X. An. 1.1.6

ὁπόσας εἶχε φυλακὰς ἐν ταῖς πόλεσι παρήγγειλε τοῖς φρουράρχοις ἑκάστοις λαμβάνειν ἄνδρας Πελοποννησίους ὅτι πλείστους καὶ βελτίστους, ὡς ἐπιβουλεύοντος Τισσαφέρνους ταῖς πόλεσι.

Why is ὁπόσας fem. acc. pl. here?

It agrees with φυλακὰς, accusative plural of φυλακή

I remember you had trouble with this earlier Mitch (yes, Nov.26 2024), and I thought we’d cleared it up then. Do you still have a problem with something here?

@Michael - Ah, groan, thanks I thought I might have asked about this previously but couldn’t find my old post. But I’ve found it now:

http://discourse.textkit.com/t/relatively-confused/20941/1

and will read it through again.

(@MattK - BTW I thought it was φυλαχ here not φυλακη which was why I got confused.)

Anyway, after struggling through X. An. 1.1 it seemed best for me to put Xenophon aside and finish working through chapters 51 and 52 of CGCG to get better grounded in the use of particples and inifinitives. And having done that I’ve come back to reading the Anabasis and have now made it up to the end of An. 1.2. And FWIW the second chapter (section? part?) seemed much easier than the first, maybe because there’s lots of repetition (e.g. “He marched…then he marched…and then he marched…”) though many more unfamiliar nouns.

But having finished the second chapter (of book 1? not sure of correct terminology, is it X. An. book.chapter.verse?) I decided to go back to the beginning and read through the first two chapters again (having learned this from Joel who once said in some old post somewhere that to understand a passage you often need to read it over again and again) and so here I am once again stumbling over relative clauses :stuck_out_tongue:

But I’m slowly getting there :wink:

Thanks again to both of you.

I still want to get a solid grip on what’s happening here grammar-wise. Is it correct to say that ὁπόσας εἶχε φυλακὰς ἐν ταῖς πόλεσι is a reduced (i.e. autonomous) (cor)relative clause since there’s no antecedent in the matrix (i.e. main) clause? It seems to me that the implied antecedent is actually the cities that Cyrus has control of and which used to belong to Tissaphernes…and if this is correct then could one also say that the antecedent here is incorporated into the relative clause itself?

The implicit antecedent of the relative clause would be τοσῶν/τοσουτῶν φυλακῶν, dependent on τοῖς φρουράρχοις ἑκάστοις, literally, “to each of the commanders of as many garrisons as he had in the cities.”

φυλακῶν is “incorporated” into the relative clause as φυλακὰς. The underlying structure is something like this:

παρήγγειλε τοῖς φρουράρχοις ἑκάστοις τοσουτῶν φυλακῶν ὁπόσας εἶχε ἐν ταῖς πόλεσι …

But the fronting of the relative clause and the “incorporation” of φυλακῶν are more idiomatic Greek.

Thanks Bill, but let me see if I’ve got all this straight:

  1. The relative clause is reduced since the demonstrative τοσουτος isn’t present in the matrix clause.

  2. The implicit antecedent is [τοσουτῶν] φυλακῶν because the main verb παρήγγειλε of the matrix clause conveys the idea that Cyrus passed word to each of the commanders of some garrisons (τοῖς φρουράρχοις ἑκάστοις τοσουτῶν φυλακῶν).

  3. The antecedent φυλακῶν is incorporated into the (cor)relative clause as φυλακὰς.

  4. The relative clause identifies those garrisons as being in the (previously reffered to) cities, which means it’s a restrictive relative clause as it identifies the antecedent.

  5. The overall effect is as if the sentence had been written like this:

παρήγγειλε τοῖς φρουράρχοις ἑκάστοις τοσουτῶν φυλακῶν ὁπόσας εἶχε ἐν ταῖς πόλεσι…

which would (literally) translate as “He passed word to each of the commanders of so many garrisons as he had in the cities…”

Have I got all this straight? :slight_smile:

Mitch, Enough from me, but It was my post of Nov.26 that I referred you back to, where I wrote as follows:

It’s acc. because it’s the object of εἶχε (lit. as many φυλακαι as he had), and the subject will be Cyrus. If τοις φρουραρχοις came earlier in the sentence we’d more probably have ὁποσων ειχε φυλακῶν, with relative attraction, or more fully ἁπασων ὁποσας ειχε φυλακάς, but he kicks off with the φυλακαι.

I think you have it right now.

@Michael - Thanks but my confusion on this my second reading of the passage was that I thought the word here was φυλαχ (masc.) not φυλακη (fem.) which clouded my understanding of how the word related to ὁπόσας.

But I think I’ve got it straight now :slight_smile: