“Aratus and the Achaean troops having expressed their thanks to him for this, Philip dismissed the meeting and departed with his army, marching towards Lasion.”
The phrase “ἐποιεῖτο τὴν πορείαν” is rendered as “marching” in the English translation. Is the verb “ἐποιεῖτο” a present participle? Or is it in the past tense?
Should the phrase “ἐποιεῖτο τὴν πορείαν” be rendered as marching (present continuous tense) or marched (past tense)?
Both of these are from a software-aided presentation of the Iliad that I’m working on as an open-source project, and both are under a CC-BY-SA license. They’re for the Homeric dialect, but most things are the same as in Attic. Book: https://bcrowell.github.io/ransom/ . In most cases, participles are easy to identify because they have noun endings on a verb stem.
Whenever you’re confused or want to check yourself, you can also always just cut and paste the verb in U Chicago’s morpho utility: https://logeion.uchicago.edu/morpho
The verb ἐποιεῖτο has an augment, which tells us it’s a past tense, and a -το ending, which is a middle or passive ending for the 3rd person singular. This is a conjugated verb in the imperfect, not a participle.
The English translation you’re looking at just isn’t very literal. The subject of the sentence is Φίλιππος, and the verb with that subject is ἐποιεῖτο. A more literal translation would be “Aratus and the Achaean troops having expressed their thanks to him for this, Philip having dismissed the meeting and having departed with his army, he marched for Lasion.” The translator has not rendered it this literally because the long chain of participles would sound bad in English and be hard to understand. The use of all the participles in Greek is clearer because we have participles in two different tenses, and that conveys the information about the sequence of events that would have been unclear in a literal English translation.
Thank you for the explanations. I can conclude that the phrase ἐποιεῖτο τὴν πορείαν can be properly rendered in the past tense as marched (literally, made a journey: ποιέω (“make”) + πορεία (“journey”)). The quotation is from Polybius’ Histories, book 4.
Not marched as in “made a journey”. There is no completion of the journey since the imperfect of ποιέομαι implies a non-completion of the action. I like “set off for Lasion” instead. This is in the past tense but emphasizes the beginning of the journey without completion. As in Latin “iter instituit.”
Thank you. Since English is not my native language, can you explain whether the English phrase “make a journey” always implies a completed journey? I had thought that the phrase may simply mean that a person has gone on a journey, not necessarily focusing on its completion.
“marched for”, “started a journey”, “set off for”, “began a journey” are all good. I just wanted to be sure that you understood that whatever translation you choose should not imply completion, only beginning. To me “made a journey” is not that clear.
Bernd, I didn’t answer your question properly, sorry. Here is a hopefully better attempt.
By itself, “he made a journey” is ambiguous as to aspect in English. English has an inherent disablility to do justice to verbal aspect.
It could be that the journey is to be viewed by the author as completed, or it could be that the the author has only changed the background in which other actions take place.
Example (imperfective):
After preparations were completed, he made a journey to Lasion. During the journey, he fell ill.
In this example, the “he made a journey” has changed the background against which the next act of the plot, falling ill, takes place.
Example (perfective):
After preparations were completed, he made a journey to Lasion, where he fell ill.
In this example, the journey to Lasion advances the plot, and changes the background to being in Lasion.
In English the simple past tense does not indicate aspect, but aspect can be supplied by context and other phrases/words.
You are correct. It could standing alone be viewed as imperfective or perfective.
Thank you for the explanations. I can see now that the phrase “was making the journey to Lasion” appears to be a suitable literal rendering of the Greek expression “ἐπὶ Λασιῶνος ἐποιεῖτο τὴν πορείαν,” because although the verb ἐποιεῖτο is apparently in the past tense, it expresses an action which had started (without reference to whether it was completed or not) and therefore was in progress.
I would just add to this discussion the point that the imperfect can be inceptive and perhaps this is the more obvious meaning of the text here.
I see however that CGCG is dismissive of the use of this term saying “Although the beginning of the action is implied..the imperfect expresses the action in process rather than its starting point…” see 33.52 page 429 Note 1.
In “διαλύσας τὴν ἐκκλησίανὁ μὲν Φίλιππος μετὰ τῆς δυνάμεως ἀναζεύξας ἐπὶ Λασιῶνος ἐποιεῖτο τὴν πορείαν.” the action of departing (aorist) is immediately followed by the imperfect “marching”. Spelling this out in the translation would not (perhaps) be idiomatic: " Philip, after he had dismissed the meeting, departed with his army beginning [to make] a march to Lasion."
Part of the issue in this thread seems to arise from trying to understand the Greek through an English translation. The Loeb translation seems to capture idiomatically the tenses used and the swapping of Greek participles for English finite verbs a normal translating strategy. As ever starting from the Greek is always safer. The English translation is always going to involve a lot of choices, some of which have nothing to do with the Greek.
I appreciate that this must have been difficult to understand for a non-native English speaker.
I believe that it’s imperfect to determine the time of action for the aorist verbs in the next part, which then take place concurrently rather than consecutively to the march (consecutive action would have been signaled by the aorist here).
Yes, an English translation does not convey all the subtleties of the original Greek text, since a translation has to read naturally rather than literally.
By the way, it may have been more difficult to identify as imperfect since ποιεω is an epsilon-contract verb; i.e. εποιεετο, where ε+ε contracts to ει. (My first thought was optative.)
