Optative in Indirect Question and Perfect Infinitive in an Unseen
A practice unseen passage reads: Ὁ δὲ βασιλεὺς ἠρώτησε τοὺς ἀγγέλους εἰ οἱ πολέμιοι ἤδη ἀφῖγμένοι εἶεν. οἱ δὲ ἔφασαν οὐδένα ἑωρακέναι. The candidate translates: 'The king asked the messengers if the enemy had already arrived. And they said they had seen no one.' The teacher says the first sentence is acceptable but misses a nuance, and the second is grammatically defensible but pragmatically odd. The passage continues with a participle: ταῦτα ἀκούσας ὁ βασιλεὺς ἐσίγησεν. The candidate must explain why the optative εἶεν appears, why ἑωρακέναι is perfect infinitive, and whether 'had seen no one' is the best rendering. She has a vocabulary list but no commentary.
1. Explain the syntax of εἰ ... εἶεν and why the optative is used after a secondary-tense verb.
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εἰ ... εἶεν is an indirect question: 'whether they had arrived.' After a secondary-tense main verb such as ἠρώτησε, Greek may use the optative in the indirect question even where the original direct question had an indicative. This is the oblique optative, or optative by attraction, which marks the report as dependent and can add a nuance of remoteness or uncertainty. It does not mean 'would have arrived.' The form εἶεν is the present optative of εἰμί used with the perfect participle ἀφῖγμένοι; the participle carries the perfect aspect, so the phrase means 'whether they were already there, having arrived.' The optative is a mood, not a tense; the participle supplies the completed action.
2. Assess the rendering 'they said they had seen no one' for οἱ δὲ ἔφασαν οὐδένα ἑωρακέναι. Consider the tense of the infinitive and the scope of the negation.
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φάναι takes an infinitive, and ἑωρακέναι is a perfect infinitive, 'to have seen,' marking completed action with continuing relevance. 'They said they had seen no one' is defensible, but it can imply 'they saw no one at all,' whereas Greek οὐδένα is the direct negation of the infinitive's object. More precise English is 'they said they had seen nobody' or 'they denied having seen anyone.' The latter brings out the negative scope, because 'deny' licenses 'anyone.' The imperfect ἔφασαν is not 'they were saying'; it is the ordinary past of φημί. The teacher's objection is pragmatic: 'said they had seen no one' is ambiguous between a report and a denial, and the Greek is a report of a denial.
3. What does the aorist participle ἀκούσας contribute that a present participle ἀκούων would not?
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ἀκούσας is aorist: it presents the hearing as a completed event antecedent to the main verb ἐσίγησεν, so 'having heard this, the king fell silent.' ἀκούων would be present: 'while hearing' or 'on hearing repeatedly,' making the hearing contemporaneous with the silence or habitual. The aorist participle is the natural choice for a single sequence: first he heard, then he was silent. It also makes the silence a reaction to the whole report, not a background condition. If the king were being described as listening while remaining silent, the present participle would be right. The choice is aspectual, not a difference of English tense.