Participles: circumstantial participles

Subordinated verbal ideas in English

English loves to use subordinate clauses as a way to describe the circumstances around the action of a clause. Consider these examples from Caroline Falkner’s translation of Lysias 1.

The circumstance might primarily be about time.

When my mother died, her passing proved to be the cause of all my problems.

By keeping watch for the times when our slave girl went to market and by propositioning her, he corrupted her.

The first example refers to a single, specific event; the second refers to the habitual practice of the slave girl. Both use the English conjunction “when.”

We can also use subordinate clauses to add descriptive detail, like this example:

I have a modest, two storey house, which has equal space for the women’s and men’s quarters on the upper and lower floors.

We can use subordinate clauses to express causation (“because…”)

The infant was being deliberately provoked by our slave girl into behaving like this because that individual was in the house.

We can use subordinate clauses to offer a contrast (“although”):

I noticed though, gentlemen, that her face was made up,although her brother had died not thirty days earlier.

You could easily extend this list, but these examples are enough to make a remarkable point: in each of these passages, Falkner is translating a Greek participle.

Syntax and meaning of circumstantial participles

When participles are not tied directly to a noun by being placed in attributive position, they express an attendant circumstance of any kind. Like attributive participles, they will agree with a noun or pronoun in the sentence that functions as the subject of the its verbal idea, but the meaning of the participle’s verbal expression will apply to the clause’s verbal action rather than more narrowly defining the noun.

A short example

Let’s look first at a minimal example. When Euphiletos tells his wife to go take care of their baby, she puts him off by saying: “You tried to grab her (the slave girl) before.” She shows that he didn’t actually succeed by using the imperfect tense (εἷλκες); the direct object (“her”) is a pronoun we’ll learn in the next unit (αὐτήν); πρότερον is an adverb, “before”, and the main clause is then πρότερον δὲ εἷλκες αὐτήν. She adds to that clause a present participle of the verb μεθύω, “to be drunk”: πρότερον δὲ μεθύων εἷλκες αὐτήν. What does it mean?

μεθύων is maculine, nominative, singular so it agrees with the subject of the verb (“you,” implied in the verb form). It’s present tense so it describes an event that was ongoing or not complete at the time of the main verb εἷλκες. We could take it simply as temporal: “while you were drunk,” and the adverb πρότερον makes this the most natural immediate interpretation. But could it also be causal? “Earlier, you tried to grab her because you were drunk”?

The syntax of the circumstantial participle is open to either interpretation. In fact, one reason a Greek author might choose to use a participle to express a subordinate verbal idea is precisely it that might simultaneously imply more than one kind of circumstance. It’s not wrong to read this passage as “Earlier, you tried to grab her when you were drunk (and by the way, that’s why you lacked the judgment to restrain yourself).” That’s an intolerably awkward English tranlsation, but it is good to remind ourselves how much could be contained in the single word of a participle.

A typical pattern: fast narrative

One pattern that Greek particular favors for narrating events that are happening in rapid succession is to use a series of one or more aorist participles with an aorist finite verb. Consider these examples from Euphiletos’ narrative of when he and his friends caught Eratotsthenes in bed with Euphiletos’ wife.

ὤσαντες δὲ τὴν θύραν τοῦ δωματίου αὐτὸν εἴδον

ὤσαντες is an aorist active participle (from the verb ὠθέω, “thrust, push back”); since it’s nominative plural, it’s agreeing with the implied subject of the aorist verb εἴδον. The action of the aorist participle was complete before the one-time event (“they saw him”). The implication is that the two events happened back to back: “They burst open the door of the room, and they saw him!”

In this passage, Lysias appends a present participle:

ὤσαντες δὲ τὴν θύραν τοῦ δωματίου αὐτὸν ἔτι εἴδον κατακείμενον παρὰ τῇ γυναικί.

κατακείμενον agrees with αὐτὸν; as the adverb ἔτι, “still,” shows, the force of this verbal expression is that at the moment they saw him, he was still in the bed lying next to Euphiletos’ wife. It is typical for Greek to use one or more aorist participles in sequence before the finite verb for the narrative action, and to follow the verb with present participles setting the scene.

ὤσαντες δὲ τὴν θύραν τοῦ δωματίου

αὐτὸν ἔτι εἴδον

κατακείμενον παρὰ τῇ γυναικί.

A more complex example

Let’s consider part of the argument that Euphiletos makes to the jury at the end of his speech. People who comment unjust acts, he claims, make their listeners angry at people who are acting justly.

The verb is a present tense form we’ll learn later on, παρασκευάζουσι, but it means “prepare, contrive.” The Greek idiom Lysias uses is that “people rouse the anger of their listeners,” using the accusative direct object ὀργὰς (“anger, emotion”) with an indirect object (the listeners). He uses the preposition κατὰ with the genitive to show who their are angry with: people rouse the anger of their listeners against people who are doing the right thing. (It is a timeless message.)

For the subject, the indirect object and the object of the preposition κατὰ, Lysias uses attributive participles. The people who do unjust things are οἱ τὰ ἄδικα πράττοντες (nominative); the listeners are τοῖς ἀκούουσι (dative); the object of the preposition is τῶν τὰ δίκαια πραττόντων (genitive). The expressive result is

οἱ τὰ ἄδικα πράττοντες ὀργὰς τοῖς ἀκούουσι κατὰ τῶν τὰ δίκαια πραττόντων παρασκευάζουσι.

But Lysias adds one further participle, a simple circumstantial participle in the masculine nominative plural: ψευδόμενοι, from the verb ψεύδομαι, “to lie.”

οἱ τὰ ἄδικα πράττοντες ψευδόμενοι ὀργὰς τοῖς ἀκούουσι κατὰ τῶν τὰ δίκαια πραττόντων παρασκευάζουσι

The circumstance that is the background of this complex action is therefore that the subject (people who do unjust things) are lying. Lysias places the circumstantial participle next to the subject. The circumstance suggests that this is how unjust people manage to rouse their listeners’ anger against just people: by lying.

The genitive absolute

The participle offers a concise way to express complex verbal ideas, that can be flexibly arranged in a clause to achieve a variety of effects. The one limitation is that a participle must be in agreement with a noun in the clause. But what if you want to add a subordinate verbal idea about circumstances that don’t have a direct connection to something in the clause? Consider this selection from Falkner’s translation of Lysias 1:

After some time had passed, an old woman came up to me.

We have a subordinate clause introduced with “After”. The subject of the subordinate idea is “time.” But the word “time” appears nowhere in the main clause, “An old woman came up to me.” Here, too, Falkner’s translation actually expresses an idea Lysias conveys with a participle.

Greek allows you to add a noun + participle combination to a clause even when the noun that the participle agrees with does not appear in the clause. In this situation, the noun goes in the genitive case. The participle of course agrees with the noun, so it, too, will be in the genitive case. The phrase that Falkner translates, “After some time had passed” is χρόνου διαγενομένου. χρόνου is indefinite: there is no article, just “a period of time.” διαγενομένου is the aorist middle particle of διαγίγνομαι, a compound of γίγνομαι that adds to the root sense of “happen, come about” the nuance of a thoroughness or duration (as often with compounds in δια-). The tense is aorist: a period of time passed or elapsed prior to the action of the main verb.

This construction is called the genitive absolute. The noun is “absolute” in the grammatical sense that it stands by itself, and is otherwise not grammatically connected to the rest of the sentence. Otherwise, it is no different from any other circumstantial participle.