188 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY. 



he should not have done the same in our passage. How now shall we 

 account for the k'Xdj} of MSS. PKs ? It may, of course, have arisen by 

 a mistake of a scribe, but siuce this is the only place in classical Greek 

 where «s o occurs with the optative, it seems to me more probable that 

 some scribe or corrector arbitrarily changed e'X0oi to e'A%. Van Herwer- 

 den and Stein are, I think, unquestionably right in reading eXdoi. 



In 3, 31, for the reasons given above, it does not seem probable that 

 av was omitted. That the passage in which the sentence occurs is 

 somewhat corrupted in some MSS. is shown by the fjv crept, of ABP and 

 by the variation in the MSS. between «$• o and is ov. It would not have 

 been difficult for av to be lost when the sentence was written thus: EC 

 OANAnoeANQCl. I am inclined to think that av should be inserted. 



av is omitted with axP L ™ 0-> 117) and p^xP 1 (4> 119). The omission 

 of av with nplv fj (eight times) and nporepov fj has been discussed by 

 Sturm, op. cit., p. 296. 



II. Tense System. 



A. Clauses of Antecedence. 



Under the head of tense system I will consider first clauses of an- 

 tecedence, both those of purely antecedent and those of overlapping 

 action. In examining these sentences it should be noted that the writer 

 could often represent an action either as partly antecedent and partly 

 contemporaneous, or as wholly contemporaneous; in other words the 

 mode of conception was often within the writer's choice, as in 1, 183: 



Ka\ Karayi^ovai \i(3ava>Tov ^t'Xia Takavra vi XaXSatat Tore tneciv Trjv oprfjv aywat 



tw #e<5 tuvtu). Here it was possible for Herodotus to represent the action 

 of dyoo-i as wholly contemporaneous, using otov, or as antecedent overlap- 

 ping. Cf. also 2. 14!> (Jweav piv cxpey), where he might equally well have 

 written ea>s av Upey. Secondly, it should be observed that the English 

 word " when," which is often used in translating the Greek temporal 

 conjunction- of antecedence, is far from being an exact word, since it 

 really means both "at," " during," and "after the time when"; the 

 accurate English equivalent for the Greek conjunctions is "after that" 

 (more commonly " after "). 



In clauses of antecedence the main verb, as regards its tense, is under 

 no limitation arising from the temporal relation and does not require 

 treatment. In describing an action which is wholly antecedent we 

 find, in accordance with the law stated above (p. 172), a verb of aoristic 

 action almost always used in the temporal clause. How neatly and 



