κἀκεῖ μὲν πρότερον ἡσθέντες ὕστερον ἐλυπήθημεν, ἐνταῦθα δὲ μετὰ τὰς λύπας τὰς ἡδονὰς ἔχομεν.
I don’t understand how “πρότερον . . . ὕστερον” work here. The moral of the sentence has to be something like “work before play” to be consistent with the context. But the usage of these two words in this sentence baffles me.
They’re almost unnecessary, but serve to make the point clear. The action of the aorist participle completes first, and then the action of the verb comes after.
Hello Joel, would you explain how this sentence works, as if for a ten-year-old? I have worked myself into a state of befuddlement.
Well, my translation (not having seen the context) would be:
“There we enjoyed ourselves first, and later grieved, but here we have our pleasures after the griefs.”
ἡσθέντες is aorist participle of ἥδομαι (aor. ἥσθην), subject “us”
ἐλυπήθημεν is aorist passive of λυπέω
ἡσθέντες ἐλυπήθημεν on its own is just the normal aorist participle followed by a verb thing, and would be “after having enjoyed ourselves, we grieved”.
With the πρότερον (first) and ὕστερον (later) it’s emphasizing the temporal aspect (rather than any causal link that could have been understood from the above):
“first having enjoyed ourselves, we later grieved”
That’s very helpful. Thanks for digging me out. I thought my trouble was the “πρότερον . . . ὕστερον” issue, but that was just a rabbit-hole that distracted me from my real problem. Without realizing it, I had lost track of the continuity between 1.46 and 1.47.