“but [let us] take care that each of them [the Greeks] may have to heal a wound at home, being stricken either with an arrow, or with a sharp spear, bounding into his ship”
I’m confused by βλήμενος here. It’s got the aorist stem, and the ending is middle. If it was going to be passive, I would think it would be something like βλήθεις, wouldn’t it? It’s singular, so it’s modifying τις, which refers to one of the Greeks. It can’t have the Trojans as its subject, both because it’s singular and because there is no plural noun present in the impersonal construction (subjunctive πέσσῃ).
It seems like the meaning is clearly passive, but the form is middle. Can anyone explain what’s going on?
These forms are translated as passives in English, but perhaps the Greeks conceptualized them as middle, something like “suffer a hit to oneself.” After all, except in the aorist, the Greek middle diathesis/voice covers both middle and passive meanings. The basic opposition in Greek is active vs. mediopassive, and the middle voice is primary; the aorist passive conjugation seems to have been a relatively late development from athematic intransitive aorist forms.
this is epic aorist passive participle. I cannot find it in Smyth, but this form is listed in LS ἕβλητο (ep. ao pass) and Bailly βλήμενος ep, pass ao part.
On p. 689, Smyth says: “Epic forms … of the 2 aor. mid. as pass. ἐβλήμην (… part. βλήμενος).”
βάλλω does take both middle and passive endings. In Homer there are passive βλῆτο, ἔβλητο and middle βάλετο, βλήμενος, ἐβάλοντο et al. Usually when a verb has both, I would expect the meanings to be distinct, but they don’t seem to be distinct here. That would explain why Cunliffe, who is normally a fanatical semantic splitter, doesn’t really remark on this.
Willi, Origins of the Greek verb, p. 53: “…in Homer middle aorists often still serve in the passive voice.” That is, I think the middle is older and the passive is a later invention, so you still see the transition occurring in Homer. But googling also turned up examples in koine ( https://hellenisticgreek.com/21.html ):
ἔθεντο εἰς τήρησιν (Acts 4:3)
ἐτέθησαν ἐν τῷ μνήματι (Acts 7:16)
The forms differ, but both are passive semantically.
Striking (pun) that this has the perfect root βλη instead of βαλ. (Cunliffe lists examples of the real aorist middle all using the βαλ root). Maybe it started life as a perfect with lost reduplication? Though “ἢ δουρὶ τυπεὶς ἢ βλήμενος ἰῷ” sure makes it seem like an aorist.
Homer uses βλήμενος in a very rare periphrastic construction in 4.211:
Well, mwh first made a mistake that came from not looking carefully at what was being discussed. Then he/she made a remark that didn’t bear logically on the issue at hand.
But thank you for taking the time to discuss this with some care.
It doesn’t seem to me that translation into other languages such as English or Latin resolves the question. In English, it would be ungrammatical to say “and they placed” without restating the object: “and they placed them.” But whether that non-repetition of the object is possible in Greek is a different question, which I don’t know the answer to. I suspect that it is possible, since word order and elision tend to be very free in Greek. The fact that Jerome translated it into Latin in a certain way doesn’t seem to me to probe the question. (And in any case my Latin is nonexistent.) Both the bad guys and the good guys in this passage are plural, so that if the non-repetition of the object is grammatical in Greek, we can’t tell from the inflection whether the subject of ἔθεντο is one or the other. Jerome had two ways of expressing the Latin translation, and English translators also have both options – this is so simply because translators don’t/can’t slavishly follow the grammar of the original.
If the question is whether koine sometimes uses middle with the semantics of the passive voice, as claimed by the author of hellenisticgreek.com, then one way to definitively establish that the answer is yes would be to find an example that doesn’t suffer from these ambiguities. For example, suppose we have some koine text whose meaning, expressed in English, is “and they were put in custody [by Sheriff Sadducee],” and the verb is middle and plural. Then we would know for sure that native koine speakers sometimes continued using this old speech habit.
In the case of this verb ἔθεντο in this particular passage, it’s very hard to see a change in subject – with connective καί linking to the previous verb ἔβαλον, with αὐτοῖς just used to refer to Peter and John, without signaling by a pronoun — especially and primarily because middle makes sense here. The idea is that they placed them under their guard for themselves with a view to dealing with them themselves the next day.
There’s just no reason to claim that this clearly middle form is used as a passive. The burden should be on someone making that claim to offer evidence, and I see none. The link is wrong on this point.
Jerome was closer to Greek than any of us – his translation shows how this passage was read in late antiquity. He translates ἔθεντο as an active verb; Latin doesn’t have a true middle voice.
I’m not arguing with the proposition that Greek aorist middles might sometimes be viewed or translated as passives or that specifically passive aorist forms are a relatively late development still in progress in the Homeric language.
The different aorist middles of βάλλω, I think, illustrate the fact that Homer often has two equivalent forms from different dialects or different phases of Greek. Typically they have different metrical shapes, which facilitates hexameter composition.
Ben, I’m sorry you’re so antagonistic. That may have been partly my fault, for not wanting to waste words over a rather simple point. Let me try again, in case Hylander doesn’t satisfy you. Middle forms of τιθημι are extremely common, and I think you’ll find that none of them is ever used in a passive sense, in or out of the New Testament. Passive forms were available for that.
You were understandably misled by that hellenisticgreek site that you were relying on (which seems to be exclusively NT), but there can’t be any real doubt about εθεντο in that Acts passage, or anywhere else for that matter. The object is easily supplied from what directly precedes. Cf. e.g. Lk.1.65-66 καὶ ἐν ὅλῃ τῇ ὀρινῇ τῆς Ἰουδαίας διελαλεῖτο πάντα τὰ ῥήματα ταῦτα, καὶ ἔθεντο πάντες οἱ ἀκούσαντες ἐν τῇ καρδίᾳ αὐτῶν.
NA now accepts ἐβαπτίσθησαν for ἐβαπτίσαντο in 1Cor 10:2. But the alternative is common enough that someone at some point in the early tradition (or the original author) did confuse the middle and passive. So there’s sort of an NT example for you all.
This following verb is interesting, in that you might think it describes an internal state, just from context and how it’s often translated, but is probably a bit more active (middle) than that. Passive deponent form in Matthew to further muddy the waters.
Matthew 9:30: καὶ ἐνεβριμήθη αὐτοῖς ὁ Ἰησοῦς λέγων, Ὁρᾶτε μηδεὶς γινωσκέτω.
Mark 1:43: καὶ ἐμβριμησάμενος αὐτῷ εὐθὺς ἐξέβαλεν αὐτόν
John 11:33: ἐνεβριμήσατο τῷ πνεύματι καὶ ἐτάραξεν ἑαυτόν
John 11:38: Ἰησοῦς οὖν πάλιν ἐμβριμώμενος ἐν ἑαυτῷ ἔρχεται εἰς τὸ μνημεῖον
I really don’t think there’s anything new or very interesting to be said about verb voice in the New Testament. There are better places to muddy the waters. But if you want to open things up you could make use of Andreas Willi’s Origins of the Greek Verb and learn all about pre-proto-IE and the antipassive. There’s an interesting youtube video with him and James Clackson discussing the book.
I have Willi’s book on order. I’m by no means qualified to understand it completely, but I’m curious about the hypothesis that Pre-proto-Indoeuropean was an ergative language, which has been around for a while without, apparently, gaining much acceptance.
With regard to Joel’s suggestion that the Homeric aorist passive (or rather, mediopassive) forms βλήμενος etc. are based on perfect βέβληκα stripped of reduplication, I think these aorist forms, as well as the perfect active βέβληκα and mediopassive βέβλημαι and the standard aorist passive ἐβλήθην, are all rather transparently built on an alternative form of the root, βλη-, with -η- suffixed to the root with a reduced vowel.
So there are three root forms of this verb: βαλλ-, giving rise to present/imperfective βάλλω, βαλ-, giving rise to aorist/perfective ἔβαλον, and βλη-, giving rise to the other forms.
To carry this one step further – just because Greek verbs are so endlessly intriguing – according to Sihler, A New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin, § 454.A.1.a, p.500, the present stem βαλλ- is derived from βαλ- plus the suffix -ν- which has been assimilated to -λ-, so there are really just two forms of the root, βαλ- and βλη-. (Apparently, the relationship between these can be explained at the PIE level.) The same alternations are transparent in καμνω - ἔκαμον - κέκμηκα.