488 ON THE ANALOGY IN THE FOEMATION OF SOME 



the difficulty. In the address of Diomede to Sthenelus, he 

 meets with the Imperative, H,a,ra^Yi<no, 



'O^iro, ■jriTov, Koi-JTCivyiiK^fi, zaru^fjirso ^icpps. Iliad. V. 109. 



which he attempts to account for in this manner : " Videtur 

 " mihi Imjyerativus ex futiiro deductus, hcet id non agnoscant 

 " Grammatici ; errareque eos, qui verbum hie in praesenti fin- 

 " gunt x.a.Tct.(3fi(rofji,Kt. Quanquam, analogia haud dissimili, per- 

 " s£epe usurpare visus est Homerus verbum Sve-oiAui, Ivino, 

 " eJufl-cTo," &c. Nothing can show more strongly the difficul- 

 ty which Dr Clarke must have felt in accounting for these 

 forms, than that he is here obliged to have recourse to another 

 gratuitous assumption of an Imperative of the Future, a thing 

 unheard of before ; and almost to admit 3u<ro/K,ar as a Present, 

 from which to deduce i^uffiro as an imperfect. The fact is, 

 that he found the authorities in favour of hnto and tSviriTo, 

 to be so numerous, and of such weight, that he did not ven- 

 ture, in these examples, to change —iro into — aro. 



Afterwards, however, he found himself obliged to abandon 

 this hypothesis of an Imperative of the Future, as well as his 

 original position, that these new Presents in — tru and — (ro/*a/ 

 are imaginary ; and he appears at last (he or his son, it is un- 

 certain which) to adopt, in its full extent, the explanation gi- 

 ven by EusTATHius. That commentator, whose remarks 

 would have been invaluable, had his taste and judgment been 

 equal to his means of information, if 1 rightly understand him, 

 has this observation on v. 154. of the 20th Book of the Odys- 

 sey : " 'OCTETS is sanctioned by a poetic rule of formation 

 " [■xoinrticiig Kcvmii^iTat) as the imperfect of the verb oktu, the 

 " Future having retrograded into a Present, For of otca) the 

 " Imperfect is oktov, the .Sd person hiin, the Imperative the 

 " same in sound, also okti, of which the plural is oio-sti." 



Dr 



