Expressions of Agency in Ancient Greek (review)

Greek students frequently have trouble with the rule that animate agents of passive verbs are expressed with + genitive unless the verb is perfect or pluperfect passive. Apart from a simple tendency to forget the rule, nearly every year at least one of my students demands an explanation of the reasons behind it and/or is puzzled by a passage that does not fit the rule. The morass of alternative constructions for expressing agency is not adequately covered by any existing reference work, so that until now students and teachers facing these questions have been largely without resources to reach accurate answers.

Now, however, the situation has changed, thanks to this superb study, which focuses on the factors that determine the use of constructions other than + genitive to express agency with passive verbs. In addition to the dative of agent, such constructions include + genitive, + genitive, + genitive, + genitive, and + dative.

In an excellent introductory chapter passive verbs and agency constructions are carefully defined and the scope of the study delineated. One discovers with surprise that these apparently obvious categories have looser boundaries than one might expect, but George's solid justifications of his choices regarding what to include and exclude provide a convincing basis for the rest of the work.

The dative of agent is given a chapter of its own, which traces its development from Indo-European through the Roman period. The conclusion is that the dative was originally not an expression of agency but a dative of interest that attached to the stative (rather than passive) function of the perfect; as the perfect passive came to be used more and more as a true passive, the use of + genitive to express agency with the perfect passive became more common. In postclassical Greek use of the dative of agent declined, but this was due primarily to an increased tendency to use the perfect active rather than the perfect passive, not to an avoidance of this construction when the perfect passive did appear.

The expression of agency by means of prepositions other than is examined in detail in prose, tragedy, and comedy (Homer and later epic are treated separately). On the basis of careful examination of the works of numerous different authors, George concludes that the use of these prepositions was determined in part by the semantic categories of the verbs involved (verbs involving motion away from the agent had a tendency to use ablatival prepositions, while those involving thought had a tendency to use locatival ones) and in part by the individual stylistic preferences of different authors and (in tragedy) metrical considerations.

A particularly interesting final chapter traces the development of the Modern Greek agency construction, + genitive. Previous works have assumed a direct change from the use of as the primary agency marker to that of , but George demonstrates convincingly (on the basis of examination of documentary papyri and a variety of late literary texts) that was replaced initially by , which remained the main expression of agency for much of the Byzantine period, and that took over from late in the Middle Ages. The early use of in the New Testament and Christian authors is argued to be a Semiticism inherited from the Septuagint and not matched in contemporary secular writings. Though this chapter is on the whole excellent, it is a pity that the literary texts are given predominance over the more conclusive evidence of the papyri; a larger corpus of papyri would also have been desirable.

The book is lucid, eminently readable—one would not hesitate to recommend it to an undergraduate—and a model of sanity in argumentation. Handy summaries of the argument and a detailed index make it easy to consult piecemeal, but it can also be read as a whole and when so tackled, is far more interesting than one might expect. This book will surely be the definitive work on the subject for decades to come.