This text is part of:
Table of Contents:
[*] 625. No case of πρίν with the indicative occurs in Homer; but the want was supplied by πρίν γ᾽ ὅτε δή with the indicative, which resembles πρίν γ᾽ ὅτ᾽ ἄν with the subjunctive just mentioned. As this construction is not the result of parataxis, and there is no such obstacle to combining the ideas of until and before in statements of past fact after affirmative clauses as was felt in future conditions (624), we find πρίν γ᾽ ὅτε with the indicative after both affirmative and negative sentences (see the examples in 636). It thus appears that πρίν was not sufficiently established as a conjunction in Homer to take the indicative without the intervention of ὅτε, although πρίν with the subjunctive had become a fixed construction. The history of the uses of πρίν after Homer will be found below. (See 627; 632-634; 637; 642; 643; 645.)
Macmillan. London, Melbourne, Toronto. 1889. reprint edition:. St. Martin's Press. New York. 1965.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.