οὔτε γὰρ ὅπως ἀποκτείναιεν εἶχον καὶ ὥσπερ τοὺς γίγαντας κεραυνώσαντες τὸ γένος ἀφανίσαιεν—αἱ τιμαὶ
γὰρ αὐτοῖς καὶ ἱερὰ τὰ παρὰ τῶν ἀνθρώπων ἠφανίζετο—
I take ἠφανίζετο to be potential (counter-factual) indicative for present time (Dickey, p 78). But why is it without ἅν? I failed to find anything to this effect in Smyth.
Thanks in advance.
But it can happen.
“ἠφανίζετο. For the impf. without ἄν, cp. (with Stallb.) Rep. 450 D, Euthyd. 304 D; Ar. Nub. 1212.”
And LSJ:
d. ἄν is freq. omitted in apodosi with Verbs expressing obligation, propriety, or possibility, as ἔδει, ἐχρῆν, εἰκὸς ἦν, etc., and sts. for rhetorical effect, εἰ μὴ .. ἦσμεν, φόβον παρέσχεν it had caused (for it would have caused) fear, E.Hec.1113. This use becomes more common in later Gk.
Liddell, H. G., Scott, R., Jones, H. S., & McKenzie, R. (1996). A Greek-English lexicon (p. 96). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
I think that the aside vividly assumes the plan under discussion as complete.
Dover explains this as “‘for the honours and sacrifices they received from men were going to disappear (sc. if they destroyed mankind’)”.
If it refers to the future (relative to the tense of the main verb), I am at a loss as to what the imperfect is doing here.
A good example of this, referenced by Dover, is from Antiphon’s 2nd tetralogy. Sure the boy was hit with the javelin my son threw, but our case rests on the fact that the javelin didn’t go off course..
Εἰ μὲν γὰρ τὸ ἀκόντιον ἔξω τῶν ὅρων τῆς αὑτοῦ πορείας ἐπὶ τὸν παῖδα ἐξενεχθὲν ἔτρωσεν αὐτόν, οὐδεὶς ἡμῖν λόγος ὑπελείπετο μὴ φονεῦσιν εἶναι· τοῦ δὲ παιδὸς ὑπὸ τὴν τοῦ ἀκοντίου φορὰν ὑποδραμόντος καὶ τὸ σῶμα προστήσαντος, <ὁ μὲν διεκωλύθη> τοῦ σκοποῦ τυχεῖν, ὁ δὲ ὑπὸ τὸ ἀκόντιον ὑπελθὼν ἐβλήθη, καὶ τὴν αἰτίαν οὐχ ἡμετέραν οὖσαν προσέβαλεν [ha!] ἡμῖν.
The “missing” ἄν occurs several times in the mss to Antiphon. Some editors add it, as here: οὐδεὶς <ἂν> ἡμῖν λόγος ὑπελείπετο.
I feel like adding ἄν to the Antiphon quote would harm the tension of the argument. It makes the “BUT” more dramatic.
If it refers to the future (relative to the tense of the main verb), I am at a loss as to what the imperfect is doing here.
Something like the “inchoative” or “inceptive” imperfect, equivalent to the present tense in past time.
Perhaps this is like apodoses with imperfect without ἄν, with verbs expressing necessity, etc., such as εχρην, “were bound to disappear,” “would necessarily disappear.”
Or perhaps Plato failed to read Smyth and Dickey closely enough.
Kühner-Gerth has more examples at sec. 393.
The absence of ἄν bothered Georg Ast (1778-1841), too, and he proposed to add it here, according to Burnet’s apparatus, but neither Burnet nor Dover was troubled by it and both left the text as found in the mss.
Thanks. Intuitively the meaning, of course, is clear from the context. I just thought there might me some hard and fast rule that I was missing.
Perhaps it’s wrong to see this as the apodosis of an implicit contrary-to-fact conditional. There’s no explicit protasis, after all. It’s a parenthetical and presents the gods having second thoughts when they were gearing up to annihilate the human race: “the honors to themselves and sacrifices from humans were on the point of disappearing”.
I had thought of the possibility to take the verb’s meaning here as “ingressive” but I know only of ingressive aorists, not imperfects.