The Aorist That Changes the Verdict
You are translating a passage of Attic prose in which a defendant describes an incident in the agora. The key sentence reads: ἐπειδὴ δὲ ἀφικόμεθα, ὁ μὲν Φίλιππος εὐθὺς ἀπῄει, ἐγὼ δὲ αὐτὸν ἐκέλευσα μεῖναι. A classmate renders this: 'When we arrived, Philip was going away at once, but I told him to stay.' You suspect the tense of ἀπῄει is doing more work than the classmate allows, and that the imperfect here is not simply 'was going away'. The passage continues with the speaker claiming he had no reason to detain Philip. You have 10 minutes and no lexicon beyond the standard school vocabulary list.
1. Explain why the classmate's rendering of ἀπῄει is probably wrong, and give a better translation of the clause.
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The classmate treats ἀπῄει as a progressive imperfect ('was going away'), which implies Philip was already in motion when the speaker arrived. But the clause is governed by ἐπειδὴ ἀφικόμεθα and marked by εὐθύς, which signals a sequence: arrival, then immediate departure. The imperfect ἀπῄει here is best read as an inceptive/ingressive imperfect - 'began to leave' or 'set off' - describing the start of a departure rather than one in progress. So: 'When we arrived, Philip set off at once, but I told him to stay.' This matters because the inceptive reading supports the speaker's claim that he then detained Philip, whereas 'was going away' makes the detention look like interference with an ongoing act. The particle μέν... δέ also sets up a contrast between Philip's initiative and the speaker's reaction, which the inceptive reading preserves.
2. The speaker later says he had no reason to detain Philip. How does your translation of ἀπῄει affect the coherence of that claim, and what would you check next in the Greek?
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If Philip 'set off at once', the speaker's insistence that he had no reason to detain him becomes a defensive move: he is pre-empting the charge that he deliberately stopped a man who was leaving freely. If instead Philip 'was going away', the speaker's claim is weaker, because stopping someone mid-departure looks like exactly the kind of interference a prosecutor would seize on. The inceptive reading therefore makes better sense of the argumentative texture. Next I would check the aspect and voice of ἐκέλευσα (aorist, active) to confirm it is a single decisive order, and look for any negated verb or particle such as οὐ or μή with the infinitive μεῖναι, since a negated command would reverse the sense entirely. I would also check whether ἀπῄει is compounded with ἀπό in a way that stresses separation, reinforcing 'departed' rather than 'was departing'.