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Finglass, P. J.
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Sophocles: <I>Oedipus the King</I>.
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Some Types of Abnormal Word-Order in Attic Comedy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
Extract
On the analogy of the colloquial register in some modern languages, where narrative and argument may be punctuated by oaths and exclamations (sometimes obscene or blasphemous) in order to maintain a high affective level and compel the hearer's attention, it is reasonable to postulate that Attic conversation also was punctuated by oaths, that this ingredient in comic language was drawn from life, and that the comparative frequency of ║ (|) M M (M) Δ in comedy is sufficiently explained thereby. There are obvious affinities between some passages of comedy, relaxed conversation in Plato and Xenophon, and the forceful, man-to-man tone which Demosthenes sometimes adopts to such good effect (e.g. xxi 209). Compare, for instance, Ar. V. 133 f. ἔστιν δ' ⋯νομα ⋮ τῷ μ⋯ν γέροντι ⋮ Φιλοκλέων / να⋯ μ⋯ Δία, τῷ δ' υἱεῖ κτλ., where the oath is a response to imagined incredulity, and X. Smp. 4.27 αὐτ⋯ν δ⋯ σέ, ἔɸη, ⋯γὼ εἶδον να⋯ μ⋯ τ⋯ν Ἀπόλλω, ὅτε κτλ. (‘Oh, yes, I did!’).
It is also important that the commonest oaths fit, in most of their forms, the end of an iambic trimeter: (να⋯) μ⋯ τ⋯ν Δία, ν⋯ (τ⋯ν) Δία,ν⋯ τούς θεούς, μ⋯ τοὺς θεούς. Add that in Aristophanic dialogue (by contrast with Menander) over half the iambic trimeters end with major pause, and half the remainder with minor pause, and we can see why Δ / established itself early as a distinctive comic pattern. Out of 105 examples of M M (M) Δ cited from comedy in Section II above, 59 have the oath at verse-end.
In the case of πάνυ, which was almost exclusively Attic and — to judge from its great rarity in tragedy — felt by Athenian poets to be prosaic, we lack evidence on its functions in the colloquial register; it may or may not have served as affective punctuation. In prose, we have to reckon with the fact that π Mπ and Mπ π constituted a genuine stylistic choice (cf. n. 32) as far back as the evidence will take us, since the two earliest instances in prose are [X.] Ath. 2.3 πάνυ δι⋯ χρείαν and ibid. 3.5 πολλ⋯ ἔτι πάνυ. The oath, as treated by the comic poets on the basis of colloquial usage, is bound to have served as a model for πάνυ, exerting an influence which pulled πάνυ to the end of the verse, but there was also a powerful metrical constraint. As a dibrach ending in a vowel which could not be elided or enter into crasis, πάνυ was especially appropriate for verse-end. That in itself was enough both to establish Mπ π as the dominant pattern in comedy and to promote Mπ … π. Out of the total of 104 examples of Mπ (…) π in comedy, 93 have πάνυ at verse-end, which makes Mπ (…) π / one of the hallmarks of comic style. Mπ … π does not occur in prose in association with any other feature identified as colloquial, but it should be noted that Aiskhines and Demosthenes are much fonder of Mπ π than other prose authors. In some cases one can see that the order Mπ π avoids a succession of short syllables (e.g. D. xviii 130, liv 1) or hiatus (e.g. D. xxx 36) or both (e.g. D. xliii 10), but there are other cases in which it has the opposite effect (e.g. D. xxiv 140, xliii 53). The possibility of comic influence on oratorical language cannot be dismissed out of hand. It is also possible that someone will find positive determinants which will explain all the cases of Mπ π in prose.
σɸόδρα, which, like πάνυ, is peculiarly Attic, is metrically more tractable than πάνυ, since it can be elided; even so, out of the 80 comic examples of Mσ (…) σ no less than 58 have σɸόδρα at verse-end, and of those 58 there are 22 at major pause, 8 at presumed major pause and 9 at minor pause. The comic treatment of σɸόδρα is thus comparable with the treatment of πάνυ, and Timokles (CGFP) 222(b).4 τηρεῖν…σɸόδρα is in fact the closest analogy we have to Ar. Pl. 234 f. ἄχθομαι…πάνυ.
δέ and γάρ are a different matter, and in some significant respects different from each other. Postponement of δέ is especially prominent in Aeschylus (45 examples, including a few in which the text is suspect) and then abundant in fourth-century comedy. It is much less common in Euripides (18 examples), rare in Sophocles (6) and Aristophanes (6), and virtually limited in prose to the categories which I labelled (l)–(3). There is as yet no evidence to associate postponement of δέ with colloquial language; on the contrary, it seems to have begun as a feature of poetic language and to have been taken up and exploited by fourth-century comedy. If, in addition to being Aeschylean, it was colloquial in the fourth century, what happened to it afterwards? Except for such an isolated and inexplicable case as Diod. xx85.1 (v.l.!) — in a military narrative — it is not a feature of the Koine at literary, documentary or subliterate level.
Postponement of γάρ was no doubt encouraged by postponement of δέ, but it is not itself notably poetic (20 examples in tragedy, of which only three come in my class (5)). One can see how it could possibly have developed in the spoken language of the fourth century, extending the function of γάρ as an explanatory particle (rather on the lines of γε) in a way which makes it comparable with the English ‘you see’ in (e.g.) ‘He didn't dare pick it up. He hurt his back last year, you see’. For an extension of this kind we may compare the current extension of the English genitive affix in (I heard both examples a year or two ago) ‘Then the girl whose place she was taking's mother turned up’ and ‘The man that Christopher liked's Introduction is much better’. Moreover, postponed γάρ appears in a segment of conversation constructed in indirect speech by Theophrastus in Char. 8.9 τ⋯ πρ⋯γμα βο⋯σθαι γάρ (p C N γάρ). Again we must ask: what happened to it afterwards? A couple of cases in Theophrastus' botanical works (CP iii 11.3 and HP iv 6.1) could be a reflex of the influence of comedy on literary language at Athens. The influence was plainly short-lived, since it did not affect the Koine.
It is not hard to see why serious poetry in the fifth century and earlier should have experimented occasionally with the postponement of δέ and γάρ: treatment of M M q as a valid alternative to M q M is metrically very convenient. No poet, however, could afford to use common words in a bizarre, un-Greek way merely to save himself time and trouble in constructing a verse. Linguistic innovation is normally analogical, proceeding by extension from a starting-point already there, and the most obvious starting-point for postponement of δέ and γάρ is constituted by my class (3). This consideration provides comic postponement with a pedigree, but does not deny it individuality. The remarkable scale and frequency with which comedy exploited a phenomenon which tragedy used with restraint and prose hardly at all gives comic postponement the right to be regarded as a quite distinctive artificial feature of comedy.
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References
* CAF = Kock's Comicorum Atticorum Fragmenta; CGFP = Comicorum Graecorum Fragmenta in Papyris Reperta, ed. Austin, C. (Berlin, 1973)Google Scholar; PCG = Poetae Comici Graeci, ed. Kassel, R. and Austin, C., vol. iv (Berlin, 1983)Google Scholar; TrGF = Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, ed. (i) Snell, B., (ii) Kannicht, R. and Snell, B., (iv) Radt, S. (Göttingen, 1971, 1981, 1977)Google Scholar. Comic fragments are cited from CAF unless otherwise indicated; fragments of Sophocles, minor tragedians and tragic adespota from TrGF; of Aeschylus, from Mette; and of Euripides, from Nauck with Snell's (1964) supplement. The following books are cited by author's name only: Blomqvist, J., Greek Particles in Hellenistic Prose (Lund, 1969)Google Scholar; Denniston, J. D., The Greek Particles (ed. 2, Oxford, 1954)Google Scholar; Dover, K. J., Greek Word Order (ed. 2, Cambridge, 1968)Google Scholar; Thesleff, H., Studies on Intensification in Early and Classical Greek (Helsinki, 1954)Google Scholar; Werres, J., Die Beteuerungsformeln in der attischen Komödie (Diss. Bonn, 1936)Google Scholar. I am indebted to the University Librarian of Bonn for a copy of Werres' work; and even more indebted to the anonymous referee who criticised the first version of my article and compelled me to reconsider some points of classification and exposition.
1 Control is crucial; there is no point in listing features found in one genre unless it can be shown that they do not occur with equal frequency in all genres. For example, the title of Poultney, J. W.'s article, ‘Studies in the Syntax of Attic Comedy’, AJPh 84 (1963), 359 ff.Google Scholar, raises hopes which the article itself disappoints, because specifically comic features are not distinguished from shared features.
2 He did not claim to have listed every instance of every comparatively rare phenomenon; in particular, his list of examples of postponed γάρ in Middle Comedy (p. 97) is selective, and he is a little perfunctory on the comic postponement of δέ (p. 188); Blomqvist (pp. 115–17) picks up a handful of (unremarkable) prose examples ignored by Denniston. Nevertheless, it seemed to me, when I went through Denniston's marked texts and annotations after his death, that he was extremely unlikely to have missed any really striking placing of a connecting particle in classical prose or the major dramatists.
3 Menander, Das Schiedsgericht (Berlin, 1925), 156Google Scholar.
4 Cf. my article ‘The Colloquial Stratum in Classical Attic Prose’, Classical Contributions. Studies in Honor of Malcolm Francis McGregor (Locust Valley, 1981), 15–25Google Scholar.
5 Cf. my article ‘Der Stil des Aristophanes’, Wege der Forschung 265 (1975), 124–43Google Scholar.
6 So Thesleff, p. 58.
7 Including instances where modern editors print a comma but a respectable case could be made for stronger punctuation.
8 Quoted words contained within narrative are treated as beginning and ending with change of speaker; a few cases of formal change in drama, where an interruption is ignored (e.g. Ar. Av. 1148; cf. Werres, p. 34), are not treated as change.
9 The fundamental treatment of colometry is in Fraenkel, Eduard, ‘Kolon and Satz’, NGG Ph.-hist. Kl. 1932, 197–213 and 319–54Google Scholar. The second part, which takes as its starting-point Wackernagel, J., ‘Ueber ein Gesetz der indogermanischen Wortstellung’, IF 1 (1892), 333 ff.Google Scholar (= Kleine Schriften [Göttingen, 1953], 1 ff.Google Scholar), is particularly important for our present purposes.
10 Emphasised by Fraenkel (yet still widely ignored) in a footnote to his note on A. Ag. 222. Cf. Blomqvist, pp. 113 ff.
11 Dover, pp. 12–14. In this paper I treat ‘prepositional’ ⋯ντός, πάροιθε, χάριν and the like as p or q, according to their position.
12 Dover, pp. 32–41.
13 On the formulae τα⋯τα ποήσω, ἔσται τάδε, etc., see Fraenkel, , Beobachtungen zu Aristophanes (Rome, 1962), 79 ff.Google Scholar Since τα⋯τα and ποιήσω can occur in either order (with Lys. 949 contrast ibid. 506 and Ra. 1515), and the verb can be omitted (e.g. V. 142), it looks as if the N/C relationship within the formula can vary from one instance to another.
14 There is also a tendency for an oath to occur when any reference is made to the hypothetical thought or speech of others, e.g. D. viii 7 πλ⋯ν εἰ το⋯το λέγουσι ν⋯ Δί', ὡς κτλ.
15 The reservation is required not just by arithmetical incompetence on my part but by the number of doubtful and variant readings (mostly in comedy), the gradations of assurance about restoration of fragmentary comic texts, and my suspicion that in making notes over a long period I was not wholly consistent in my admission or exclusion of Platonic works of questionable authenticity. I have left out of account ‘real’ oaths uttered in response to a command ‘Swear…’, citations which consist wholly of oaths without context, and two dozen oaths which are themselves quite clear in fragmentary texts but do not reveal with sufficient clarity their position in the clause. Each multiple oath is treated as one example. D. xviii 208 is unique and unclassifiable.
16 Cf. Werres, p. 31.
17 Antiphanes, fr. 159.7 μετά γε ν⋯ Δία / τοὺς μητραγυρτο⋯ντας can be treated as ⋮ p q Δ if Kock is right in printing the whole passage without change of speaker; but the more persuasive division of the passage between speakers in Kaibel's Athenaeus (226d) points to ||| p q Δ.
18 In many, as in many of the category ⋮ p Δ, one can see the force of Werres' assertion (pp. 6, 30, 32, 37 f.) that a banal oath by Zeus is in effect a particle. Cf. also Blaszczak, W., Götteranrufung and Beteuerung. Untersuchungen zu volkstümlichen Ausdrucksformen in der griechischen Literatur (Diss. Breslau, 1932), 7 f., 13Google Scholar.
19 X. Cyr. ii 3.23 ⋯ποσάκις γε, ἔɸη, κα⋯ δειπνοποιούμεθα ν⋯ Δία is formally p q, ἔɸη, p M Δ, but one may hesitate to treat so massive a relative as p.
20 Cf. D. xxv 51, mentioned above.
21 I treat unstressed temporal adverbs as C.
22 Perhaps minimal pause should be placed after οὐκ ἔστιν; cf. D. xxv 51, lv 17.
23 This oath, however, is not banal but elaborated at length.
24 Cf. n. 21.
25 On positive μά see Sandbach's note on Dysk. 151.
26 A good example of unitary M M created by the sense of the context, not an established phrase. The words are an answer to a question, and the question is not ‘What shall we do to Diopeithes?’ or ‘Whom shall we put on trial?’ but ‘What shall we do then?’
27 In Men. Epitr. 878 ὐπομαίνεθ' οὗτος (deictic). ν⋯ τ⋯ν Ἀπόλλω μαίνεται the oath intensifies the following word (which discards the restraint of ὑπο-), not the preceding words.
28 Thesleff, pp. 56–80.
29 In S. Ph. 650 ὥστε πραΰνειν πόνου, the reading πόνου, formerly attributed only to some recentiores, is now known to have been the original reading of Ven. gr. 468 (Dawe, R. D., Studies on the Text of Sophocles [Leiden, 1973–1978], iii 55Google Scholar). πάνυ, the reading imported by a corrector and shared by the other manuscripts, was long ago assailed and emended, first by Reiske and later by Meineke and Hense, all of whom had a keen ear for the difference between tragic and comic tone. In TrGF ii. 152 Kannicht and Snell rightly discard as comic a passage designated τραγικόν by Stobaeus (iv 41.51) and printed as Adesp. fr. 547 by Nauck.
30 Thesleff, pp. 77.
31 The negative status of εἰ μή, ‘unless’, is variable, and interrogative οὐ (e.g. Eupolis, fr. 311.1) commonly introduces a positive command. Examples of these categories will be included.
32 I mean by this term a pair or set of alternatives (‘style markers’; cf. Gnomon 41 [1969], 636 f.Google Scholar) available to writers at a given time and place.
33 Everyone prints πάνυ σο⋯ ɸιλ⋯, but I prefer enclitic σου here.
34 κακ[⋯ς πάνυ] Kassel; cf. Sandbach's n. ad. loc.
35 Cf. n. 15.
36 There is an obvious affinity between this usage and ‘absolute’ πάνυ.
37 Thesleff, pp. 60 f.
38 There is room for doubt; cf. Thesleff, pp. 107 f.
39 Cf. Thesleff, p. 60 n. 1, where this interpretation of Ec. 954 is treated as ‘possible’.
40 Thesleff (p. 60) takes πάνυ with ɸωραθῇ.
41 Thesleff, pp. 92–111; his treatment of σɸόδρα follows the same plan as his treatment of πάνυ (Section III above). Like πάνυ, σɸόδρα is rare in tragedy: S. Aj. 150, El. 1053, Adespota (TrGF) 700.26; add one example from Akhaios' satyr-play Aithon (F11.2). All these are σ M σ.
42 Cf. Denniston, pp. 185–7,189. I treat instances such as Ar. Ra. 1007 ἵνα μ⋯ ɸάσκῃ δέ as involving only one M.
43 This pnizling one-line citation (and the puzzle is in no way removed by Naber's μόνης for μόναι) appears to contrast ⋯ρετή with something else. It is conceivable that the passage is spoken by a cynical character, that the previous line or lines decried the lasting value of ⋯ρετή (as opposed to κτήσεις), and that an excerptor transformed the sentiment by putting the pause before ⋯ρετ⋯ς instead of after it. Wilamowitz suggested (cf. Radt ad loc.) that the excerptor invented ⋯ρετ⋯ς. Cf. the radical and unscrupulous transformation of Ar. Nu. 412–19 in Diog. Laert. ii 27.
44 ‘Apollod. Gel.’ in Denniston, p. 188 n. 1.
45 For the colometric principle involved here cf. Fraenkel (n. 9 above), 329 ff.
46 Denniston, pp. 95 ff. On such examples as E. Or. 314 κἂν μ⋯ νοσῇς γάρ see n. 38 above.
47 The manuscripts have καιρ⋯ς κα⋯ πλο⋯ς ὅδ' ⋯πείγει γάρ, which Jebb, Pearson and Denniston all accepted. Webster found it difficult, and favoured the rather awkward repunctuation proposed by Cavallin. Dawe finds it incredible, as I do too, and adopts Burges' simple transposition.
48 Cf. n. 45.
49 Denniston, p. 166.
50 Cf. the archaic ‘Damme!‘, and at a coarser level (I heard this from a Lancashire soldier), ‘All on a sudden he turns left. He did that! Eh, fucking hell! And I couldn't stop. Eh, fuck me!…’ etc.
51 Werres, p. 13.
52 Xenophanes (IEG) Bl.18 is the only pre-Aeschylean example. Instances in Democritus are attributable to Attic influence on Ionic.
53 Theodektas, fr. 6.2 ἰσόμετροι πάνυ / has a thoroughly comic ring, and I do not think it irrelevant that the speaker of the passage is an illiterate rustic.
54 On the relevance of metrical constraints to word-order cf. Hofmann, E., Ausdrucksverstärkung (= ZVg1Spr Ergänzungsheft ix. 1930), 145 ff.Google ScholarBooth, Bertha Ellis, The Collocation of the Adverbs of Degree in Roman Comedy and Cato (Diss. Chicago, 1923)Google Scholar explains the placing of magis, maxume and satis at verse-end primarily in metrical terms (especially pp. 31 ff., 43 ff., 59, 79 ff.) and comparable phenomena in prose as poetic influence (e.g. p. 48) or – vaguely and unsatisfactorily – as ‘stylistic’. I am indebted to Dr Elaine Fantham for a copy of Booth's work.
55 The only example in Ionic Greek is Hdt. ix 17.1, in an oddly self-contradictory sentence: ⋯μήδιζον γ⋯ρ δ⋯ σɸόδρα κα⋯ οὗτοι, οὐκ ⋯κόντες ⋯λλ' ὑπ' ⋯ναγκαίης.
56 There is however no example in Prometheus. Su. 791 would be Class (5) if the text were sound, but Johansen and Whittle (n. ad. loc.) make a strong case for Burgard's deletion of δ'; cf. Fraenkel's n. on Ag. 653.
57 My figures for Sophocles and Aristophanes may be a little too low.
58 Xenophanes (IEG) Bl.17 is doubtful; see West's punctuation ad loc., retaining the plural ὕβρεις.
59 For this negative generalisation I rely on Blomqvist, pp. 120 f., on the lack of examples of postponement in Mayser and Blass-Debrunner, and (more positively) on Mauersberger's Polybios-Lexikon.
60 Cf. Blomqvist, p. 121.
61 Cf. n. 59. Peek, , GVI i 104Google Scholar, reads ⋯νέστασαν γινάμενοι τό 
in a Hellenistic epitaph (Argos, s. i a.C.); the first editor (Vollgraff) read nothing after -νοι. Composers of epitaphs, struggling to produce verse, not always very successfully, are apt to employ abnormal language which tells us nothing about the prose or colloquial usage of their time.
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