaning” in itself, but there’s no point in rewriting the sentence to make the two parts fit together.
But you’re right that αὐτὸ τοῦτο . . . raises the expectation that it will be the object of a transitive verb (or maybe the subject of a transitive or intransitive verb), but the rest of the sentence disappoints that expectation and moves off in a different direction.
So I must have gone wrong somewhere.