I thought I’d have a look at the translation into Greek of Ovid which is in the resources thread.
However, I can’t even make out all the letters. The letters I can’t make out I have replaced with "?"s:
τὰς εἰς καινὰ σώματα, μεταμειφθείσας μορφὰς
διανίστησιν – 3rd pers. sing. pres. ind. act. of δι-αν-ιστημι (with movable ν at end of sentence)
μετεβάλετε – 2d aor. act. 2d pers. pl. μεταβαλλω
κριτάγοιτε should be κατάγοιτε 2d pers. pl pres. opt. act. of καταγω (this is a wish).
χρόνον is right.
I’m wondering why Planudes (1) used two different words, μεταμειφθεισας and μετεβαλετε to translate mutatas and mutastis, respectively, and (2) translated the two Latin imperatives, adspirate and deducite by imperative ἐπιπνεύσατε and optative καταγοιτε, respectively.
But if the Perseus Greek Word Study Tool does not recognize διανίστησι(ν), μετεβάλετε and κατάγοιτε (which I’ve confirmed by experiment it does not), they clearly must not be Greek.
Hi daivid, Since this is a translation of Ovid’s Latin, it really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to read it without the original. And if you’re looking for relatively easy Greek, this isn’t it, though it’s not particularly hard, and it’s very good classicizing Greek.
The script itself is easy once you get used to it, which doesn’t take long. It’s modelled on the handwriting of medieval scribes, 10th cent. or so.
Do you understand it all?
Bill, On (1) I guess μεταμειφθείσας was thought more appropriate with εις καινα σωματα—swapping one thing for another as distinct from merely changing. It is a striking lack of consistency, though. On (2), κατάγετε avoided as liable to be taken for indicative, or the optative deemed more apt? I don’t know anything about how Planudes set about translating, but the tense difference (επιπνεύσατε aor., κατάγοιτε pres.) is something to be appreciated. This is a smart translation, by the looks of it, and one concerned with good Greek.
Incidentally, there’s a variant reading with some mss. support in the second line of the Metamorphoses, which Tarrant adopts in his OCT, namely, illa instead of illas. It would translate ταυτα instead of ταυτας, but wouldn’t fit Planudes’ translation as it stands because he uses singular ἔργῳ instead of Lat. neut. pl. coeptis, “my beginnings”, and places it after the parenthetical.
Illa makes better sense than illas because it gives weight to et: the gods changed these too (my beginnings), in addition to the shapes (formas/μορφὰς).
The idea is that the gods also changed what Ovid had begun as a poem in elegiac couplets into a poem entirely in hexameters. The parenthetical comes in the second half of the second hexameter–right where you would expect the second half of a pentameter, but the verse continues as the second half of a hexameter. It would have been a shock to a Roman contemporary reading the Metamorphoses for the first time, expecting an elegiac couplet from Ovid, the virtuoso of elegy, and getting instead a full-blown hexameter. In reading nam uos mutastis et illa, the Roman reader would have stumbled over uos, a long syllable where a short would have been expected. Of course, the writing on the page would be a continuous series of letters, with no clue that the poem would turn out to be entirely in hexameters.
the tense difference (επιπνεύσατε aor., κατάγοιτε pres.) is something to be appreciated.
The more you think about Pl.'s choice of aspect (pres. vs. aor.), the more interesting it seems. Latin doesn’t have the aspectual distinction between present and aorist. and there is only one form of the imperative. But Pl. has drawn a distinction between breathing propitiously on the beginning, right now, and continuously leading the continuous (continuum/συνεχῆ) song down to the present.
This isn’t really advice for daivid, but for new learners approaching this thread. Perseus is a bad resource when you don’t recognize a verb form. It may work (if you’re lucky), but it doesn’t really help you on to recognizing the next one. Hylander has already parsed these, but here is some method for attacking these kinds of words:
διανίστησιν
Even if you don’t recognize ἵστησιν as the 3rd person present, στη is a giveaway that it’s likely some form of ἵστημι. Therefore you can look up the word in the dictionary at διανίστημι, and for the form, in your grammar for ἵστημι.
μετεβάλετε
Taking out μετα we have ἐβάλετε. That’s either an imperfect for some verb like βάλω or a 2nd aorist with the stem βαλ-. In this case, it’s the 2nd aorist for βάλλω. Kaegi’s Greek Grammar has a list of principal parts that prints the stems in their own column, and can be useful for these lookups. Morwood’s Greek Grammar also has very clear principal part lists.
κατάγοιτε
At first it might look like the base verb would be γοιτε, but notice the accent. The base is ἄγοιτε. οι means optative, so ἄγω, with a dictionary form of κατάγω.
ἐπιπνεύσατε
There is an aorist ending here, and while ἐ might look like an augment, note that it’s part of ἐπι-. A form like πιπνευω wouldn’t be impossible, but ἐπι- is much more likely. Any time you see an aorist without an augment, you know that it’s a mood other than the indicative. In this case, imperative. You might expect a root form like ἐπιπνεύω (which actually exists in the LSJ, though Perseus doesn’t pick it up. See ἐπιπνεύων.)
However ε-contracts sometimes go to ευ for the aorist, and your principal parts list will tell you that ἔπνευσα is the aorist for πνέω.
Good advice from jeidsath. Even if the perseus parser were reliable, it’s far better to learn how to figure out for yourself what a given form will be, rather than resorting to a parser for the individual form. If you do have to use a parser, take the time to ask yourself what is it about the word (e.g. μετεβάλετε) that makes it (a) 2 pl. (answer: -ετε ending), (b) aor. (-εβαλ- with one λ), (c) indic. (εβαλ- with augment, plus ending -ετε not -ητε subj. or -οιτε opt.), (d) act. (-ετε not -εσθε), or whatever. That will make it easier to recognize forms in future.
Hylander wrote:
Of course, the writing on the page would be a continuous series of letters, with no clue that the poem would turn out to be entirely in hexameters.
Hmm. I wonder. The elegiacs of the Gallus papyrus, contemporary with Ovid, are written with the pentameters indented (and also with interpuncts), and so are some (not all) of the elegiac graffiti from Pompeii. Latin practice was not identical with Greek. And even without indents, hexameters and elegiacs have a different look on the page, since the “pentameter” lines tend to be shorter. So I reckon it would have been clear to a reader from the outset that these are continuous hexameters, the meter of epic (and of Nicander’s Heteroiomena, a predecessor metamorphoses poem), not elegiacs. Someone listening to a recitation, if they were expecting elegiacs (if), might have been a bit taken aback when the second line turned out to be a hexameter, but I can’t well imagine a reader stumbling over vos. The self-referentiality of nam vos mutastis et illa (if that’s actually right: I believe it) is very nicely placed, at the point where the metrical difference asserts itself, but I wouldn’t go any further than that.
Be that as it may, Planudes clearly read illas, not illa.
