Perfect, including the verse-final δ’ου. It would be accented, δ’ οὔ. We await the complete tragedy.
ουκ οιδεν ουδεις ασφαλως ει μη θεος,
θεοισι γαρ ταδ’ εμφανη, βροτοισι δ᾽ου.
ημεις λιποντες τοις θεοισι ταυριον,
τερπωμεθ αυτοι οις φερει το σημερον.
Impressive. A born poet! I envy your skill. 
εὖγε, εὖγε.
ἀλλ’ οὐ θεῶν εἰσιν τὸ μαντικὸς γένος;
EDIT: With corrections from bedwere:
ἀλλ’ οὐ θεῶν ἐστιν τὸ μαντικὸν γένος;
And to make it make sense as a reply:
ἀλλ’ οὐ βροτῶν ἐστιν τὸ μαντικὸν γένος;
ουκ οιδεν ουδεις ασφαλως ει μη θεος,
θεοισι γαρ ταδ’ εμφανη, βροτοισι δ᾽ου.
ημεις λιποντες τοις θεοισι ταυριον,
τερπωμεθ αυτοι οις φερει το σημερον.
Hmm, a sententious poet, this. But as I think I said before, once you get into the swing of it they do flow like water don’t they?
Still, without taking anything away from the ευγεs, would λειπω be used like this? And that’s a very ugly hiatus in the last line. So ὥστ’ επιτρεποντες … τερπωμεθ’ ημεις …?
ἀλλ’ οὐ θεῶν ἐστιν τὸ μαντικὸν γένος;
You could make a trimeter out of this. αλλ εκ θεων ουκ εστι μαντικον γενος;
I was already playing with it to eliminate the hiatus. Does this work?
ουκ οιδεν ουδεις ασφαλως ει μη θεος,
θεοισι γαρ ταδ’ εμφανη, βροτοισι δ᾽ου.
τι δ’ουκ εωμεν ουν θεοισι ταυριον;
τερπωμεθ ημεις οις φερει το σημερον.
ΧΟΡΟΣ
βροτοί ἐκ μεγαλῶν μεγαλαυχιάων
ἑλληνίζειν προσποίουσιν.
ἀλλ᾽ οὐ δυνατὸν τοὺς ἀνοήτους
τούτων γνώμας προδιδάσκειν.
τοὺς δ᾽ ὅταν πληγὴ Διὸς ἤ Ἑκάτης
ἐμβέβληκει
σιγῇ πτήσσουσιν ἄφωνοι.
(I have borrowed “a little” from Sophocles; the first two lines, at least, are entirely my own!)
(As to what Hecate has to do with all this – ask me not. It fits the meter. You can dagger Ἑκάτης and assume the verse is corrupt beyond repair if you like.)
Or νῦν δ᾽ οὐ δυνατὸν, to make προσποίουσιν on the previous line scan.
Well just about but it’s not pretty, esp. with that ουν plonked in the middle there (better replaced by τοῖς as you had it before), and the dative looks odd with εωμεν just as it did with λιποντες. You could try something like
τι δ’ουκ εωμεν ταυριον; το σημερον
τερπωμεθ ημεις μαλλον οισπερ αν φερῃ, with το σημερον pulled out of its clause.
(or στεργωμεν ημεις οισπερ αν φερῃ κακοις, adapting the sentiment to “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof”)
But I prefer my modification of your first shot, επιτρεπω being the mot juste.
Paul, . Personally, I would dagger rather more than Ἑκάτης. But in the circumstances I don’t dare criticize!
EDIT. —And actually it’s pretty good, as well as very funny. But ignoring a handful of false accents, wouldn’t μεγαλαυχιάων have long alpha? And I’m not sure what’s going on with τοὺς δ᾽ ὅταν πληγὴ Διὸς ἤ Ἑκάτης ἐμβέβληκει. Would τοις δ’ (or οι δ’) οτε πληγη Διος εμβαλλει (better εμπιπτει) do? Great ending.
Switching meters,
“ουδεν προς Διονυσο …” τί δ’ ουδεν προς Διονυσον;
or “ουχι προς τον Ευιον.” τί; παντα προς τον Ευιον.
I give up. This is just too hard for me, and I’m wasting too much time on it.
ουν is ugly in other than the second position, but τοις θεοισ is ugly, tooι. As far as I can tell, θεοι doesn’t usually have an article. Yes, επιτρεπω is the mot juste, but I would never have thought of that on my own. Getting the penthemimeral, or even hephthemimeral, caesura right is impossible with my limited knowledge of Greek. I don’t have enough Greek vocabulary actively at my fingertips to do this successfully.
I’m not quite ἄφωνος yet! I believe I’ve corrected all the wrong accents and made a couple of improvements otherwise. I hesitated between μεγαληγοριῶν and μεγαλανοριῶν.
The pluperfect ἐμβέβληκει was an unsuccessful attempt to add an epic touch.
ΧΟΡΟΣ
βροτοὶ ἐκ μεγάλων μεγαλανοριῶν
ἑλληνίζειν προσποίουσιν·
νῦν δ᾽ οὐ δυνατὸν τοὺς ἀνοήτους
τούτων γνώμας προδιδάσκειν.
τοῖς δ᾽ ὅτε πληγὴ Διὸς ἐμπίπτει
σιγῇ πτήσσουσιν ἄφωνοι.
In a millennium or two, another M.L. West will claim that the poet of this fragment has copied verses from Sophocles; but he will hushed down by a clamorous majority according to whom tragedy was a traditional genre and the duplicated verses were part of a traditional repertory of formulas.
hi, an idiomatic way to express the meaning “only the gods know”, at least from plato, would be simply θεὸς οἶδε, e.g.:
phaedrus 266b-c: καὶ μέντοι καὶ τοὺς δυναμένους αὐτὸ δρᾶν εἰ μὲν ὀρθῶς ἢ μὴ προσαγορεύω, θεὸς οἶδε, καλῶ δὲ οὖν μέχρι τοῦδε διαλεκτικούς.
timaeus 53d: ταύτην δὴ πυρὸς ἀρχὴν καὶ τῶν ἄλλων σωμάτων ὑποτιθέμεθα κατὰ τὸν μετ᾽ ἀνάγκης εἰκότα λόγον πορευόμενοι: τὰς δ᾽ ἔτι τούτων ἀρχὰς ἄνωθεν θεὸς οἶδεν καὶ ἀνδρῶν ὃς ἂν ἐκείνῳ φίλος ᾖ.
all these iambics tris are making me want to practice again! a decade ago i did a set of my practice notes on these (my answers to sidgwick’s greek prose comp with notes, statistics i gathered on iambics, a summary of sidgwick on greek prose comp rules and moorhouse’s syntax of sophocles, etc.), on a website which has now disappeared into oblivion, but a ghost of the doc seems to survive online: http://docplayer.gr/3042620-Writing-greek-iambics-tragedy-my-notes-c-bochan-sydney-last-updated-30-june-2006.html . maybe i’ll go back to the drawing board and start working through this again.
ps to the original poster – did you climb mount zas on naxos? i did last year. for some reason, i decided to abandon the path on the way down and cut across the mountain hoping to find zeus’ cave (but with no map, or any actual idea of the direction). ended up in a field of razor sharp plants and some sort of eagle-looking birds circling overhead, with no human beings in sight, and the path long lost. was fun!
cheers, chad
ps here’s my quick attempt at the expression in iambic tri (i’m out of practice! probably riddled with errors). the expression to be turned calls to mind a phrase that euripides uses many times for “no human being”, eg :
hecuba 864: οὐκ ἔστι θνητῶν / ὅστις ἔστ᾽ ἐλεύθερος
(one of my favourite lines, and also the one i use to remember the frequent (from memory the most frequent) jingle in iambic tri in tragedy - positions 1 and 5 heavy, position 9 light - giving the jingle --u-- / -u-u-ux)
heracleidae 977: οὐκ ἔστι θνητῶν / ὅστις ἐξαιρήσεται.
and so to get a play on ideas as so often appears in tragedy (here, he who knows that only the gods know is wiser), i put:
οὐκ ἔστι θνητῶν / ὅστις οἶδ’· ὁ δὴ θεούς
μόνους νομίζων / εἰδέναι σοφώτερος.
i’m definitely thinking of getting back into this, just for practice. btw:
-
i didn’t make the accent in θεούς grave, following west, e.g. in his teubner aeschylus, where he said in the intro pg xxxi: “Oxytona in versus fine non sunt ‘sopienda’ (οὐ δεῖ κοιμίζειν τὸν τόνον), nam etsi sententia nullam pausam facit (which is def. the case in my lines), versus pausam facit”
-
i always find it more interesting to know how someone put together a copy - the copy itself is almost irrelevant (which is why i find answer keys to greek prose/verse comp textbooks useless. i used to wish that someone would create something like the porson prize but where contestants needed to explain for each line why they did what they did…) and so in case anyone is curious, i started with the euripidean expression οὐκ ἔστι θνητῶν / ὅστις, and knew i wanted to finish with σοφώτερος for the play on ideas, and so this left me with:
οὐκ ἔστι θνητῶν / ὅστις - x - u x
x - u - x - u - σοφώτερος.
next i looked up a nice book i have by sargent called “models and materials for greek iambic verse”. it arranges verses from tragedy by theme. i went to the “god” theme and found the line from euripides: τοῦτον νόμιζε Ζῆνα· τόνδ’ ἡγοῦ θεόν. that made me think of using ὁ νομίζων for the substantive idea “he who thinks…” and then i mentally filled in the words δαίμονας μόνους and i kept open the idea “to know” since there are lots of options. now the word νομίζων, having the shape u - -, always lives at position 3 in the iambic tri (see dik 1998, table 37, here; https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/12307/illinoisclassica231998DIK.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y), and so this gave:
οὐκ ἔστι θνητῶν / ὅστις - x - u x
x - νομίζων / - u - σοφώτερος.
this then left a cretic shape after it, and so i put in the simplest word there εἰδέναι. i then put δαίμονας at the end of the first line, the only available spot now, and so μόνους at the start of the second line, giving:
οὐκ ἔστι θνητῶν / ὅστις - x δαίμονας
μόνους νομίζων / εἰδέναι σοφώτερος.
i needed still to put in the definite article ὁ, leaving only a single long space for the verb to know, giving οἶδε elided. this gave:
οὐκ ἔστι θνητῶν / ὅστις οἶδ’· ὁ δαίμονας
μόνους νομίζων / εἰδέναι σοφώτερος.
but the lack of any particle with connective force felt too blunt and so i changed δαίμονας to θεούς, leaving a space for δή.
cheers, chad
Hi chad,
I believe I saw your Sidgwick notes when they were in legible form. I guess the verse comp book leads to a good feel for the workings of the trimeter, but I didn’t even know of its existence when I was learning. In college I was foolhardy enough to sign up for an optional exam in Greek Verse Composition, but I had nothing to help me prepare for it other than the Greek texts themselves, plus some outrageously clever modern compositions that I knew I’d never be able to emulate or even appreciate. I suppose I must have had something that told me about anceps and caesura and Porson and suchlike. Then when the schedule of exams came out, Greek Verse Composition was nowhere to be seen. An exam had to be scheduled and set just for me, and that gave me a full two weeks to prepare for it, two weeks I spent doing nothing but soaking myself in stichic verse (only stichic—I skipped all the choruses—not recommended reading practice!), underlining words I didn’t know and locutions I wanted to remember (I still have the marked-up books), until I was practically thinking in trimeters and elegiacs etc, so I did well on the exam (the examiners must have had no-one to compare me with). I’ve never practiced since, till here on Textkit. Sorry to be so anecdotal, I’m not usually this chatty, but your good post kind of encouraged it.
So I’ve never thought in terms of 9th position and suchlike—I’d find that difficult, counting them all out that way—but only of the three metra and the line’s dynamics which I absorbed by osmosis—more organically, in a word. I must say I prefer that approach. Hardly anyone does verse composition today (perhaps noone at all in the States, which is where I now am), and that’s fine by me, but it does impress on one how the thing works.
Your explanation of how you came up with your version is instructive. It’s a very self-conscious method, but one that must lead to good results. For me it would be instinctive to put a word shaped like νομιζων/ει directly before the caesura, without having to think about it; and I don’t like to work backwards. — Wouldn’t it be fascinating to have Sophocles explain how he set about composing his verses? But would he be able to say?
Michael
PS. Paul, That’s funny. Let’s agree to call the verses authentic.
hi michael, i always find it super interesting to hear about how people like you have learnt and think about these things, having had a real classical education. there used to be someone on this forum a few years ago - username whiteoctave, one of the few in the last few hundred years to win all 4 prizes in the same year at cambridge from memory (porson prize for grk verse comp, plus the medals for grk prose comp, latin verse comp and latin prose comp) - i found his stories about this so interesting (he was kind enough to share them with me). like you, he had to have special sessions with experts, as demand wasn’t great enough for a full class.
i on the other hand haven’t had a classics education, and so have had to collect as much info as i could to invent a technique (the textbooks don’t give you this - they give you the ingredients section but the recipe is missing), to work out how to do manually what you do automatically - or at least to have a benchmark against which i could assess whether what i was doing was consistent with ancient texts, as i’ve never had a teacher who could say, “that’s wrong”, “better to put this word here”, “why don’t you say X instead of Y”, “did you think about using this particle given the context”, etc. but after a bit it did become natural and the “position 3 etc” language is just to give an objective way of explaining my process - the words naturally gravitate towards their preferred slots, so no need to think about caesurae etc., e.g. a bacchic and a cretic finding their preferred spots either side of the caesura form the caesura all by themselves.
i get the feeling that lots of non-strophic classical poetry might have been composed in a similar way, eg so often it seems that vergil and others laid down two dominant (and syntactically related) words, one next to the caesura and another at the end, and then built out the rest after that, rather than working from left to right: … tenui / … avena; … artem / … amandi, etc. but that’s just a feeling. as you say, the poets themselves might not be able to explain how they do what comes to them as naturally as breathing, cheers, chad
To Chad:
I’ve been climbing the mountain (if you can call it climbing - more walking) several times as I’m regularly visiting Naxos. We have an apartement there. The cave is pretty easy to find depending on which route you take. Did you start from Agia Marina ? Then the cave is on the other side. If you take the route just after Filoti it will take you 10-15 minutes to find it. They have built an entrance of concrete around the cave, so you might walk past it.