Page 18 of 18

Nearing the end...

Posted: August 25th, 2014, 8:05 pm
by Wes Wood
I must admit that I am sad to see this come to a close. I am thankful for the opportunity that I have had to try something new, and I want to offer my thanks to this forum at large and to Stephen Hughes and Dr. Conrad specifically for all the help and encouragement along the way.

I haven't forgotten this quote and can truthfully say I have found it so!
Barry Hofstetter wrote:Greetings, Wes, as they say, jump on in, the waters fine... You don't need courage to ask questions here or make observations. Nobody will think less of you, we are all here, from the newest beginner to the most advanced to help one another.
P.S. Stephen, I can't tell you how glad I am that you have decided to do the composition. (Especially since you know I have my doubts about my ability to do so. I still believe that if I were to call myself "intermediate" I would be giving myself too much credit.) I have wanted to try my hand at it for quite some time. Just let me know when you are ready.

Re: Lysias' Λόγος ὑπὲρ τοῦ ἀδυνάτου

Posted: August 25th, 2014, 8:29 pm
by Wes Wood
Stephen Hughes wrote:[this means "will be grateful", doesn't it?]
Yes, I believe it does.
Stephen Hughes wrote: [I think this is referring to morals (surpass / excell) not t referring to future court cases, do you?]
Absolutely. I did not make that clear enough in my rendering. I have found translation for the sake of being understood to be much more difficult than translating for my own benefit.
Stephen Hughes wrote:I think that the word τῶν ὁμοίων αὐτῷ is a loaded back-hand swipe at that fellow's character.
I missed this, but I agree. I had envisioned the plaintiff's social equals rather than his equals in conduct. I believe you caught the subtlety that was wasted on me. I am thinking of your Shakespeare quote from earlier at this particular moment. It was too far removed from my own time (ability to put myself in the moment) to catch it on my own, but when it was pointed out I wondered how I missed it. This happens to me frequently. 8-)

Re: Lysias 24 - §18 - Text and Hints

Posted: August 26th, 2014, 2:11 am
by Stephen Hughes
cwconrad wrote:What makes this passage complicated is that, for all its powerful rhetorical arrangement, it has a strong colloquial ring to it. In a certain sense the "cripple" is making fun of his accuser in the very way that he accuses his accuser of making fun of him. This is a sort of rhetorical tour de force.
...
—ὥσπερ τι καλὸν ποιῶν = ὥσπερ ἂν εἰ ἐποίει καλόν τι: “just as if he were doing something ‘cool’ (when it’s obvious that he isn’t!)
Wes Wood wrote:but he is wanting to satirize [is this the correct sense?] me. And he is doing a good job."
I think Carl's take on ἐμὲ κωμῳδεῖν βουλόμενος as "wanting to poke fun at me", rather than a more literal, "desiring to cast me in a comic role" has a lot to be said for it. The ability to recognise register
(differentiate formal / informal styles) in Attic Greek is further than a stone's throw beyond my present ability. To be able to do that within a particular genre of literature, requires extensive and intelligent reading.

Re: Nearing the end...

Posted: August 26th, 2014, 3:07 am
by Stephen Hughes
Wes Wood wrote:I still believe that if I were to call myself "intermediate" I would be giving myself too much credit.
"Intermediate" is a brush with a very broad stroke.
Wes Wood wrote:I must admit that I am sad to see this come to a close. I am thankful for the opportunity that I have had to try something new, and I want to offer my thanks to this forum at large and to Stephen Hughes and Dr. Conrad specifically for all the help and encouragement along the way.
In my experience of Greek at least, texts do not always come to a close (completion) as we have done here. The prescription given at University was flexible to some extent, and as we reached the end of the term (later semester) things were often shortened or rushed through.

I realise you are not unacquainted with study and the requirements of college life, but let me give you some idea of how this text (that we got through in about a month and a half) would fit into the workload of a full-time student. In a 19 week semester (in fact 15 after loosing 2 to mid semester breaks and 2 to exam preparation and exams), at intermediate level, this text along with 3 or 4 others by the same authour would be read in a 1 hour per week class (one of Monday to Thursday at 9am).

Off the top of my head, besides Lysias, the classes on the other days at lower intermediate level consisted of Sophocles or Euripides, Plato and Homer, with another 2 hour class for grammar and unseens on Friday morning. So our study would be made up of reading 3 or 4 texts concurrently on different days of the week with an approximate ratio of 5:1 - preparation time outside class : class participation time. At a rough guess then, this text would take up 4 or 5 hours of class time, so totally 20 to 30 hours of work.

At intermediate level, students worked from well indexed "school texts", with more translation "crib notes" rather than the hints which I have tried for the most part to structure for you to apply your current knowledge of New Testament Greek, or to get you thinking in some way or other. That is in contradistinction to what happened at advanced level, where in some cases we were simply given a photocopy of the OCT and left to find our best path through it. In the case of Homer we were just told which book to read for the next week's class when we would discuss issues arising from the reading rather than going into line-by-line details as we had done with Homer at intermediate level. The amount of (handwritten in those days) notes that the lecturers had in front of them (and hence the amount of preparation they had done over the years to teach) at advanced level was phenomenal. The issues covered were not limited to language, but also included other things needed to understand the texts. In a very few cases, there are passages in a text that answer some historical question, but generally speaking, "understanding a text" has a different meaning in Classical Greek classes than in Theological college classes.

Most students that I studied with at University, who were reading Greek for their Bachelors degree also read Latin (one as a minor the other as a major), which was timetabled in the following hour or after an hour's break. I opted for Modern Greek (evening classes) as a double major rather than the Latin. Taking a double major with advanced options in both subjects actually took up most of my degree, and I only had little time left for other subjects or to participate in archery & marksmanship activities.

What I wanted to do - but only sometimes had the time to do - in this presentation was to show that certain words and syntactical structures associated with them that occur only once (or rarely) in the New Testament, and are often rushed through (almost overlooked) by unintelligently translating them word for word into intelligible English do in fact have syntactic parallels in the wider Greek literature. One of the purposes in quoting the New Testament passages throughout the discussion and in a few cases in the hints was to encourage such parallelism in thinking. We all see μέν ... δέ ... and think syntactic structure, but in other cases understanding the syntax is treated as optional, especially when a word-for-word rendering makes sense anyway. In the case of finding parallels for this speech, a lot of those things that seem to be sui generis in a New Testament context, came from Luke, Acts and Hebrews. If we had (or if later we do) read some different works, we would (will) find parallels for different passages. Recognising that there is a recognisable structure in what we are reading adds a perspective that would otherwise be lacking.

One good way to recognise structures is to actively use them in composition, and (where appropriate) in conversation.

Lysias 24.26 ὁμοίων still in question

Posted: August 26th, 2014, 3:38 am
by Stephen Hughes
cwconrad wrote:Lysias 24.26:
μὴ τοίνυν, ὦ βουλή, μηδὲν ἡμαρτηκὼς ὁμοίων ὑμῶν τύχοιμι τοῖς πολλὰ ἠδικηκόσιν, ἀλλὰ τὴν αὐτὴν ψῆφον θέσθε περὶ ἐμοῦ ταῖς ἄλλαις βουλαῖς, ἀναμνησθέντες ὅτι οὔτε χρήματα διαχειρίσας τῆς πόλεως δίδωμι λόγον αὐτῶν, οὔτε ἀρχὴν ἄρξας οὐδεμίαν εὐθύνας ὑπέχω νῦν αὐτῆς, ἀλλὰ περὶ ὀβολοῦ μόνον ποιοῦμαι τοὺς λόγους.
May I offer some suggestions here on matters that seem in question?
Although I have offered an answer to the best of my ability addressing what I see to be at issue here, I still have questions about the ὁμοίων of itself and in its context.

If you have any opinions on the ὁμοίων (footnoted as ὁμοίως) which could either repudiate or improve my guesswork here, the quality of this thread would most likely be improved.
Stephen Hughes wrote:
Wes Wood wrote:
Stephen Hughes wrote: ὁμοίων - You did take this as neuter plural for substantive, right?
I am not confident that my rendering is correct. I had a hard time with this phrase. My initial reaction was that it was "from people like you." I envisioned this referring to either other councils (less likely) or a more reverential "from people such as yourselves." I could not make sense of the entire phrase (up to ἀλλὰ) without supplying extra words. When I supplied those words I simplified ὁμοίων to from you. I probably should have placed "the same things" in brackets. In my mind it is linked with "[that you gave]." Does this answer your question?
"From people like yourselves" would be something like ὁμοίων ὑμῖν. The adjective takes a dative of what is resembled. If your nemesis means "obtain" here, then supplying the "[which you gave]". In that case, it takes a genitive of the thing obtained + another genitive of the person from whom it was obtained. I see your "[that you gave]" as a resolution of the idea of the dative of advantage. Personally, I'm in two minds as to whether to take the dative with ὁμοίων in a badly constructed sense to differentiate it from the genitive ὑμῶν, but the sense of it is that the μηδὲν ἡμαρτηκὼς (himself presumably) is contrasted with τοῖς πολλὰ ἠδικηκόσιν (some others). Things don't follow the syntax I expect here. If the variant ὁμοίως is read as written, then it more or less "repeats" the sense of the verb, and can be used with the following dative. In this case I think you are edging towards preferring ὁμοίως.

Re: Lysias 24.26 ὁμοίων still in question

Posted: August 27th, 2014, 12:30 pm
by cwconrad
Stephen Hughes wrote:
cwconrad wrote:Lysias 24.26:
μὴ τοίνυν, ὦ βουλή, μηδὲν ἡμαρτηκὼς ὁμοίων ὑμῶν τύχοιμι τοῖς πολλὰ ἠδικηκόσιν, ἀλλὰ τὴν αὐτὴν ψῆφον θέσθε περὶ ἐμοῦ ταῖς ἄλλαις βουλαῖς, ἀναμνησθέντες ὅτι οὔτε χρήματα διαχειρίσας τῆς πόλεως δίδωμι λόγον αὐτῶν, οὔτε ἀρχὴν ἄρξας οὐδεμίαν εὐθύνας ὑπέχω νῦν αὐτῆς, ἀλλὰ περὶ ὀβολοῦ μόνον ποιοῦμαι τοὺς λόγους.
May I offer some suggestions here on matters that seem in question?
Although I have offered an answer to the best of my ability addressing what I see to be at issue here, I still have questions about the ὁμοίων of itself and in its context.

If you have any opinions on the ὁμοίων (footnoted as ὁμοίως) which could either repudiate or improve my guesswork here, the quality of this thread would most likely be improved.
I have been ruminating about this thread and some of what’s been said in reflection about it as it draws toward a close, but I’m going to post that separately in a more appropriate location within the forum later. I would like to offer some suggestions about how best to understand this problematic ὁμοίων.

Yes, ὁμοίων or ὁμοίως is a puzzler here; I didn’t even mention in it in my own earlier comments on this difficult §18. I think the reason is that it didn’t seem to me to affect the basic understanding of what the text of §18 means, namely, that the cripple begs not to be meted out the same severe treatment by the βουλή that has beendealt to those guilty of real wrongdoing — he really deserves better than to be deemed as one of those people.

But there’s the question of how ὁμοίων fits syntctically into its context, or, if it doesn’t fit quite adequaely, the question is whether ὁμοίως might fit better.

ὁμοίων could be either masculine or neuter. If we think its masculine, we’ll construe it with ὑμῶν, ὑμῶν in turn being construed with the optative τύχοιμι and the strong initial negation μῆ τοίνυν. On the other hand, if ὁμοίων is neut. gen. pl, then it will be of the thing obtained from the person from whom the thing is obtained.

The verb τυγχάνω here must have the sense of LSJ "get/obtain something from someone":
LSJ wrote:II c after either case a gen. pers. may be added, obtain a thing from a person, ὧν δέ σου τυχεῖν ἐφίεμαι S.Ph.1315 ; σου τοῦτο τ. Id.OC1168 ; or the pers. may be added with a Prep., τ. ἐπαίνου ἔκ τινος Id.Ant.665 ; παρὰ σεῖο τ. φιλότητος Od.15.158 ; τιμίαν ἕδραν παρʼ ἀνδρῶν A.Eu.856 (dub.); αἰδοῦς ὑπό τινος X.Cyr.1.6.10 , cf. Mem.4.8.10 , etc.: abs., χρὴ πρὸς μακάρων τυγχάνοντʼ εὖ πασχέμεν Pi.P.3.104

That being the case, I think that we must understand ὑμῶν as the gentiive of the person from whom the objective is obtained, while ὁμοίων is the gentiive of what is obtained: “May I not gain from you the same kind of treatment … “ and this would be completed by the dative group τοῖς πολλὰ ἠδικηκόσιν. “May I not receive the same kind of treatment from you as those who have done much wrong.” But that seems sort of awkward. I think it would be simpler and clearer to understand ὁμοίων as agreeing with ὑμῶν: “May I not encounter you as similarly inclined (to me) as to those who have done much wrong.”

That strikes me as a better way to understand ὁμοίων, namely as masculine in agreement with ὑμῶν and bearing the sense “similarly disposed (to me) as to those who have done much wrong.”

But the alternative reading ὁμοίως would, I think, yield the same meaning. ὁμοίως would construe with τύχοιμι and carry the substantive sense “encounter you (as judges) in a disposition like that in which those who have done much wrong have encountered you.”

Of the alternatives, I think that understanding ὁμοίων as masculine genitive plural in agreement with ὑμῶν works best here. But I would reiterate (yet once again) that it’s easier to grasp what the whole sentence means than to analyze exactly how it means what we think it means.

Lysias ὁμοίων

Posted: August 27th, 2014, 4:45 pm
by Wes Wood
This is both helpful and insightful. Your description in places very much resembled my own attempts to construct meaning. I felt like I understood the major thought, but I could not bring the details into focus.