εὐθὺς ἀποκαθαίρει τὴν χεῖρα
this is middle 2 pers. sing., Why in all dictionaries is it given under the active signification?
Here it’s middle 2d sing.; active 3rd sing. is identical.
yes, but this very phrase, Cyr1, 3, 5 is cited in all dictionaries under the active meaning, whereas in the text, in all editions it is 2 sing med. I would expect the dictionaries to cite it in the med. rubric. From Bailly:
ἀπο·καθαίρω [κᾰᾰ] 1 nettoyer : τὴν χεῖρα εἰς τὰ χει-
ρόμακτρα, XÉn. Cyr. 1, 3, 5, s’essuyer la main aux serviettes ;
whereas under the middle another meaning is mentioned:
Moy. se purifier
Maybe, I don’t understand how the dictionaries work.
Most manuscripts have ἀποκαθαίρεις there (which the dictionaries refer to). One ἀποκαθαίρῃ. Marchant doesn’t give a source for ἀποκαθαίρει, so I assume it’s his fix. (Maybe not a fix, given the middle meaning, though it is a self-cleaning action.)
ἀποκαθαίρεις is clearly the reading that the lexica were following. LSJ implies that’s what Marchant has too. Joel reports that the middle is also attested (the difference between -ῃ and -ει being merely orthographic). I don’t know which has the greater authority, nor which is right (I’d have thought the active was acceptable), and it’s hardly worth discussing.
It’s not. The entry predates the Marchant OCTs and wasn’t ever revised to reflect Marchant’s emendation here.
If the middle is a manuscript reading, it may not be Marchant’s emendation? But as I say, it’s not worth discussing without better data, and probably not even then. Threads here do tend to be dragged out to no good purpose.
One ms. has -ῃ; the rest have -εις. As Joel says, -ει seems to be Marchant’s conjecture, an attempt to reconcile the middle with the reading of the other mss. But the truth seems irrecoverable and less than unimportant.
Before we leave this thread entirely (and I can think of one way it could have been shorter), let’s take a moment to remember that at some point someone is going to have to revise the LSJ entry for ἀποκαθαίρει or the Xenophon text, assuming that the AI haven’t taken all this over by then.
…And dismissing the Marchant suggestion to the apparatus is obviously preferable. As a middle use it doesn’t fit with the other middle uses, though it can be justified based upon self-cleaning. He was being far too cutesy about trying to incorporate a single divergent manuscript reading.