I’m currently grappling with an unadapted passage from Xenophon Hellenica and am completely stumped on one of the sentences. It’s the following that’s giving me a headache…
I can do "after these things happened, as ??? to them to do already what they wanted, many of them killed because of hatred, many others for gold.
Really, it’s ἐξὸν that I can’t make sense of. Assuming it’s a neuter singular future participle of ἐχὸν, using ὡς I would construct a purpose clause - but I can’t see what meaning you could construe from it, nor why the participle is neuter.
BTW, the future neuter participle of ἔχω is ἕξον. ἔχω has a smooth breathing mark because of a rule that when two successive syllables are aspirated, the first gets unaspirated.
That was a difficulty of mine for a very long time, and maybe still is. One way for us English speakers to attune ourselves to these snobby highly inflected languages is to get into the habit of taking everything that you translate to English, waiting 24 hours, and translating it back to Greek again, and then comparing. You would then (ideally) have seen the πολλοί vs. πολλούς problem yourself.
τούτων δὲ γενομένων, ὡς ἐξὸν ἤδη ποιεῖν αὐτοῖς ὅ τι βούλοιντο, πολλοὺς μὲν ἔχθρας ἕνεκα ἀπέκτεινον, πολλοὺς δὲ χρημάτων.
after these things had happened, since by that time it was possible for them to do whatever they wanted, they killed many out of hatred, and many others for money.
ὡς ἐξὸν absolute acc.
many thanks @paveln , it’s reassuring to know this is a concrete construction I simply wasn’t aware of yet, rather than a failure on my part to spot something i knew already.