The Odyssey 5 lines 5-6

Greek Learning Greek
1

Hi everyone…I’m looking for some help with this sentence. I definitely get the gist of it, but I’m lacking somewhat in precision, and I want to make sure I really understand everything I’m reading very thoroughly:

τοῖσι δ᾽ Ἀθηναίη λέγε κήδεα πόλλ᾽ Ὀδυσῆος
μνησαμένη

I am trying to figure out whether Ὀδυσῆος is in the genitive case because the subject of λέγε is the troubles of Ὀδυσῆος, or rather if it’s because Ὀδυσῆος alone is the object of μνησαμένη. The most satisfying explanation to me is the latter, which is provided in Frank Beetham’s Beginning Greek With Homer something like this:

“And to them Athena was telling many cares, having remembered Odysseus”

But Perseus has it like this:

“To them Athena was recounting the many woes of Odysseus, as she called them to mind”

They are saying that it’s the woes of Odysseus, and that these are the object of both the speaking and the remembering. That seems like a better explanation of what’s going on in the story, but doesn’t seem to fit the language quite as accurately.

Which, if either of these is the correct interpretation? Thanks in advance for any insight you can provide!

-John

2

Hi Outis,
Why did no-one post this question? :smiley:

It’s the many κηδεα of Odysseus that she spoke of. The sentence is potentially complete at the end of verse 5. Then μνησαμενη applies to Odysseus and his many cares, and introduces the speech in which she recalls them. So the Perseus translation is better.

Michael

3

Because no one cares lol :wink:

So you are saying that “κήδεα πόλλ᾽ Ὀδυσῆος” is the object of both λέγε and μνησαμένη? Part of what confuses me is that as a complete term it’s accusative, but my book says that μνησαμενη uses the genitive case. I can’t find any info on which case the object of λέγε would use, but at least taking Ὀδυσῆος as a separate term satisfies what I’ve been told about μνησαμενη.

4

I would say that the participle μνησαμένη doesn’t really have an object here; it only requires an object once you translate it to English. Rather, it just sort of expands (I don’t know the exact term) the finite verb λέγε.

5

Genitive is the most common case, but for the sense “call to mind” and “remember”, accusative is also used. Cf. LSJ: “remind oneself of a thing, call to mind:—Constr.: sts. c. acc., remember”.

6

Thanks for all the replies everyone.

I think I know what you mean…I’m beginning to understand the differences in how participles are used in Greek compared to English. With the acc. vs. gen. thing settled it all makes more sense now.

7

The important point, I think, is that Οδυσηος should not be separated from κηδεα πολλα. That would be out of keeping with Homer’s compositional style. The phrase κήδεα πόλλ᾽ Ὀδυσῆος is primarily the object of λεγε, but secondarily serves as the object of μνησαμενη too. That’s the way I’d put it, in conjunction with my first post.

8

Thanks…I’ll keep that in mind about style. I will have to read a lot more before I get a sense of that. I read way ahead after struggling with this, hoping that it would become clearer, but I’m still pretty much at the beginning!

9

Just a quick aside: part of what’s great about this site is that you can get help with your own problems but also learn a lot from threads like this.

That’s it.

10

I think what you are looking for here is that the participle is adverbial- modifies, expands, adds to the main predicate idea. I always like to remember what Munro says at the beginning of his Homeric grammar, that there are basically two parts of speech, predicates and adverbs. This has helped me a lot with Homer.
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I have found that you’ll frequently find situations like this where a noun can be object of two predicates, so it is seemingly left ambiguous. But either way it means the same thing, so a sharp distinction does not need to be made. Homer’s audience were not grammarians like us and did not pidgeon-hole every individual usage into specific categories. We need to do that, to a certain extent, as we learn the language, but I have found over time to be open to a looseness of the language. Where a sharp distinction needs to be drawn Homer will draw it. Where it does not need to be drawn, things are left a little open ended, and I wonder if different listeners in Homer’s time heard things like this a bit differently sometimes, perhaps depending on the dialect they were most familiar with.

As well at times I’ve thought that Homer (the bards in general) would use this kind of ambiguity to toss in a sly aside here and there. It would pass over the heads of most listeners but be perceived by the more astute. Can’t think of specific passages where this is the case, and the case in point is not one of them. Just a thought.

11

This has been my experience as well.

12

Welcome aboard, reader of Homer! It’s good to have you join in our Homeric dialogues.

I certainly agree Homer’s audience (and the audiences of Homeric rhapsodes) would not have consciously analysed it like this, and nor would most of Homer’s hundreds of thousands of readers over the course of the next centuries. They had no or little need to, just as English-speakers normally have no need to consciously analyse the utterances they hear or the texts they read.* But when we are asked (or ask ourselves) to analyse a construction, or to elucidate the function of its various constituents, we can set about doing it, and the greater familiarity we have with ancient Greek in general and Homer in particular, the more successful we’re likely to be.

An experienced reader of Homer (such as Paul Derouda) takes a sentence like this in her/his stride, without having to think about it, but a beginner like Outis might appreciate some guidance on how to approach it, especially when Beetham seems to have led him astray, and that’s what we were trying to provide.

Personally I don’t think Homer goes in for sly asides. And I wouldn’t say there was any ambiguity here (or anywhere in Homer?), it’s simply a matter of how best to characterize a construction such as this, which is actually perfectly ordinary, and in no way “loose.” I have no substantial quarrel with Paul’s formulation, and I’d hope he has none with mine.

Homeric verse tends to move line by line, and it’s a common pattern to have the first verse potentially complete and then expanded by a participle kicking off the next. The beginning of the Iliad is an example: μηνιν αειδε … | ουλομενην …. In much the same kind of way, as I look at the beginning of Od.5, |λαῶν οἷσιν ἄνασσε in v.12 picks up οὔ τις (yes, Outis :slight_smile:) in the previous verse, 19 |οικαδε νισομενον expands 18, and so on.

Incidentally, Outis, I seem to remember there was an earlier thread on 5.29. —Yes, http://discourse.textkit.com/t/odyssey-book-5-line-29/13631/4

  • But the grammarians among them had the means of doing so, just as we do with English sentences. They would probably have labeled the construction απο κοινοῦ, meaning that κήδεα πόλλ᾽ Ὀδυσῆος was common to both λεγε and μνησαμενη.
13

Note also the meter, which speaks against Beetham’s interpretation. “|” means caesura, which breaks the line in two:

τοῖσι δ᾽ Ἀθηναίη | λέγε κήδεα πόλλ᾽ Ὀδυσῆος (– u u – – – | u u – u u – u u – u) (– long, u short)
μνησαμένη

The meter makes λέγε κήδεα πόλλ᾽ Ὀδυσῆος a single entity that belongs strongly together; μνησαμένη is a sort of afterthought.

14

I’m glad I found this site :slight_smile:

With regard to the level of analysis that has been mentioned, I certainly don’t think of my native language this way, but that’s because I don’t need to. The way I look at it, whatever it takes to understand the new language with the same precision, I will have to do it, even if it means lengthy discussions about the fine points of a single sentence. Eventually, I won’t have to do that any more (hopefully) - whereas if I settle for vagueness now, then I will always be missing things and making subtle mistakes. Beetham’s book is short and just doesn’t have room for this kind of thing.

As far as the meter is concerned, I was under the assumption that it wouldn’t really play a part in the meaning - for instance there are lines that are not complete at all without part of the next line, for example line line 14 from book 5:

νύμφης ἐν μεγάροισι Καλυψοῦς, ἥ μιν ἀνάγκῃ
ἴσχει

This happens in English poetry too sometimes and I always assumed it’s something poets do as a last resort.

15

Yes, you’re right that the relationship between the meter and the sense is quite a bit more complicated than what I implied in my last message. I wouldn’t say there isn’t one, though. Here I suppose that with Beetham’s interpretation it would be too much to have a sense pause BOTH before Ὀδυσῆος and after μνησαμένη, neither of which is located at the caesura. You could have either one, but two seems too much to me. But this sort of thing is difficult to analyze, something just feels right and it’s difficult to explain why.

That sort of runover from one verse to the next is very common. Consider the beginning of the Odyssey
ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὅς μάλα πολλὰ || πλάνxθη etc. This sort of thing makes the poem more varied. It would become very dull very soon if there was a clear pause after each verse.

16

Thank you mhw for welcoming me. It’s nice to have somewhere to discuss these things.

You wrote-

Personally I don’t think Homer goes in for sly asides. And I wouldn’t say there was any ambiguity here (or anywhere in Homer?), it’s simply a matter of how best to characterize a construction such as this, which is actually perfectly ordinary, and in no way “loose.”

I’m not sure myself if Homer (the bards) intended to throw in sly asides, or double meanings. I’d have to do a comprehensive study to defend the idea, and that would be a monumental task, far beyond me. But wherever there is some possible ambiguity in the grammar, such as here, it makes me wonder. In this case there is no double meaning, I agree with Paul Derouda that the participle just expands the verb (adverbially or not). But all listeners of an inflected language had their ears tuned to the possibilities of the different forms they heard. In this case both the primary verb and the participle are “looking” for an object, which is the source of the OPs confusion. Listeners might have briefly wondered about this but since there is not an important distinction to be made in the meaning of the passage they would not be at all troubled by it, and would just see the participle as an expansion of the basic idea rather than introducing a separate and distinct predicate idea. The participle could have been used to introduce a separate clause with a separate object, but wasn’t, so it defaults to an adverbial use. This is what I mean by the looseness of the language, just that there are at times several possibilities presented by the forms, and it takes an experienced eye to see the direction intended or perhaps sometimes dictated by common usage.

Another area of ambiguity that makes me wonder is the uses of the optative and subjunctive. Usually they are fairly straightforward but not always. Sometimes, in the middle ground between the will and intent of the subjunctive and the simple potential of the optative I wonder whether the bards make sly asides, or characterize the speaker as doing so. Again I haven’t made a list of such passages so I can’t really defend this.

This would seem to contradict the fact that Homer is always very straightforward and direct in expression. But the characters are, at times, anything but, and I wonder to what extent ambiguity in the language was used by the bards to color their characters’ manipulative inclinations.

17

It depends on what you mean by “sly asides”. Certainly there are word plays and intentional double entendres in Homer. Take μίσγεται here (7.244-247):

Ὠγυγίη τις νῆσος ἀπόπροθεν εἰν ἁλὶ κεῖται·
ἔνθα μὲν Ἄτλαντος θυγάτηρ, δολόεσσα Καλυψώ,
ναίει ἐϋπλόκαμος, δεινὴ θεός· οὐδέ τις αὐτῇ
μίσγεται οὔτε θεῶν οὔτε θνητῶν ἀνθρώπων.
“No one, neither a god nor a human, keeps her company”. Surely it’s no coincidence here that the word for “keeps her company” is also used for sexual intercourse? Especially since Kalypso keeps Odysseus for the express purpose of making him her lover? There are other similarly ambiguous uses of μίσγω in the Phaeacian books. I suppose they were meant to amuse a predominantly male audience.

18

I agree. So much for the constantly revived thesis that the Odyssey is the work of a woman. But μισγεται is inherently ambiguous, and that doesn’t apply to Od.5-6, where I think it’s mistaken to think that there’s even “possible ambiguity," as Reader of Homer maintains. As he (not she :slight_smile: ) says, “both the primary verb and the participle are “looking” for an object.” But they don’t have to look very far. λεγε’s object follows immediately (khdea poll’ Odushos), and μνησαμενη’s is already there (khdea poll’ Odushos). What may make it seem ambiguous to us non-ancient-Greek-speakers is that we might be inclined to ask “Which verb does the object belong to?—could be this one, could be that one, it’s ambiguous”—as if in Greek it can’t perfectly well belong to both. We need to revise our grammatical preconceptions.

And swtwentyman: thanks for the non-sly aside.

PS Why is almost everyone on these boards male? No don’t answer that.

19

yeah, mhw, I see your point. This example is really pretty straightforward. Not the best example for talking about double meanings or sly asides. PD’s example is better, though of a different nature- the ambiguity of how far a metaphor gets stretched as opposed to ambiguity in grammar.

How do you know I’m male? Am I that obvious?