χρῶνται δὲ τοῖς μένουσι τῶν ἐφήβων αἱ ἀρχαί, ἤν τι ἢ φρουρῆσαι δεήσῃ ἢ κακούργους ἐρευνῆσαι ἢ λῃστὰς ὑποδραμεῖν ἢ καὶ ἄλλο τι ὅσα ἰσχύος ἢ τάχους ἔργα ἐστί.
What is this τί? is it the direct object of φρουρῆσαι? or is it the subject of δεήσῃ? ἤν τι ἢ κακούργους ἐρευνῆσαι δεήσῃ?
ok it is the direct object of the implied χρῆσθαι.
No, it’s just an internal accusative with δεήσῃ (“if there’s a need”).
im afraid i dont understand this, coz δεήσῃ does not take Acc but Gen., maybe it is an adverbial Acc.?
…ἤν τι ἢ φρουρῆσαι δεήσῃ ἢ κακούργους ἐρευνῆσαι ἢ λῃστὰς ὑποδραμεῖν ἢ καὶ ἄλλο τι ὅσα ἰσχύος ἢ τάχους ἔργα ἐστί
…if there comes up something that either needs to be guarded or evildoers to be interrogated [?] or bandits to drive away [?] or something else whatever are jobs of strength or speed.
As you see, I took it as a direct object of φρουρῆσαι. Doing some lookup work to support my reading (which is only based on how it struck me when I read it, so take it for what it’s worth), δεήσῃ is impersonal, taking an infinitive with acc. pers. omitted here. See the LSJ entry for δεῖ, not δέω.
If I may, I humbly disagree, as mwh said this is an internal acc of dei but for clarity, I would call it adverbial accusative (which is internal). Cf. the following: πρῶτον μὲν ὥσπερ οἱ ἔφηβοι παρέχουσιν ἑαυτοὺς ταῖς ἀρχαῖς χρῆσθαι, ἤν τι δέῃ ὑπὲρ τοῦ κοινοῦ,
PS I read Cyr, with old commentaries by H. Holden (1887) and he suggests that τί here is a direct object of implied χρῆσθαι.
ἤν τι δέῃ ὑπὲρ τοῦ κοινοῦ made me think that the subject is τι “if something is needed”.
Looking in the LSJ, I see something similar to that with a dative person [X nom. needed by Y dat.]:
“4. rarely with Subj. in nom., δεῖ μοί τι something is needful to me, ἓν δεῖ μόνον μοι E.Supp.594; εἴ τι δέοι τῷ χορῷ Antipho6.12; πρῶτον μὲν τοῦτο δεῖ, ὑπειληφέναι . . D.10.15.”
Of course, I have no idea though without seeing a bunch of similar examples.
Here is what it is, whether you call it adverbial accusative or internal accusative – take your pick.
LSJ τις A.II.11.c:
joined with Verbs, somewhat, in any degree, at all, ἦ ῥά τί μοι κεχολώσεαι Il. 5.421; παρεθάρρυνέ τι αὐτούς X. HG 6.4.7, etc.: with Adjs. or Adverbs, οὕτω δή τι ἰσχυραί, οὕτω δή τι πολύγονον, etc., Hdt. 3.12, 108, cf. 4.52; so also ὀλίγον τι ἧσσον Od. 15.365; οὐδέ τι μᾶλλον Hdt. 6.123, etc.; ἧσσόν τι Th. 3.75, etc.; οὐ πάνυ τι, πολύ τι, σχεδόν τι, v. πάνυ I.3, πολύς III.1a, 2a, σχεδόν IV; also in conjunction with οὐδέν, μηδέν, οὐδέν τι πάντως Hdt. 6.3; οὐδέν, μηδέν τι μᾶλλον, E. Alc. 522, S. Aj. 280; μηδέν τι λίαν E. Andr. 1234:—also καί τι καὶ . . ὑποψίᾳ in part also from suspicion, Th. 1.107; καί πού τι καί Pi. O. 1.28.
yessssssssssss
That explanation would be workable if didn’t have that “ἢ καὶ ἄλλο τι” tacked on at the back.
There can’t really be any doubt that τι is an internal accusative with δεήσῃ (an adverbial acc., in Constantinus’ preferred terminology), not a direct object of φρουρῆσαι. There’s nothing out of the ordinary about it.
The intervening ἢ dissociates the τι from φρουρῆσαι, and the string of infinitives all depend on ἤν τι δεήσῃ. The word order makes it all perfectly clear.
Given the frequency of δεῖ with infinitive, there should be no need to “do lookup work” to understand the construction. If the infinitives had a subject—which they don’t—it would be in the accusative. “If there’s a need either to keep a lookout or to search for malefactors or to …”. The concluding ἢ καὶ ἄλλο τι etc. makes no difference to that.
ἢ καὶ ἄλλο τι – this τι is parallel to the infinitives φρουρῆσαι, ἐρευνῆσαι and ὑποδραμεῖν, not to the first τι.
" . . . if there should be some need [τι . . . δεήσῃ] for guard duty or tracking criminals or running down thieves or something else [ἢ καὶ ἄλλο τι] that calls for strength or speed."
Cross-posted with mwh.
Some issues here: φρουρῆσαι aorist doesn’t really mean “be on guard duty”. Do an act of guarding. Or better, if we had an object, “guard something.” And context-wise, guard duty is in no way a “reward” for your best youth and hardly fits here. The adverbial τι, “need a bit” is also out of place in context. “Some need” as Hylander puts it, is a bit of English-language cover for the weirdness.
If τι is an accusative object of the infinitive, then the disassociation of τι from φρουρῆσαι is exactly what does need to be explained, of course. Here’s one explanation: Xenophon envisioned each infinitive taking τι as the object, “should there be a need to guard something, investigate something, chase something…” but when he got to ἐρευνῆσαι, he began to specify a bit more explicitly. κακούργους, λῃστὰς. Another (worse, imo) explanation, though, might be the difficulty of ἤν ἢ forcing some word order rearrangement.
φρουρῆσαι is intransitive here. See LSJ “keep watch or guard.”
The infinitives aren’t “rewards” — they’re serious responsibilities that call for “strength and speed.”
This isn’t weird — it’s staightforward Greek. Adverbial/internal accusative τι is quite common and idiomatic. Take another look at the LSJ entry. The word order doesn’t need an explanation — it flows naturally if you read it instead of treating it as some sort of puzzle.
I have seen it. Please notice the tense in every example. What do you see?
And guard duty isn’t generally where you put your strongest and fastest. It’s not the first thing that Xenophon would have thought of here. “Defending something” on the other hand is a different matter.
The meaning of the adverbial is what is weird in this context, not the “Greek”. Take a careful look at what is being said.
φρουρέω is “guard,” not “defend.”
These are not the outstanding boys – these are the others, τοῖς μένουσι.
The infinitives are aorist because they’re thought of as happening on discrete occasions, not continuously. τι reinforces this.
That’s all I have to offer.
Just to note that I see we have ἢν δέ τι δεήσῃ a little earlier (para.11), where again τι is internal acc.
I can’t think Joel really believes in his misguided reading, but true to form he’s dug in his heels. I’ve had occasion before now to remark on his habitual obduracy. It’s alienating.
τι is clearly an internal accusative, like mwh said, not a direct object of φρουρῆσαι. It’s a common use of τι. I didn’t make it through all the posts above, but this seems straightforward.
Every aorist use of φρουρέω in Greek literature, at least until Chrysostomus (after which I gave up), takes an accusative object. The aorist is rarish (this is only occurrence in Attic prose), but there are a couple of dozen appearances before Chrysostomus. Twice, this is only a cognate “accusative of extent” with what we might call an otherwise absolute use (once in Herodotus, and once in Arrianus), but these are exceptions. Otherwise, the intransitive use only exists in the temporally bounded tenses, like the present, where it is common. It should have been obvious to any sensitive reader that φρουρέω is a word similar to ἔχω as far as tense and transitivity goes, and I have only bothered with looking all this up to make the point (to myself as much as you).
It should also have been obvious from the flow of accusatives in the sentence here that something was going on.
Michael, you would have noticed something like this 5 years ago. I don’t hold your ill-temperedness against you really, but it has grown progressively worse as your sensitivity to the language has diminished. Cephalus left the younger men to their argument.
Hylander, I appreciate your trying to engage. Your point about “guard” and “defend” precisely missed the point. I’m trying to get you to think about how an “act of guarding” is different from “guarding”.
For example, here is Siculus using the aorist: διόπερ ἀποίκους τε ἐξέπεμψαν εἰς τὴν Ἐπίδαμνον καὶ στρατιώτας ἱκανοὺς φρουρῆσαι τὴν πόλιν.
We’d naturally say that there were not enough troops to “defend the city” from the coming attack.
You are correct, now that I look at the context, that these are not a specially signaled out group of youth, but rather signaled out because of their youth exactly (meaning they are fast and strong because of their age). But the point remains what it was: simple guard duty is not thought of as requiring strength and speed, and would be a strange example to use here for a military man.
Phalakros: These constant posts about which threads you reading or not reading and which you have time for are increasingly surprising to me. I would have thought that you would have noticed that no one else does this. (We get it, you are a very very serious important person…but you’re still wasting your time on this dumb internet board with the rest of us, man.) Here though, I appreciated it, as it tells us that the comment comes from a place of being too lazy to engage, but still wanting to through in your opinion anyway.
Joel,
I found this post disrespectful. After a similar conflict in a previous thread, we corresponded over private message. We both agreed to be more respectful in any future Textkit interactions. My post above was intended to respond to the original question about τι. I read the sentence Constantinus posted and gave my thoughts, which didn’t add much of anything to the thread because it had already been discussed at length. I apologize if I gave the impression that I was antagonizing you. I was not, and I meant no disrespect. I was responding to Constantinus.
I’ve found almost all my interactions on Textkit to have been very friendly and mutually respectful. Personally, the thing I find most valuable about the site is how questions about Greek and Latin, particularly from beginning and intermediate students, are typically answered extremely well by several of the longtime posters. Usually far better than I at least could ever provide in a classroom with the constraint of limited time. And it’s all free! There are not many good, free resources for learners of Greek and Latin. Textkit is invaluable.
EDITED a few times for clarity–it is not easy to communicate intent online like this!