φημὶ δὲ καὶ εἰς πόλιν ὅπῃ βούλει ἐλθόντα ῥητορικὸν ἄνδρα καὶ ἰατρόν, εἰ δέοι λόγῳ διαγωνίζεσθαι ἐν ἐκκλησίᾳ ἢ ἐν ἄλλῳ τινὶ συλλόγῳ ὁπότερον δεῖ αἱρεθῆναι ἰατρόν, οὐδαμοῦ ἂν φανῆναι τὸν ἰατρόν, ἀλλ᾽ αἱρεθῆναι ἂν τὸν εἰπεῖν δυνατόν, εἰ βούλοιτο.
I am trying to parse this sentence, from Gorgias 456 b-c. I have two main doubts.
I originally found the sentence in Mastronarde’s first edition, Unit 35. The version I gave just above is straight copy paste from Perseus. There are differences between the texts. Mastronarde has βούλῃ instead of βούλει, but I guess this is only a variant.
Another difference is that Mastronarde has ὅποι instead of ὅπῃ. This makes a difference to me. I can make sense of ὅπῃ but not of ὅποι. Either way, it seems that the word is being used as indefinite relative. ὅποι is ‘whithersoever’ and ὅπῃ is ‘by whichever way’. I can understand ὅπῃ as modifying ἐλθόντα. It is simply a dative of means, so that εἰς πόλιν ὅπῃ βούλει ἐλθόντα means ‘having gone to a city by whichever way you wish’. What I don’t understand is why Mastronarde also thinks it makes sense to read ὅποι. This leads me to my first question.
In this case, ὅποι βούλει would mean ‘whithersoever you may want’. But the translation of the participle would then be ‘having gone whithersoever you may want to a city’. This sounds a bit weird to me, since here ‘gone’ has two complements of destination (apologies if that is not the correct term). It would be like saying ‘going to London to the south’. I guess one could perhaps take ὅποι βούλει as an adverbial modifier of ἐλθόντα, so that we get ‘having gone-whithersoever-you-may-want to a city’. Is that what is going on here? Are such double complements common in Greek?
The second doubt I have is this: I understand that φημί is the main verb, and that it takes both an accusative and an infinitive as complements to form an indirect discourse construction. I also understand that τὸν ἰατρόν in οὐδαμοῦ ἂν φανῆναι τὸν ἰατρόν is the accusative complement and that οὐδαμοῦ ἂν φανῆναι is the infinitive complement. What I don’t understand is what ῥητορικὸν ἄνδρα καὶ ἰατρόν is doing. I would perfectly understand if ῥητορικὸς ἀνήρ and ἰατρός were in the genitive case. We’d simply have an absolute genitive participle construction. I would also understand if we simply had πόλιν ὅπῃ βούλει ἐλθόντα. It would be a circumstantial participle modifying τὸν ἰατρόν. But as things stand, I can’t make sense of the sentence because to me there seem to be two dangling accusatives (ῥητορικὸν ἄνδρα καὶ ἰατρόν).
Of course, I understand that the sentence is saying that if a rhetorican and a physican went into an arbitrary city, and if they had to compete by speaking, etc., the physician would lose and the rhetorican would win. So I understand that the function of εἰς πόλιν ὅπῃ βούλει ἐλθόντα ῥητορικὸν ἄνδρα καὶ ἰατρόν is to tell us that the sentence is going to say something about a rhetorican and a physicist that go to some city. But, as in my other post, I want to know what is going on at the level of syntax.
So far the explanation I’ve been able to come up with is either that Greek allows you to repeat an accusative when you have a long sentence like this or that εἰς πόλιν ὅπῃ βούλει ἐλθόντα ῥητορικὸν ἄνδρα καὶ ἰατρόν is actually an absolute participle and the case has been changed to the accusative by attraction.