i came upon the following sentence in my textbook last night:
διὰ τί α?τὸς αὑτὸν ο?δεὶς γα?γαλίζει;
i understand it to mean: “why is no one able to tickle themself?”
i’m pretty sure this is right, but my question has to do w/ α?τὸς. maybe this is one of those cases where the goal is understanding the sense of the sentence rather than actually trying to ‘translate’ it. now, i often have trouble w/ α?τὸς b/c of its various uses, but it seems to me here to be almost redundant in light of αὑτόν. that is ‘hauton’ i take for ‘himself’ or ‘oneself.’ but ‘autos’ i read as sometimes also meaning ‘him/oneself’ or possibly ‘the same, seflsame, etc.’ does then ‘autos hauton’ together roughly mean ‘the same man himself’ or does it sort of make ‘himself’ emphatic? and if/how would you render that in english?
any input on any of these questions would be greatly appreciated, as well as any input on my english version of the sentence.
thanks alot,
dave
Well, I am rather in a hurry but it’s similar to ‘you, yourself’. Its use is verging on emphatic. However hautos is very often found in this ‘double’ way so I don’t know if I would really called it so. Happily this forum is full of scholars who know more about subjects such as these than I do.
I’d probably go with “why doesn’t anyone tickles himself by himself?” but I may change my mind if I have some more time to think about it.
Each of the 'autos’s is doing something different, and they are both necessary. The second one, ‘hauton’ (he + auton), is the REFLEXIVE pronoun - it means that the person of the direct object is the same person as the person of the subject. (tickle himself, rather than tickle him, someone else).
The FIRST autos in the sentence is the INTENSIVE (rather than reflexive) pronoun, and, being in the nominative singular, agrees with and intensifies ‘oudeis’ I think IreneY’s translation of “by himself” for that intensive ‘autos’ is good - it means that, maybe someone could tickle himself by going up to a fern and letting it rub against him, but he himself - by himself, the very person ‘he’ - couldn’t tickle himself.
In case you’re in a Latin frame of mind, the ‘hauton’ would be Latin ‘se’ and the ‘autos’ would be Latin ‘ipse’ (Quam ob rem ipse se nemo titillat?)