insidecolinshead

τὴν μέν κεν ἐπαινέσσειε νοήσας,

ἡ δ᾽ ἐπιμωμητή· διὰ δ᾽ ἄνδιχα θυμὸν ἔχουσιν.

I do begin to wonder how much of this I actually remember from Greek at school and how much I know from English. κεν, for example, is nothing to do with kenos, “empty”, as in kenosis, but turns out to be a modal particle. Isn’t that odd?

ἄνδιχα is “asunder”, which I didn’t know, but isn’t nearly as peculiar.

οὐκ ἄρα μοῦνον ἔην Ἐρίδων γένος, ἀλλ᾽ ἐπὶ γαῖαν
εἰσὶ δύω·

ouk ara mounon een Eridon genos, all’ epi gaian
eisi duo.

There is not a single (mounos, not monos, for this is Homeric-era stuff) Eris, it turns out, but two.

τύνη· ἐγὼ δέ κε, Πέρση, ἐτὼτυμα μυθησαίμην.

tune. ego de ke, Perse, etetuma muthesaimen.

I can’t remember when I last came across a new closed-class word in English. It might have been the preposition “ere” but I may be imagining that. Equally, if you’ve studied a language for any amount of time at school, you can expect to get all of the closed-class words in. Except here is one that’s new to me–τύνη. It’s a form of “you (singular)”.

ῥεῖα δ' ἀρίζηλον μινύθει καὶ ἄδηλον ἀέξει,
ῥεῖα δέ τ' ἰθύνει σκολιὸν καὶ ἀγήνορα κάρφει
Ζεὺς ὑψιβρεμέτης, ὃς ὑπέρτατα δώματα ναίει.
κλῦθι ἰδὼν ἀίον τε, δίκῃ δ' ἴθυνε θέμιστας

rheia d’ arizelon minuthei kai adelon aexei
rheia de t’ ithunei skolion kai agenora karfei
Zeus hupsibremetes, hos hypertata domata naiei.
kluthi idon aion te, dike d’ ithune themistas

So far there is nothing here that would trouble an agricultural story editor. I like “high-roaring Zeus”. But also so far it’s a bit like a number puzzle in a newspaper—if you don’t know something on one side of καὶ, then find the matching part of speech on the other side, and take the opposite. ἀέξει isn’t the familiar Greek word we know from auxin, say, but you can work it out from μινύθει.

ῥέα μὲν γὰρ βριάει, ῥέα δὲ βριάοντα χαλέπτει,

rhea men gar briaei, rhea de briaonta khaleptei,

At school, I might have translated μέν as “on the one hand” and δέ as “on the other hand”, but now I’m older I recognize that the Greeks used those in place of prosody, or intonation. That’s how native English speakers would express a balanced sentence like that. It’s slightly less clear how you would do it written down, though.

ὅντε διὰ βροτοὶ ἄνδρες ὁμῶς ἄφατοί τε φατοί τε,
ῥητοί τ' ἄῤῥητοί τε Διὸς μεγάλοιο ἕκητι.

onte dia brotoi andres homos afatoi te fatoi te,
rhetoi t’arrhetoi te Dios megaloio heketi

There is some contrast between φατοί and ῥητοί that I’m not getting and I’m not sure whether it’s a high–low split like that between “rhetoric” and “phatic”. Look at the … τε … τε construction, though. To every coordinand a coordinator. Emily Bender calls this omnisyndeton, for the good reason that polysyndeton is already taken.