I have a passage that I need to translate from Greek to English. I know the meaning of the words and phrases but am having difficulty in figuring out what order to put them in. I will concentrate first on the part before the comma, which I placed in bold:
The first three words in the genitive I figured are an introduction so just set them aside for the moment.
I think the first part with the main verb is ἴσμεν τοὺς μὲν βελτίστους καὶ σωφρονεστάτους, “I know that the best and most prudent. . .”
I think that ἐθέλοντας is a supplementary participle. I think it goes before the infinitive but am wondering if there is a rule whether the supplementary participle always goes first or if it depends?
One of my biggest troubles is figuring out αὐτῇ τῇ φύσει πάντα. Which goes with the participle and which goes with the infinitive.
I think that αὐτῇ τῇ φύσει means “origin or nature itself.”
I figured I would place the relative pronoun and impersonal verb at the end.
For the part in bold, I have this, “Of the other men, we think that the best and most prudent are willing by nature itself to do all that is necessary . . .”
I will get to the second half once I have the first half figured out.
Yes that’s it. You’ve seen that πάντα ποιεῖν ἃ δεῖ go together, controlled by the intervening ἐθέλοντας. When you saw τῶν ἄλλων ἀνθρώπων ἴσμεν τοὺς μὲν βελτίστους at the outset of this passage and knew what all the words meant, you should have had the following three thoughts:
I expect τῶν ἄλλων ἀνθρώπων is a partitive genitive with τοὺς μὲν βελτίστους;
I expect a participle is coming, in agreement with τοὺς βελτίστους, to complete the construction (indirect statement, “we know that the best people …”);
then I expect another accusative and participle, this time with δέ counterbalancing the μέν in the first part of the sentence.
In other words, anticipate, and as you read on you will either find confirmation or something to upset or modify your initial expectations.
For the second half, I am uncertain of the extra τῷ . I did stumble upon a previous post that has a similar question but with a different passage: An extra τῷ
So far I have, “while those worse but not all evil are prevented by the fear regarding you to err.” I am not sure how to handle the extra τῷ. If it is like the earlier post and ties τῷ φόβῳ to πρὸς ὑμᾶς, how does a Greek writer decide what case to place the second definite article?
τῷ φόβῳ τῷ πρὸς ὑμᾶς. Yes the second τῷ anchors πρὸς ὑμᾶς, tying it to τῷ φόβῳ. Otherwise πρὸς ὑμᾶς would be a floating free with no indication of what it goes with.
As to the case of this second article, do you really need to ask that? Its being dative is what ties it to the preceding dative noun!
For τοὺς δὲ χείρους ἀλλ’ οὐ πάνυ πονηροὺς ὄντας τῷ φόβῳ τῷ πρὸς ὑμᾶς κωλυομένους ἁμαρτάνειν you have “while those worse but not all evil are prevented by the fear regarding you to err.” You need to translate that into English. What are you doing with ἁμαρτάνειν?
Yes Lukas of course I realized that, but how are you relating it to other components of the sentence? Do you understand the syntax? Do you see how it all fits together? What sense are you making of it?
I don’t know. What I translated into English was as far as I could get.
I think I know what the writer is saying. He starts out with men who are the best and most prudent by nature. Then contrasts them with men who are worse but not all evil. I think he is saying that the ones not all evil are prevented by fear of either the the men who are great or by the men whom the writer is speaking to. I translated it literally but don’t know a good way to smooth it out.
You’re nearly there. You remember how the sentence starts out: τῶν ἄλλων ἀνθρώπων ἴσμεν and then it forks: τοὺς μὲν βελτίστους …, τοὺς δὲ χείρους ….
So now we’re in the τοὺς δὲ half, but the opening τῶν ἄλλων ἀνθρώπων ἴσμεν still applies, and here again it’s followed by an accusative and participle construction. In the first half the participle was ἐθέλοντας, in the second half it’s κωλυομένους. In the first half the participle ἐθέλοντας governed the infinitive ποιεῖν, in the second half the participle κωλυομένους governs the infinitive ἁμαρτάνειν. We should pick up on the parallelism, and then all we need to do is see how the other elements fit into that basic structure.
So here he’s saying “we know that … the worse but not thoroughly evil ones are prevented from erring τῷ φόβῳ τῷ πρὸς ὑμᾶς (by their fear with regard to you).”
I was not sure if I could throw in “from” by looking at Liddell and Scott but see that I can. I also did not know that I could switch from “to err” to “erring.” That smooths it out. And I will read your message more than once to get it in my head. Thank you. It would be interesting to see what the writer says about the all evil.