Are prepositions used in Homer for the agent of a passive verb, or for "with" a person?

Greek Homeric Greek and Early Greek Poetry
1

I picked up a used copy of Lewis and Styler, Foundations for Greek prose composition, had some fun repairing the binding, and am now trying to work through the exercises. The book uses the Attic dialect, but I have never spent any time learning Attic vocabulary or grammar, so I’ve decided to try to do all the exercises using as pure a Homeric dialect as I can. (This sometimes leads to funny situations, e.g., it’s hard to find Homeric words for concepts like capturing prisoners, since what we do with the losers of a battle is Homer is to destroy, kill, or rout them – not capture them. “To negotiate” is also a verb that doesn’t come up much, since the Homeric equivalent thereof would be to shake one’s spear at the enemy and yell at them to bring it on.)

In the second lesson, L&S have a discussion of the use of certain prepositions and cases in the following situations:

  • ὑπὸ + gen. for the human agent of a passive verb (or an abstract or personifiable agent like hunger)

  • πρὸς + acc. for “with” a person, when the meaning is face to face

  • μετὰ + gen for “with” a person, when the meaning is side by side with (an ally, etc.)

Prepositions generally don’t seem to be used as much in the epic dialect as in Attic, so I’ve generally been omitting them in my answers to these exercises. Would that be idiomatic in these constructions, or not?

I’ve spent some time searching in Monro for any discussion of how one tags the agent of a passive verb in Homeric Greek, but haven’t found anything directly on that topic. At the end of this post I’ll list a few examples that I found in the first chapters of the Iliad.

Would μετά+gen be ἅμα+dat in Homer? Monro seems to say that μετά+gen is rare in Homer: https://dcc.dickinson.edu/grammar/monro/μετά

Examples of my answers in which I’m unsure of the correct Homeric idiom:

2.19. δῶρα πέμφθησαν βασιλῆα [ὑπὸ] λαού. Gifts were sent to the king by the people. (L&S have “citizens.”)

2.18. κόραι παίζουσιν ἅμα ἐραστῷ [μετὰ ἐραστῶν?] δώματῳ. The girls are playing in the hall with their lovers.

2.16. εἰρήνῃ Θηβαῖοι ἅμα συμμάχῳ [μετὰ συμμάχων?] τῶν διαλέγοντο [πρός] Φίλλιπον. The Thebans with their allies were negotiating with Philip concerning peace.

Examples from the Iliad of tagging the agent of a passive verb:

Iliad 1.65
εἴ ταρ ὅ γ ̓ εὐχωλῆς ἐπιμέμφεται ἠδ ̓ ἑκατόμβης,
whether [Apollo] is made resentful by either a vow or a hecatomb
…dative of a concrete thing that can’t be personified

Iliad 2.860
ἀλλ ̓ ἐδάμη ὑπὸ χερσὶ ποδώκεος Αἰακίδαο ἐν ποταμῷ
but he was killed in the river at the hands (dative) of Achilles
…dative of a concrete thing that can’t be personified (the hands), indirectly linked to the
owner of the hands, in the genitive

Iliad 3.348
οὐδ’ ἔῤῥηξεν χαλκός, ἀνεγνάμφθη δέ οἱ αἰχμὴ ἀσπίδ’ ἐνὶ κρατερῇ
but neither did the bronze break, as the point was bent back in the strong shield [dat]
…looks like a dative governed by ἐν, although Monro seems to say that this idea
of prepositions governing a certain case is later, and the dative noun should
just be connected directly to the verb

The wiktionary entry for ὑπό says that the use of ὑπὸ + gen can be used for causal agents, which don’t have to be people. It gives several examples, including this one:
Iliad 13.153
ἀλλ᾽ ὀΐω χάσσονται ὑπ᾽ ἔγχεος
but I think they will be be forced back by my spear

2

So given the examples above, I think maybe the way it works in the Homeric dialect is something like this:

The agent of a passive verb is specified using the dative (Iliad 1.65, Iliad 3.348), ὑπὸ + dative (Iliad 2.860), or ὑπὸ + genitive (Iliad 13.153). When the agent is someone’s hands, the idiom is ὑπὸ χερσὶν plus the genitive of the person whose hands they are.

Does this sound right?

I haven’t found any examples where the agent is a human and is directly expressed that way. The examples I’ve found seem to be ones in which the human agent is expressed indirectly. But that could just be because I have a small sample size, or because as a matter of style Homer prefers not to use passive constructions in that way.

3

It doesn’t look like anyone else was particularly interested in this topic, but I did find a book that discusses it in detail, so I thought I’d post a follow-up for the benefit of anyone who happens by or finds this page by googling. The book is George, Expressions of agency in ancient Greek. Ch. 2 is about Homer.

The use of passive constructions with an agent is much less common in Homer than in later authors.

In most cases, the agent is marked with the dative, without any preposition. This depends somewhat on the semantics of the verb, and is especially common with verbs like δάμνημι, κτείνω, and ἀνάσσω that express subjugation of the patient.

ὑπό + dat. and ὑπό + gen. both occur, but they’re pretty infrequent.

Other prepositions/adverbs also occur. They sometimes seem to me to act more like adverbs, e.g., in Iliad 11.831–2.