I’ve understood the syntax of this sentence: οὶ σοφοί is the subject, πολλά is an accusative governed by μανθάνουσιν, etc. I just want to know whether I lost some subtlety in the meaning of this verb, because “The wise learn much away from their enemies” doesn’t seem to make much sense.
Of this I’ve got nothing but the beginning: The Pythagoreans said that… I truly cannot understand the rest (what is that genitive doing there? If it were τὸ λογικὸν ζῷον, it seems to me that the meaning would be “The Pythagoreans said that the rational animal is either a god, or a man, or like Pythagoras”).
Wassup Ἰωάννης, I think I’ve got some insights. Regarding the first one, I’d say the preposition ἀπό has a causal sense: “The wise learn much from their enemies”.
In the second one, I believe the structure to be as follows: “The pythagorics said that (έλεγον ὡς), regarding the rational animal, there is (τὸ μὲν εστι) the god, there is (τὸ δ’) the men, and there is (τὸ δὲ) the one like Pythagoras”. The τὸ μὲν… τὸ δὲ… work as nouns, making a differentiation between two groups. Check the famous fragment of Heraclitus: Πόλεμος πάντων μὲν πατήρ ἐστι, πάντων δὲ βασιλεύς, καὶ τοὺς μὲν θεοὺς ἔδειξε τοὺς δὲ ἀνθρώπους, τοὺς μὲν δούλους ἐποίησε τοὺς δὲ ἐλευθέρους. “τοὺς μὲν θεοὺς” is not jointly the object of the action, but rather “τοὺς μὲν”, and the same with the “τοὺς δὲ”.
It makes sense for από to mean from; if I’m not mistaken, the Latin preposition ab (a cognate of the Greek one) can also be used thus: Sapitentes multa discunt ab inimicis.
On the second point: can the genitive alone, therefore, be used as the Latin de (as in De Imitatione Christi and De Natura Deorum)? I know that περί is thus used with that case (as in the phrase Zuntz himself put in another chapter: Περὶ θεῶν λέγε ὡς εισίν.), but I don’t remember he saying that the very genitive also has that function.
Hey! Actually, it is not in the sense of περί that it is used here, it’s not “about”, but rather “among”, “of”, as Bedwere notes. My use of “regarding” may have been misleading, I used it because in English this use of “of” sounds a bit rare to me; in Spanish, we would say “del animal racional, uno es dios…”, such as Bedwere did it in English. Let me make this example: τοῦ άνθρώπου, τὸ μὲν εστι σοφός, τὸ δ’ἀμαθής.
It’s first framed as bipartite (τὸ μὲν … τὸ δέ, god/human) but then a third part is added. A possible translation would be “the one part of the rational animal is a god and the other is a human being—and the other is like Pythagoras.” For Pythagoras’ followers Pythagoras was rather more than human: Superman.
Also, that οἷον would be a conjunction, like Latin ut, right? It seems οἷος is an adjective, but here it doesn’t seem to concord with anything neuter to be one…