In the interest of context, here is the full sentence.
ἀλλ ̓ οὐ γὰρ αὐτῆς φροντίδ ̓ ὡς τέκνων ἔχω·
κείνην μὲν οὓς ἔδρασεν ἔρξουσιν κακῶς,
ἐμῶν δὲ παίδων ἦλθον ἐκσῴσων βίον,
μή μοί τι δράσωσ ̓ οἱ προσήκοντες γένει,
μητρῷον ἐκπράσσοντες ἀνόσιον φόνον.
I have been enjoying The Intellectual Revolution (JACT) which offers the comment “οὓς refers to an understood οὗτοι subject of ἔρξουσι.” In order to make sense of this, I am tempted to apply κακῶς to both verbs: ἔδρασεν and ἔρξουσιν. It seems to me that they are both neutral and need an adverb to express the idea of doing harm or treating someone badly. So my very clumsy translation would be: “Those whom she has harmed will do her wrong.” Is my interpretation correct?
ἔδρασεν is already a semi-significant word without any adverb. Like our “commit”. Look at μή μοί τι δράσωσι a couple of lines later. Taking the κακῶς with the two different verbs here seems like an idea inspired from the context rather than the language, and makes more sense when thinking about it in terms of English translation. (Unfortunately once an idea like that gets into the commentaries, it tends to stick…)
Charlie is right. δράω is a neutral verb. It can be modified by both εὖ and κακῶς, as well as other adverbs.
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3Ddra%2Fw1
In 1302 ἔδρασεν requires κακῶς to complete the sense, and the concise double modification is rhetorically effective. In 1305, τι complements δράσωσ’, echoing ἔδρασεν . . . κακῶς in 1302, so that κακόν or κακῶς not only is unnecessary, but would be otiose, just as repeating κακῶς in 1302 would be.
It can be modified by both εὖ and κακῶς.
More than can be…it often is! Hence the confusion here about the adverb. But sense of some significant act is enough, and the relative phrase effectively blocks any grammatical connection. The argument seems to be based purely on proximity and the fact that in English we have to make “do” do for δράω.
Mastronarde remarks:
“1302 κακῶς: the adverb is to be taken with both verbs: ‘as for her, those to whom she has done harm will harm her’.”
We are in fine company if we are wrong on this.
The juxtaposition of the verbs followed immediately by κακῶς makes it clear that κακῶς belongs with both.
It is a very fine company. The commentaries share substantially this same note copied around going back long before Mastronarde was around. But let me ask this: do we have other cases in Greek literature where an adverb applies both to a main verb and to a verb within a contained relative phrase?
We have just as clear a sense in context from: “those she practiced on will work her ill”. The focus on who/whom even improves, I think, the ἐμῶν δὲ παίδων. Not ἐγὼ δὲ, you’ll note. The μέν δέ contrast is about who whom, not what is being done.
The question is, which is more likely, that we add a dictionary entry, δρᾶν τινά to practice upon someone, going next to εὖ δρᾶν τινά, or that we add this adverb intrusion to a relative phrase to the grammars? Both with the same paucity of examples?
Aside: The “juxtaposition” statement just now seems to take up my statement that the argument is “based purely on proximity.”
I doubt Mastronarde is a hack who merely repeats notes found in other commentaries, and I suspect he’s read a lot more Greek, and knows Greek much better, than I. Denys Page’s note says the same thing as Mastronarde, and he knew Greek pretty well, too.
My money’s on them.
I didn’t call Mastronarde a hack. However, the note is substantially the same in all the Medea commentaries on my shelf (Page, Mastronarde, and Baywater). Often this sort of thing is a warmed over scholia, but here it would seem to go back to Gottfried Heinrich Schaefer. He proposed a change to the punctuation in Porson’s edition (which had commas around οὓς ἔδρασεν):
Dele interpunctionem ante οὓς et post ἔδρασεν· nam κακῶς referendum etiam ad ἔδρασεν. G. H. S.
That out of the way, I’ll ask again: where else in Greek do we ever see the same adverb applied to both a main verb and to another verb within a contained relative phrase?
the note is substantially the same in all the Medea commentaries
That’s because they all read the Greek the same way – the same way as I do.
where else in Greek do we ever see the same adverb applied to both a main verb and to another verb within a contained relative phrase?
Where did you find a rule that this is impossible? Page and Mastronarde don’t think so.
Even if you think this is a stretch syntactically, I think you’ve read enough Greek to know that tragic syntax often pushes the envelop, frequently with a view to compression and concision.
What is all this language about “my money” and “same way I do”? That’s all “like”-button psychology. It’s whenever a crowd agrees on something that it’s most likely that it has not been arrived at by reason. It’s whenever a commentary note has been taken up everywhere without change, because it’s the same one that’s in all the other commentaries, that we can assume that there has been the least thought devoted to it.
Anyway, no one is talking about impossibilities, but rather likelihoods. Now that we’ve admitted the extreme uniqueness of what is being suggested – though it took several posts to get there – we can go on and answer the second part of the argument: what is the likelihood of the understanding of an absolute δρᾶν τινά completing the sense here when the relative phrase terminated, compared to the likelihood of κακῶς completing the sense?
Putting aside everything else…κακῶς in an ἀπὸ κοινοῦ construction with the two preceding verbs would be ἀτοπώτατον in prose but not beyond the pale in poetic syntax. The context makes it crystal clear. δρᾶν/ποιεῖν τινα used absolutely like that isn’t Greek as far as I know
It’s whenever a commentary note has been taken up everywhere without change, because it’s the same one that’s in all the other commentaries, that we can assume that there has been the least thought devoted to it.
No. we can’t assume that at all. And the fact that two or more commentators make the same point in notes doesn’'t mean they’re both wrong – it means they read the same passage the same way. Denys Page and Mastronarde are not and never were zombies – both of them, meticulous scholars, know, or in Page’s case knew, a lot more Greek than I, and they are/were much smarter, too.
Now that we’ve admitted the extreme uniqueness of what is being suggested
For my part, I haven’t admitted anything of the sort. I’m not prepared to comb through all of ancient Greek literature to find an example, but in my experience, apo koinou contructions are found throughout the tiny bit of Greek I’ve read, even in prose. Perhaps you should come up with evidence establishing your apparently arbitrary rule that an adverb can’t be understood in an apo koinou construction with two verbs, one of which is embedded in a relative clause. Or examples of δραν τινα used absolutely without a qualifying word.
This is exactly where the discussion should be, I think. Notice that while ποιεῖν is never used like this (as far as I know), πράττειν τινά is.
[I can’t resist mentioning that Aristotle said the tragoidians used δρᾶν for πράττειν, saying: καὶ τὸ ποιεῖν αὐτοὶ μὲν δρᾶν, Ἀθηναίους δὲ πράττειν προσαγορεύειν.]
I do have a number of examples of the adverb with two verbs in tragedy (and one similar to this from prose, Thucydides: οὐ γὰρ πάσχοντες εὖ ἀλλὰ δρῶντες κτώμεθα τοὺς φίλους). But I think it requires a small jump to get from there to here. What I don’t have is another example of a relative like that terminating with the sense incomplete, to be taken up later by an adverb (or with the sense completed later by a shared direct object or whatever – I wouldn’t be picky).
I’m not sure what you have in mind re πράττειν. Can you give an example? There’s the financial idiom, eg τοῦτον ἔπραξε δραχμήν, common in the middle in Attic eg μισθὸν ἐπράξατο. Cp ἐκπράσσοντες in the Medea passage. That’s different from positing τοῦτον ἔπραξε in the sense of τοῦτον ἔπραξε κακόν. Again, the latter doesn’t seem Greek to me.
The Thucydides example is perfectly idiomatic. In prose one would be more hesitant to extend beyond the boundary of the relative clause as Euripides has done, but I don’t think it’s so remarkable in this context.
πράσσω VII in the LSJ is “c. acc. pers, πράττειν τινά deal with, finish off” and what I was looking it, but I now see that section VII was deleted in the supplement (because both examples given require text emendation?, they aren’t moved elsewhere). πράσσω VI also takes c. acc. pers., the example there from Polybius, “μὴ πράττειν τοὺς ὀφειλέτας”, there a debt, but the meaning of πράσσω VI also dealing with vengeance extracted.
I see. My post above tackles the idiom referred to in LSJ VI. For the Aesch passages in VII, Choer 440 isn’t relevant to πράττειν τινά:
ἐμασχαλίσθη δέ γ’, ὡς τόδ’ εἰδῆις·
ἔπρασσε δ’ ἅπερ νιν ὧδε θάπτει,
μόρον κτίσαι μωμένα
ἄφερτον αἰῶνι σῶι·
(She acted, intending to…)
Choer 132 is likewise irrelevant, but interesting nonetheless:
πεπραμένοι [mss πεπραγμένοι] γὰρ νῦν γέ πως ἀλώμεθα
πρὸς τῆς τεκούσης, ἄνδρα δ’ ἀντηλλάξατο
Αἴγισθον, ὅσπερ σοῦ φόνου μεταίτιος.
I haven’t thought much about the textual issues in this passage, but πεπραγμένοι doesn’t seem impossible. It would be like διαπεπρᾶχθαι which can be used (poetically) like ἀπολωλέναι, eg Aesch Persians:
ὡς πάντα γ’ ἔστ’ ἐκεῖνα διαπεπραγμένα, (260)
καὐτὸς δ’ ἀέλπτως νόστιμον βλέπω φάος.
Still, the emendation is obviously attractive—and perhaps required by ἀντηλλάξατο?
Well, I thought it was clear how the pre-supplement LS article took it at least: νιν as the object. So she ἔπρασσε’d him, just like with a corpse…
For the second, an absolute passive use would not be irrelevant since it would indicate an active with a personal object.
But that’s enough defense of a deleted chunk of a dictionary.
EDIT: After coffee my brain woke up: “Thus she ἔπρασσε’d him, so interring [him]”
Not quite. With the reading ἔπρασσε δ’ ᾇπέρ νιν ὧδε θάπτει you could take (1) ἔπρασσε δ’ ᾇπέρ νιν as the relative clause, ᾇπέρ…ὧδε being correlatives. So the LSJ (rightfully deleted in the supplement). The μασχαλισμός is a separate act from the τάφος. Alternatively (2) you could take ᾇπερ as a left-boundary (ie ἔπρασσε δ’, ᾇπέρ νιν ὧδε θάπτει, …). (3) ἅπερ (=Att./Ionic ἥπερ) seems the better reading.
As for (δια)πεπρᾶχθαι in the sense of intransitive ἀπολωλέναι, you can’t infer an active use governing a direct object.
Both of these Choephoroi passages are textually difficult and interesting (though they have nothing to do with the original topic).