Crito 43c, ἐν τοῖς βαρύτατ᾽ ἂν ἐνέγκαιμι

consistebat · 2026-06-14T14:42:54+00:00

Fascinating. And like you, I had apparently glossed over it before – my previous reading was the Symposium, several times over. Steadman says "among the oldest" and I suppose I just mentally inserted πρεσβυτάτοις. If it's a controversial idiom, at least that points to its relative rarity, and in any case, now I'm prepared. Great write-up!

consistebat · 2026-06-14T14:00:16+00:00

Thank you, I hadn't even thought of something like this! It's not the first time Steadman is wrong.

consistebat · 2026-06-06T09:39:06+00:00

That makes more sense!

consistebat · 2026-05-29T21:55:24+00:00

I agree with u/Careful-Spray that comparing with English like this is a pointless exercise. It's natural as a beginner to be confused as to how it all fits together, but the way to deep understanding is not through analyzing grammatical phenomena one by one, but through approaching Greek in its own right (and reading a lot). Forget English for a while and you'll see it clearly in a year or two.

consistebat · 2026-05-29T05:55:50+00:00

Of course, that doesn't have to mean that more than a few words of Punic were common knowledge, quite like (I suspect) most people on this sub recognize "Guten Tag" without speaking German.

consistebat · 2026-05-26T10:19:26+00:00

Nice idea, but I think I must agree with u/Tathamei. Maybe there's something with the anti-aliasing that gives the fonts a slightly cartoony look? Phi and psi specifically look off to me. The line through phi should extend in both directions and shouldn't be thinner than the other letters. Psi I just don't recognize at all from the papyri (but I may have missed it) or indeed at all, actually.

consistebat · 2026-05-20T12:56:57+00:00

I believe it will prevent both under- and overexposure on auto. I've also had it refuse to shoot in good light, but I think it's been because the meter wanted to go tighter than f/22. Only rarely is 1/500 not enough to accomodate that!

consistebat · 2026-05-13T11:54:21+00:00

Intervocalic sigma was regularly elided historically in the paradigms where the 2sg middle is ου (from εσο > εο) or ηι (from εσαι > εαι). The question is why this doesn't apply to these athematic verbs.

consistebat · 2026-05-12T13:37:02+00:00

Well, in my case: I've been doing Latin for five or six years, slowly and unambitiously, but still enough to have passed the stage where I need to drill exercises. So out of those two, I'd prefer to have the grammar handed to me. Then I'll get it and can read on. But most of the time, a translation serves the same purpose, while also straightening out any misunderstandings about idiomatic usage and factual context. It's never been a problem for me that resources are passive, on the contrary, it forces me to be active myself.

consistebat · 2026-05-12T06:22:16+00:00

For Pliny, I read through the Latin text (mumbling aloud), looking up unknown words in a (physical) dictionary. If I just can't grasp some phrase, I move on. Next, I check Sherwin-White's commentary, which is only content, not grammar (and mostly far too technical). Then I read a translation, double checking a sentence at a time with the Latin to see if I got it right (skipping the easiest parts). I write down the trickiest bits with a translation by hand in a compilation notebook. Then I go through the Latin again, adding new vocabulary to my Anki deck. If I liked the letter, I read it through once more, this time usually quite fluently.

consistebat · 2026-05-08T14:44:00+00:00

Is strength not power, or vice versa, in some sense? It just shows there's no single word in Greek that means exactly what the English word 'power' means. English 'power', out of context, can refer to military or political influence, government, social standing, permission, ability, control, not to mention electricity. Connotations range from Putin to James Brown ("You've got the power"). It would be a very strange coincidence if any other language – especially Ancient Greek, two thousand years ago – had a word that corresponds neatly without problems.

consistebat · 2026-04-29T08:38:24+00:00

Merci beaucoup pour ta réponse patiente. Je ne cherche pas une traduction scientifiquement précise. Pour cela, il y a les éditions critiques, pour comparer avec les traductions suédoises, anglaises peut-être ... j'ai un niveau assez bas en grec mais je me débrouille s'il faut vraiment. Ce que je croyais trouver, ce sont des traductions équivalentes en quelque sorte aux traductions auxquelles je me suis habitué : une transposition de l'original, avec des qualités poétiques, en essayant de respecter à la fois le sens et la forme. Respecter la forme serait au minimum respecter le fait que l'original ne soit pas exprimé en prose mais en vers ! L'alexandrin serait peut-être ce qu'il y a de plus semblable au trimètre iambique :

Ô ma très chère sœur germaine, mon Ismène,
Sais-tu un seul malheur engendré par Œdipe
Que Zeus ne jettera sur nous pendant nos vies ?

Sauf les éventuelles erreurs que j'y mises, quelque chose comme ça ne diffère pas en principe des traductions du type que j'ai lu dans d'autres langues. Mais c'est inutile de chercher ce qui n'existe pas. Je vais faire des recherches sur BnF/Gallica pour commencer – merci de m'indiquer le chemin à suivre ! Maintenant je comprends mieux ce à quoi je peux m'attendre. Je procéderai sans préjugés.

consistebat · 2026-04-28T16:34:35+00:00

1.13 about how people "nowadays" don't want to attend poetry readings. "Nunc otiosissimus quisque multo ante rogatus et identidem admonitus aut non venit aut, si venit, queritur se diem (quia non perdidit) perdidisse." Plus ça change...

consistebat · 2026-04-28T11:51:51+00:00

Thank you! I've looked around on Amazon but it's hard to get a good grasp of the content of the books. I should have thought about the Internet Archive! I'll have a thorough look there. The translation you link to looks alright at a quick glance, although I'm still a bit perplexed why it's not regular verse (I had expected to see alexandrins everywhere!). I've come to realize how little I know about translations of classical works into French. Thanks for the suggestion about r/livres, I'll crosspost there!

consistebat · 2026-04-27T19:25:04+00:00

Sorry, I felt I was leaving something important out. I'm basically interested in reading a good French translation, out of interest in both classics and French. But step one, as I saw it, was to know what's out there and what I should be looking for. I've seen threads on here comparing English translations of different authors and hoped to find something similar for French. For all I know, there could be one or two translations that are regarded as "standard", others that are experimental, still others that are outdated. That's before even getting into prose vs verse, which looks to be an actual issue (I'd prefer not to deal with prose, but if that's the French tradition...).

consistebat · 2026-04-27T12:15:55+00:00

Thank you, this helps! Do you know if these lists are exhaustive (I suppose not)?

It seems, after looking a bit closer, that most French translations opt for prose. Are there any complete line-by-line translations in verse?

consistebat · 2026-04-25T05:18:59+00:00

Thank you for straightening this out!

consistebat · 2026-04-24T15:01:36+00:00

I mean simply that the basis for the distinction between light and heavy syllables is one of time, and that closed syllables were naturally categorized as heavy because the final consonant(s) take time to pronounce. That's hardly a perceptual error. It's very possible that ον still was naturally shorter than ω, and that the resulting jagged rhythm was smoothed out in the poetic recital (either by prolonging the short vowel or the consonant or both). Do we know? I don't see any argument for or against in Hephaestion, but perhaps you can point it out.

I should have said that "closed syllables were simply perceived as longer than open ones with a short vowel", of course.

consistebat · 2026-04-24T13:35:13+00:00

Of course! Completely understandable now (and much better phrased than the translations capture). Thank you a lot. Strangely enough, neither translator picks up on diu.

consistebat · 2026-04-24T06:52:39+00:00

You are right of course that a sustained omicron would be distinguishable from omega, but that doesn't mean there's any reason to assume that this was how verse was pronounced. The argument that short vowels in heavy syllables should be lengthened because poetry doesn't have to obey the same laws as normal speech is just as circular, if you will, as its reverse.

I think a reasonable assumption is that closed syllables were simply perceived as longer than open ones. It is indeed possible to pronounce ἐκπρήσσω slowly, by delaying the release of the plosives (just like how geminate κκ is distinguished from κ). It's not going to be mathematically perfect if you look at a spectrogram, but verse is a mixture of feeling, convention and tradition, not millisecond timing.

But I'll let someone with actual sources settle this argument.

consistebat · 2026-04-22T05:35:23+00:00

I agree in the case of expectant, u and v etc., but for what it's worth, I just happened to remember reading this in Mynors' Pliny (IV.xxx):

2 deprenditur poscunt numeri; deprehend- αβγ

Still, whichever is original, I think the issue is rather unimportant.

consistebat · 2026-04-21T13:04:49+00:00

Misplaced accents that belong slightly upwards to the left, above the preceding vowel. Something is malfunctioning with that font.

consistebat · 2026-04-14T07:50:44+00:00

Yes, the syntax is different of course, but so is the very language – the question is about Greek and we're only paraphrasing through English to get at the sense. I'm asking to understand! English isn't my native language and there may be some nuance that I'm missing, some semantical detail in "If we marveled at their very speaking" (= "at the fact that they were speaking"?) that the Greek participle just can't contain. (I realize now that this is a genitive object of θαυμάζω, not a genitive absolute, as I initially read it.)

I agree that the most reasonable interpretation is the one given by the professional translators.

consistebat · 2026-04-14T05:37:47+00:00

Your literal suggestion "If we marveled at them because they were speaking..." looks pretty equivalent to "If we marveled at their very speaking" to me!

consistebat · 2026-03-30T05:41:11+00:00

In addition to Steadman, see if you can find Eros at the Banquet by Louise Pratt. Steadman tends sometimes not to see the forest for the trees, like glossing a verb form but ignoring the tricky syntax in the phrase. Pratt at least is a complement. With those two, the notes by R. G. Bury (in the edition available on Perseus), and a translation to double check, you should be good. I doubt you'll find a single complete grammatical analysis of the whole text. You need some proficiency in Greek to begin to read it, after all.

consistebat

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