Demosthenes, 3rd Philippic, 1

Greek Learning Greek
21

jeidsath: you are lucky to have an exceptionally patient καθηγητής in Hylander.

Looking at it now, I see Dionysius didn’t rewrite/tamper with this condition. He does treat the rest of the passage though, adding extra pronouns just like we do when teaching and rearranging clauses so as to water down Demosthenes’s rhetorical vigor.

For the beginning:

ἁπλῶς ἂν ὁ λόγος ἦν καὶ κατ᾽ εὐθεῖαν ἑρμηνείαν ἐκφερόμενος, εἴ τις οὕτως κατεσκεύασεν αὐτόν: “πολλῶν, ὦ ἄνδρες Ἀθηναῖοι, λόγων γιγνομένων καθ᾽ ἑκάστην σχεδὸν ἐκκλησίαν, περὶ ὧν ἀδικεῖ Φίλιππος ὑμᾶς τε καὶ τοὺς ἄλλους Ἕλληνας, ἀφ᾽ οὗ τὴν εἰρήνην ἐποιήσατο.” νυνὶ δὲ τό τε ὀλίγου δεῖν παραληφθὲν ἀντὶ τοῦ σχεδὸν καὶ τὸ ἀδικεῖ Φίλιππος διαιρεθὲν καὶ διὰ μακροῦ τὴν ἀκολουθίαν κομισάμενον καὶ τὸ οὐ μόνον ὑμᾶς ἀλλὰ καὶ τοὺς ἄλλους Ἕλληνας, δυναμένου καὶ χωρὶς ἀποφάσεως διὰ τῆς συμπλοκῆς μόνης τὸ πρᾶγμα δηλῶσαι, τοῦ συνήθους ἐξηλλαγμένην καὶ περίεργον πεποίηκε τὴν λέξιν.

And the next bit (πάντων οἶδ᾽ ὅτι φησάντων γ᾽ ἄν… Dion. has an ευ before οτι):

ὁμοίως δὲ καὶ τὸ ἐπιλεγόμενον τούτῳ, εἰ μὲν ἁπλῶς καὶ ἀπεριέργως ἔδει ῥηθῆναι, τοῦτον ἂν δή που [p. 146] τὸν τρόπον ἀπήγγελτο: “καὶ πάντων λεγόντων, καὶ εἴ τινες τοῦτο μὴ ποιοῦσιν, ὅτι δεῖ καὶ λέγειν καὶ πράττειν ταῦτα, ἐξ ὧν ἐκεῖνος παύσεται τῆς ὕβρεως καὶ δίκην δώσει.” οὕτω δὲ ἐξενεχθέν: “καὶ πάντων εὖ οἶδ᾽ ὅτι φησάντων γ᾽ ἄν” οὐ σῴζει τὴν εὐθεῖαν τῆς λέξεως ὁδόν. τό τε γὰρ οἶδ᾽ ὅτι χώραν οὐκ ἀναγκαίαν εἶχε, καὶ τὸ φησάντων γ᾽ ἂν ἀντὶ τοῦ φασκόντων παρειλημμένον οὐ τὴν ἀφελῆ διάλεκτον ἀλλὰ τὴν ἐξηλλαγμένην καὶ περίεργον ἐμφαίνει.

22

Joel, As I hope you now realize, there’s nothing strange about it at all. It seems you were still misreading this, despite what Bart, I, Hylander, and phalakros had written. The two καί’s are not “doing the same thing.” The clause introduced by εἰ καὶ applies to the entire protasis, as phalakros put it, while the καὶ within the clause conjoins its two parts. Just as Hylander explained.

It’s still not clear that you understand, when you say “ὧν refers to the actions rather than the things being said.” The ἐξ ὧν clause refers equally to λέγειν and χειροτονεῖν.

phalakros does well to draw attention to Dion.Hal.’s treatment of this proemium, elucidating Dem’s characteristic style.

23

I do think that I do and have understand your position:

“εἰ καὶ λέγειν ἅπαντες ἐβούλονθ᾽ οἱ παριόντες [λεγόμενον] … ἐξ ὧν ὡς φαυλότατ᾽ ἔμελλε τὰ πράγμαθ᾽ ἕξειν”
“even if all the speakers deliberately advocated … a proposal that would result in the worst possible state of affairs”

You are taking ἐξ ὧν as referring to the action. That’s not impossible. But it hasn’t done much to explain to me why this is impossible or even less likely:

εἰ καὶ λέγειν ἅπαντες ἐβούλονθ᾽ οἱ παριόντες [λεγόμενα], καὶ χειροτονεῖν ὑμεῖς ἐξ ὧν [partitive! from λεγόμενα] ὡς φαυλότατ᾽ ἔμελλε τὰ πράγμαθ᾽ ἕξειν

24

No, you still don’t seem to be getting it right. ἐξ ὧν refers to the proposal – advocated (contrafactually) by the speakers and adopted (contrafactually) by the voters – and it’s not partitive – it means something like “resulting from which”.

I’m not sure what you mean when you assert our position is that ἐξ ὧν refers to “the action”. That’s exactly why mwh and I think you’re still not getting it right.

25

Joel, You are hopelessly muddled, as happens all too often. Get some sleep, put your weird reading out of your mind, and start again. Or just learn Greek and stop wasting everyone’s time.

(Written independently of Hylander.)

26

So, looking up instances of ἐξ ὧν in Demosthenes, it generally has a specific referent. (Though rarely a more general action ἀλλὰ μὴν ὑπέρ γε τοῦ προῖκ᾿ ἢ μή, τὸ μὲν ἐκ τούτων λαμβάνειν, ἐξ ὧν ἡ πόλις βλάπτεται.) And it doesn’t seem to be used partitively (though I would think that this is an exception ὥς φησιν ἡ μήτηρ, ἃ κατέλιπεν ὁ πατὴρ πάντα, καὶ ἐξ ὧν ἔδει τούτους λαβεῖν τὰ δοθέντα.)

I don’t think that mwh’s reply was helpful. Something like: “in my experience of Demosthenes, ἐξ ὧν is generally not used partitively, you’ll realize this if you read him for a bit” might have been. Or even “look at a few other cases of ἐξ ὧν, it has a specific usage, and doesn’t generally depart from this.”

I used to tutor kids with learning disabilities a bit in fairly basic math. “Look at the right answer, just look at it!” was never the right thing to say to them. You had to understand how they were seeing it, and then figure out where the basics needed to be strengthened, and then guide them to it. It was probably some the hardest mental work I’ve ever done in my life.

Perhaps I am not as frustrating for you as the kids were for me – it was a treatment facility, and they were also violent – but no doubt pretty frustrating. But the right answer in itself is fairly useless, otherwise we could shut off Textkit and just redirect over to the Loebs. What’s helpful is how to get there and why it’s so. That is, if anyone is interested in being a καθηγητής.

27

Now that I see how you want to read this, Ison’t think it’s impossible grammatically. But it’s perverse,and that’s why we were having trouble seeing it: λεγειν would be reduced to “if the speakers were willing to speak”, without specify that they would (contrafactually) be recommending a disastrous course of action.

But εξ ων is definitely not partitive, and ει και is “even if”. εξ ων has to be “from which”, i. e., resulting from which, “which” being the proposal contrafactually advanced by the speakers and voted on by the assembly. The relative clause defines the proposal.

28

“Perhaps I am not as frustrating for you as the kids were for me.” I wouldn’t be too sure about that.

We haven’t just been feeding you “the right answer,” we’ve been explaining how the Greek fits together, so that you can see the right answer for yourself. We’ve been leading you to the water but you refuse to drink. Your instinctive resistance, coupled with your constant defensiveness, does not help you. You’d do better if you asked questions instead of making confident but misguided assertions as you tend to do.

You don’t need to go looking up instances of ἐξ ὧν in Demosthenes, you need to understand what we’ve been explaining about how the relative clause relates to what’s come before it. If you had read the posts more carefully you wouldn’t have been tempted to supply either [λεγόμενον] or [λεγόμενα] as you did in your last post.

29

So it seems you may have been misled by thinking ἐκ must be partitive. Without looking far you can find a similar use of ἐκ—not partitive, but closer to an instrumental dat or indicating consequence; Hylander’s “resulting from which” is good)—in Dionysius’s reworking of the ὅπως (“effort”) clause I posted above:

καὶ πάντων λεγόντων…ὅτι δεῖ καὶ λέγειν καὶ πράττειν ταῦτα, ἐξ ὧν ἐκεῖνος παύσεται τῆς ὕβρεως καὶ δίκην δώσει

(from: πάντων φησάντων γ᾽ ἄν, εἰ καὶ μὴ ποιοῦσι τοῦτο, καὶ λέγειν δεῖν καὶ πράττειν ὅπως ἐκεῖνος παύσεται τῆς ὕβρεως καὶ δίκην δώσει)

But don’t get bogged down by this example if it’s not immediately clear.

30

I ran across this today while reading Xenophon, which is much more like what I would expect normal “ἐξ ὧν” to mean:

ἔταξε δὲ καὶ πόλεις ἐξ ὧν δέοι τοὺς ἱππέας παρασκευάζειν, νομίζων ἐκ τῶν ἱπποτρόφων πόλεων ἐυθὺς καὶ φρονηματίας μάλιστα ἂν ἐπὶ τῇ ἱππικῇ γενέσθαι.

This was rather different from the Demosthenes’ normal “resulting from” usage, which seemed pretty much uniform in my TLG search of his works.

31

Joel you could learn from these posts if you were not so obdurate. Instead of finding instances of ἐξ ὧν in other contexts you’d do better to consider what ἐκ can mean. Here, apart from the fact that ἐξ ὧν ὡς φαυλότατ᾽ ἔμελλε τὰ πράγμαθ᾽ ἕξειν has no expressed antecedent (a grammar book might supply ekeina as the object of λέγειν and χειροτονεῖν), the meaning is crystal clear—as I hope you now can see.

32

I’m not trying to find anything, it was the first time I ran into ἐξ ὧν since the last post. As I wrote earlier, reading more – in fact every – example of ἐξ ὧν in Demosthenes convinced me that Hylander’s explanation seemed more likely. Running into this right off the bat, however, made me wonder this was something specific to Demosthenes, or whether the only difference was contextual.

I’m not obdurate, in Greek I just like examples more than analysis. With calculus, I’m the other way, and like analysis far more than worked examples.

33

Joel, I’m puzzled as to why you went looking for examples of ἐξ ὧν in Demosthenes. It’s simply the preposition ἐξ + the genitive plural of the relative pronoun – “out of which” or something similar. (In this context, I translated it as “resulting from which”, but perhaps I should have adhered more closely to a literal translation of the Greek words.) You can find examples of this causal usage of ἐκ in LSJ.

If there’s anything requiring explanation here, it’s the fact that, as mwh noted, the relative pronoun has no expressed antecedent. That’s a syntactic point: there’s no need for an expressed antecedent because it’s clear that the antecedent if expressed, would be a neuter plural pronoun which would be the object of λέγειν and χειροτονεῖν. The antecedent is “understood,” to use the term found in grammar books.

You can find many other examples of the omission of an unnecessary pronoun on which a relative clause would otherwise depend, in Demosthenes as well as in other authors. This is covered in Smyth 2509. But your other sentences aren’t examples of that: in each of them the antecedent of ἐξ ὧν is expressed.

In the sentence from Xenophon ἔταξε δὲ καὶ πόλεις ἐξ ὧν δέοι τοὺς ἱππέας παρασκευάζειν, the antecedent of ἐξ ὧν is πόλεις. “he also designated cities from which cavalry troops were to be provided.” The meaning of ἐξ here is more or less literal and spatial, not causal: the cavalry was to come out of the cities.

In ὥς φησιν ἡ μήτηρ, ἃ κατέλιπεν ὁ πατὴρ πάντα, καὶ ἐξ ὧν ἔδει τούτους λαβεῖν τὰ δοθέντα, the antecedent of ἐξ ὧν is πάντα. “as the mother says, everything the father left and out of which they were supposed to take the gifts [maybe a dowry, but I haven’t looked at the context].”

And in ἀλλὰ μὴν ὑπέρ γε τοῦ προῖκ᾽ ἢ μή, τὸ μὲν ἐκ τούτων λαμβάνειν, ἐξ ὧν ἡ πόλις βλάπτεται, πάντες οἶδ᾽ ὅτι φήσαιτ᾽ ἂν εἶναι δεινὸν καὶ πολλῆς ὀργῆς ἄξιον, the antecedent is τούτων. (Here ἐξ ὧν, “out of which” is used in a sense that comes closest to its use in the first sentence: “as a result of which”.) “But with regard to whether or not it was just a freely given gift [with no quid pro quo, rather than an outright bribe], I’m sure everyone would say that accepting anything out of/as a result of those things [i.e., those circumstances] out of/as a result of which the city incurs harm is something terrible and warranting extreme anger.”

So these last three sentences are different from the first in that respect. But in all four of these sentences, ἐξ ὧν essentially means simply: “out of which” or “from which”, in slightly different senses and contexts. And ἐξ ὧν as a unit isn’t the right focus for understanding the use of ἐξ ὧν in the first sentence: it’s the use of the common preposition ἐξ or ἐκ in the sense of “originating in”, “resulting from” that’s the key. But searching for examples of usage of common prepositions every time they crop up seems like a needless expenditure of time and energy.