Optative Condition: Diagnosing a Future Less Vivid Sentence
Grammar clinic. A student translates a short adapted passage: εἰ μὲν ὁ βασιλεὺς ἔλθοι, πάντες ἂν χαίροιμεν· εἰ δὲ μή, οὐκ ἂν πείθοιμεν τοὺς συμμάχους. The glossary gives βασιλεύς 'king', σύμμαχος 'ally', χαίρω 'rejoice'. The student writes: 'If the king came, everyone rejoiced; but if not, we did not persuade the allies.' The teacher marks ἔλθοι and χαίροιμεν wrong and asks for a parse before any re-translation. You have five minutes and must decide whether the sentence is a past condition, a future remote condition, or a wish, using only the moods, the ἄν, and the particles. There is no English translation supplied. The teacher has written on the board: 'Mood first, then time.' Your first draft must be a parse, not a translation.
1. Parse ἔλθοι and χαίροιμεν. What construction do they form with ἄν, and why is 'came/rejoiced' an unsafe translation?
Read the worked answer
ἔλθοι is aorist optative active, third person singular, of ἔρχομαι. χαίροιμεν is present optative active, first person plural, of χαίρω. The pair forms a future less vivid (remote) condition: εἰ + optative in the protasis, ἄν + optative in the apodosis. It presents a future possibility as conceivable but unlikely or remote, not as a past fact. 'If the king came, everyone rejoiced' is unsafe because 'came' and 'rejoiced' read as past indicative events, and the second clause loses the modal force of ἄν. A better rendering is 'If the king were to come, we would all rejoice.' The present optative χαίροιμεν suggests continuing rejoicing in the imagined future, not a completed past emotion.
2. What changes if the Greek had εἰ μὲν ὁ βασιλεὺς ἦλθεν, πάντες ἂν ἐχαίρομεν? Explain the difference in meaning, not just the labels.
Read the worked answer
ἦλθεν is aorist indicative and ἐχαίρομεν imperfect indicative; with ἄν in the apodosis this is a past counterfactual: 'If the king had come, we would all have rejoiced' - and the implication is that he did not come. The optative version leaves the future open as a remote possibility; it does not assert that the condition was unfulfilled, only that it is a hypothesis at a distance. The change from present optative χαίροιμεν to imperfect ἐχαίρομεν also shifts from 'we would rejoice' to 'we would have rejoiced' (or 'would have been rejoicing'). The difference is not just tense labelling: one sentence looks forward from a moment of uncertainty, the other looks back at a missed opportunity.
3. The student renders εἰ δὲ μή as 'if not now'. Explain the idiom and how you decide its reference from the immediate context.
Read the worked answer
εἰ δὲ μή means 'but if not' or 'otherwise'; μή is the negative used in conditional suppositions and with non-indicative moods, not a word for 'now'. The phrase refers back to the whole preceding condition, not to a time adverb. Here the first clause supplies the omitted verb: 'but if he does not come'. You decide the reference by parallelism: the δέ balances the first εἰ clause, and the μή negates the same hypothesis. 'If not now' would require a word such as νῦν and would change the contrast from 'if he comes / if he does not' to 'if not at this time'. In translation, expand the ellipsis explicitly rather than guessing a temporal nuance.