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Sunday, December 14, 2025

Death Wish

Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1448-1451 (tr. Alan H. Sommerstein):
Ah, if only some fate could swiftly come— not a painful one, nor one that left us long bedridden—that would bring us eternal, unending sleep...

φεῦ, τίς ἂν ἐν τάχει μὴ περιώδυνος
μηδὲ δεμνιοτήρης
μόλοι τὸν αἰεὶ φέρουσ᾿ ἂν ἡμῖν        1450
μοῖρ᾿ ἀτέλευτον ὕπνον...
"Some fate" in English, but in the Greek 13 words separate τίς from μοῖρα, a good example of hyperbaton.

I don't have access to A.M. Devine and Laurence D. Stephens, Discontinuous Syntax: Hyperbaton in Greek (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

From Kevin Muse:
Literally τίς is an interrogative adjective, modifying, as you say, μοῖρα, the whole thing being a question with a potential optative—"What fate might/ could come....?" But the upshot is that it is a wishful thought, and so the translators opt to translate τίς as indefinite, though it is accented and not enclitic, and they render the optative as one of wish. I see that Smyth cites this passage as an example of a potential optative used to express a wish at § 1832.