Tuesday, September 6, 2022

21st Century Classical Greek -- the last imperative

We have now seen imperatives in two aspects, one imperfective eventive and the other progressive conceptual, dekhesthe from last week.

Oddly enough, in perfective White’s grammar lists no imperative for the executive voice, but only for the base voice. How could you issue an imperative to bring about a result, without having it produced deliberately?

Well, are there any examples? I used my search engine and did find an example, and the result is sort of weird. This is Demosthenes’ 25th oration, section  21:

τί γὰρ ἂν τοῦτον αὐτὸν οἴεσθε ποιεῖν λυθέντων τῶν νόμων, ὃς ὄντων κυρίων τοιοῦτός ἐστιν; ἐπειδὴ τοίνυν οἱ νόμοι μετὰ τοὺς θεοὺς ὁμολογοῦνται σῴζειν τὴν πόλιν, δεῖ πάντας ὑμᾶς τὸν αὐτὸν τρόπον ὥσπερ ἂν εἰ καθῆσθ᾽ ἐράνου πληρωταί, τὸν μὲν πειθόμενον τούτοις ὡς φέροντα τὴν τῆς σωτηρίας φορὰν πλήρη τῇ πατρίδι τιμᾶν καὶ ἐπαινεῖν, τὸν δ᾽ ἀπειθοῦντα κολάζειν.

The problem I had to work out is, how can you have a passive voice imperative?

Well, Demosthenes is saying that Aristogiton is an enemy of the state, which operates by certain laws. His behavior being such in the current conditions, says Demosthenes, get the laws repealed! That result being achieved, you will see him behave worse.

This is the only example on Perseus of luo in perfective imperative. I would appreciate it if you could send me citations to actual examples of perfective imperatives in executive voice for any verb; remember, send me the citation, not just a copy of the text. I intend to keep looking for them.

But with this wildly limited dataset, it looks as if imperatives work according to aspect, like personal gerundives, which is not much of a surprise since their functions complement each other, imperative being for immediate action just because I say so, and i.g.s being for action  that is due and owing based on prior developments.

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