αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ σίτου τάρφθεν δμῳαί τε καὶ αὐτή,
Why is the passive voice used here, instead of the middle?
πασάων δ᾽ ὑπὲρ ἥ γε κάρη ἔχει ἠδὲ μέτωπα,
S&H says that κάρη and μέτωπα are accusatives of specification. Could not be just direct objects of ἔχει?
ἐτέρψαντο would not have fit the meter, though I suppose τέρψαντ’ would have done. Sometimes there is a difference in meaning between the aorist middle and the aorist passive (έγράψατο versus ἐγράφη) and sometimes (more often?) there is not. (ἀποκρίθη versus ἀποκρίνατο.) I would not see any semantic difference here.
Sure. πῶς γὰρ οὔ?
As an aside, the terms “direct object” and “accusative of specification” really mean the same thing. In each case, the verb is limited by the accusative. τὴν σφαῖραν βάλλω means not I throw in general, but that I throw in respect to the ball, I throw as far as the ball goes. Another way of saying this is, I throw the ball.
No, because ἔχει is compounded with ὑπέρ to give a verb with the meaning “overtops”. There is a similar instance at Iliad 3, 210: στάντων μὲν Μενέλαος ὑπείρεχεν εὐρέας ὤμους
I think the point with “accusative of specification” (which I think is the same as “accusative of respect”) is that you have two ways of interpreting this:
I don’t think you would call τὴν σφαῖραν βάλλω accusative of specification/respect.
πόδας ὠκὺς Ἀχιλλεύς is famous case of “accusative of respect”: Achilles, swift with respect to his feet = swift-footed.
EDIT: I see Victor got there before me. Anyway, I think you can really interprete this in two ways.
τάρφθεν
Smyth, secs. 803:
The second aorist in -ην is primarily intransitive and shows active inflection (as ἔστην stood). Many so-called passive forms are in fact merely intransitive aorists of active verbs, as ἐρρύην from ῥέω flow, κατεκλίνην from κατακλί_νω lie down, and do not differ in meaning from the aorists of deponent verbs, as ἐμάνην from μαίνομαι rage.
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Smyth+grammar+803&fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0007
sec. 804:
The aorists in -θην that are called passive are often active or middle in meaning, as ἥσθην took pleasure in from ἥδομαι, ᾐσχύνθην felt ashamed from αἰσχύ_νω disgrace, αἰσχύ_νομαι am ashamed; ὠργίσθην became angry from ὀργίζω anger.
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Smyth+grammar+804&fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0007
According to Sihler, the aorist in -ην was originally stative, meaning “arrive at a state,” not exclusively passive. Later it became more or less generalized as passive.
See Sihler sec. 452, pp. 497-8.
See also Chantraine, Morphologie Historique, secs. 187-190; Grammaire Homérique, I p. 188, sec. 399.
Hi, Paul.
The point is, you would not HAVE to, because this sentence happens to more or less mirror what we call in English the direct object. I’m nitpicking, but the accusative of respect, I think, is only appealed to when the Greek grammar happens to diverge from the English. For example:
ἐφόρει ἱμάτιον.
No problem here. “He was wearing a garment.” We can call this a direct object.
ἦν ἐνδεδυμένος ἱμάτιον.
“He was clothed IN a garment,” or “He was clothed in respect to a garment.” We cannot say in English “He was clothed a garment,” so we don’t like to call this a direct object. We say that the first verb is transitive and the second first is intransitive and we say that intransitive verbs (in English, anyway) do not take direct objects, so, it goes down a little easier to call the second instance an accusative of respect. But in both cases the noun limits the verb in the same way. The reality is that intransitive verbs (in Greek) CAN take direct objects, it’s just that when they do, we call them something else (accusative of respect.)
πόδας ὠκὺς Ἀχιλλεύς is famous case of “accusative of respect”: Achilles, swift with respect to his feet = swift-footed.
Same thing. In English we can say “He has fast feet.” Feet is a direct object. In English we cannot say “He is fast, feet.” So we need a label different than direct object. But there is no such distinction in Greek. There is only an equally limiting accusative.
What I am saying here about the accusative of respect does not necessarily apply to Odyssey 6:114, which is a little more complicated than my examples.
Anyway, I think you can really interprete this in two ways.
You almost always can. You can always see Greek from several different angles of meta-language.
I checked (admittedly rather casually) the Prendergast and Dunbar concordances to the Iliad and Odyssey, respectively. I found only one instance of a sigmatic aorist for the verb τέρπω: Od. 12.188:
ἀλλ᾽ ὅ γε τερψάμενος νεῖται καὶ πλείονα εἰδώς.
“But he sails on having enjoyed [the experience of hearing the Sirens sing] and knowing more things.” (The Sirens are singing this.)
This short-vowel subjunctive may also be a sigmatic aorist (Od. 16.26):
ἀλλ᾽ ἄγε νῦν εἴσελθε, φίλον τέκος, ὄφρα σε θυμῷ
τέρψομαι εἰσορόων νέον ἄλλοθεν ἔνδον ἐόντα.
“But come now, come in, my dear child, so that I may rejoice in my heart, seeing you newly being here inside my house [having come] from elsewhere.”
Here τέρψομαι is transitive.
Forms based on roots taking the -ην aorist forms in the indicative otherwise prevail:
τερφθ-, ταρπ-, ταρφθ-
Incidentally, these are metrically equivalent, so we can’t be sure what form a 7th century BCE Ionian ἀοιδός might actually have used.
LSJ:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3Dte%2Frpw
The conclusion I would draw from this is that in the Homeric poems (not including the Hymns), aorist forms in -ην are the norm for τέρπω.
Addendum: ὄφρα σε θυμῷ
τέρψομαι εἰσορόων νέον ἄλλοθεν ἔνδον ἐόντα
τέρψομαι isn’t transitive here. σε is the complement of εἰσορόων. I altered the translation to reflect this.
Do you think, Bill, there would have been a difference in meaning had Homer written
ἀλλ᾽ ὅ γε ταρφθεὶς νεῖται καὶ πλείονα εἰδώς.
Do you think, Bill, there would have been a difference in meaning had Homer written
ἀλλ᾽ ὅ γε ταρφθεὶς νεῖται καὶ πλείονα εἰδώς.
Probably not, and perhaps the composer chose τερψάμενος because it was metrically convenient–it fills the first half of the hexameter, allowing the singer to concentrate on the second half.
I wonder whether ἀλλ᾽ ὅ γε τερψάμενος might be formulaic–the pattern might be:
ἀλλ᾽ ὅ γε [sigmatic or second aorist root]-ά/ό-μενος
But investigating that would take more time than I have to spare.
Smyth makes essentially the same point as Markos at the very beginning of his discussion of the accusative:
1551:
The accusative is a form of defining or qualifying the verb.
1552:
A noun stands in the accusative when the idea it expresses is most immediately (in contrast to the dative) and most completely (in contrast to the genitive) under the influence of the verbal conception (in contrast to the nominative).
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0007%3Asmythp%3D1551
Accusatives classified as “direct object” and as “accusative of respect” are really just two manifestations of the same phenomenon. The traditional classifications can be useful, so long as you remember that they are really essentially aspects of the same thing.
“defining or qualifying the verb” – Smyth could have added “or adjective”.
That’s a more reasonable approach than mine, Paul, I have to say. I’ve only got the editions of Stanford and Merry to hand, and I was following Stanford’s interpretation. It would be nice to know what more recent editors have to say about this. Maybe there is a consensus now, and the consensus is that the κάρη and μέτωπα are simply direct objects of ἔχει after all.
If κάρη and μέτωπα are direct objects, ὑπερ must be a preposition (or more accurately a postposition), not a pre-verb in tmesis. In that case, ὑπερ ought to be accented ὕπερ, shouldn’t it? The fact that editors accent it ὑπὲρ suggests that they consider it a preverb and take κάρη and μέτωπα as accusatives of respect. This is one instance where the distinction between direct object and accusative of respect actually makes a difference in the printed text, if I’m not mistaken (which I could well be).
Allen (1917), von der Muehll (1945) and van Thiel (1991) all read ὑπὲρ, suggesting that they understand κάρη and μέτωπα as accusatives of respect, not direct objects.
[Edited to correct slip-up noted by Victor below.]
Incidentally, it’s worth noting that this is an instance where the traditional grammatical categories of “direct object” vs. “accusative of respect” make a difference in meaning. Is she physically taller or does she just have better posture? She’s a goddess, so of course you’d naturally expect her to be taller than any mere nymph.
I checked Garvie (Green and Yellow for books VI-VIII from 1994), which has ὕπερ (thus accented) and cites Il. 6.509 and 15.266 as parallels. So he considers it a postposition, but notes that others have taken it differently, exactly as Qimmik says.
But I find it hard to believe that accusative of respect is just a subjective tool for English speakers for situations where Greek syntax doesn’t agree with English. First of all, my own native language is very different from English, yet I find the concept works very well. Then, if indeed we say that there’s no fundamental difference between a direct object and an accusative of respect, we’d have to call ὑπερέχω here a transitive verb. Other strange things would then happen to the transitive/intransitive distinction, which I believe is a very relevant and universal distinction in languages across the world. I’m not a linguist, quite the opposite, but I suspect that it’s possible to test more or less objectively whether are Greek verb is transitive or not, if we keep to the traditional definitions. I don’t have a solution, I’m just voicing my doubts.
How you call these accusatives is a question of meta-language, I agree. But the real question in this particular example is whether the verb is έχω or ὑπερέχω. That makes a real difference in meaning.
Compare:
Push the door to, Jack! (=Jack, please close the door!)
Push the door to Jack! (Take the door and move it where Jack is)
Nobody would say that the difference in meaning is just meta-language here.
(I believe “push to” isn’t common in contemporary English, but that’s the first example that came to my mind)
Il. 6.509 and 15.266 (of a horse–a fomulaic simile): ὑψοῦ δὲ κάρη ἔχει . . . Not an exact parallel.
This seems like a much closer parallel: Iliad 3.211
στάντων μὲν Μενέλαος ὑπείρεχεν εὐρέας ὤμους,
where εὐρέας ὤμους can only be accusative of respect, since ὑπείρ- is a preverb and can’t be a postposition, and there is no function for στάντων in the sentence other than a genitive depending on ὑπείρεχεν used intransitively.
Thanks for your reply! I’m still a little confused, I must admit, namely by your statement “The fact that editors accent it ὑπὲρ suggests that they consider it a direct object.”
Did you mean “suggests that they consider it a preverb in tmesis”?
LSJ seem to consider hyper here to be functioning as a postposition, since, where they cite this passage under the entry hyper, they write ὕπερ, though leaving out the intervening δ᾽.
Jelf’s edition of Kühner’s Grammar, in its treatment of the preposition hyper, also apparently assumes it to be a postposition here, since the cited passage reads πασάων δ᾽ ὕπερ ἥ γε κάρη ἔχει.
Dindorf’s edition of Stephanus’ Thesaurus does the same where it cites this passage under the entry hyper.
Many later editors, though, do seem to accent ὑπὲρ, don’t they? Confusingly for me, though, that includes Merry, whose note clearly indicates that he regards hyper as a postposition. Are we to see this simply as an oversight and he meant to write ὕπερ, or does he regard the intervening δ᾽ as something that would annul the need for a recessive accent?
Did you mean “suggests that they consider it a preverb in tmesis”?
Yes, that’s what I meant. I went back and edited the earlier post to correct my slip.
Many later editors, though, do seem to accent ὑπὲρ, don’t they? Confusingly for me, though, that includes Merry, whose note clearly indicates that he regards hyper as a postposition. Are we to see this simply as an oversight and he meant to write ὕπερ, or does he regard the intervening δ᾽ as something that would annul the need for a recessive accent?
Maybe that’s right; I can’t say I know for sure whether the intervening δ᾽ would affect the paroxytonization (to coin a word) of ὕπερ, although the other sources you cited that treat it as a postposition seem to accent it paroxytonically.
But for me the parallel with Il. 3.210 is very persuasive. I can’t see εὐρέας ὤμους as anything but accusative of respect here.
Also, I really think the context makes it clear that Od. 6.107 is about stature, not posture.
The “correct” word is anastrophe (Smyth §175).
Smyth doesn’t mention anything about intervening words annulling the need for anastrophe. I suppose that Merry is just mistaken.
Victor, which book do you actually mean by Merry? Merry-Riddell or the school commentary by Merry alone?
I guess I’m also more convinced by the parallel with Il. 3.210.
I like paroxytonization better. More syllables.