I just started Rouse’s Greek Boy. I thought it would make a nice break from the Thucydides that I just finished in The Intellectual Revolution (JACT). I have a hardcopy published by Hackett. Ι really should provide more context but it takes me forever to type in Greek. This sentence is from IIIδ. I think it’s supposed to mean something like “For we leave some eggs in the nests every time.” Later on, our Greek boy says that some nests are too high up in the trees. They don’t care to climb that high. I don’t understand what ἕστιν is doing there. What am I missing?
ἐστὶν ἃ is an idiom meaning just “some.” ἐστὶν doesn’t function as a verb in the syntax of this sentence. Literally, “there are [those] that.” ἐστὶν ἃ τῶν ᾠῶν = “some of the eggs”
Similarly, you may encounter εἰσίν οἱ/αἱ for masculine and feminine things and persons.
Thank you Hylander. It is clear to me now. In fact, I just found ἐστὶν ἃ “some things” in the Middle Liddell.
I’m revisiting this thread because I find this use of ἔσιτν ἃ somewhat odd. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the idiom used of fungible, unspecific items like this. In my experience it implies a number of unidentified but specific particulars or human individuals, more like “certain” than just “somee.” But I could be wrong. Anyone else have thoughts about this?
Yes Rouse was far from infallible, as I’ve commented before. Somehow this reminds me of an Alan Bennett sketch in Beyond the Fringe, which played with “Are there eggs in this basket?” versus “some eggs” and “any eggs”. Ad fontes!
And here it seems unnatural to have λειπομεν ahead of ἔστιν ἃ.
This and even more the other example of ἔστιν οἷς from Rouse are very hard for me to read, unlike all the examples I can find in real usage, where it just makes plain sense. Maybe Rouse had come across something like Jelf’s grammar and took Jelf’s rule “ἔστιν οἵ = ἔνιοι” as a composition rule?
But on “some” versus “certain”:
Here is one example of εἰσὶν οἴ (it can sometimes be plural) from Laws where it seems to be “some” rather than certain. μαίνονται μὲν οὖν πολλοὶ πολλοὺς τρόπους· οὓς μὲν νῦν εἴπομεν, ὑπὸ νόσων, εἰσὶν δὲ οἳ διὰ θυμοῦ κακὴν φύσιν ἅμα καὶ τροφὴν γενομένην…
This example from Thucydides could be either “certain” or “some”, depending on how well you think he had the geography in mind. I don’t think there’s any way to tell from context. But the Loeb has to choose one or the other, and goes with the better style: “certain”
καὶ Ἴωνας μὲν Ἀθηναῖοι καὶ νησιωτῶν τοὺς πολλοὺς ᾤκισαν, Ἰταλίας δὲ καὶ Σικελίας τὸ πλεῖστον Πελοποννήσιοι τῆς τε ἄλλης Ἑλλάδος ἔστιν ἃ χωρία
Here’s one from Xenophon that Perseus gives as “some”, but maybe it could possibly be “certain” depending on whether the author was having warm fuzzies about his war-buddies as he was writing (dictating to his slave):
ἐντεῦθεν προυβάλλοντο πρέσβεις πρῶτον μὲν Χειρίσοφον, ὅτι ἄρχων ᾕρητο· ἔστι δ’ οἳ καὶ Ξενοφῶντα.
EDIT:
If the objection is that the ᾠά are separated out because of no particular intrinsic quality – “there were some eggs that we left” in English would imply that we left the rotten ones, etc., but Rouse means “we left some [at random]” – the Thucydides χωρία seem to be a direct enough parallel, with no intrinsic quality singled out.
I don’t know that there’s any significant difference between “some” and “certain" in such contexts, but the crucial thing is shown by Jelf’s examples (from Kühner?), esp. his last one, from Thuc.2. The verb comes after εστιν ἅ, not ahead of it as in Rouse’s λείπομεν γὰρ ἔστιν ἅ κτλ. See my post above.
So, I thought something similar when I saw the other thread ending in ἔστιν οἷς, and did a search which turned up this from Thucydides:
ἦλθε Γύλιππος Λακεδαιμόνιος στρατιὰν ἔχων ἔκ τε Πελοποννήσου καὶ ἀπὸ τῶν ἐν Σικελίᾳ πόλεων ἔστιν ὧν.
Also:
καὶ τῶν ἄλλων Ἑλλήνων τὸν βουλόμενον ἐκέλευον ἕπεσθαι πλὴν Ἰώνων καὶ Ἀχαιῶν καὶ ἔστιν ὧν ἄλλων ἐθνῶν.
The first one really grates, but seems like something he actually wrote.
They really shouldn’t grate. They’re readily intelligible cases of ellipse and attraction. What should grate is Rouse’s λείπομεν γὰρ ἔστιν ἃ τῶν ᾠῶν, which leaves the verb stranded outside of the relative clause that it belongs within. Contrast Thuc.2.26.2 (Κλεόπομπος) τῆς τε παραθαλασσίου ἔστιν ἃ ἐδῄωσε καὶ Θρόνιον εἷλεν.
To consider whether the idiom is better translated into English by “some” or by “certain” in any given instance is quite beside the point. First you have to grasp the construction.
Maybe I don’t understand the construction. I try to avoid learning constructions, actually, and just read lots. Some things just feel natural than others. Having read a few hundred examples of this now I would have thought that Thucydides stretches it a bit farther than other authors in the examples I quoted.
Regardless, what you’re objecting to about the verb, though regular practice for other authors, seems to be Arrianus’ (unique?) usage:
ἐπεὶ καὶ αὐτὸς ἐμεμψάμην ἔστιν ἃ ἐν τῇ ξυγγραφῇ τῶν Ἀλεξάνδρου ἔργων
περιφλέγει γὰρ ἔστιν ἃ τῶν πελασάντων
He was translated by Rouse for the Loeb Library, I believe. I can’t remember if Rouse pastiches Arrianus anywhere in Greek Boy, but I know that Wilson does once in the Harry Potter translation, for his description of a railway. (None of the reviewers mentioned neat facts like this, making me wonder how many of them had read the whole thing, tbh. The story does drag badly in the second half, but that’s not really Wilson’s fault.)
Let me try to make my problems with λείπομεν ἔστιν ἃ τῶν ᾠῶν clearer. I think the idiom ἔστιν ἅ etc. implies that there are (or were) specific members of a class – things or persons – in existence. I think that’s implicit in ἔστι. None of the examples of real Greek runs counter to this. In the examples, the members of the class are unspecified, and the author may not have known the identities of the class members specifically, but the idiom, in my understanding, implicitly asserts that specific, specifiable even if unspecified, class members exist or existed..
λείπομεν ἔστιν ἃ τῶν ᾠῶν may mean “we leave some of the eggs” on a habitual basis (though perhaps more context might clarify this), using the idiom simply as a quantifier equivalent to English “some.” In this case, though, the speaker is not talking about an existing subset of eggs – s/he seems to be talking about eggs that may be collected in the future, on a habitual basis, and are not necessarily in existence at the time of speaking.
And even if s/he’s using present tense λείπομεν in a punctual, as opposed to habitual, sense – “we’re leaving some of the eggs in the baskets” this time, right now – eggs are fungible items that I think can’t have sufficient individual specificity for the ἔστι ἅ idiom. (Actually, I think the semantics of such a punctual use in Greek would require either an aorist, “we left,” or a perfect, “we left and they’re still there,” or a future, “we’re going to/about to leave”; English “we are leaving” is semantically really future).
To me, this just feels weird. I could be wrong, of course.
I think that Rouse is obliquely referring to the following myth (?) about wild egg collection. I discovered it in some boy’s book (Tom Brown? Rascal?), but here is George Orwell:
In early spring we went after squirrels with squailers, and later on we went birdnesting. We had a theory that > birds can’t count > and it’s all right if you > leave one egg, > but we were cruel little beasts and sometimes we’d just knock the nest down and trample on the eggs or chicks.
A Google Books search shows it repeated in many places, dating back to at least 1841, but I didn’t search very hard.
EDIT:
It was Tom Brown. I suppose that Thomas Hughes would have been senior to Rouse at Rugby by about 40 years.
“Not a bit,” answered Tom; “you can’t hurt if you only get good hand-hold. Try every branch with a good pull before you trust it, and then up you go.”
Martin was now amongst the small branches close to the nest, and away dashed the old bird, and soared up above the trees, watching the intruder.
“All right—four eggs!” shouted he.
“Take 'em all!” shouted East; “that’ll be one a-piece.”
“No, no; leave one, and then she won’t care,” said Tom.
We boys had an idea that birds couldn’t count, and were quite content as long as you left one egg. I hope it is so.