[B-Greek] Genitive Absolute?

Carl W.Conrad cwconrad at ioa.com
Mon Apr 18 07:35:57 EDT 2005


On Apr 17, 2005, at 9:49 PM, Richard Ghilardi wrote:

> Hello Folks,
>
> ANDROS D' EPEIDAN hAIM' ANASPASHi KONIS
> hAPAX QANONTOS, OUTIS EST' ANASTASIS
>
> Aeschylus, Eumenides (spoken by the god Apollo)
>
> I know this is not Biblical or even Hellenistic Greek and if Carlton 
> and
> Carl decide that all responses should be offlist to me privately, so be
> it.

I've never felt that questions about Classical Attic or even Homeric 
Greek were out of bounds, but maybe that's because of the diachronic 
bias I hold toward ancient Greek.

> Here are my 4 questions:
>
> 1) Can the words ANDROS... hAPAX QANONTOS be construed as a genitive
> ablsolute or must they be taken as an adnominal genitive specifying the
> head noun hAIM'?

I would not understand it that way, although I can see how you might 
want to think of it that way.
One problem is that in poetry, and especially in Aeschylus, language is 
strained far beyond the normal range of prose usage. But I personally 
think I'd prefer to understand ANDROS as adnominal genitive to hAIM(A) 
and hAPAX QANONTOS as circumstantial adverbial participle to ANDROS: "a 
man's blood, when once he has died, ... "

But on the other hand, the marvel of this Aeschylean formulation is 
that ANDROS ... hAPAX QANONTOS can and probably should also be 
construed with the apodosis: "there is no resurrection for a man once 
he has died."

> 2) In this present general condition do we have a double protasis: man 
> is
> dead; dust soaks up blood or a single complex protasis: dust soaks up
> dead man's blood?

I suppose that one could understand hAPAX QANONTOS as equivalent to EAN 
hAPAX QANHi--that would be one way to conceive this circumstantial 
participle (and circumstantial participles CAN function as the protasis 
of a conditional clause, certainly). But I think I'd rather take the 
participle as a subordinate temporal qualifier: "Whenever the dust has 
sucked up the blood of a person once he has died, there is no 
resurrection."

> 3) If the words ANDROS... hAPAX QANONTOS are removed (as they could be 
> if
> they were an absolute construction), can the remainder of the sentence
> stand by itself and make tolerable sense: EPEIDAN hAIM' ANASPASHi 
> KONIS,
> OUTIS EST' ANASTASIS? Does spilt blood generally signify death?

More or less, I think, even if not universally. It's somewhat like 
"bloodshed" in English. But I think that the complementary force of 
ANDROS ... hAPAX QANONTOS to both hAIMA and ANASTASIS makes this 
particular Aeschylean couplet all the more forceful an expression about 
homicide.

> 4) Could this sentence be rewritten with two gen. abs. in the protasis 
> as
> follows: ANDROS D' hAPAX QANONTOS KAI hAIM' AUTOU ANASPASASHS KONEWS,
> OUTIS EST' ANASTASIS? In this case is the AUTOU needed?

Well, I think that the Greek sentence is grammatically (not 
politically!) correct, but it seems very prosaic, doesn't it, compared 
to the Aeschylean couplet? You might add another AUTOU with OUTIS EST' 
ANASTASIS, too. But I do think that even in normal prose the AUTOU is 
superfluous, inasmuch as it would be understood in both places.

> I would English it as,
>
> Once a man is dead and the dust soaks up the blood,
> there is no resurrection.
>
> Here's Herbert Weir Smyth's translation:
>
> But when the dust has drawn up the blood of a man, once he is dead, 
> there
> is no return to life.
>
> My translation does not seem to differ substantially from Smyth's. I 
> have
> simply used parataxis where the Greek uses hypotaxis since the English
> language prefers the former.

I wouldn't quarrel with either version, but I wonder to what extent a 
real poet in English is restricted to writing paratactically--but 
that's another question altogether.

> Finally, I'm only interested in the grammar and syntax of this 
> sentence,
> not in any theological viewpoint that it may contain. So please 
> restrict
> your replies to what the Greek grammar and syntax may legitimately be
> taken to mean.

Gee, that language sounds very familiar! Sounds almost like something I 
might have written!

This was an interesting question to ponder, Richard.

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at ioa.com
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/




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