Zosimus, Historia Nova 3.3.5. "εἰς αὐτοὺς"

Stephen Carlson
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Re: Zosimus, Historia Nova 3.3.5. "εἰς αὐτοὺς"

Post by Stephen Carlson »

cwconrad wrote:
Stephen Carlson wrote:OK, I moved this topic to Church Fathers and Patristic Greek texts.
Well, that gets it out of a location where it is clearly inappropriately placed, but this is not a Patristic text either. Zosimus was a secular Byzantine historian. We don't currently have a better location for it than "Koine Greek Texts: Other" -- and that's not really very good either.
It is true that Zosimus was a pagan, but he's writing at the same time as many other Patristic authors. I don't have permission to rename the fora, but I would rename this to Patristic and Byzantine Greek Texts.

Stephen
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
Melbourne, Australia
Murray Hogg
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Re: Zosimus, Historia Nova 3.3.5. "εἰς αὐτοὺς"

Post by Murray Hogg »

Sorry all, but having gone over it time and again, I have to ask a follow-up question:
ἐκδεδώκασι is a perfect pcple
No matter how I come at this, I'm seeing ἐκδεδώκασι as a perfect active indicative, third person plural.

For the perfect participle I would expected ἐκδεδώκοσι but clearly I'm missing something.

Can somebody please suggest what it is?

- Murray
Murray Hogg
Melbourne, Australia
Alex Hopkins
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Re: Zosimus, Historia Nova 3.3.5. "εἰς αὐτοὺς"

Post by Alex Hopkins »

Murray Hogg wrote
Thanks to everybody who replied, esp. Alex Hopkins who appears to have nailed it.
Thankyou, Murray. I reckon the BGreek forum is terrific, and it was particularly nice on this occasion to be able to give some help to a fellow Australian - indeed, fellow Melbournian - with this puzzle.

Alex Hopkins
Melbourne, Australia
cwconrad
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Re: Zosimus, Historia Nova 3.3.5. "εἰς αὐτοὺς"

Post by cwconrad »

Murray Hogg wrote:Sorry all, but having gone over it time and again, I have to ask a follow-up question:
ἐκδεδώκασι is a perfect pcple
No matter how I come at this, I'm seeing ἐκδεδώκασι as a perfect active indicative, third person plural.

For the perfect participle I would expected ἐκδεδώκοσι but clearly I'm missing something.

Can somebody please suggest what it is?

- Murray
You are, in fact, absolutely right; it (ἐκδεδώκασι) is not a perfect participle but a 3 pl. indicative perfect active. So I guess we'll have to reformulate the syntactic analysis (although I do think that Alex Hopkins understood the sense rightly):

Text: εἰκότως τοίνυν ὁ καῖσαρ ἀχθόμενος ἐφ’ οἷς τό γε ἧκον εἰς αὐτοὺς ἐκδεδώκασι τοῖς βαρβάροις τοὺς ὁμοφύλους

The difficulty lies in recognizing the subject of the finite indicative verb ἐκδεδώκασι. I believe that we ought to understand the prepositional phrase ἐφ’ οἷς as an instance of attraction of the relative pronoun into the case of its antecedent. That is to say, we should understand ἐφ’ οἷς as ἐπ’ ἐκείνοις οἲ ... ἐκδεδώκασι τοῖς βαρβάριος τοὺς ὁμοφύλους, "angered at those who surrendered their kinsmen over to the barbarians insofar as it was in their power [to do so]." I understand the phrase τό γε ἧκον εἰς αὐτοὺς as Alex understood it, as an adverbial accusative ("with respect to that which befell them" -- i.e. with respect to the opportunity of which they availed themselves.

I don't know who wrote the Wikipedia article on Zosimus, but I found amusing this sentence about the style of the Historia Nova: "The style is characterized by Photius as concise, clear and pure; other historians have judged his accounts confused or muddled ... "
οὔτοι ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς πάντα θεοὶ θνητοῖς ὑπέδειξαν,
ἀλλὰ χρόνῳ ζητέοντες ἐφευρίσκουσιν ἄμεινον. (Xenophanes, Fragment 16)

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
Murray Hogg
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Re: Zosimus, Historia Nova 3.3.5. "εἰς αὐτοὺς"

Post by Murray Hogg »

Thanks Carl,

I must say I got a good laugh out of this.

Clearly I'm in that zone where my Greek is good enough to parse terms with some accuracy, but not good enough to render me confident in my own analysis.

Ah, the joys of learning...

-Murray
Murray Hogg
Melbourne, Australia
Alex Hopkins
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Re: Zosimus, Historia Nova 3.3.5. "εἰς αὐτοὺς"

Post by Alex Hopkins »

Good on you, Murray, for pursuing this - including picking up my own mistake - to the point of a satisfactory resolution.

- Alex
Barry Hofstetter
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Re: Zosimus, Historia Nova 3.3.5. "εἰς αὐτοὺς"

Post by Barry Hofstetter »

Just a quick anecdote. I just went through the two chapters with my "Greekies" in Crosby and Schaeffer on the perfect active and middle/passive. I remember reflecting on Zosimus and thinking -- "Oh, you know, that's not a participle, but a finite verb, and the relative must be by way of attraction." By the time I got back to the thread, it was too late. I was also annoyed that everybody ignored my post, even though I correctly rendered the sense and pointed out what τό γε ἦκον κτλ meant... :evil:

I don't get no respect, but them's the breaks...
N.E. Barry Hofstetter, M.A., Th.M.
Ph.D. Student U of FL
Instructor of Latin
Jack M. Barrack Hebrew Academy
καὶ σὺ τὸ σὸν ποιήσεις κἀγὼ τὸ ἐμόν. ἆρον τὸ σὸν καὶ ὕπαγε.
cwconrad
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Re: Zosimus, Historia Nova 3.3.5. "εἰς αὐτοὺς"

Post by cwconrad »

Barry Hofstetter wrote:Just a quick anecdote. I just went through the two chapters with my "Greekies" in Crosby and Schaeffer on the perfect active and middle/passive. I remember reflecting on Zosimus and thinking -- "Oh, you know, that's not a participle, but a finite verb, and the relative must be by way of attraction." By the time I got back to the thread, it was too late. I was also annoyed that everybody ignored my post, even though I correctly rendered the sense and pointed out what τό γε ἦκον κτλ meant... :evil:

I don't get no respect, but them's the breaks...
Sour grapes? Poor ole Rodney Hofstetter! So we're back in the classroom where every student competes to get out the right answer first! Or is it the game show where the first respondent to a trick question wins the prize? And how often it does indeed happen that one has the answer on the tip of one's tongue and can't get it out fast enough? In this instance, however, my sense is that we were not engaged in a classsroom rivalry but in a shared endeavor to solve a puzzle. But really, we do admire and en;joy your contributions to our ἀπορήματα ἀθλητικά, even if there is no ἆθλον.
οὔτοι ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς πάντα θεοὶ θνητοῖς ὑπέδειξαν,
ἀλλὰ χρόνῳ ζητέοντες ἐφευρίσκουσιν ἄμεινον. (Xenophanes, Fragment 16)

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
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