mwh wrote:Have you (pl.) been misled by the optatives? As I indicated above, they are purely a function of the narrative’s being in past sequence.
In primary sequence, or in direct speech, they’d be aor.indic. What she's to be imagined as exclaiming is something like
“O Laius, my erstwhile husband, with what bitterness I call to mind the long-ago spermata which caused your death [not “would cause”] and my childbearing … O marriage bed, where in my two-fold wretchedness I gave birth [not “would give birth”] to husband from husband and to children from child.”
It’s a perfectly dreadful outcome of her love-making, to be sure (witness her two δυσ- compounds), but there’s no suggestion here of the historical inevitability of it. Fated or not, it happened. That is the stark reality she is confronted with.
One of the best things ever written on the OT, btw, in my view, is E.R. Dodds’ On misunderstanding the Oedipus Rex. Googling it will turn up a pdf, and it’s reprinted in Harold Bloom’s collection of essays on the play. (Not that I want in any way to promote Bloom.)
Some of the terminology in Cooper and Steadman is never explained, for example
secondary sequence[1] which has to do with a relationship between
two clauses where the first clause has an indicative historical (secondary) tense/aspect and the second clause is an optative or whatever. The problem word is
sequence. This metalanguage isn't used very much outside of classical philology. I found in the index of a hundred year old NT Grammar, AT Robertson where the readier is redirected to see "indirect discourse."
Wikipedia:
The optative mood is used in a subordinate clause that is governed by a past tense verb (secondary sequence).
Soph. OT 1271 where the optative is FUTURE.
Ἀποσπάσας γὰρ εἱμάτων χρυσηλάτους
περόνας ἀπ' αὐτῆς, αἷσιν ἐξεστέλλετο,
1270
ἄρας ἔπαισεν ἄρθρα τῶν αὑτοῦ κύκλων,
αὐδῶν τοιαῦθ', ὁθούνεκ' οὐκ ὄψοιντό νιν
οὔθ' οἷ' ἔπασχεν οὔθ' ὁποῖ' ἔδρα κακά,
ἀλλ' ἐν σκότῳ τὸ λοιπὸν οὓς μὲν οὐκ ἔδει
ὀψοίαθ', οὓς δ' ἔχρῃζεν οὐ γνωσοίατο.
For he broke off the golden pins from her raiment, with which she was adorned, and lifting up his eyes struck them, uttering such words as these: that they should not see his dread sufferings or his dread actions, but in the future they should see in darkness those they never should have seen, and fail to recognise those he wished to know.
— Lloyd-Jones LCL Harvard 1994
The optative is FUTURE. Cooper (2:53.7.8.A v3 P2395) who cites Soph. OT 1271, states:
"The
future optative does not appear before Pindar, and is used primarily in O.O (indirect discourse) of the secondary (historical)
sequence to represent a future of implied direct discourse (O.R.)"
[1]Steadman used it in reference to
ὄψοιντό.
C. Stirling Bartholomew