Hi Joel, I agree with you the ἔχων is not semantically circumstantial to αἰσθάνομαι alone: I take it as semantically circumstantial to the combination of αἰσθάνομαι and the indirect speech, treated as one unit (i.e. to the belief including its content).
Syntactically, the ἔχων circumstantial clause is a predicate modifier to the first-person subject of the main clause (i.e. Socrates) (see e.g. Cambridge grammar secs 26.26 and 52.31, esp. n. 1).
Cheers, Chad
Joel, You’ve been told how to read it. Your resistance is quite ill-founded, and merely perverse. The only difficulty here is in your head, and yours alone (well, maybe the OP’s too).
It would seem to me that 52.31n1 doesn’t tell us whether ἔχων is agreeing with “Socrates”, the subject of the main clause, or “Socrates” the subject of the infinitive clause. I wouldn’t deny that it agrees with “Socrates”, of course.
I assume that this is good Greek: παρῶν τῇ γυναικὶ λέγω κρίνειν αὐτὴν πρὸ τῆς ἑταίρας
If παρῶν agrees with the subject of λέγω: Being present with my wife, I say that I prefer her to my mistress
If παρῶν agrees with the subject of κρίνειν: I say that, being present with my wife, I prefer her to my mistress
The difference would be between moral cowardice and rekindled passion.
In the Plato passage, the difference seems to me to be whether the fullness of his breast is attendant on his perception that he can speak better, or whether his perception of that fullness is the cause of his claim that he can speak better. The context, it seems to me, would demand the second.
I like this move, Joel. (Would not φημί be more regular with inf. + acc.?)
But ἔχων, it seems to me, can be taken causally even without being included in the indirect discourse. The difference, then, would be between “Because I have my breast full, I believe that I’m able to …” and “I believe that, because my breast is full, I’m able to…”
φημι certainly makes sense.
I don’t think that οἴομαι and αἰσθάνομαι are quite the same, so I’d change the gloss to “perceive”, but that’s not really the core of what you’re saying. Yes, ἔχων could be casual, associated with either clause:
“Because I am having … I perceive that …”
or
"I perceive that I am having … (so that) "
However, in the first sense, the ἔχων info comes unintroduced, pulled from nowhere. To me, in Greek, in Plato, it feels like a strange way for a piece of new non-obvious information to enter into the flow. Justified by αἰσθάνομαι, it’s easier for me to read it in context. Obviously my Greek is limited though, and maybe in a year I’ll come back to it and have a different opinion.
I notice that Fowler’s Loeb does seem to follow my interpretation:
“What ground have I for saying so? Why, my dear friend, I feel that my own bosom is full, and that I could make another speech, different from this and quite as good.”
So we can add a third to Michael’s list of people with “difficulties in the head” here.
Fowler was translating ioosely, that’s all. Here’s Hackforth, a first-rate scholar steeped in Plato: “Good sir, there is something welling up inside my breast, which makes me feel that I could find something different, and something better, to say.” That’s more like it.
Michael, do you believe that an ancient reader was just trained to make a pause where you suggested to insert a comma? I’m not bringing this in as an argument, am just wondering, how the listener, having heard the word αἰσθάνομαι, was supposed to figure that it does not refer to what precedes it.
I think a reader of the text in antiquity would recognize that εχων ends the phrase and would not run it on to what follows. As several of us have pointed out, the word order supports this articulation. I reckon you went astray in your initial post, imagining that the phrase was completed by the following αισθανομαι, whereas in fact αισθανομαι begins the clause that’s completed by what follows. I think you’ll find that this verb generally precedes what depends on it, whether participle, infinitive (as here), or a οτι or ὡς clause.
Thanks! It’s a shame they do not include such info on plausible word order in textbooks.
There is a small supplement to Mastronarde’s book that might be helpful: http://atticgreek.org/downloads/WordOrder.pdf
Thanks for bringing this in. I’ve now recalled reading this piece and realized that it is precisely that that had given me the idea that the verb would anyway normally follow the focus, which in our passage clearly is “πλῆρές τὸ στῆθος ἔχων,” as answering to the “πόθεν δὴ τεκμαιρόμενος λέγω;”. Which is to say, that the fact that ἔχων precedes αἰσθάνομαι cannot, in this context, serve as a sufficient indication to the reader to not take ἔχων as governed by αἰσθάνομαι.