I often see, in the exercises in M, a verb such as e.g., “καθιστaναι” = “to establish”, being translated as “try to establish”.(e,g,. M25.III.11). I have seen that translation in a few places so far. I can’t find any mention of a rule concerning that construction in M (I might have missed it).
Can anyone clarify this?
Thanks to all.
The infinitive, καθιστάναι, has the present stem and is used in indirect speech.
It’s direct-speech equivalent would have the same stem, the present stem, but could be either in the present tense or in the imperfect tense. This is because the present tense and the imperfect tense both use the present stem.
See M. page 168, “(Thus an imperfect inidicative in a direct statement becomes a present infinitive in an indirect statement.)”
In this case, the imperfect is used in its conative meaning, “try to …”
See M. page 165, “Because the present stem implies action not yet completed, its meaning is often conative: that is, it expresses an action begun, attempted, or intended…”
ὁ μὲν Σωκλῆς οὐ δίκαιον ἡγεῖσθαι ἔφη τοὺς Λακεδαιμονίους βασιλείας καθιστάναι εἰς τὰς πόλεις, οἱ δ’ ἄλλοι πάντες πρῶτον μὲν εἶχον ἐν ἡσυχίᾳ ἑαυτούς, ἔπειτα δ’ ἅπας τις αὐτῶν φωνὴν ἔρρηξε [“let loose his voice”: i.e., “broke into speech”] καὶ ᾑρεῖτο τὴν ἐκείνου γνώμην. καὶ οὕτως ἐκέλευον οἱ σύμμαχοι τοὺς Λακεδαιμονίους μηδὲν ποιεῖν δεινὸν περὶ πόλιν Ἑλληνικήν [“Hellenic” or “Greek”].
Either the present or imperfect can be used of an attempted action. I don’t think it’s possible to distinguish here in the referenced exercise. Same as last thread: the Greek gets across the completeness/incompleteness of the action better than the time.
Also, a translator saying that they were “trying” to do it is a little opinionated. They are or were in the midst of doing it, and may not be in any doubt of eventual success.
That’s a good point, thanks. It would be better to say that it was the conative sense of the imperfective aspect. It could apply to either an imperfect or present tense.
Jeidsath, how did you get the paragraph from the book to show up on your reply? It doesn’t look like it was scanned from the book, there’s no “curvature of the page” showing, as there would be if you had simply opened the book to that page and put it face down on a scanner.
Thanks.
To katalogon and jeidsath who have replied so far, thanks very much - your replies have been very enlightening.
Also, a translator saying that they were “trying” to do it is a little opinionated. They are or were in the midst of doing it, and may not be in any doubt of eventual success.
I wouldn’t say “opinionated.” It’s true that such a translation is strictly speaking an interpretation of the Greek, which would need more context to validate or falsify it, but Mastronarde is making the point that the infinitive is present tense (“imperfective”) not aorist.
And this does not mean that they are or were “in the midst” of doing it. They may be just at the start. They hadn’t yet done it, that’s all.
Asterisk1234, I just wanted to point out, in case you were looking closely at what I wrote in my first post, that I made a mistake in analyzing the sentence.
The infinitive, καθιστάναι, has the present stem and is used in indirect speech.
This is wrong. I blundered. καθιστάναι here is the subject infinitive of a clause containing an impersonal expression. Here the impersonal expression is a predicate adjective, and the copula is not expressed. καθιστάναι has nothing to do with the two levels of indirect speech found in the sentence.
See M. bottom of page 78 for subject infinitive with predicate adjective. And also bottom of page 79 for the same thing but with subject accusative of the infinitive.
I find that unravelling levels of indirection in complex sentences can help in getting to the essence of the sentence and prevent errors of the type that I made with καθιστάναι.
This sentence is a good example for that process.
So to go through the sentence with care removing the two levels of indirect speech.
Start
ὁ μεν Σωκλῆς οὐ δίκαιον ἡγεῖσθαι ἔφη τοὺς Λακεδαιμονίους βασιλείας καθιστάναι εἰς τὰς πόλις,
Add in the unexpressed copula (εἶναι) for clarity. The infinitive form εἶναι is required due to the indirect speech verb ἡγεῖσθαι.
ὁ μεν Σωκλῆς οὐ δίκαιoν εἶναι ἡγεῖσθαι ἔφη τοὺς Λακεδαιμονίους βασιλείας καθιστάναι εἰς τὰς πόλις,
Remove the indirect speech verb ἔφη (causing the infinitive ἡγεῖσθαι to become finite)
ὁ μεν Σωκλῆς οὐ δίκαιoν εἶναι ἡγεῖται τοὺς Λακεδαιμονίους βασιλείας καθιστάναι εἰς τὰς πόλις,
Remove the indirect speech verb ἡγεῖται and the subject ὁ Σωκλῆς (causing the infinitive εἶναι to become finite)
οὐ δίκαιόν ἐστι τοὺς Λακεδαιμονίους βασιλείας καθιστάναι εἰς τὰς πόλις,
Remove the copula in the remaining predicate adjective clause
οὐ δίκαιον τοὺς Λακεδαιμονίους βασιλείας καθιστάναι εἰς τὰς πόλις,
This leaves us back at the example in M. bottom of page 79.
οὐ δίκαιον τοὺς πολίτας λείπειν τὰ παιδία.
So now we are back to just your original question regarding the appropriate translation into English of the infinitive καθιστάναι, given that the infinitive has imperfective (present-stem) aspect, which jeidsath and mwh have addressed.
katalogon, I don’t think your original statement was wrong. καθιστάναι is in indirect speech, after all, governed by ἡγεῖσθαι.
And with respect, I’d query your step 3. ἡγεῖσθαι could represent either ἡγεῖται or ἡγεῖτο. (Indeed, as it stands, τοὺς Λακεδαιμονίους could be its subject!) And your entire procedure, adding things in and then taking them out again, strikes me as unnecessarily cumbersome.
Other imperfectives to observe here are εἶχον, ᾑρεῖτο, ἐκέλευον and ποιεῖν—none of them conative, btw.
καθιστάναι could be translated “set about establishing.” That’s often a good translation for imperfectives. Sometimes the imperfect tense is best translated as a simple past tense (no differently from the aorist), but in reading it’s important always to register the tense and to distinguish imperfect from aorist.
—But I’m only posting here to divert me from doing my taxes. 
Never do today what you can put off to tomorrow. Something tells me that won’t be in Erasmus’ collection of maxims.
mwh thanks for the feedback.
Ι’d query your step 3. ἡγεῖσθαι could represent either ἡγεῖται or ἡγεῖτο.
Yes, the finite ↔ infinitive mapping is not one-to-one. I could have transformed the infinitive into an imperfect. But the idea was just to see if unwrapping the layers of indirection might be useful, and so I didn’t care about that.
It is cumbersome but I would only do something like this if I had a confusing case of several levels of indirection.
What initially confused me about the sentence was that M. decided in this case to leave the copula εἶναι in the predicate adjective expression unexpressed.
So the idea was to reinsert the copula in order to make the indirect speech construction involving ἠγεῖσθαι clear.
ὁ μεν Σωκλῆς οὐ δίκαιoν εἶναι ἡγεῖσθαι ἔφη τοὺς Λακεδαιμονίους βασιλείας καθιστάναι εἰς τὰς πόλις,
In the above, I take εἶναι to be governed by the indirect-speech verb ἡγεῖσθαι. That is, the copula is forced to be infinitive by ἡγεῖσθαι.
Without the εἶναι included, it wasn’t initially clear to me how the indirect speech was put together.
I take (τοὺς Λακεδαιμονίους βασιλείας καθιστάναι εἰς τὰς πόλις) to be the neuter accusative singular subject of εἶναι. The predicate adjective of εἶναι is δίκαιoν, agreeing in case, number and gender with the subject (τοὺς Λακεδαιμονίους βασιλείας καθιστάναι εἰς τὰς πόλις).
So that is why I said that καθιστάναι has nothing to do with the two chained indirect speech constructions.
I had in mind the example in M. middle of page 169,
δίκαιον τὸν ἄνδρα φαμὲν εἶναι.
mwh wrote:
Sometimes the imperfect tense is best translated as a simple past tense (no differently from the aorist), but in reading it’s important always to register the tense and to distinguish imperfect from aorist.
And other times (as follows from this whole discussion), the translation might need “set about” or “tried to.”
Some verbs are “lexicaly perfective” in a given language. In English verbs like “catch,” “buy,” “solve,” and–“establish” belong to that group. Putting them into the progressive present (“is buying”) gives us the idea of successful but still incomplete action (or perhaps ongoing success in repeated action). The progressive past (“was buying”) would usually suggest repeated, successful completion.
Another language might handle such verbs differently, so that imperfective fish-catch might mean “be fishing,” while the perfective of that verb meant “catch a fish.” Imperfective shoe-buy might mean “shopping for shoes,” while the perfective might mean “buy shoes.”
I’m saying that when you translate a verb from Greek, you might need to consider the lexical aspect of that verb in the “to” language to decide whether “trying to” is appropriate.
“Sic fiet, ut minus ex crastino pendeas, si hodierno manum inieceris. Dum differtur, vita transcurrit.”
Not Erasmus of course but where he found his inspiration no doubt.
Greek communicates that the action is not completed (being carried out) with the present tense. If anyone is interested in going deeper, then Rijksbaron’s Syntax and Semantics is well worth reading (I wish that was the Rijksbaron book that people here were hawking rather than CGCG) and it is worth thinking about the ideas that he is trying to get across.
But the point of the original post was not to quibble with anyone, but to express the fact as simply as I know how for someone trying to learn Greek. The discussion of the multitude of ways to express in English a human mental process that has been filtered through the medium of the Greek language is wonderful, but trying to pursue that at the same time as learning Greek is counterproductive, in my opinion. What drove my comment is the conviction that drumming the categories of the different uses of the present tense into students, or the categories of the use of participles, is mostly a harmful way to think of it at the learning to read stage, because they are a translation concept, not an understanding concept. The learner needs a grasp of the flexibility of the expression, not the categories.
I said opinionated translation, not bad translation, because it communicated a particular fact about the underlying idea – one that may be probable, though in an exercise there’s no real context – rather than sticking to the precise information that the Greek communicated.
I like this a lot, from a previous discussion of the same sentence:
Hearing the Greek, a listener could generally tell you whether the indirect speech was a completed action or an ongoing action, but not always past/present except by context.
It has always bothered me that what happens inside the brain of a native listener is not same as what happens inside the brain of a reader of a translation.
I’ve been wondering about that. The answer key translates καθιστάναι as an infinitive: "…it was unjust for the Lacedemonious to establish etc. Thus not as an “infinitive of indirect discourse”, but as a plain everyday infinitive..
Very confusing…
You can’t go by a translation, you have to understand the Greek syntax.
διδασκαλος εστι “he’s a teacher”
ηγουμαι αυτον διδασκαλον ειναι “I think he’s a teacher” or “I consider him to be a teacher.” Can be translated either way.
In the given sentence it doesn’t help to think of καθιστάναι as “a plain everyday infinitive.” It’s the infinitive in an acc.&infin. construction governed by ηγεισθαι governed in turn by εφη.
I would have thought that, as katalogon has it, καθιστάναι was governed by δίκαιον, with an implied εἶναι governed by ἡγεῖσθαι. What he thinks is: ου δικαιον εστι/ην τους Λακεδαιμονιους βασιλειας καθισταναι.
Well yes, isn’t that what we’ve been saying?
“S. said (εφη) that he thought (ηγεισθαι) it not right (ου δικαιον, sc. ειναι if you must) that the Lacs. were setting up (τους Λακ. καθισταναι) .,.. “
What’s the problem?