This is Pausanias describing the rites which parties of Spartan youths put on:
ἐπὶ δὲ τῇ θυσίᾳ κάπρους ἠθάδας οἱ ἔφηβοι συμβάλλουσι μαχουμένους: ὁποτέρων δ᾽ ἂν ὁ κάπρος τύχῃ νικῶν, ἐστιν ἐν τῷ Πλατανιστᾷ κρατῆσαι τούτους ὡς τὰ πλείω συμβαίνει.
This is the closest I can get
At the sacrifice the youths put to fight trained boars to fight. Of (whom) whichever of the boars should by chance win, these overcome as the (things) in the-main happen.
I assume that ὁποτέρων refers to two parties of youths and κρατῆσαι τούτους refers back to them but I can’t quite get the sentence to connect up.
At the sacrifice the youths put to fight trained boars to fight. The owner of the one that happens to win there is able also to win at the Plane tree [some festival?], and that is what usually happens.
Impersonal ἔστιν means rather ‘it is possible’? (LS εἰμί VI)
As to Πλατανιστάς, LS chains it: Πλατανιστάς (= Doric for Πλατανιστής) > πλατανών > πλατανιστοῦς. It means ‘plane-tree grove’, here apparently a proper noun.
I was so focused on everything else that the the Plane tree grove dropped out - thanks for picking on that.
As to the rest it does get me much closer but I still have questions.
From the translation ὁποτέρων must connect to τούτους. I assume τούτους is accusative because it is part of an infinitive construction but why can’t it refer to the boars?
So ἐστιν + infintive means able to do x. Thanks to both of you for that.
In ὡς τὰ πλείω συμβαίνει I assume that the reader is expected to supply something after τὰ. What would that be?
At the sacrificial festival the ephors bring together boars who had become accustomed to combat: Of these, the boar that will win is the one that overpowers the others in the majority of encounters in the sacred grove.
I should think that τὰ πλείω means ‘mostly’, ‘generally’ or something to that extent.
It should be translated in a way that shows that there are two competing teams, as Daivid mentioned. “Which ones’ boar” isn’t good English, so it has to be opened: ‘the side/team whose boar’ uel sim.
οποτερων shows the ephebes are in two groups.
If there were only two ephebes we’d have ὁποτέρου and τοῦτον.
If there were more than two groups we’d have ὧν and τούτους.
“… and whichever group’s (οποτερων) boar wins, it generally (ως τα πλειω) turns out that this group (τουτους) prevails at the ’platanistas.’” It looks as if εστιν should be deleted.
No, they fight, one side against the other, in the platanistas (the area ringed by plane-trees), after the preliminary boar-fight. It’s ritualized no-holds-barred preparation for their adult fighting lives as Spartiates.
Alternatively, as I have seen suggested, these rituals were later inventions which the Spartans of Pausianias’ time put on to keep Roman tourists visiting.
I see. Thank you. In other words, the result of the boar fight was considered an omen for the ephebes’ subsequent fisticuffs. The modern mind wouldn’t probably see much correlation between the two.
This is a tad strange as the link you provide uses the same edition (Teubner 1903) as Perseus.
Couldn’t it be the other way around, that ἐστιν is being added to make the sentence more coherent? Finding the edition with it bracketed I would tend to read it as either demanding the ἐστιν or as having a superfluous ὡς — so if we want to keep the ὡς, we’d have to add the ἑστιν.
If I interpreted mwh’s message correctly, »generally» is ὡς τὰ πλείω in the Greek, not τὰ πλείω. I’m yet to find this tricolic syntagm in dictionaries, but it may still be lurking somewhere.