Verbal repetition in Greek Tragedy ...

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C. S. Bartholomew
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Verbal repetition in Greek Tragedy ...

Post by C. S. Bartholomew »

is it "marked language rather than just an idiosyncratic solecism"

Soph. OT 399ff
ὃν δὴ σὺ πειρᾷς ἐκβαλεῖν, δοκῶν θρόνοις
παραστατήσειν τοῖς Κρεοντείοις πέλας.
Κλαίων δοκεῖς μοι καὶ σὺ χὠ συνθεὶς τάδε
ἁγηλατήσειν· εἰ δὲ μὴ 'δόκεις γέρων
εἶναι, παθὼν ἔγνως ἂν οἷά περ φρονεῖς.
{ΧΟ.} Ἡμῖν μὲν εἰκάζουσι καὶ τὰ τοῦδ' ἔπη
ὀργῇ λελέχθαι καὶ τὰ σ', Οἰδίπου, δοκεῖ.

"Let us be honest: this sort of thing, even in Sophocles, is bad writing." Pickering p. 27 who quotes this from another work to disagree with it. (thanks to Michael for pointing this out).

Comment on chapter two in Pickering "Verbal repetition in Greek Tragedy":

I appears that there is a large body of tradition in classical studies devoted to this topic, much of which is of very questionable linguistic merit. The idea that repetition is bad writing or careless presumes that the ancient authors critics both ancient and modern have some sort of valid set of criteria by which repetitions can be categorized. Reading chapter two of Pickering leads one to suspect that this is a fallacy.
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Re: Verbal repetition in Greek Tragedy ...

Post by mwh »

To be honest, as I quickly read through this I was not aware of any repetition. Then looking back I saw that δοκειν had been used three times (correction: four!). But each use is so perfectly in place, so “naturally” used as it were, and without the sort of positional or syntactical consistency that would bring out the recurrence, that I just hadn’t registered them collectively, any more than I would have registered four occurrences of some form of ειναι within the same space.

402 ἐδόκεις did strike me, though not as a repetition of δοκεῖς in the previous line. I found it a little jarring for him to say “if you didn’t seem to be an old man” rather than just “if you weren’t an old man.” But that only shows I’m not as good a reader of Sophocles as I’d like to be.

It’s the very opposite of “bad writing.” The whole speech is a magnificent piece of writing, coming as it does as the climax of his set-to with Teiresias. Neither Aeschylus nor Euripides was capable of such expressive representation. I doubt whether either Sophocles or spectators or ordinary readers would have been aware of the multiple occurrences of the same very common verb peppering a speech of such power and passion.

Housman made the valid observation that the ancient Greeks were less sensitive to repetition than the Romans were, or than modern authors are (or have been until recently). The fact that he called it as a “fault” should not be taken at face value; he was good at irony.

The closest thing to repetition that did impress itself on my consciousness was those weighty mutually reinforcing participles in the conclusion, κλαίων and παθών, each up front. That's repetition of a kind.

PS I’m aware that this post may seem (or even be) “of very little linguistic merit."

PPS "Let us be honest: this sort of thing, even in Sophocles, is bad writing."
This quote comes from an article by A.B. “Zeus” Cook published in 1902. I don’t know if anyone agreed with it then. I can’t imagine anyone agreeing with it today.
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Re: Verbal repetition in Greek Tragedy ...

Post by C. S. Bartholomew »

mwh wrote: PS I’m aware that this post may seem (or even be) “of very little linguistic merit.”
I am not implying that classical philology is inherently inferior to "modern" linguistics [post-Saussure]. Carl Conrad and I have gone around that subject often enough.
mwh wrote: PPS "Let us be honest: this sort of thing, even in Sophocles, is bad writing."
The quote comes from an article by A.B. “Zeus” Cook published in 1902. I don’t know if anyone agreed with it then. I can’t imagine anyone agreeing with it today.
Right. The 2nd chapter of the Pickering thesis is loaded with quotes of people quoting others who in turn quoted someone else.

off topic comment about plagiarism
In a recent controversy about plagiarism regarding a certain well known preacher using blocks of material from other authors with minimal credit given, I suggested that this is just what scholarship is all about. As long as you footnote (which said pastor did) your covered. The author sent the pastor in question free copies of his books. The author wanted him to use them. The footnote was there, it wasn't handled in a scholarly fashion but this guy is not scholar.
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Re: Verbal repetition in Greek Tragedy ...

Post by mwh »

The PS was intended as a preemptive bid to discourage dismissal of my post on that basis.

The PPS was intended as making clear how antiquated and isolated the quote was. Pickering quoted it in order to attack it.

But let's forget the PS's. They don't affect the body of my post.

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Re: Verbal repetition in Greek Tragedy ...

Post by C. S. Bartholomew »

mwh wrote: Pickering quoted it in order to attack it.

Good point, I missed that and have amended my original post.
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Re: Verbal repetition in Greek Tragedy ...

Post by C. S. Bartholomew »

The Euripides fragment #645 which came up in another thread[1] has some verbal repetition. Some latter day disciples of Halliday and Hasan[2] have talked about verbal repetition as a mechanism employed for producing "texture"[3] also known as verbal cohesion along with other elements such as anaphora.
Euripides
Fragment 645

ἀλλ' ἐν κακοῖσι δύναμιν οὐ μικρὰν φέρει.
βαρὺ τὸ φόρημ' οἴησις ἀνθρώπου κακοῦ.
ὅταν κακός τις ἐν πόλει πράσσῃ καλῶς,
νοσεῖν τίθησι τὰς ἀμεινόνων φρένας,
παράδειγμ' ἐχόντων τὴν κακῶν ἐξουσίαν.
συγγνώμονάς τοι τοὺς θεοὺς εἶναι δόκει,
ὅταν τις ὅρκῳ θάνατον ἐκφυγεῖν θέλῃ
ἢ δεσμὸν ἢ βίαια πολεμίων κακά,
ἢ παισὶν αὐθένταισι κοινωνῇ δόμων.
ἤτἄρα θνητῶν εἰσιν ἀσυνετώτεροι
ἢ τἀπιεικῆ πρόσθεν ἡγοῦνται δίκης.

[1] viewtopic.php?f=23&t=62287

[2] M.A.K Halliday and Ruqayia Hasan (1976): Cohesion in English. London: Longman.

[3] Cynthia L. Westfall, McMaster Div. College, private communication.
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Re: Verbal repetition in Greek Tragedy ...

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The famous locus amoenus of Calypso's island, in the Odyssey (book 5):
ὕλη δὲ σπέος ἀμφὶ πεφύκει τηλεθόωσα,
κλήθρη τ’ αἴγειρός τε καὶ εὐώδης κυπάρισσος.
ἔνθα δέ τ’ ὄρνιθες τανυσίπτεροι εὐνάζοντο, (65)
σκῶπές τ’ ἴρηκές τε τανύγλωσσοί τε κορῶναι
εἰνάλιαι, τῇσίν τε θαλάσσια ἔργα μέμηλεν.
ἡ δ’ αὐτοῦ τετάνυστο περὶ σπείους γλαφυροῖο
ἡμερὶς ἡβώωσα, τεθήλει δὲ σταφυλῇσι.
κρῆναι δ’ ἑξείης πίσυρες ῥέον ὕδατι λευκῷ, (70)
πλησίαι ἀλλήλων τετραμμέναι ἄλλυδις ἄλλη.
ἀμφὶ δὲ λειμῶνες μαλακοὶ ἴου ἠδὲ σελίνου
θήλεον. ἔνθα κ’ ἔπειτα καὶ ἀθάνατός περ ἐπελθὼν
θηήσαιτο ἰδὼν καὶ τερφθείη φρεσὶν ᾗσιν.
ἔνθα στὰς θηεῖτο διάκτορος Ἀργεϊφόντης. (75)
αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ δὴ πάντα ἑῷ θηήσατο θυμῷ,
αὐτίκ’ ἄρ’ εἰς εὐρὺ σπέος ἤλυθεν. [...]
J.B. Hainsworth in the Oxford commentary to the Odyssey (p. 263):
The thrice repeated θηήσαιτο–θηεῖτο–θηήσατο is inelegant, an instance of Kirk's "tired style" (Songs [of Homer], 166-8).
I couldn't disagree more. I think the repetition is very nice and not "tired" or mechanical at all. The verb is actually repeated in three different inflections and in three different metrical positions, and this creates a delicate effect, whose point is to emphasize the idea that even gods marvel at the beautiful sight. But Hainsworth and Kirk (I haven't looked the reference, but I think I can guess what it'll be saying), partisans of the "oralist" school of Homeric studies, would have us believe that poor Homer repeats the verb only because his mechanical formulaic system of oral poetry doesn't allow otherwise, that after presenting this beautiful scene he ruins it because he has no adequate metrical formulas available to avoid repeating inadvertently the same word.

This doesn't mean that I don't agree that sometimes Homer is inattentive to repetition.
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Re: Verbal repetition in Greek Tragedy ...

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Paul, Hainsworth is generally denounced by "hard Parryists" for entertaining the possibility that individual aoidoi had the ability to manipulate formulas in creative ways. And nearly everyone--even M.L. West--is an "oralist" these days, in the sense that everyone accepts that the Homeric poems are the products of an oral tradition built up to a large degree, if not entirely, out of formulas.

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Re: Verbal repetition in Greek Tragedy ...

Post by C. S. Bartholomew »

The textlinguists I have on hand don't discuss repetition. I did see it in some online sources listed along with anaphora, cataphora and exophora as one of elements which contribute to texture. Anaphora is discussed extensively as a mechanism of cohesion. Anaphora eliminates repetition. It might be argued that repeating a noun or substantive does not increase textual cohesion at all. I haven't seen an argument like that but the lack of interest in repetition in the discussions of cohesion implies that it isn't a major issue. Lexical cohesion is accomplished by using multiple words which share a semantic domain or are constituents within a given scenario. Scenario analysis looks at how words in a discourse unit share a subunit of a cognitive framework related to a given setting/event.
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Re: Verbal repetition in Greek Tragedy ...

Post by mwh »

"Anaphora eliminates repetition."

I don't understand. Isn't anaphora a particular form of repetition?

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Re: Verbal repetition in Greek Tragedy ...

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Qimmik wrote:Paul, Hainsworth is generally denounced by "hard Parryists" for entertaining the possibility that individual aoidoi had the ability to manipulate formulas in creative ways. And nearly everyone--even M.L. West--is an "oralist" these days, in the sense that everyone accepts that the Homeric poems are the products of an oral tradition built up to a large degree, if not entirely, out of formulas.
I didn't mean oralist from that broad perspective – of course everyone is oralist, if you see it that way. I don't know how Hainsworth would define himself, so maybe it was wrong to call him an oralist. Generally I find his commentary helpful, and if "hard Parryists" denounce him thus – it shows him to be a good man, deep inside! ;) My real point was to bring up an interesting case of repetition and, at the same time, to report a very tendentious and, in my opinion, fallacious way to analyse it. These verses are composed, not a careless patchwork of repetitive formulas.

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Re: Verbal repetition in Greek Tragedy ...

Post by Paul Derouda »

I have no complaint with "entertaining the possibility that individual aoidoi had the ability to manipulate formulas in creative ways", quite the contrary. It's actually ironical that the "hard Parryists" and I are criticizing Hainsworth for exactly the opposite reasons! Perhaps indeed I'm being unfair with him. But what I don't agree with is the idea of automatically equating repetition with clumsiness and calling it "tired style", at least in this particular case. Perhaps these repetitions are "creative adaptations of formulas"?

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Re: Verbal repetition in Greek Tragedy ...

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Definitely think Aoidoi could break down/expand formulas as they saw fit. Don't think Serbo-Croatian bards are a particularly good parallel but then being irreligious by nature I am poorly suited to oralism! (as it so often is propounded in modern times). We are all, of course, in one way or another, orally informed nowadays but so few of us push to the -ism.

repetition: I don't think it's a particularly prominent stylistic effect outside of anaphora (but cf early Latin styles for full on alteration). Denniston in his handbook on Greek Prose makes a good case for it not to be important in Greek generally. Even when Greek lost its quantity it wouldn't organise around those features.

I think given basic statistics some repetitive is unavoidable but best not to read too much into it. Here's a wonderful parody/intro to tragic style...

http://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/housman.html
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Re: Verbal repetition in Greek Tragedy ...

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Paul, I agree it’s an effective clustering, and it’s hard to think the effect was not calculated. The poet is in control of his material.

At the same time, he is evidently drawing on collocations already in the repertoire. (Whether they should be called “formulaic” or not is a matter of definition: see Hainsworth’s still useful if rather stiff Flexibility book, which made waves in those far-off days.)
-- 75f. are identical with 7.134f., except for the name-formulae (Od. not Hermes). That too comes at the end of a locus amoenus, Alkinoos’ gardens. Formulae meet type-scenes. We have πάντα ἑῷ θηήσατο θυμῷ elsewhere too.
-- With 74 (κε) |θηήσαιτο ἰδὼν cf. 17.315 |αἶψά κε θηήσαιο ἰδὼν, and many other comparable phrases.
-- And for (κε) θηήσαιτο ἰδὼν (74) and θηήσατο θυμῷ| (76) combined, cf. 24.90 ἀλλά κε κεῖνα μάλιστα ἰδὼν θηήσαο θυμῷ.

You say “These verses are composed, not a careless patchwork of repetitive formulas.” You’re setting up a false opposition, I’d say. No-one would deny they’re composed, or even composed. Nor would anyone call them a careless patchwork of repetitive formulas. But it’s the formulaic system (not a term I like, but never mind) that enables the poet to compose so fluently and to such good effect. A book I found very exciting when I was just starting out was Michael Nagler’s Spontaneity and Tradition. I’ve since learnt to distrust generative grammar, but I still think of it as an extremely good book, which nicely negates the polarized dichotomy, as well as nullifying the “is this a formula or not?” debate then raging. I haven’t looked at it for donkey's years, but it was formative to my thinking about these things, and I've encountered nothing to match it since. I don’t know what you or the rest of you think of it.

If there is "inelegance" here, I’d say it consisted in following up the concluding “even a god would gaze in wonderment” with an actual god (rather than a mortal) actually doing so. It’s not a perfect fit.

Each time I read Housman's Fragment (which Qimmik, Paul, and now Scribo have all referred to) I see something new in it.

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Re: Verbal repetition in Greek Tragedy ...

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mwh wrote:You say “These verses are composed, not a careless patchwork of repetitive formulas.” You’re setting up a false opposition, I’d say. No-one would deny they’re composed, or even composed. Nor would anyone call them a careless patchwork of repetitive formulas.
I didn't write "compose" in any technical sense, I just meant something like (in your words) "the poet is in control of his material". As for "patchwork" – well, maybe no one calls them that, but I think "tired style" comes pretty close.

But I agree with everything you're saying there. Thanks for the book recommendation, I'll check that out.

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Re: Verbal repetition in Greek Tragedy ...

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I understood what you meant. :)
It was Wilamowitz, no less, who called the Iliad a Flickwerk, and I'm betting that's the ultimate source of your "patchwork." But he wasn't speaking of formulas, of course, but analytically, of the overall composition. As you well know, West (a scholar greater even than WM) has now revived Analysis. I'm also betting that unlike his Iliad book you will not like his Odyssey book (which he should have just finished writing), but maybe I'm wrong. Anyway, I think the now intensified polarization of "oralism" vs. analysis is most regrettable. It's as bad as the US Congress. The only thing that's mechanical (as Scribo intimated) is the facile thank-the-Lord-now-we-have-the-answer-to-everything approach that now dominates in the US.

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Re: Verbal repetition in Greek Tragedy ...

Post by Qimmik »

In referring to "Homer's tired style" Hainsworth and Kirk aren't condemning the poems as a whole or claiming that the formulaic character of epic diction is tiresome; rather, they recognize that some passages of the poems are less engaging and less skillfully composed than others, as would be true of any work of this length--the Metamorphoses, War and Peace, Proust come to mind (not to speak of Wagner).

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Re: Verbal repetition in Greek Tragedy ...

Post by Paul Derouda »

My apologies to Stirling for high-jacking his thread... :)

I agree that strong polarizations are regrettable; my real intention was more like a defense of repetition as stylistic device rather than a crusade against "oralism", although it might seem otherwise. ;) I'm just objecting the fact that Hainsworth took this one especially famous and charming scene to claim that Homer concludes it in "tired style". Homer is not tired here, but sometimes the Homerist nods. I'm just saying that repetitions are much too easily targeted with comments like these, probably because English and some other modern languages don't like repetitions. I don't suppose the "oralists" are the only ones who are guilty of this.

As for West's new book, we'll see if I like it... I'm not going to be shocked if West will make the impious claim that the Odyssey has many imperfections... :) I'm actually aware of many of those, especially when it comes to discontinuities in the plot line, and I'm really looking forward to hear his take on them. I will be disappointed, though, if he will call this particular passage "tired style". (In another thread months ago we were discussing a passage West was calling a "lurid interpolation" or something like that. But he wasn't making a judgment like Hainsworth here, but just pointing out what he thought was a discontinuity in style.)

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Re: Verbal repetition in Greek Tragedy ...

Post by mwh »

"Tired" is best retired, I'd say.

So to hand Stirling his thread back:

"Anaphora eliminates repetition."

I don't understand. Isn't anaphora a particular form of repetition?
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Re: Verbal repetition in Greek Tragedy ...

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mwh wrote:the facile thank-the-Lord-now-we-have-the-answer-to-everything approach that now dominates in the US.
What do you mean "thank-the-Lord"? Maybe you mean "thank-Lord-now-we-have-the-answer-to-everything"? :lol:

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Re: Verbal repetition in Greek Tragedy ...

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mwh wrote:So to hand Stirling his thread back:
Ok, let's start a new thread if we want to continue the other debate...

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Re: Verbal repetition in Greek Tragedy ...

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Well yes, that's what I meant, I was counting on you to see through the disguise. Lord has been effectively divinized. Now back to Stirling.

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Re: Verbal repetition in Greek Tragedy ...

Post by Scribo »

Ok, so, repetition. Let's narrow this down to where repetition ought to cluster most naturally: sexy sexy catalogue poetry. Ubi sunt? Iphigenia in Aulis obviously, anywhere else?
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Re: Verbal repetition in Greek Tragedy ...

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Paul Derouda wrote:My apologies to Stirling for high-jacking his thread... :)
No apology is necessary. I start threads just to see where they will go. Not concerned about them being high-jacked. The discussion of Hard Parryist's and so forth is over my head. I picked up a free set of Elizabeth Vandiver's lectures on the Iliad last week which I listen to while driving. I have been through her lectures on all the Classical Greek authors before, several times. She explains some of the issues covered in this thread. But you know, it is really field in which you need to have done some serious work. I don't excited about theories of composition after nearly five decades of exposure to that in biblical studies … Pentateuch, Synoptic Problem … blah blah blah …

Homer's works contain large blocks of repeated material which don't qualify as verbal repetition at all. If I understand (vaguely) Parryism there are shorter formulas like name + epithet which are dictated by the meter. These would also be ignored in a discussion of verbal repetition since they are fixed forms. I just posted in koine an example of Chiasmus which doesn't count as verbal repetition. So there are lots places where a word will be used twice which are not of interest.
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Re: Verbal repetition in Greek Tragedy ...

Post by Markos »

C. S. Bartholomew wrote:is it "marked language rather than just an idiosyncratic solecism"

Soph. OT 399ff
ὃν δὴ σὺ πειρᾷς ἐκβαλεῖν, δοκῶν θρόνοις
παραστατήσειν τοῖς Κρεοντείοις πέλας.
Κλαίων δοκεῖς μοι καὶ σὺ χὠ συνθεὶς τάδε
ἁγηλατήσειν· εἰ δὲ μὴ 'δόκεις γέρων
εἶναι, παθὼν ἔγνως ἂν οἷά περ φρονεῖς.
{ΧΟ.} Ἡμῖν μὲν εἰκάζουσι καὶ τὰ τοῦδ' ἔπη
ὀργῇ λελέχθαι καὶ τὰ σ', Οἰδίπου, δοκεῖ.

"Let us be honest: this sort of thing, even in Sophocles, is bad writing." Pickering p. 27 who quotes this from another work to disagree with it. (thanks to Michael for pointing this out).
mwh wrote:To be honest, as I quickly read through this I was not aware of any repetition. Then looking back I saw that δοκειν had been used three times (correction: four!). But each use is so perfectly in place, so “naturally” used as it were, and without the sort of positional or syntactical consistency that would bring out the recurrence, that I just hadn’t registered them collectively, any more than I would have registered four occurrences of some form of ειναι within the same space.

402 ἐδόκεις did strike me, though not as a repetition of δοκεῖς in the previous line. I found it a little jarring for him to say “if you didn’t seem to be an old man” rather than just “if you weren’t an old man.” But that only shows I’m not as good a reader of Sophocles as I’d like to be.

It’s the very opposite of “bad writing.” The whole speech is a magnificent piece of writing, coming as it does as the climax of his set-to with Teiresias. Neither Aeschylus nor Euripides was capable of such expressive representation. I doubt whether either Sophocles or spectators or ordinary readers would have been aware of the multiple occurrences of the same very common verb peppering a speech of such power and passion.
Hi, Clay and Michael,

I agree with Michael that the repetition of δοκεῖν is far from bad writing. The play is all about the difference between τὸ δοκεῖν and τὸ εἶναι, and here we have some verbal shadowing of that theme.

Here's how Neophytus Doukas' paraphrase

http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=n ... 2;size=175

handles the four δοκεῖν's:

1.
TEXT:
ὃν δὴ σὺ πειρᾷς ἐκβαλεῖν, δοκῶν θρόνοις
παραστατήσειν τοῖς Κρεοντείοις πέλας.
PARAPHRASE:
ὃν σὺ νῦν σκευωρεῖς ἐκβαλεῖν τῆς ἀρχῆς, ἵνα πάρεδρος τῷ τοῦ Κρέοντος γένῃ θρόνῳ.
The ἵνα clause showing the putative content Teiresias' δοκεῖν.
2.
ΤΕΧΤ:
Κλαίων δοκεῖς μοι καὶ σὺ χὠ συνθεὶς τάδε
ἁγηλατήσειν·
PARAPHRASE:
ἀλλ΄οὐ χαίροντες ἄμφω ἐκβαλεῖτέ με δήπου.
The future indicative being more definite than δοκεῖν plus the future infinitive.
3.
TEXT:
εἰ δὲ μὴ 'δόκεις γέρων
εἶναι...
PARAPHRASE:
εἰ μὴ γέρων ἦσθα...
This is what Michael would have expected. The very fact that Doukas leaves the δοκεῖν out causes you to notice it in the original, thus appreciating Sophocles more. I think the idea is that Teiresias is not truly a wise elder.
4.
TEXT:
Ἡμῖν μὲν εἰκάζουσι καὶ τὰ τοῦδ' ἔπη
ὀργῇ λελέχθαι καὶ τὰ σ', Οἰδίπου, δοκεῖ.
PARAPHRASE:
ἀμφότεροι ἡμῖν δοκεῖτε ὀργῇ μᾶλλον, ἢ σὺν λόγῳ εἰρηκέναι.
The only time Doukas reproduces a δοκεῖν. Perhaps it shows reticence on behalf of the chorus.

Doukas therefore is not as repetitive as Sophocles, but Doukas himself would never suggest that his art comes close to the original. The purpose of his paraphrase is not, of course, to improve Sophocles, but to provide target language helps to those of us who struggle with the original.
C. S. Bartholomew wrote:The idea that repetition is bad writing or careless presumes that the ancient authors critics both ancient and modern have some sort of valid set of criteria by which repetitions can be categorized.
I don't have a set of criteria for evaluating effective repetition, but I know it when I see it.
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mwh
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Re: Verbal repetition in Greek Tragedy ...

Post by mwh »

On the subject of Sophocles and magnificent writing, I was reading through the Ajax after making an unwise observation about σωφρονεῖν at 1264 (I said it was practically redundant, meaning in the grammatical context of that particular line, but I should have noted the strong thematization of σωφρονεῖν in this drama of madness—affinities with Eurip’s Bacchae here, his finest play), and here’s the standout passage, the perfectly untranslatable ending of Agamemenon’s thoroughly obnoxious put-down of Teucer, jeering at his bastard status. (Teucer is intent on burying Ajax, his half-brother.) It directly precedes the chorus’ distich 1264f.

καὶ σοὶ προσέρπον τοῦτ’ ἐγὼ τὸ φάρμακον
ὁρῶ τάχ’, εἰ μὴ νοῦν κατακτήσῃ τινά·
ὃς τἀνδρὸς οὐκέτ’ ὄντος, ἀλλ’ ἤδη σκιᾶς,
θαρσῶν ὑβρίζεις κἀξελευθεροστομεῖς.
οὐ σωφρονήσεις; οὐ μαθὼν ὃς εἶ φύσιν
ἄλλον τιν’ ἄξεις ἄνδρα δεῦρ’ ἐλεύθερον,
ὅστις πρὸς ἡμᾶς ἀντὶ σοῦ λέξει τὰ σά;
σοῦ γὰρ λέγοντος οὐκέτ’ ἂν μάθοιμ’ ἐγώ·
τὴν βάρβαρον γὰρ γλῶσσαν οὐκ ἐπαΐω.

Does anyone do abuse better than Sophocles? (Gotta love that κἀξελευθεροστομεῖς.) — So there’s another magnificent piece of writing. It goes way beyond the effects of repetition (to stay on topic!). Has to be read in the context of the whole play, of course. It’s the rhetoric that does it.

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