When the Unseen Prose Resists Literal Rendering
A student translating unseen Attic prose meets a long periodic sentence: a main verb delayed past three subordinate clauses, a neuter plural subject with a singular verb, an accusative-and-infinitive in indirect statement, and a string of μέν ... δέ pairs nested inside each other. Her first draft runs to 60 English words in one sentence and is barely intelligible. She has 20 minutes left and must decide whether to split the period into several English sentences, and whether to reorder the clauses. The rubric rewards fidelity to the Greek's structure as well as readability.
1. Advise the student on splitting the period, with reasons.
Read the worked answer
Splitting is legitimate and often necessary: English cannot sustain a 60-word periodic sentence with nested μέν ... δέ pairs without losing the reader. The key is to split at the seams the Greek itself marks - at each μέν ... δέ pair and at the boundary between subordinate clause and main clause - so the English breaks reflect the Greek's own architecture rather than an arbitrary chop. She should keep the main verb in its emphatic final position in its own sentence if possible: 'X happened. Y happened. Then he did Z.' The rubric's 'fidelity to structure' is satisfied by preserving the order and weighting of the clauses, not by reproducing Greek word order verbatim.
2. How should the neuter plural subject with a singular verb be handled?
Read the worked answer
Greek regularly uses a singular verb with a neuter plural subject (τὰ ζῷα τρέχει). English requires a plural verb: 'the animals run'. The student should translate the subject as plural and the verb as plural, and should not read philosophical significance into the Greek number - it is a grammatical rule, not a claim that the group is a unity. If the subject is a neuter plural abstract ('τὰ τοιαῦτα'), English may prefer 'such things are' or a singular collective ('all this is'), depending on sense.
3. The student is unsure whether to keep the indirect statement as indirect. Advise her in about 40 words.
Read the worked answer
Keep it indirect ('he said that...') unless English idiom demands otherwise. Converting to direct speech invents quotation marks and a first-person voice the Greek does not give, and it obscures whose words the jury is hearing - a point the passage may be exploiting.