H. N. Fowler: “And listen to what happened to me, that you may be convinced that I would never yield to any one, if that was wrong, through fear of death, but would die rather than yield.”
This is obviously not a literal translation, but I struggle to comprehend the Greek.
Perhaps:
μὴ ὑπείκων δὲ
and refusing to yield
ἀλλὰ κἂν ἀπολοίμην
I would rather even die
Taking ἀλλά to be equivalent to μᾶλλον? Why not μᾶλλον?
μὴ ὑπείκων δὲ ἀλλὰ κἂν ἀπολοίμην – I interpret this as “but I would even die by not yielding.”
With optative ἀπολοίμην, κἂν must be crasis for καί + ἄν, “I would even die.”
“. . . even if I were to die” would be καὶ εἰ ἀπολοίμην.
There’s some textual uncertainty here – the mss. are confused. Suffice it to say that the new OCT reads μὴ ὑπείκων δὲ ἅμα κἃν ἀπολοίμην, which is closer to the mss., and ἀλλὰ instead of ἅμα is Burnet’s conjecture, with some ms. support.
μή ὑπείκων δὲ ἅμα κἂν ἀπολοίμην would be something like “and I would even die by not yielding.” Not much difference. ἅμα I think would strengthen the consequential connection between failing to yield and dying.
Thank you for going it through in detail. Yes, κἂν of course is καὶ ἄν “would even”. Your translation of both versions with ἀλλά and ἅμα look intuitive, but what irks me is that “I would even die by not yielding” doesn’t make much sense in context. Why would Socrates add such a remark if he didn’t in fact mean “I would rather die than yield” (which the translator has)? Perhaps my brain is too inflexible, but I can’t make the first mean the second by some magic of pragmatics. I would rather believe that I’m missing some, perhaps tiny, nuance in the Greek.
“I would not yield . . . , and I would even die not yielding [if death were to be the consequence].” That seems to me something like the unstated protasis of the apodosis μὴ ὑπείκων δὲ ἀλλὰ/ἅμα κἂν ἀπολοίμην, and it makes sense to me in context.
I think you might translate the optative κἂν ἀπολοίμην as “I would even rather die” but I don’t think μὴ ὑπείκων literally translates as “than yield.” Fowler’s translation, as you note, isn’t literal, and, as a non-literal translation, perhaps it’s acceptable in conveying the underlying idea of the Greek.
I see it now! I may have been thinking of ἄν + opt., the Greek equivalent of “would”, as too much of a pure logical consequence, without any sense of will. But any reasonable interpretation here has to mean that Socrates is stating a preference, not merely positing a syllogism, so to speak. Something to bear in mind, I suppose.