Anabasis questions

[Hylander]

EDIT: Disregard this--it's wrong.

I think there is an explanation for the switch from primary sequence with imperfect έθαύμασε to secondary sequence with aorist ἤρετο. The imperfect is more "vivid" than the aorist, in that it portrays the action as in progress; hence the present indicative and the direct interrogative τίς, with the question stated exactly as it would have been asked. The aorist is simply a statement as to what happened in past time; hence the less vivid secondary (or "historical") sequence, with the indirect interrogative ὄ τι, in presenting a past event.

I may be over-interpreting here, though.

[swtwentyman]

I read "ethaumase" as aorist -- the present is "thaumazo", so wouldn't the imperfect be "ethaumaze", or is there some euphonic rule I'm not aware of?

[Hylander]

Yes, you're absolutely right, I misread it. It's aorist. Should have kept my mouth shut.

[jeidsath]

When τις comes first in a sentence, it's orthotone.

Cyrus has just finished asking about the noise, and Clearchus/Xenophon has said that it's the password passing the second time. Then, as soon as Cyrus has asked this -- as soon as he has finished marveling at the noise -- the password reaches them and "someone" nearby says the password to his neighbor. Cyrus asks what it is that he said.

[Hylander]

Cyrus has just finished asking about the noise, and Clearchus/Xenophon has said that it's the password passing the second time. Then, as soon as Cyrus has asked this -- as soon as he has finished marveling at the noise -- the password reaches them and "someone" nearby says the password to his neighbor. Cyrus asks what it is that he said.

I don't think that's a possible reading of this sentence. If τίς παραγγέλλει were a new sentence, you would need a connective particle, maybe δε, to signal the transition. Without a particle, it would be too abrupt to begin a new sentence with orthotone τίς (although of course X. didn't use diacritics--some Byzantine scholar added them). Continuous Greek prose--at least, the well-crafted prose that X. writes--requires these connectives.

And the shift back and forth between aorist-present-aorist would be quite strange and unmotivated. Yes, Greek authors sometimes shift from past tenses to historical present and back, but not for a short sentence embedded in a longer passage.

Also the word order would probably be reversed if τις were an unemphatic indefinite pronoun: παραγγέλλει δέ τις. LSJ τις:

2. position: a. τις is rarely first word in the sentence, and rarely follows a pause

Then you would need some word or words to shift the subject of ἤρετο back to Cyrus, maybe ἤρετο δ'ὃς; otherwise you have the somebody "passing along" the password and then asking what it is. καὶ links έθαύμασε with ἤρετο.

From LSJ θαυμάζω:

6. freq. folld. by an interrog. sentence, “θαυμάζομεν οἷον ἐτύχθη” Il.2.320; “θ. ὅστις ἔσται ὁ ἀντερῶν” Th.3.38; “θαυμάζοντες τί ἔσοιτο ἡ πολιτεία” X. HG2.3.17; “θ. ὡς οὔπω πάρεισιν” Th.1.90, cf. X.Cyr.1.4.20, etc.; θ. ὅτι I wonder at the fact that . . , Pl.R.489a; “πολλάκις τεθαύμακα ὅπως . . ” Com.Adesp.22.46D.;

After εθαυμασε, τις παραγγελλει (suppressing discritics) reads most naturally as a question asked by Cyrus.

[jeidsath]

Yes. That's the reason I did the paraphrase rather than a translation -- I'm fairly certain that the text is corrupt. I know the argument for τίς παραγγέλλει -- Xenophon would be bringing home the lack of C-in-C that Cyrus had over the Greek mercenaries -- but I just don't see that in context. I think that my suggestion is a bit closer to how it should read, and I imagine that a participle got changed into an indicative verb or something.

[Hylander]

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[mwh]

Joel, May I gently suggest that when you wish to contradict Hylander, you do so less dogmatically, and pause before doing so. Your interpretation, stated as if it were fact, was ill-founded and untenable in any number of ways, as Hylander with superhuman forbearance took the trouble to explain to you. Only to have you blithely say “Yes” in response and propose that “a participle got changed into an indicative verb or something.”

[jeidsath]

I'm sorry, but I work full time, and not on Greek, and it can be difficult to carve out time for long posts.

The meaning of the Greek as written is clear. And I thank Hylander for pointing out the reasons why. Some of them I had considered before his post. I confess that I hadn't considered connectives at all and appreciate his efforts there.

[Hylander]

Joel came up with what appeared to be an alternative translation--one that couldn't possibly be supported by the Greek text, as I explained. But that turned out to be a "paraphrase", an alternative account of an occurrence that took place at a single, brief, fleeting instant of time 2417 years ago, for which the only source of information is the text itself.

To support this alternative account, the text, which is coherent and fits neatly into the narrative, was dismissed as "corrupt," with no suggestion as to how the authentic text should have read beyond a suggestion that "a participle got changed into an indicative verb or something," and with no effort to account for how the alleged corruption might have occurred. We could rewrite the whole history of the ancient world this way, changing it to suit our preferences by waving the magic wand of "the text is corrupt." But that's not how responsible textual criticism works. Sometimes the text is corrupt and sometimes alternative explanations are plausible, but there has to be some basis for the inference other than simply a re-imagining of events.

[Hylander]

It's interesting that the E (Eton) manuscript reads παραγγέλλοι instead of παραγγέλλει, according to Marchant's critical notes. This is the same manuscript that reads ἀφικνοῖτο against the other mss' ἀφικνεῖτο at 1.9.16, as recently discussed in this thread:

http://www.textkit.com/greek-latin-foru ... =2&t=64983

There might be a pattern here. Did the person who copied out this ms. have access to a better (but now lost) manuscript than the other mss. on which the text is based? Or did the copyist, priding himself on his mastery of the optative, change present indicatives he found in the ms. he was copying from whenever he thought they should be optatives? The second explanation is probably the right one, but this neatly illustrates the kind of dilemma editors face.

[swtwentyman]

I'd just like to thank Hylander; without this website I probably would have given up on Latin (and never started Greek) long ago, and he's a large part of the reason I didn't. Obviously I have a ways to go in Greek and I look forward to being illuminated in the days to come.

[jeidsath]

I saw that, but assumed that that παραγγελλοι was influenced by the τι παραγγελλοι in the preceding line where Cyrus asks about the noise. (I'm writing from memory not the text just now, but the line had something like that.)

Looking over things this morning, I saw why the question asked by Cyrus didn't make sense to me in context, and what I was overlooking. I thought that the narrative described Cyrus marveling at the Greek watchword custom. His acceptance of the phrase when explained sounded to me like an echo of what he had just told Xenophon about the sacrifices. And Cyrus' question is seemingly ignored.

However, getting out Marchant and reading showed what I was missing. Cyrus is surprised by the noise, but not perplexed. On Xenophon's explanation he is shocked by the fact that someone other than him had given the watchword. Clearchus is the one to answer (in some manuscripts or was it a critical emendation, I can't recall), because he also happens to be the one who gave the watchword and already knows it. Cyrus accepts the watchword rather than contradicting Clearchus to his men before the battle, and also recognizes it as propitious.

(On my phone from the Bay Ferry as I float towards work.)

[swtwentyman]

A bit off-topic, but when I came across the word "watchword" I was reminded of my first -- and I believe only -- encounter with that word in Saki's wonderful (very) short story "The Toys of Peace":

http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stori ... Peac.shtml

I'm reminded of my nephews "shooting" each other with their baptismal candles in the church.

[Bart]

Thanks! Saki is great, I didn't know that story yet.
Never saw watchword before either. It is very similar to the Dutch word for password: 'wachtwoord'

Enjoy your Xenophon!

[swtwentyman]

I've finished book I, and I'll start a new thread for book II (multipage threads are hard to navigate on the phone). It's not that I was totally without questions: quite the opposite, in fact, as I pretty much bombed the latter half or so of chapter 9. I took a week's break from reading then went back through it sentence-by-sentence with a translation: there were too many problem spots for me to burden you all with so I just gave up. Fortunately chapter 10 is really easy and in one or two days I renewed my confidence.

The good news is that book I is the longest book of the first four; the bad news is that in marking Mather & Hewitt up in the margins with the section numbers I noticed that there are a lot of speeches which should put my primary tenses to the test. Nine-and-a-half chapters of book I weren't at all bad but I fear the rest might be rough. We'll cross that bridge when we get there, I guess.

As far as a comparison to Caesar: I went through him just with the Loeb and I'm going through the Anabasis with two commentaries so perhaps it's apples-and-oranges but I'm consistently getting more right with Xenophon than I did with Caesar (which I guess is the point). The part that I had trouble with, though, was as difficult as anything in Caesar.

[Hylander]

Congratulations on finishing Book 1!

[swtwentyman]

Thanks!

[Timothée]

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