τούς γ᾽ αὐτὸς αὑτοῦ πολεμίους. οὐ γὰρ καλόv.
Why is πολεμιουσ in the accusative?
What is a literal(exact) translation?
Is τουσ associated with πολεμιουσ or does it, especially with the particle, refer back to something else?
Richard Ross
These questions can’t be meaningfully addressed without the context. This is the repellent Menelaus arguing with Teucer about the burial of Ajax in back-and-forth Sophoclean stichomythia (line-by-line duologue), where one of the two parties continues the syntax of the previous speaker.
Immediately preceding lines:
Men: “Would I censure the gods’ laws?”
Teucer: ει τους θανοντας ουκ εᾷς θαπτειν παρών, “(That’s what you’re doing) if you’re here forbidding (lit. not allowing) to bury the dead.”
Now Men.'s retort, τούς γ᾽ αὐτὸς αὑτοῦ πολεμίους. οὐ γὰρ καλόv;
The γε both confirms and qualifies: “I do indeed (forbid to bury) my own enemies.”
τοὺς αὑτοῦ πολεμιους “one’s own enemies,” here “my own enemies.” The accusative picks up τους θανοντας in the previous line, object of θαπτειν. The added αὐτός (“oneself,” here “myself”) is idiomatic, intensifying the αὑτοῦ (lit. “oneself oneself’s, “myself my own”).
Does this help, Richard?
Yes it does, thank you very much.
R
Doukas’ paraphrase:
ΜΕ. Πῶς ἂν ἔγωγ’ ἀτιμάσαιμι θεῶν νόμους?
ΤΕΥ. κωλύων ταφῆς τυχεῖν τοὺς τεθνεῶτας.
ΜΕ. Τοὺς γε πολεμίους μόνον. οὐ γὰρ καλὸν τοῦτό γε.
I’m going to call it sticcomythia from now on. Or should that be stickomythia? I’ve seen it spelt that way. In Italian of course it’s sticomitia. No need for spelling bees there.
Interesting how Doukas sucks all the life out of Sophocles. He destroys every nuance and dodges anything remotely difficult. Kills him stone dead.
Hi, Michael,
Could you offer us a better L2 paraphrase of the passage in question?
I can never resist a challenge, so how about:
ἐγὼ γὰρ μεμψαίμην ἂν τοὺς νόμους τῶν θεῶν;
εἴ γ’ ἐνθάδε ἥκεις ὡς οὐκ ἐῶν θάπτειν τοὺς ἀποθανόντας.
τούς γ’ ἑαυτοῦ ἐχθρούς· οὐ γὰρ καλόν;
I don’t know if this qualifies as an “L2 paraphrase” or not—perhaps you could tell us precisely what that would be—, but what it does is depoeticize the original, turning it into its closest attic prose equivalent. It ruins Sophocles, inevitably, and distorts his meaning, inevitably, but less than Doukas’ banalizing rewrite does, or so I’d argue. It overtranslates παρών in line 2 (ignored by Doukas, typically), and the first part of line 3 in the original is so dense that it simply cannot be unpacked in paraphrase. Incidentally, unlike Doukas (and the OCT), I take ου γαρ καλον as a question not a statement, and see no need to amplify it. You can take Sophocles out of the rhetoric, but you can’t take the rhetoric out of Sophocles.
BUT all this is beside the point. It doesn’t affect what I said. If anything it reinforces it.
I’ll be sorry to see every Sophocles thread turn into a Doukas thread instead.
An L2 paraphrase is rendering an Ancient Greek passage into Ancient Greek. An L2 paraphrase allows one to unpack the basic meaning of the original without recourse to bi-lingual lexicons, translations or meta-language. The Ancient scholiasts routinely offered L2 paraphrases of given passages, but in people like Gaza and Doukas you have entire works so rendered opposite the original, so you don’t have to flip back and forth between books.
This is a very, very good L2 paraphrase. It captures more of the original than Doukas’, but it is also a little harder than Doukas. That’s often a trade-off.
Does it do this more than an English translation does? There is no accounting for taste, but I find the English translations of Sophocles unbearable. And needless to say, translations fail to capture all that is in the original. We judge “made up” Greek paraphrases with a higher standard than we do English translations.
Anything distorts Sophocles’ meaning, because his original only means what his original says. Doukas is printed opposite the original so that once you have a BASIC sense of what the original means, you can go to the original to find out EXACTLY what the original means.
Well, if you think about it, the status quo is that every Sophocles thread has been turned into a grammar-translation thread. Every Sophocles thread becomes about Smyth or LSJ or an English equivalent or some grammar terminology. To the extent that Doukas uses the same language as Sophocles, a Doukas thread is always going to be MORE about Sophocles. A monolingual thread is always going to be more Direct, to use Rouse’s term. Doukas reminds us that there are other (monolingual) ways to answer these questions we get on Textkit.
You might want Doukas to capture more of the original and be better written. I might want him to be even easier so that the student can get to the original more easily.
διὰ τί σὺ λέγεις ὅτι ἐγὼ ἀθετῶ τὴν ἐντολὴν τῶν θεῶν?
διότι σὺ πάρει ἵνα σὺ κωλύῃς μὲ θάπτειν τοὺς νεκρόυς.
μόνον ἐγὼ κωλύω σε θάπτειν τοὺς πολεμίους μου. τὸ γὰρ θάπτειν τοὺς πολεμίους κακόν ἐστι.
Every Sophocles thread becomes about Smyth or LSJ or an English equivalent or some grammar terminology.
There are also the Scholia. See pg. 109, line 1151 here: https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=N6oNAAAAQAAJ&pg=GBS.PA109
ΤΟΥΣ Γ’ ΑΥΤΟΣ. ἤγουν τοὺς πολεμίους αὐτὸς αὑτοῦ, ἀντὶ τοῦ ἐμαυτοῦ, οὐκ ἐῶ θάπτειν.
I would respectfully challenge this. Surely the most ‘Sophoclean’ thread will be that which helps its readers to comprehend Sophocles’ artistry and meaning to the fullest extent, regardless of its language.
Take a look at some of the (frequently complex) discussions of problem passages on this forum in recent years, e.g. (because that’s a particular interest of mine!) on the Thucydides thread. It would have been frankly ludicrous - not to say extremely time-consuming - to attempt to conduct those discussions in (quasi-) ancient Greek, or to be constantly paraphrasing the original text in Greek.
As I have said before, if monolingualism works best for some people that is all well and good; however, I have yet to see any evidence that this method is inevitably and invariably superior to others.
With regard to paraphrasing, I think a good paraphrase should be in idiomatic Greek, as otherwise it could be unhelpful to the student by encouraging the use or expectation of bad idioms.
John
Hi, John,
I guess I would encourage you to try a more immersive approach. Take a look at Doukas’ paraphrase and notes
and see if he answers some of the questions you have in a different way. And why not try to talk about about Thucydides in Ancient Greek? Granted it might take longer and you may not be able to discuss fine nuances, but if Doukas can talk about Ancient Greek in Ancient Greek, I don’t see why we can’t.
Right now I am reading Doukas’ Sophocles OT in conjunction with Carlo Diano’s edition of the Scholia. These are great, and often parallel/overlap/supplement what Doukas does. What I would say about the Scholia is that we need to not only read them, but we also need to produce our own. Chad has done this to great effect with Ajax. Like Steadman, he prints these with the text instead of in separate books. (Diano’s edition is frustrating because he separates out several strands of the Scholia so you have to do even more page flipping.)
Monolingualism is not really a method; it is an approach. I don’t think you can provide evidence to prove that an approach is superior. An approach is based on pre-assumptions. My pre-assumption is that while L1 and meta-language can be helpful in the early stages of learning a language, they should ultimately give way to immersion into Greek. That pre-assumption is either assumed or not. It’s prescriptive, not descriptive.
From that assumption, you have methods, like Speaking Greek and replacing translations with L2 paraphrases. If you don’t share that pre-assumption, then there is no reason to move beyond L1 into those methods.
Sure, I agree this is the case with intermediate students, but for beginners a paraphrase is worthless if it is not understood. Beginners don’t understand idiomatic Greek, so I am willing to give them simplified Greek (what Buth calls care-taker speech) so that the original becomes comprehensible input without relying on L1.
Far be it from me to dissuade you from persisting with an approach that suits you, but your whole assumption about the benefits of monolingualism seems to be based on a fallacy: namely, that what you refer to as “immersion in Greek” is in fact immersion in Greek, properly speaking. Plainly it’s immersion, but immersion in any language is only ever as authentic, and therefore useful, as the proficiency in that language attained by the people generating what you’re immersing yourself in, and, in the case of Ancient Greek, however proficient these people may be, the proficiency of their Greek will always be a very poor substitute for the authenticity your immersion presumably aspires to approach (if not attain) in the first place: the authenticity of a native speaker.
You may by now be ready to object that immersion strategies for learning modern languages where the dominant speaker is a non-native of the language in question can still be highly beneficial to learners. Anticipating that objection, I’d just say that the two cases are, plainly, worlds apart, with the modern-language learner able to verify the idiomaticity of any utterance at any stage, and the learner of Ancient Greek completely dependent on a finite and unresponsive body of surviving texts, which, however much you may ransack them for guidance on usage, will very often refuse to yield the answers you’re looking for.
Markos - many thanks for this and your other comments.
With regard to your specific point above, to be honest I simply cannot see that, for me at least, the benefits would outweigh the costs. When I post about a problem passage in Thucydides, I generally (in an attempt to be helpful to potential responders) summarise the context; quote the passage in question; set out the apparent options; comment on previous scholars’ preferences; and express my own current view. To attempt to write all this in Greek would take a considerable amount of time, which would be out of all proportion to any advantage gained; moreover I would regard it as both discourteous and unhelpful to my readers, who should not have to wade through my attempts at Greek in order to understand and assist me. It’s bad enough that they should have to read my ramblings in English! 
More generally, I’m afraid that I don’t really have any interest in attempting to communicate in Greek; even were I tempted to do so, I would be very mindful of the points raised by Victor. Moreover - unless one is working within a network of people all checking each other’s work - there is the danger that one’s own inevitable errors will go uncorrected, and hence be perpetuated in one’s future efforts. But, as I say, this is in any case somewhat academic for me, since I only wish to read Greek literature, and have no communicative ambitions.
Thanks for the link to Doukas (though I’ve been unable to open it more than one page at a time - probably due to technical incompetence on my part). I was aware that he produced an edition of Thucydides, which was apparently published in Vienna in 1805; it’s one of the few I’ve not seen or consulted directly (though I have considered some of his interpretations as relayed in other commentaries). One drawback will be that it antedates the epoch-making work on the text of Thucydides by Bekker (and others), but it might still be worth the occasional look. I hope, however, you will agree that anyone studying an ancient author in depth should consult the best commentaries and studies, regardless of the language in which they have been written - for example, in my view it would be most unwise to study Thucydides without availing oneself of the commentaries of Krueger, Poppo-Stahl, Classen-Steup, Gomme, and de Romilly, to name just a few.
Best wishes,
John
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When I am reading ancient-Ancient Greek texts and get stuck I need help in as simple an clear manner as possible. That really means in a language I really understand not Ancient Greek which really I still don’t.
Teachers of English in a foreign language when using a monolingual approach are careful to give their students material to work with that is within their students capabilities. I can’t see that approach using extracts from Thucydides working except for very advanced students.
Immersion would be great if it meant having a flatmate who spoke to me every day about everyday things -that is simple things.
Right. Most of the grammarians speak a language which is so opaque that even with the help of something like David Crystal’s Dictionary on Linguistics you still end up not quite sure you know what they are saying.
I must say that I certainly haven’t found this to be the case with works such as Smyth’s Greek Grammar, or Goodwin’s Syntax of the Moods and Tenses of the Greek Verb. What I do find confusing, and sometimes even impenetrable, are modern discussions in a self-consciously ‘academic’ style, which make free with terms such as ‘metalanguage’, and this may be the sort of thing you have in mind.
If people find (e.g.) Doukas helpful, that is all well and good; however, I think it would be somewhat unrealistic, and indeed ultimately unhelpful to the individuals concerned, to put certain commentaries etc. on a pedestal simply on the grounds that they are written in Greek, when better resources may be available in other languages.
John
Is the following impenetrable enough for you, John?
“Modalizing particles [MP], class (c), nuance the modality of a proposition, that is to say they convey the writer/speaker’s view and estimate of its validity and actuality as well as of its relevance to the current situation or immediate context…Modal particles also clarify the writer/speaker’s emotional state and intention; such modalizers are apt to sharpen the expression of intention in varying degrees up to redefining, in their extreme and most effective function, illocutionary values in that they alter for a given hosting sentence the prototypical speech-act quality of its specific sentence type.”
“Rhematicity is ascertainable solely on an intersentential (or “transphrastic”) basis, being dependent on the wider context and situation; contrariwise, although focality can be conditioned by or relating to elements outside the frame of the single sentence…more often it is not. By and large, focus markers (d) are intrasentential and adconstituential markers, whereas particles of the other classes ((a) to (c)) are adsentential markers, and intersentential relations par excellence are of course effected by words of class (a).”
Right. Got it.
Yes, Victor - that’s just the sort of thing I had in mind!
John