The Particle That Will Not Sit Still
A student translating an unseen passage from a fourth-century Attic prose author meets this sentence: 'ὁ δὲ ταῦτα ἀκούσας, οὐχ ὅπως ὠργίσθη, ἀλλὰ καὶ πάνυ πρᾴως ἀπεκρίνατο.' The student renders it: 'But he, having heard these things, was not angry in whatever way, but also answered very gently.' The teacher marks the rendering of 'οὐχ ὅπως ... ἀλλὰ καί' as a serious error but notes that every individual word has been correctly identified. The passage continues with two more instances of 'οὐχ ὅπως', one followed by 'ἀλλ' οὐδέ' and one standing alone before an infinitive. The student has 20 minutes left and a dictionary that lists 'ὅπως' under five separate headings.
1. Diagnose the error and explain what the student should do with the two later instances.
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The error is not lexical but constructional. The student has translated 'ὅπως' as if it introduced a relative or indirect question ('in whatever way'), which is a legitimate sense in isolation but wrong in this frame. In the combination 'οὐχ ὅπως ... ἀλλὰ καί', the 'οὐχ ὅπως' clause is concessive and is normally rendered 'not only not ... but also' or, more idiomatically, 'so far from ... he actually ...'. So the sentence means: 'He, on hearing this, so far from becoming angry, actually replied very gently.'
The key move is to recognise the correlative pattern before reaching for the dictionary. The student should scan for the second limb ('ἀλλά', 'ἀλλ' οὐδέ') and let it fix the function of the first. Where the second limb is 'ἀλλ' οὐδέ', the sense intensifies: 'not only not X, but not even Y'. Where 'οὐχ ὅπως' stands alone before an infinitive, it usually means 'so far from' plus a verbal noun, and the negative force belongs to the whole clause, not to 'ὅπως' itself.
The dictionary is not the problem; the failure to bracket the construction is. A useful discipline is to mark the correlative particles first, then assign meanings.
2. The student proposes to render the standalone 'οὐχ ὅπως' plus infinitive as 'he did not see to it that ...'. Assess this proposal.
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This proposal imports the wrong heading. 'ὅπως' with a future or subjunctive in an object clause after verbs of striving or caring does mean 'see to it that', and that is a common and correct usage. But that construction is not marked by 'οὐχ' in the way we have here, and the infinitive after 'οὐχ ὅπως' in this idiom signals the concessive frame, not purpose or care.
The test is syntactic, not semantic: what mood and what negative? If the verb after 'ὅπως' were subjunctive and the main verb one of effort, the 'see to it' reading would be defensible. With an infinitive and a following adversative clause, the concessive reading is strongly preferred. The student should also ask whether the resulting English makes sense in context: 'he did not see to it that ... but ...' produces an odd contrast, whereas 'so far from ... he actually ...' produces exactly the kind of pointed contrast Greek prose enjoys.
A good answer will say the proposal is not impossible in the abstract but is ruled out here by the infinitive and by the presence of the adversative second limb.