It’s the middle bit that is giving me trouble namely “καὶ τῶν Ἑλλήνων ἔχων ὁπλίτας ἀνέβη τριακοσίους,”
The best I can do is that the subject of ἀνέβη is to be supplied by the reader so that a translation would be something like and of the Greeks having heavy arms (a detachment) to the number of 300 went up
I’m assuming that τριακοσίους is an accusative of relation.
Alternatively it could be that the 300 is taken by Kyros along with Tissaphernes but then what is ἀνέβη doing?
The OCT (and all of the manuscripts, I think) include the ἀνέβη. In another thread last year, I parodied this section (no doubt incorrectly) and mwh commented on how out of place it was.
EDIT: Now that I think of it, I recall a footnote in the Loeb about this. And yes, it’s there online: “Before τριακοσίους the MSS. have ἀνέβη: Gemoll brackets, following Bisschop.”
ανεβη is certainly gratuitous after the opening αναβαινει, and the tense-switch of the same verb in the same sentence is odd. Hence the editorial deletion. So daivid your follow-up question was a good one.
ἔχων, lit. “having,” is probably best translated “with.” It’s often used like this. τριακοσ. is adjectival with οπλιτας, direct object of εχων.
Word order:
των Ελληνων up front, contrasting with Tissaphernes. He took Tiss with him, and of the Greeks:….
εχων οπλιτας: εχων nom.sing. clinching the expectation that the subject is Cyrus. The mundane εχων is sandwiched between the partitive gen. των Ελλ. and “hoplites.”
ανεβη the main verb, dispensable and probably intrusive. Right or wrong, it’s unobtrusively slipped in between οπλιτας and 300.
τριακοσιους gains a little punch from being deferred till the end. The clause is framed by “of Greeks” and “300.”
Nothing exceptional about the word order, it’s just rather nice.
The next bit gives a second object of εχων, grammatically speaking. Both εχων and the main verb carry over; they don’t need to be repeated.
This sort of thing reminds me of R. H. Charles Commentary on the Apocalypse of John. 100 years a go it was in vogue to reconstruct the text even when all the witnesses were against your reconstruction. Editors “bracketing” is excusable when you only have one or two manuscripts separated by a millennium or more from the autograph.
I am relieved that it is sufficiently tricky that some editors have felt the need to emend it.
That word order did throw me initially but I’m on the look out for such so I did take in on board eventually. (hyperbaton is the term is it not?) I have read that hyperbaton is done for reasons of stress but I had no idea what was being stressed. That it should be 300 makes sense as it contrasts with the 10,000 that Kyros takes in his later march up country.
It occurs to me that though might normally be redundant it is essential if Xenophon wants to use hyperbaton here as it is ἀνέβη that splits ὁπλίτας from τριακοσίους. Further, ἀνέβη being aorist is what I would expect - it does seem the neutral tense for this context. Hence maybe in the first instance he use the present for emphasis (vividness perhaps?) while in the second it is only there to allow him to emphasize 300 so he reverts to a more neutral form. Does that make sense?
Thanks for answering my initial question and just much for explaining what the hyperbaton was doing here.
And indeed thanks to everyone who has answered.
Well, most of the MSS of Xenophon (of which there are lots) are separated by a millennium or more from the autograph. But interpolations can creep in at any point, even within a few years. Papyri sometimes expose them as subsequent accretions, but even the earliest papyri can contain undoubted interpolations that had already infiltrated the text. If we had a papyrus manuscript of this particular passage (I haven’t checked whether by now we do), it might have the ανεβη, it might not. If it did, that wouldn’t prove it genuine. If it didn’t, it would effectively confirm that it’s interpolated. As a rule of thumb, absence signifies, presence doesn’t.
daivid,
I don’t think that’s quite it. I really don’t see any hyperbaton here worthy of the name. There’s nothing at all unusual about the word order, I was just trying to explain why it is what it is. The interposition of ανεβη doesn’t make a significant difference to οπλιτας τριακοσιους. What matters—though not a whole lot—is that οπλιτας comes first, to give the sequence “of Greeks, hoplites, 300.” We should’t think that Xenophon introduced ανεβη for the sake of separating the two words.
Right. The analysis of the word order MWH provided is quite similar to what you will find in works on text-linguistics (R. Buth, S. Levinsohn, H. Dik, etc.) the point of view is different as well as the terminology but you end up with similar (not identical) conclusions about the significance of the word order.
Here a few random thoughts subject to revision at any time.
Cyrus accordingly went up2 to his father, taking with him Tissaphernes as a friend and accompanied by three hundred Greek hoplites,3 under the command of Xenias of Parrhasia. LCL 1998
The presence of ἀνέβη suggests a different parsing of the sentence. Without ἀνέβη we have one finite verb with a some participles hanging off of it. The participle clauses provide background information about the main clause. With a second finite verb then we have to decide which participle clauses belong to which finite verb. Participle clauses prior to the main verb are used as contextualizers to link the main clause to something earlier in the text or to something presumed to be known by intended audience. If we omit ἀνέβη then all the particles follow the kernel clause and provide background but probably do not serve to link the clause with something said earlier in the discourse.
If we retain ἀνέβη and read the participles before it as preparation for the second main verb, then ἀνέβη is in a position after the contextualizing constituents a position which draws no attention, R. Buth might call it the “quiet spot” but I not sure Buth would allow for a main verb in the “quiet spot.” If we join the early participles with ἀναβαίνει and thus read ἀνέβη as clause initial, that position isn’t particularly noteworthy for a main verb. Either way, ἀνέβη is not in position to call attention to itself.
For bizarre reasons this problem reminds me of Bruce Waltke’s exegesis of Genesis 1:1-2 (Creation and Chaos, 1975). If we retain ἀνέβη the kernel clause ἀναβαίνει οὖν ὁ Κῦρος might in theory function like a general statement standing alone by itself. The following participles providing a complex setting constituent[1] for the second finite verb ἀνέβη. This isn’t intended as a serious proposal.
[1] setting constituent is sort of the same thing as contextualizer but not exactly identical.
