“SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIVE GENITIVE
With a verbal noun the genitive may denote the subject or object of the action expressed in the noun.
a. Many of these genitives derive their construction from that of the kindred verbs: ““τοῦ ὕδατος ?πιθυ_μία_? desire for water? T. 2.52 (1349), χόλος υἱός anger because of his son O 138 (1405). But the verbal idea sometimes requires the accusative, or (less commonly) the dative.”
Several times I have doubted the thoroughness of this text only to be mistaken. I have come to realize that, if one searches hard enough, eventually he will find an answer within this grammar. Thanks for all of your help Irene. After seeing your responses and discussing this issue with my teacher, I have broadened my view of the denotation of emotion.
The issue of whether this is a genitive of cause or not doesn’t change the fact that what’s going on is attraction, though – maybe I’m mistaken, but it seems as though this has been presented as an alternate explanation rather than attraction. It’s got to be attraction, no matter what we do with it.
Sommerstein’s Cambridge commentary call this a subjective genitive depedent upon ‘oneidos’ in the next line, which I find the most satisfactory explanation: “the reproach or blame of (those) whom I killed.”
I should think that the real difficulty in this passage lies in the fact that we have a nominative subject ‘ego’ with accompanying participle that serves no syntactic purpose to the sentence - immediately following is a different subject and verb. The explanation (again, thanks to Sommerstein) seems to be that, in her frenzy, the speaker Clytemnestra just loses track of what she’s saying, and starts with one idea but moves onto the next without forming her first train of thought into a complete sentence.
The commentary I was referring to is a recent Cambridge, so it wouldn’t be online as far as I know.
And although the gen. of toutos is indeed omitted, the normal grammatically sound rule is for the relative pronoun’s case to be dictated by its function within the relative clause – we would expect accusative in this case. But this phenomenon called attraction allows a relative pronoun to take its case from that of an assumed but omitted antecedent. This does not strictly speaking make grammatical or syntactic sense, but is nevertheless common.
I haven’t read the whole passage but couldn’t it be "there’s no lack of (my) όνειδος between the dead for/because of those I have killed? " That’s how I read it at least. Not a subjective genitive but a genitive of cause.
The attraction of course is still there, there’s no doubt about that since, whatever we call the genitive, “ων” should have been “ο?ς” (too lazy to do anything that switch keyboards to modern Greek).
You are correct Irene, but, when a genitive of cause is used with a verbal noun such as όνειδος, it is considered a subjective genitive.
Smyth: "SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIVE GENITIVE
…Many of these genitives derive their construction from that of the kindred verbs…χόλος υἱός anger because of his son O 138 (1405). "
In the case of this particular line, the understood “toutos” would be a subjective genitive expressing the cause usually found in verbs expressing the emotion found within the noun όνειδος.
Hmmmm I am not saying it’s not so since it’s the muddy water area anyway (one I used to have a bloody row with my teachers, professors and most notably my mother) but the translation here is different when it is considered a genitive of cause and when a subjective genitive. Since I don’t remember and I am too lazy to look for it, is this a case(cause/subjective) with nouns that do not derive from verbs too?
I do not think Smyth was saying the noun had to be derived from a verb; rather, he was merely stating that nouns that by nature express some type of emotion are verbal nouns. όνειδος means blame or reproach; you could also use a verb meaning to blame or reproach. Even if the noun is not derived from the verb, it still is a verbal noun because it expresses the verbal action as a state of being. Just because όνειδος is not derived from a verb does not mean it cannot function as a verbal noun. As a result, it can express the cause relationship through the subjective genitive usually used with verbs of emotion.