My translation: “So I must try to relate that which each won by lot.” Corrections welcome.
The verbal adjective is: πειρατέον. I translate this “it is necessary to try” or “I ought to try.”
My issue is that I cannot “feel” this form. For me it does not “map” well into English. How did any translator ever know that it means “it is necessary to try” or “I ought to try.” I don’t think we have a parallel structure in English.
By the way, this instance is my first encounter “in the wild” with any verbal adjective. My online study group is reading the Symposium now.
The forms do show up, and I suppose I’ve mostly noticed them in Plato. This is πειράω + τέος. The neuter singular is impersonal, so πειρατέον εἰπεῖν “it needs to be attempted to say”.
In English we have “-able” to nounify the possibility of an action. In my regular speech, the equivalent to this that comes to mind is “ya gotta try and say…”
Since this is an impersonal expression, “one ought to try” or even, in context, “we ought to try” would seem better than “I ought to try”.
Many things in Greek don’t map word for word onto English. But this expression doesn’t require a great effort to translate into idiomatic English. In any case, it would be better to avoid mapping and try to read and understand the Greek text without translating word for word.
Hi, I try to understand Greek texts in Greek too, without translating. But with this verbal adjective I have a problem to understand it directly in Greek. There is nothing similar in my native language. How do you do it? Do you have a trick to start understanding it directly in Greek?
There’s no trick to it, you just need to understand the -τέον ending. Without leaving Greek you can think of it as equivalent to δεῖ + infinitive (“gotta" as Joel has it, i.e. signaling necessity or obligation).
Incidentally, on ἃ δ᾽ οὖν ἑκάτερος εἴληχε, “that which each won by lot” would be more like ὅπερ ἑκάτερος ἔλαχε, aorist. Here we have the perfect: the things that each has been allotted, their respective provinces.
Thanks, the δεῖ is a good idea. I found some simple sentences with verbal adjectives. I’ll try to learn to understand these sentences directly in Greek. Here they are, if that helps anyone too: