D.9.34

Greek Learning Greek
1

οὐ μόνον δ᾽ ἐφ᾽ οἷς ἡ Ἑλλὰς ὑβρίζεται ὑπ᾽ αὐτοῦ, οὐδεὶς ἀμύνεται, ἀλλ᾽ οὐδ᾽ ὑπὲρ ὧν αὐτὸς ἕκαστος ἀδικεῖται

I’ve been having fun staring at this and almost want to save it for myself but since I’m not the greedy type I thought I’d share it. :smiley:


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  1. ἀδικέω is bugging me. Jack adikew(intr). Jack adikew(tr) Jane. Jane adikeomai(intr) upo Jack. But can Jane adikeomai(tr) X upo Jack? Here X would be a cognitive accusative yielding: Jane suffers injustice by Jack. And what of a non/not so cognitive accusative: Jane suffers dishonesty by Jack? What really bugs me is that the LSJ entry doesn’t really clear it up for me. The Middle Liddell cites: ἀδικεῖσθαι εἴς τι Eur. But what good is that? Here is the whole LSJ entry:
    http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=a)dikei%3Dtai&la=greek&prior=e(/kastos&d=Perseus:text:1999.01.0069:speech=9:section=34&i=1#lexicon

  2. Are ἐφ᾽ οἷς and ὑπὲρ ὧν both obviously cases of attraction with antecedents omitted? I assume they are, “upon these things which” and “over these things which”.

  3. The overall drift I get, but I can’t parse it so that the relative pronouns attracted or unattracted connect up to the verbs nicely. :frowning:

Anyway, give it a whirl if you are bored. But if you have better things to do, don’t worry about it as I am having fun on my own! :sunglasses:

2

If you check Perseus, you can get Davies’ notes on the text. He suggests that

ἐφ᾽ οἷς, ‘on the ground of the wrongs which’; ὑπὲρ ὧν is substituted in the following clause merely for the sake of variety.

So yes, there is attraction going on, and the prepositions aren’t governed directly by the verbs. I think that should clear up most of your difficulties.

As for ἀδικέω – I have an idea what’s going on but I can’t find a reference for you at the moment. According to LSJ it can take a double accusative. This makes sense – the second accusative is an internal (cognate) accusative (“to wrong wrongs”). I seem to recall that in such cases the cognate accusative may be retained in the passive, as counter-intuitive as this may seem. Smyth doesn’t mention this directly, but it’s implied in some of his examples in §1619 ff.

3

Davies doesn’t directly say there is attraction going on. And I’m afraid his translation doesn’t really help me. And even if there is, shouldn’t one be able to write it in unattracted form and have all the pronouns and prepositions governed by the verbs?

I’m still doing a big study of adikew.

Thanks. I’ll be posting more later.

4

I’m sorry spiphany to blow off your response. I missed what you said about Smyth and I think you are right. I worked through the whole LSJ entry and all the examples and now I’ve finished the relevant sections of Smyth and I suppose you are correct that adikeomai can take a (cog.) acc.. I use the parentheses here because after having worked through the Smyth, it seems that the acc. for the passives are not always really cog.! I mean if “one suffers defeat [in] battle” that is different than if “one suffers defeat [in] sport” right? So do those examples really belong in that section of Smyth??? I think what surprised me is me initially is that LSJ didn’t have a bunch of examples given how central a verb adikew is! Indeed, that whole entry strikes me as somewhat short. But I guess they figure they had covered all the bases. Still it would be nice to have a clear passive cog. acc. example from the classical period. They have one example from the New Testament, ἀδικούμενοι μισθὸν ἀδικίας, which is I guess pretty good.

Here is the Smyth if someone wants to tell me what is cog. about these accs.:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0007%3Asmythp%3D1621

I’m also still trying to understand the prepositions if anybody wants to enlighten me.

5

Hi, pster. From the sections in Smyth spiphany mentioned, it seems that in the passive
there are examples where both the internal and external accusatives are kept, and
some where one of them is changed to the nominative.

ἐφ᾽ οἷς = ἐπὶ τούτοις ἃ… ; ὑπὲρ ὧν = ὑπὲρ τούτων ἃ…

The neuter acc. relative pronouns function as those internal objects here
while the external objects are changed to the nominative:

Not only that no one avenges (on behalf of Greece) on the ground of the outrages which Greece suffers by him, but not even on account of the wrongs which each suffers himself.

Obviously, the translation @ Perseus is much cleaner with fewer words:

And it is not only his outrages on Greece that go unavenged, but even the wrongs which each suffers separately.

6

Thanks Nate. I think I finally understand it. One of the things that was bothering me was that I wasn’t even sure what was governing ἐπὶ and ὑπὲρ, but as your gloss makes clear, ἀμύνεται ἐπὶ and ὑπὲρ!

What happens to me is that when I read a sentence like this, I see pretty quickly all the possibilities, including the one at which you arrived, but then it is very hard for me to convince myself that one is indeed the correct one. And when my BPC commentary doesn’t explicitly say that these are cases of attraction when it had said so in other cases I see that as possible evidence that these are not cases of attraction! But I guess you can’t really have ἐφ᾽ οἷς without there being attraction; but I didn’t know that a week ago–at least not for sure!

Attic is such a humbling thing.

I’m ordering a Smyth. Maybe that will help!

7

I have a slightly urgent question. I thought I would put it here rather than in a new thread for obvious reasons.

  1. Demosthenes uses pairs like this quite a bit: ἐφ᾽ οἷς and ὑπὲρ ὧν. Can you have these without attraction?

  2. Relatedly, I’m confused about relative pronouns in Greek.

In English we can say:

I want that which he wants.

But also:

I want what he wants.

In Greek I see ὅ sometimes and I am not sure whether there has been attraction + loss of original demostrative OR whether the Greek relative can behave like English “what” as in the example above. (To save your time and my brain, short answers without any reference to indefinite relatives are preferred. :slight_smile:)

8

Doesn’t the second sentence imply the first? I’m not a native English speaker, so I’m not sure. :confused:

EDIT: I’m a bit confused about this myself. I’ll read up in Smyth and come back later.

9

I guess I understand now the difference, after reading up in my Beginner’s Greek study book (written in
Hebrew by the former head of the Classics department). In the first sentence, the relative clause
functions as an attributive to the direct object, whereas in the second, as a substantive, i.e., the direct
object itself.

So, translating these sentences, we would get:
a) βούλομαι ταῦτα ἃ βούλεται.
vs.
b) βούλομαι ἃ βούλεται.

According to Smyth, the demonstrative pronoun to which the relative pronoun relates, would be
omitted in most cases, unless some emphasis is needed, and thus, b) would be more frequent.

In both a) and b), the relative pronoun is neuter pl. acc. as required by the verb inside the rel.
clauses.

Then we get to the tricky part where the antecedent, or the omitted demonst. pron., is in a case
different than the rel. pron.

Example:
You hear Socrates whom you meet in the market.
ἀκούεις τοῦ Σωκράτους ᾧ ἐντυγχάνεις ἐν τῇ ἀγορᾷ.

When the author chooses to use a demonstrative pronoun instead, sometimes he/she
would attract the rel. pron. case to that of the (omitted) antecedent:

You hear [him] whom you meet in the market.
ἀκούεις οὗ [=τούτου ᾧ] ἐντυγχάνεις ἐν τῇ ἀγορᾷ.

However, In a sentence such as this there’s no need for an attraction as both
the rel. pron. and its antecedent have the same case:

Socrates meets [those] with whom he often associates.
ὁ Σωκράτης ἐντυγχάνει [τούτοις] οἷς πολλάκις σύνεστιν.

Note that there’s rarely any attraction when the rel. pron. case is nominative:

You hear what/that which is said
ἀκούεις [ταῦτα] ἃ λέγεται.

Although the omitted demonst. pron. case is accusative, the rel. pron. is nom. and remains so
because λέγεται requires it.

10

Thanks Nate. I’m wrapping up studying for the day, but I think I’ll have some examples that bother me in a couple of days. Now I’m working on memorizing all of D.9, so I’ll be returning to all the trouble spots. But maybe my question is just whether this is proper Greek:

ἀκούεις ἃ λέγεται

Or do we always have to understand that a ταῦτα is implied and hence required by Greek grammar:

ἀκούεις ταῦτα ἃ λέγεται

11

I wouldn’t really know what constitutes as proper Greek. All I know is that from what I read so far,
the one with the implied ταῦτα is more common. You could of course read the sentence
without any need to supply the omitted antecedent. ἃ λέγεται functions as direct object of ἀκούεις
and as Smyth noted in his sections about attraction, when ταῦτα is mentioned there is some
emphasis put on it, these words rather than those other words that were said.