These verbs are confusing to me because a lot of the reference materials that discuss them describes Attic, which is different. Am I correct in thinking that in Homer, the generic verb for ‘to say’ would be φημί in the present and imperfect, ἔειπον in the aorist (but also ἔφατο and φάτο), and ἐρέω in the future, except that ἐρέω often doesn’t really have future meaning and can just serve as an intensifier, like “declare?”
Example: ἀλλ ̓ ἔκ τοι ἐρέω (Iliad 2.257). Buckley translates this as “But I declare to thee,” and it does seem from context like there is no future meaning. Cunliffe seems silent on the future semantics or lack thereof.
I guess you’re saying that ἔκ τοι ἐρέω is equivalent to τοι ἐξερέω? That’s interesting, but Cunliffe’s definition of ἐξερέω seems identical to his definition of ἐρέω, so I don’t know if that reanalysis makes a difference. I don’t know for sure, but it seems to me like either one of those cases where you just stick a preposition on the front of the verb as an intensifier, or else maybe the ἔκ is there as metrical filler.
I think maybe my example wasn’t the best, because it muddies the water with the fact that the statement he’s making is itself a statement about the future. Here’s an example that looks cleaner:
So I think the idea is that this figure of speech serves as a way for a speaker to introduce what they’re about to say – immediately in the future, in their very next sentence.
For speech tags using past tenses of φημί, it looks like the choice of ὣς φάτο, ὣς ἔφατ᾽, or ὣς ἔφατο depends completely on whether the following word starts with a consonant, a vowel, or a double consonant. He seems to be just doing this so as to make the meter work.
I imagine that the meter also determines the use of the synonym ἐξερέω or variations like ἔκ τοι ἐρέω.
I suppose Cunliffe is quite concise and does not necessarily explain every nuance. LfgrE (Lexikon des frühgriechischen Epos), a dictionary of Early Greek hexameter poetry Greek that is quite the opposite of concise, translates εξερεω “speak out openly”. So εκ adds a somewhat similar nuance as “out” in English “speak out”.
ἐξερέω is indeed a compound of ἔκ and ἐρέω. In Homeric Greek such compounds are quite often separated, as in ἀλλ ̓ ἔκ τοι ἐρέω, without a change in meaning. It’s called “tmesis”.
I would actually consider Cunliffe to be an extreme “splitter” in his definitions. Many times his sense 7c is indistinguishable to me from his sense 8a.
I wasn’t careful enough earlier about characterizing Cunliff’s definition of ἐξερέω. He doesn’t quite define it as a simple synonym for one sense of ἐρέω. Condensing his presentation, he has ἐρέω=speak, tell, assert, announce/herald, and ἐξερέω=speak out, speak, say, tell. But I get the impression that the initial “speak out” is basically there to explain the etymology, not to exclusively define the word.
“Speak out” doesn’t seem very apt to me in Iliad 2.257. In English the implication of “speak out” seems to me that the speaker is an ordinary person who is not in a position of power and who is voicing what may be an unpopular or dangerous opinion. LfgrE’s “openly” reinforces the impression that the speaker might find it in his self-interest to keep his mouth shut. None of that is present in Iliad 2.257, where a military leader is making physical threats (which he immediately follows through on) against a proletarian dissident in the ranks. If anything, I would describe Thersites as, in English, “speaking out,” not Odysseus. For that reason, it makes sense to me that Buckley translates the phrase using the simple verb “declare.”
I really suspect that in Homer it’s just a metrical device, but I don’t know if there’s any reliable methodology for proving such a thing. The purely metrical reason behind ὣς φάτο/ὣς ἔφατ᾽/ὣς ἔφατο is easy to convince oneself of because the pattern is so consistent, but that’s only because the speech tag is always used at the beginning of a line, which imposes a very strict metrical constraint.
There are 11 uses of ἐξερέω in Homer (not counting tmesis), so I guess one could go through those and look at whether there is anything about any of the context that would suggest an actual semantic difference. I did a quick and dirty text search in the Iliad and found that 6 were near-identical instances of the same phrase:
It perfectly fills a line of meter with one complete thought, and would obviously have been locked into the bard’s brain as a set phrase.
I suppose “speak out” could also be a rhetorical strategy for someone in power to depict himself as brave, when in fact he’s in a privileged position that makes him invulnerable. For example, a right-wing congressman in the US could say, “I’m going to speak out openly against critical race theory, even though I’m sure I’ll be viciously attacked for it by the liberal media.” However, in Iliad 1.212 the Speaker is Athena, and she’s speaking to Achilles while wearing her Harry Potter cloak of invisibility. So “speak out openly” seems just completely inapplicable here. She’s a goddess, so she’s not subject to even the rhetorical possibility of suffering consequences for her words, and she’s speaking in the most private way possible, not openly. I think the sense of ἐξερέω is probably be more like “to declare,” as in the Buckley translation. The meaning seems to be that you’re publicly committing yourself to something. The words are “out there,” having already been said, and cannot be taken back. Having looked at this more carefully, I was sure enough to add some text to this effect on wiktionary: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ἐξεῖπον#Verb
Well, the good news about this discussion is that it will help to lock this particular piece of vocabulary permanently into my brain
