I am beginning to work on Unit 35, conditional constructions. I think I am going to have a lot of questions with this. For Exercise 1, I need to render the following into Greek, “The men (whom(ever) Socrates examined by conversing with (them) appeared to those present to know nothing, with the result that they were angry with him.”
“The men” is the subject of the sentence—“The men whom S. examined seemed …” Soc. Is the subject of the relative clause ("whom S. examined”), not of the sentence. Your ἐδόκει has no subject: perhaps you meant it impersonally (“It seemed that the men…”) but Greek tends to use a personal construction (ἐφαίνοντο or ἐδόκουν).
It’s optative because the main verb (“seemed”) is a past tense, putting the dependent verbs into secondary sequence. And the present optative represents what in primary sequence would be a present subjunctive with αν (note “whomever,” suggesting an indefinite clause), which in secondary sequence becomes plain optative.
I think I should have written ἔδοξαν instead of ἐδόκει. “The men appeared. . .” The second part to your response is way above my head and very confusing. “Examined” seems like an indicative. I do not see anything hypothetical about “examined.” If I had to write a similar sentence into Greek, I would make the same mistake. I am just not getting it.
Yes, ἔδοξαν would have been better (since it provides the subject), but the imperfect is better still, since it wasn’t a one-off occurrence but a recurrent one.
As to ”examined,” you can’t just go by the English. I’ve made this point before. Here, “whom(ever)” gives a clue. It’s not simply “the men whom S. examined” (particular individuals) but more like “the men whom S. examined, whoever they may have been” —it’s an indefinite clause. Mastronarde will have something on indefinite clauses. In past sequence they usually become optative. So here. The tense (present not aorist) is another matter—a matter of aspect. We’ve been here before.
Here’s an example of an indefinite clause towards the beginning of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus: (Oed. to Antigone) μανθάνειν γὰρ ἠκομεν πρὸς ἀστῶν, ἃν (i.e. ἃ ἂν) δ᾽ἁκούσωμεν τελεῖν, “We’ve come to learn from the townsfolk and to carry out what we hear (whatever it might be).”
This is in primary sequence (since ἥκομεν is present tense).
In secondary sequence (e.g. “We had come … to carry out what[ever] we heard/should hear”) it would be ἃ ἀκούσαιμεν, plain optative.
(On indefinite relative clauses see esp. Smyth 2506.)
Thank you. I am beginning to comprehend this, but I will likely be making many mistakes in the future trying to grasp this. That is an interesting quote from Oedipus.
Good. It’s a little misleading for Mastronarde to put indefinite clauses into a chapter on conditions, since they’re not always conditional at all. They can be relative (“Always do what you’re told”), temporal (“You can leave when you want”), etc. etc. The essential thing is that in primary sequence they all have subjunctive with ἄν, and optative (without ἄν) in secondary sequence.
I reviewed chapter 35 more than once while doing the other exercises and listening to a couple videos from the web page that Bedwere posted. I think I was misreading the rule about Sequence of Moods. I took it that changing the mood from subjunctive to optative in a secondary clause when the verb in the primary clause was secondary meant changing the tense to secondary also. I now think the rule means I change the mood and not the tense.