Is there a form "ἤμελλεω"?

Hi Michael, yes that (correct) version sounds much nicer! To be honest I couldn’t look anything up (my resources are at home), and so wasn’t aware of that correct version: I was just moving around the words as given and trying to change as little as possible there, like the first few lessons in Sidgwick’s Greek verse comp book, where you just move the words around like lego blocks to get something that scans.

Agreed that chiastic anadiplosis (A B, B A) is very rare (and too mannered for my tastes: if I could have started from scratch I would not have written that!), but interestingly it does occur having just looked around a little, e.g. κακὸς δ᾿ ὁ μὴ ἔχων, οἱ δ᾿ ἔχοντες ὄλβιοι (Euripides fragment), gestari iuuat et iuuat lauari (Martial 7.76), etc.

On anarthrous adjectives used as substantives, I remember we talked about this a while back – do you think absence of the article here is more natural?
http://discourse.textkit.com/t/rouse-syntax-idioms/17383/9

On χρή versus δεῖ, I’ll take your word for it! My knowledge of Greek after Aristotle drops off a cliff and plunges deep, hitting the ocean floor. My version was responding to the Aristotle quote.

Cheers, Chad

Hi again Chad,

The thing I don’t like about the Sidgwick exercises is precisely that they encourage you to just shuffle the given words around until you get something that scans. As you well know, that is not at all how the dramatists went about their business.

I don’t doubt the existence of verses with chiastic anadiplosis (!), but they’re few and far between and they always look very contrived in isolation (and even in company, I should think). And what I find jarring in your chiastic θάλλει τε πάντα, πάντα καὶ μαραίνεται is the τε and the και.

As to ανθρωπινα vs. τανθρωπινα with φρονειν, it would surely be more idiomatic in verse and even in prose to have it without the article, cf. e.g. μεγα φρονειν, internal acc.

The distinction between χρη and δει begins to break down after the 5th/4th cent., with δει increasingly encroaching on the older χρη. There was actually a rather unprofitable Textkit thread on this I think. See Barrett on Eur.Hipp.41.

All very useful, thanks Michael!

Cheers, Chad