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 ... "