χαλεπὰ τὰ καλά ἐστιν ὅπῃ ἔχει μαθεῖν beautiful things are difficult where there is learning. I suppose μαθεῖν is the subject of ἔχει.
Does your translation make sense to you? How do you understand “ἔχει”?
ehei means to be here, ἔχει = ἐστί, Another interpretation may be that the subject of ἔχει is ta kala, and the inf mathein has the passive meaning, that is beautiful things are difficult where they are to be learned. There may also be an ellipse of τις
I think the difficulty you have here is fixing on ὅπῃ as meaning “where”.
Try looking at the following meaning from LSJ:
“II. [select] of Manner, in what way, how, as, “ὅπῃ νόος ἐστὶν ἑκάστου” Il.20.25, cf. Od.1.347 : more freq. in Trag. and Att., as A.Pr.586,906 (both lyr.), Ag.67 (anap.), al., Th.1.129, Lys. 14.4, etc. : joined with “ὅπως, ὅπῃ ἔχει καὶ ὅπως” Pl.R.612a, cf. Lg. 899a, 899b, etc. ; “ὅπῃ ἔτυχεν” Arist.GA743a21 (v.l. ὅπου) ; ὅπῃ ἄν, with subj., ὅπῃ ἂν δοκῇ ἀμφοτέροις Foed. ap. Th.5.18 ; ὅπᾳ κα δικαιότατα Dor.Foed. ap. eund.5.79, cf. 8.56 ; “ἔστιν ὅπῃ” in a way, Pl.Prt.331d ; ἔσθ᾽ ὅπῃ . . ; Id.R.486b ; “οὐκ ἔστιν ὅπῃ” Aeschin.3.209 (as v. l.).”
I think ὅπῃ must be a relative but I cannot think of how one would produce a meaningful literal translation. Middle Liddel gives “ἔσθ᾽ ὅπη or ἔστιν ὅπη in any manner, in some way, Plat.” So I think this must be an idiomatic phrase.
One translation might be “‘fine things are difficult to know about” (Francesco Ademollo). The Loeb has “knowledge of high things is hard to gain”.
I hope someone with more expertise can help you further.
After some consideration, I think that the best interpretation would be ἔχειν = εἴναι because 1) μαθεῖν can have a passive meaning usually in infinitive-defining- ajective constructions like χαλεπὸν καταλαμβάνειν; 2)one does not need to assume anything extra, like ellipses or whatever.
Well, not quite. ἔχει = ἐστί is a false equation. Still, the saying is essentially χαλεπὰ τὰ καλὰ ἔχει μαθεῖν, where we could reasonably translate εχει by “are.”
But what’s really been throwing you off here, as seneca recognizes, is εστιν οπη.
In reading we have to learn to chunk sentences into their constitutive parts, so that we no longer read word by word but by cola and commata. (See Ed. Fraenkel’s Kolon und Satz or Habinek’s derivative Colometry of Latin Prose.)
Here a competent reader will immediately recognize that εστιν οπη is an indivisible unit. εστιν οπη and εστιν οπως (lit. “there is how” i.e. “somehow”) are comparable with εισιν οἳ “some” (lit. “there are who”).
Socrates recaps just a few lines later: ἀλλ᾽, ὃ νυνδὴ ἔλεγον, εἰδέναι μὲν τὰ τοιαῦτα χαλεπόν (“As I was just saying, it’s hard to have knowledge of such things”). This shows that εστιν οπη is not essential to the sense.
An expression such as the upcoming εἰ δέ πῃ ἄλλῃ εχει, on the other hand, illustrates the use of πῃ enclitic—interesting, incidentally, to see that πῃ does not follow αλλῃ as it “should” (since it’s postpositive) but is pulled back by the preceding ει δε, showing that ει-δε-πη αλλη is a single chunk.
So: it is difficult (χαλεπὰ ἐχει) to learn beautiful things (τὰ καλὰ μαθεῖν) somehow (έστι ὁπῃ). It looks easy when explained, thank you,
Hi all, it’s interesting, I read the sentence in a different way. I don’t chunk ἐστιν ὅπηι, but ὅπηι ἔχει.
ὅπηι ἔχει is a common expression in Plato, especially with verbs of knowing and similar, e.g.:
Euthyphro 4e: Σὺ δὲ δὴ πρὸς Διός, ὦ Εὐθύφρων, οὑτωσὶ ἀκριβῶς οἴει ἐπίστασθαι περὶ τῶν θείων ὅπῃ ἔχει,
Phaedo 85c: δεῖν γὰρ περὶ αὐτὰ ἕν γέ τι τούτων διαπράξασθαι, ἢ μαθεῖν ὅπῃ ἔχει ἢ εὑρεῖν…
Cratylus 420b: ἣν ἡ ψυχὴ διώκουσα τὸ εἰδέναι ὅπῃ ἔχει τὰ πράγματα πορεύεται,
Republic 581b: παντὶ δῆλον ὅτι πρὸς τὸ εἰδέναι τὴν ἀλήθειαν ὅπῃ ἔχει πᾶν ἀεὶ τέταται,
Republic 581d–e: τὸν δὲ φιλόσοφον, ἦν δ᾽ ἐγώ, τί οἰώμεθα τὰς ἄλλας ἡδονὰς νομίζειν πρὸς τὴν τοῦ εἰδέναι τἀληθὲς ὅπῃ ἔχει καὶ ἐν τοιούτῳ τινὶ ἀεὶ εἶναι μανθάνοντα;
I see the construction in the original post as the same. τὰ καλά are difficult to know ὅπηι ἔχει. This adverbial qualifier can then easily drop out (as understood) when the idea is recapped later.
Cheers, Chad
Quite right Chad, of course. I wasn’t paying proper attention. Thank you!
Ironic really (in a non-Platonic sense), when I was very recently advised to “think not once, not twice, but at least three times before you hit “send." I should at least have thought once.
Hi Michael, I found the above thread very useful as it got me thinking about the broader point of chunking - I wondered whether the chunking would be marked here by a breath or pause, or whether the chunking would simply become clear when the reader got further into the clause. It then got me wondering whether in your professional work you see conflicting chunking in papyri (if chunking is actually marked, that is): I’d really appreciate your thoughts on this, many thanks! Chad
Hi again Chad, With a sentence like χαλεπὰ τὰ καλ(ά) ἐστιν ὅπῃ ἔχει μαθεῖν I can’t imagine Socrates or a competent reader (one unlike me) pausing before ὅπῃ ἔχει μαθεῖν (let alone before μαθεῖν as well!) unless he suffered from shortness of breath (something that Plato’s sentences don’t seem to be written to accommodate). It coheres so very closely. And would anyone other than perhaps a by-the-book German punctuate there? (“I know thee, who you art”?) Doesn’t Plato’s articulation habitually make itself so clear as the reader goes along that there’s no need for anything to be put on hold until it promptly resolves itself? Of course a reader is free to read at any pace he likes, but Plato’s sentences (unlike these of mine) run along briskly, or so it seems to me. The Euthyphro sentence you cite (Σὺ δὲ δὴ πρὸς Διός, ὦ Εὐθύφρων, οὑτωσὶ ἀκριβῶς οἴει ἐπίστασθαι περὶ τῶν θείων ὅπῃ ἔχει) obviously breaks after ὦ Εὐθύφρων (possibly before it too), but nowhere else?
As to the papyri, as you’ll know, there’s very little consistency to punctuation, and It seems that punctuation was not regarded as part of the textual transmission itself (unlike in medieval scriptoria). Punctuation among papyrus manuscripts varies much more than do the words of the text, which clearly took precedence. Many papyri go without punctuation altogether, leaving it to the reader to articulate the text, and those that do have punctuation are very sparing in the use of it. Punctuation seems generally to have been a rather casual and arbitrary business.
That said, some literary papyri do punctuate quite systematically, a few even deploying a two- or three-grade system of stops. And a few others combine stops with short gaps, in places where modern editors would put a strong stop. So this will be further evidence of chunking. And change of speaker is regularly marked (double point + paragraphus). Beyond that, punctuation was generally syntactical in nature, separating sentences and major clauses, more or less as in modern editions. Latin practice was different, with its use of points between individual words and making no concession to delivery. (The Gallus papyrus even separates mea dulcia.) But in both languages chunking in writing correlated principally with grammatical structure, one way or another.
There’s not much evidence of chunking conflicts. The most telling case of discrepant chunking known to me in Plato is at Phaedo 92d, where the medieval mss all have καὶ ἄν τις αὐτοὺς μὴ φυλάττηται, εὗ μάλα ἐξαπατῶσι while an estimable papyrus (POxy.2181) punctuates after ευ μαλα (cf. 116e, Rep.411c). Presumably both interpretations were current in antiquity. I’ve suggested that the papyrus version is right.
Don’t know if this helps at all.
Michael
Thanks very much Michael, that’s very helpful, and the Phaedo 92d point is super interesting. Thanks again! Cheers, Chad