Of the Greek republics, which have again and again risen to greatness and fallen into insignificance, it is not difficult to speak, whether we recount their past history or venture an opinion on their future.
What kind of use of ὅσα is this? It seems to be functioning as a relative pronoun, but is there a Smyth number? Or am I missing some sort of fancy attraction, dropping of antecedent, etc.?
I know that ὅσα is strictly a quantitive relative pronoun and that its antecendent is often omitted.
Its meaning is generally “as many as.. = all those who…”
However, I don’t understand the meaning of συμβαίνει here. You’ve read it as impersonal which is fine
but how did it become “to speak” or “to describe” as another version reads it?
Here is one of the things I am struggling with. Consider a basic relative pronoun. It has an antecedent. That antecedent is some kind of noun. Sometimes it is a demonstrative. And sometimes, as with attraction, that demonstrative can drop out.
Now when we get to these osos, oios relative pronouns, I assume it is the same thing. They have antecedents. Sometimes those antecedents are not the correlative demonstratives. Sometimes they are. And sometimes they are correlative demonstratives that are implicit/have dropped out (I guess through attraction??).
Is that story correct?
And if it is correct, what is happening in this passage from Polybius. What exactly is the antecedent for this relative?
I don’t want to prejudge matters. I think most people would instinctively say it is a relative. So what is the antecedent that provides its referent? Nate seems to suggest that the antecedent has been omitted. If we go that route, then if we unomit it, what do we get? And what allowed us to omit it. Some kind of attraction process? If we don’t think the antecedent has been omitted, then it must be somewhere in the sentence. What is it? Or maybe one thinks it needs no antecedent. OK, then how does that work?
The first LSJ entry is the clearest and it illustrates the usage with its correlative.
τόσσον χρόνον ὅσσον ἄνωγας
τόσσον is a demonstrative adjective. You can almost imagine somebody pointing at a calender while saying it. So some quantity of time gets fixed in adjective number/quantity land.
Then ὅσσον refers to that same amount.
But you could imagine a similar expression with an actual number in place of τόσσον and do away with the demonstrative and replace it by an explicit adjective.
Roughly: 10 χρόνον ὅσσον ἄνωγας.
But these are the simplest examples. Pretty soon the Greek starts getting stretched and I get lost.
Can’t really help with this one, though I might as well add that this construction does occur in Thucydides - in my reading of the latter I’ve just seen an example at 5.10.10:
‘And then at last the whole Athenian army was in flight; and with difficulty, and following many different routes through the mountains, all those who were left, and who had not been killed either on the spot in close combat, or by the Chalcidian cavalry and the peltasts, got away to Eion.’
In the meantime, here are my criteria for a full understanding of a use of osos which I present with the reasons behind said criteria:
osos is an adjective. So:
One must be able to say what noun it is modifying, or one must say that it is being used substantively.
osos is a relative. As such, it must be Janus faced, looking “back” to some antecedent and “forward” to some what I’ll call “relative content”, “RC” for short. I put “back” and “forward” in scare quotes because sometimes the antecedent comes after. Moreover, the antecedent is strictly speaking adjectival.
One must be able to identify an adjectival antecedent.
One must be able to identify the RC.
Here’s an English example:
I bought him some beers, as many beers as he wanted.
“osos____” is equivalent to “as many____as”.
Our relative adjective is modifying the second “beers”.
The adjectival antecedent is “some”.
And the RC is roughly "he wanted ____ beers "
When I try and apply these criteria, criteria that come from our basic understandings of what it is to be an adjective, a relative, and you can even throw in the process of substantialization of adjectives, I get lost.
In the Thucydides example, I guess we would have to say:
Our relative adjective is modifying an implied “men” directly following it, or it has itself been substaintialized. Numbers slip back and forth between nouns and adjectives more than any other kind of word.
The adjectival antecedent is an implied (adjectival) number modifying λοιποὶ. Note that the antecedent follows.
And the RC is roughly “____(men) μὴ διεφθάρησαν ἢ αὐτίκα ἐν χερσὶν ἢ ὑπὸ τῆς Χαλκιδικῆς ἵππου καὶ τῶν πελταστῶν”.
So for Thucydides, we see that several things have to be filled in by hand so to speak. But the Polybius example is less congenial still. And I am still at a loss.
It even seems conceivable that what are being linked are the rises and falls.
Well, I’d have said that it falls under the first big batch of entries (A), where one of the translations is ‘as many as’; in the middle of this batch LSJ comments: ‘freq. without antec.’
I should have remembered another good Thucydidean example from 1.22.1, his famous description of his methodology:
‘With regard to all that the two sides said in speeches, either when they were on the verge of war, or when they were actually in conflict, remembering the exact terms of what was spoken was difficult, both for me, in the case of the speeches which I heard myself, and for those who reported them to me from elsewhere; …’
Warning: I have already budgeted a quite insane amount of time to master these words by working through all of Smyth, LSJ and probably Goodwin.
As for LSJ’s ‘freq. without antec.’ section, it is actually really quite short. It is made up of passages from Homer and one passage from Thucydides, 2.45:
Here I would claim that we are to imagine an implicit antecedent in front of γυναικείας. Yes, I know, we would have to change it from the abstract adjectival feminine to plural substantial women. But that doesn’t phase me in the least. I think at the heart of the meaning and sense that is what is happening.
If it is necessary for me to remark somewhat of feminine virtue, as many as are now widows…
If it is necessary for me to remark somewhat of so many virtuous women, as many as are now widows…
The syntax needs to be massaged, but the sense and meaning point to a clear antecedent. If they didn’t, or so I claim, we wouldn’t be able to understand it.
I will put up a comment about the Thucydides passage you mention in an hour or two.
