It would not be completing the δῆλον, sitting after the ὅτι, right? Not "clear to us,” right?
Also correct.
And the verb is infinitive because ἀναγκαῖον takes an infinitive-accusative?
Not so much. Above it takes a dative complement + infinitive.
“So it is clear that it is necessary that we come to know first things by > epagōgē> ”?
(After this, I need to figure out why some manuscripts have ἡμἐν instead of ἡμῖν.)
Awkward English, what we sometimes call translationese, but otherwise correct. And no you don’t, not really. It’s simply a copyist variation and means the same thing.
Hi John, yes the first part of your post is right: ἡμῖν operates in its own ὅτι clause in the way you describe, and not with δῆλον.
See e.g. Cambridge Greek lexicon on ἀναγκαῖος, 8: in the neuter impersonal, it can take the dative with infinitive. The lexicon does not give examples unfortunately except in rare cases, but on this see e.g. Phaedo 75d: ὥστε ἀναγκαῖον ἡμῖν τούτων πάντων τὰς ἐπιστήμας πρὸ τοῦ γενέσθαι εἰληφέναι.
(So your reference later in the post to accusative plus infinitive would need to be updated.)
As to your last point on the textual robustness of this construction, it is interesting: a quick search seems to reveal that this is not a strongly attested construction in Aristotle. Ross’ apparatus shows that the alternative reading is ἡ μὲν (I’m sure that’s what you meant) — would be interesting to know what the indirect tradition has here.
EDIT: Barry posted at the same time. Agreed on Barry’s response which accords with mine (although I’m a little more curious about the textual point at the end perhaps).
But what of Barry’s claim that ἡμἐν and ἡμῖν meaning the same thing? Two spellings of the plural first-person dative?
Is ἡμἐν not a first person plural verb? If so, I don’t see what sense to make of the sentence.
Or did the manuscripts mean ἡ μἐν? How would that work? What would the meaning then be?
In at least two manuscripts, ἡ μ ἐ ν has been scratched out and replaced with ἡ μ ῖ ν. I presume multlple readers independently thought the ἡ μ ἐ ν was a mistake. They seem not to have thought it was an innocuous alternate.
I want to know whether those readers thought,
That is the wrong way to spell that word; I’ll change it.
What must Aristotle have said such that someone might have miscopied it as ἡ μ ἐ ν ? Oh, he probably meant the similar ἡ μ ῖ ν. I’ll change the text to that.
Hi John, apologies I only just saw your follow-up queries today.
Is ἡμἐν not a first person plural verb?
Nope, it is not a Greek word. Look at the second diacritical sign, which cannot be a smooth breathing (given its position in the word) or a coronis (as there is no crasis). It is a mistake.
Ross’ apparatus does not give this odd form, but gives ἡ μὲν in corrections to A and B. That does not seem to make sense in context either.
No idea about what happened in the history of the manuscripts here, but a simple correction of an odd form to ἡμῖν (as printed in the main text in Ross) may be the simplest possibility.
