I’m stuck with a whole lot of infinitives and participles, in Chase and Phillips lesson 25.
[size=150]ὦ ξεῖν’, ἀγγέλλειν Λακεδαιμονίοις ὅτι τῇδε κείμεθα, τοῖς κείνων ῥήμασι πειθόμενοι.[/size]
– for those who don’t have spionic–
w)= cei=n’, agge/llein Lakedaimoni/oij o(/ti th|=de kei/meqa, toi=j kei/nwn r(h/masi peiqo/menoi.
The best I tried is:
Oh, foreigner, anouncing(go and telling) the Spartans that we lay ourselves to(surrender?) them, (also tell our) obeying to the sayings of them(their requirements?).
– Although I cannot handle πειθόμενοι in nominative properly in this trial translation.
Participles are said to play important roles in ancient greek, but I’m not used to their heavy use.
First, in poetic language at least, you can use an infinitive as an imperative. So, “Stranger, bring the message to the Spartans…” I would take τῇδε to mean “in this place.” So, “bring the message to the Spartans that we lie in this place.”
– Although I cannot handle πειθόμενοι in nominative properly in this trial translation.
It agrees with the “we” implicit in κείμεθα. “We lie in this place obedient (‘obeying’) to their orders (‘the words of those’).”
That also answers why it’s in singular while ‘Spartans’ is in plural .
And, Oh, now I remember Smyth said something about the suffix ‘-de’ used to denote places, I see.
(I was only thinking of ὁδε explained in White lesson 17 I read yesterday.)
It agrees with the “we” implicit in > κείμεθα> . “We lie in this place obedient (‘obeying’) to their orders (‘the words of those’).”
That helps very much, ‘implicit matchings’… Thank you so much, William!
Don’t know if your book mentions it, but this is Simonides’ verse from the monument to the Spartan force which was wiped out by the Persians at Thermopylae.
I’m curious, how does your book teach you translate participles? Because in German of course it would sound terrible to try and translate them as participles, because the Germans don’t use the participle in the same way as the Greeks did, and they don’t use it as much either.
So I had to learn 100ds of ways how to translate participles and how to find out when to use which translation.
Some times it’s easy, for example
[size=150]ὡς ζητῶν[/size] ‘as if he was searching’
[size=150]ὡς θύσων[/size] uh… lol, in English it would just be ‘to sacrifice’, but in German you would have to translate it as ‘um zu opfern’.
It starts getting annoying, when there’re no little words like a(te or ws around, and you just have to know whether it’s temporal, causal, consessive, modal or whatever.
Like (hope there aren’t too many mistakes in this sentence )
[size=150]ἔπλησα ἀμφορῆ ἐγενεσαντα μη πλήρησ[/size]
I filled the amphora because it wasn’t full. hope you know what I mean, even if that sentence is totally wrong.
The -de suffix you’re thinking of is not in play here. I think I’ve only ever seen that on nouns, and it attaches to the stem or the accusative, so, in Epic, either οἶκόνδε or οἴκαδε.
The demonstratives sometimes get used in a location sense, usually the feminines but not always. I’ll have to dig around a bit for references for that. Also, poets are happy to use bare cases without prepositions to indicate location (dative) or motion (acc. or gen.).
Well, then you have to find out the relationship that exists between your participle and the other verbs in the sentence (Of course, it is of no help to look at the participle alone). Moreover, there are manchmal several acceptable translations (for example, time and cause). What about using the relative clause in German ? In French it is often helpful.
Yes, I forgot to mention the relative clause, I try to use that translation where ever possible .
I don’t have the results back of my Greek exam, but I my teacher’s already told me to read up on participles again, as he hates how I always try to translate them as participles and relative clauses, and ignore all the other ways of translating them .
Ok, deep in the Middle Liddell article for ὅδε, ἥδε, τόδε: IV τῇδε “here, on this spot;” of Way or Manner, “thus”. And τόδε “hither, to this spot” also this and τάδε “therefore”.
It seems he wrote an entire enkomion on the event. We have only part, Simonides 531. Here are the first few lines (some Doric elements, mostly long alpha where most of us will expect eta):
“Of those who died in Thermopylae,
their fortune is well-famed, and their fate good,
their grave an altar, remembrance rather than weeping, and for pity, praise.”
Not sure about the “remembrance rather than weeping” bit. This is very compressed Greek. Perhaps I should take a break from Hesiod, ponder this more and do the whole thing up for Aoidoi.
It’s the genre. Choral odes are always written with a Doric patina. Pindar’s native dialect was Aeolic, but he composed his odes with this Doric/Epic mix, just as Hesiod, a Boeotian, used the Epic dialect for his poems. Even in Attic drama, the main dialog is in a poetic Attic, but the choral parts switch into this literary Doric.
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hope you know what I mean, even if that sentence is totally wrong.
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