Translation, phrase by phrase, in Engish word order.
There is no way [οὐδεμία μηχανή ἐστιν]
that you might persuade anybody [τινα . . .ἀνθρώπων]
even one limited in intelligence
that it is logical for the same human to believe in demigods and gods
[ and also to believe]
in neither demigods, nor gods, nor heroes.
Several things gave me a hard time. First, my English-trained brain didn’t like the main clause coming at the end. That’s where the stumbling started.
Second, I had trouble spotting just what the negative word οὐ negated. What it negates is τοῦ αὐτοῦ.
Third, I’m still not used to the genitive of characteristic, which is I believe is an acceptable term for the genitive construction following οὐ.
It’s certainly a tricky little passage—deliberately befuddling on Soc’s part.
I think you’ve disentangled it successfully, but it’s not clear how you arrive at your “it is logical” etc., which does not seem to represent the Greek. As I read it (somewhat hesitantly), the οὐ after ὡς merely anticipates the negative of the upcoming οὐδεμία in the deferred main clause, for his point is that it’s not the case that one and the same person will both believe and not. In other words, οὐδεμία repeats and reinforces the earlier οὐ.
But perhaps I’m befuddled myself.
Incidentally, you’ll have noticed that the previous sentence was structured in a similar way: ἀλλ᾽, ὦ Μέλητε, οὐκ ἔστιν ὅπως σὺ ταῦτα οὐχὶ ἀποπειρώμενος ἡμῶν ἐγράψω τὴν γραφὴν ταύτην ἢ ἀπορῶν ὅτι ἐγκαλοῖς ἐμοὶ ἀληθὲς ἀδίκημα: “there’s no way that you ….” Only there the verb of the ὅπως clause was indicative (ἐγράψω), whereas here it’s the potential optative+ἄν.
My understanding is that rather than leading to the οὐδεμία, the οὐ denies the καὶ…καὶ linkage in the first branch and the μήτε linkage in the second:
“…that it’s not necessary for the same man to believe in spirit-things and divine-things, and also [persuade our bear of little brain] that it’s not necessary for the same man to not believe in spirts and not believe in gods and not believe in heroes…”
The logical point being that it’s impossible to persuade anyone these things aren’t linked. Spirit-things and god-things must be believed together. And spirits and gods and heroes go together and must be disbelieved together.
Note: This is my parse of Burnet’s view, which he got from H. W. Garrod.
Many thanks to mwh and Joel for their comments. I have to think about them and the passage. I do agree with mwh that the “logical” does not represent the Greek. It was a brute-force effort to end the work on this sentence in order to move on to another one.
Thanks for that quotation, Joel. Interestingly, While I used both the Helm and the Steadman student commentaries, I had a hard time using their comments on this point. The snip you provided gives a longer explanation.
Let’s first look at the context. This passage follows a Socratic refutation. I extract my schema of that refutation from my manual of Socratic method:
If > p> , then > q> : If Socrates believes in spiritual things, he believes in spirits (27c8–9). If > q> , then > r> : If Socrates believes in spirits, he believes in gods (27c10–d1). But > p> : But Socrates believes in spiritual things (27c5–8). Therefore > r> : Therefore Socrates believes in gods (27d4–10).
In the conversation we also hear an argument for the premise ‘if > p> , then > q> ’ (27b3–c2).
In the passage in the OP, Socrates is now rubbing it in: he’s simply giving the key premise ‘if p, then q’ from that earlier refutation in another form, basically that there’s no way you could persuade a sensible person that it’s not a characteristic of someone to believe in X and that it’s a characteristic of that same person not to believe in Y (alluding to p and q from the schema). It feels to us like there is one negative too many here, but the sense is relatively straightforward.
And so οὐ simply goes with τοῦ αὐτοῦ in my reading.
Socrates is just therefore repeating an earlier point, but in a slightly modified way. Demosthenes likes to do this too, often following up a longer more difficult construction with a more straightforward construction, to ensure the audience understood his previous point (see e.g. Wooten 2008 p. 44). Socrates’ re-cap, however, is sometimes more difficult rather than more straightforward, as this example shows.
I think everyone in this thread is really saying something very similar — everyone gets the main point of what Socrates is saying — and so I’m not sure if I’m adding anything…
I felt pretty sure what the literary character Socrates purposed on the literal level, concluding his argument for the incoherence of Meletus’s indictment. But, I had a lot of trouble aligning the grammar with the purpose. Your explication made sense to me right away.
