Dickey: "What rule is violated here, and why do you think it was violated?"

Greek Learning Greek
1

Dear forum,

I’m working my way through Dickey’s Greek Composition book (which is lovely: I can highly recommend it). At the end of Chapter 2 is this exercise I’m battling with. The questions is, in the following excerpt from Republic, 354a, what grammatical rule is violated and why you think the rule is violated.

ΣΟ: ἀλλὰ μὴν ὅ γε εὖ ζῶν μακάριός τε καὶ εὐδαίμων, ὁ δὲ μὴ τἀναντία.
ΘΡ: πῶς γὰρ οὔ;
ΣΟ: ὁ μὲν δίκαιος ἄρα εὐδαίμων, ὁ δ᾽ ἄδικος ἄθλιος.

My best guess is that the problem is with “ὁ δὲ μὴ τἀναντία”, but I’m doubting myself.

The intent of the sentence, I guess is: “The one who lives well is … but the one who does not [live well] is…”, so the μὴ is supposed to be read as part of the subject (and supply “εὖ ζῶν”). Underline for emphasis:

ΣΟ: ἀλλὰ μὴν > ὅ γε εὖ ζῶν > μακάριός τε καὶ εὐδαίμων, > ὁ δὲ μὴ > τἀναντία.

This immediately leads to many questions.

  1. Is the problem the absence of μέν? I’m thinking if the absence of μέν implies that ὁ δὲ refer to the previous subject (in the broader sense of subject: the first underlined part) which gives “but he [the one who lives well] is not the opposite(s)”. (Stated differently, “ὁ δὲ” refers to the entirety of “ὅ γε εὖ ζῶν”, or only “ὅ γε εὖ ζῶν”? If the latter, then I guess an absence of μέν is not a problem)

  2. Is the problem with μὴ, either existence or position? (This is a rabbit hole in it’s own right…)

  3. Is the problem with τἀναντία: neuter plural?

  4. Is the problem something completely different?

A hint would be highly appreciated, thanks!

2

Hi Björn,
I may be wrong here, so forgive me if I pull you down the rabbit hole with me! I think what Dickey wants us to see is that although the subject is singular and thus we’d expect to see οὐ instead of μή in ὁ δὲ μὴ τἀναντία, what we actually have is a general statement that applies not just to ὅ γε but to people in general. I think the rule she’s referring to is in F.1 “They may take as negatives, in the attributive position, either οὐ or μή, with a difference in meaning: οὐ indicates specificity and μή indicates generality.”

3

I don’t know of any rules that would keep μη from occurring with a singular subject.

For the rule Dickey is referring to, I believe that you should see rules C2 and C3 on page 18-19. She expects you to read τἀναντία as a predicate noun and to notice that it has not dropped the article.

(But I would not have read τἀναντία as a predicate noun at all. It looks like a slight anacolouthon to me, standing in for whatever the opposites to μακάριός τε καὶ εὐδαίμων are.)

4

I don’t either. My thought was that because the subject was singular and employed ὅδε as opposed to say, ὅστις, Socrates’ statement might be taken as having a specific subject as opposed to a general one, which is where Dickey’s rule in F1 comes into play, but τἀναντία as a predicate noun with an article is certainly more obvious, for without the article, ἐναντία is no longer a predicate noun.

5

As Aetos points out it certainly couldn’t be called a predicative noun if it didn’t have the article, since εναντια is nothing but an adjective. Obviously it’s predicative. We would say “the opposite.” Some would call this adverbial. I don’t think anyone would call it an anacoluthon. We had a similar issue with αμφοτερα and ουδετερα I vaguely recall, without article of course.
There’s no problem with the generalizing μη (sc. ευ ζων), entirely regular.

6

Hi all, sorry still catching up and working through the threads. I agree that there’s nothing unusual about Plato’s Greek here.

As others have said, the μή here is correct (see e.g. s 28.25 n. 1 of the Cambridge grammar).

The neut. pl. τἀναντία is also normal. I read this as working in the same way as the neut. acc. pronominal and adjectival constructions in secs 17 and 41–3 of Riddell’s Digest of Platonic idioms (notice the prevalent use of neut. acc. pl. throughout the examples where the neut. acc. refers back to part of a sentence, as is the case in the example in question):

sec. 17: https://archive.org/details/apologyofplat00platuoft/page/126/mode/1up
sec. 41 and ff: https://archive.org/details/apologyofplat00platuoft/page/139/mode/1up

The neut. pl. is therefore perfectly fine even to refer to one idea (see also Smyth s. 1026). Even so, the pl. seems the most natural construction here, as τἀναντία refers back to two ideas: (1) μακάριος and (2) εὐδαίμων. If Plato instead wrote τοὐναντίον here, it would have a different force.

The same explanation applies for the previous thread on ἀμφότερα and οὐδέτερα that Michael mentioned above. I just looked it up and assume it’s this one: http://discourse.textkit.com/t/plato-ibidem/17854/1

You see this all throughout Plato. e.g. Phaedo 68c:

ὁ αὐτὸς δέ που οὗτος τυγχάνει ὢν καὶ φιλοχρήματος καὶ φιλότιμος, ἤτοι > τὰ ἕτερα > τούτων ἢ > ἀμφότερα> .

Of course, the phenomenon above can be labelled in different ways, e.g. Dodds’ commentary on Gorgias 524c describes ἀμφότερα in

οἷον εἴ τινος μέγα ἦν τὸ σῶμα φύσει ἢ τροφῇ ἢ > ἀμφότερα > ζῶντος

(which looks back to (1) φύσει and (2) τροφῇ) as acc. of respect (1959 p. 380). But it falls under the same pattern, regardless of the label.

You can’t rely on the normal grammars for complexities in Plato’s Greek: Smyth leaves out some things; the Cambridge grammar leaves out many standard things (e.g. just looking at the genitive, I can’t find in the Cambridge grammar the genitive of explanation covered in Smyth sec. 1322, or the genitive of topic covered in Smyth sec. 1381, to take just two examples). Commentaries and author-specific syntaxes are usually more helpful.

Cheers, Chad

7

I’m still a little confused as to the final conclusion on what grammatical rule was violated (and why).

When I look at:

ὁ μὴ (εὖ ζῶν ἐστι) τἀναντία

I see a generic subject (whoever does not live well) with a definite predicate noun (the previously mentioned other things)

This seems like an obvious grammatical violation. A predicate noun cannot be definite if the subject is indefinite.

Please let me know if I’ve got this correct!

If I have it correct, can you give me the reason why this violation was made.

Apologies if you’ve already come to this conclusion in the thread. I just want to be absolutely sure what Dickey is getting at.

8

The “violation” is τἀναντία (τὰ ἐναντία, neut.pl.) as predicate, whereas in the first part we had μακάριός τε καὶ εὐδαίμωv. Lack of concord, therefore, but this is actually normal Platonic idiom. See my and Chad’’s posts above.

It has nothing to do with indefinite/definite. Both the subject and the predicate are definite, in the sense that both have the definite article. The μή merely generalizes the understood ευ ζων—no violation of anything there.

9

Thanks!

I thought that if an attributive participle was negated using μὴ then the attributive participle used as substantive referred to a class of people or an indefinite person.

I was following the examples at the bottom of Mastronarde, page 229, one of which is
ὁ μὴ νοσῶν
any man who is not sick, whoever is not sick (indefinite even though there is a definite article)

So I added in the understood εὖ ζῶν and got ὁ μὴ εὖ ζῶν τἀναντία
which looks like an indefinite subject.

I wasn’t concerned about lack of concord because with predicate nouns I thought that only case concord was required, not gender or number.

Of course the first thing that I noticed was that there was a lack of concord between the predicates in the two clauses, but I thought that grammatically we could consider the two clauses to be independent, just concatenated with a comma. Therefore I looked only for grammatical errors within the scope of a clause.

10

Maybe that’s just a confusion of terminology. Anyhow, the issue lies with τἀναντία, as I trust you’d agree. I’d hesitate to call it a predicate noun, since it’s just a nominalized adjective, with no actual noun. There’s also the question of its case, but I’ll leave that alone.

Happy New Year!

11

Thanks for suffering through this for my benefit. It does help. Happy New Year!

Yes, it is now clear to me that the grammatical issue was with the concord of τἀναντία, and it definitely is not a predicate noun. I had a look at the Plato idiom references and it seems that τἀναντία is functioning as a generalized “reverse” of something previous, in this case predicate adjectives. In the third sentence of the example, a specific substitution of the reverse adjective is given in order to demonstrative the idea of the first sentence. Almost as if τἀναντία is a template for something reverse, regardless of grammatical category.

And I can now clearly see that μὴ is not an issue - the positive part of the sentence is clearly referring to a generic well-living person, and so the negative must be μὴ to ensure the generic meaning - nothing more than that.