Κολασθέντων ἀξίως τῆς ἀδικίας, Thucydides Book 3, chapter 39.
“Let them be punished in a manner befitting their crime” (Robert Foster Smith).
I have never seen a passive aorist genitive participle used like this to express “Let them….” Does anyone know of any grammatical explanation of this usage in Smyth or elsewhere?
Stephen Hoffman
Hunter College, CUNY
Κολασθέντων isn’t a participle. It’s the 3rd person plural imperative (aor. pass., as you note).
However, it’s identical in form witih the gen. plur. masc./neut. of the participle.
The paradigm is at Smyth 383.3 (p. 118 in the hardbound HUP edition).
The on-line version is somewhat jumbled, but the aorist passive imperative is towards the bottom of the middle column at the end:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Smyth+grammar+383&fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0007
And to be fair, the two forms are identical, and neither show up with a great deal of frequency… Oddly enough somebody asked the same question recently in the B-Greek forum, although different verb and different author.