6 - The decline of ὑπό in agent constructions

Summary

In the previous chapters, it was seen that several prepositions, primarily ablatival in sense, competed with ὑπό as means of marking the agent. While ὑπό was clearly the dominant preposition in Attic authors like Plato, Xenophon, or Demosthenes, its position was not particularly stable: especially in Demosthenes, παρά sometimes alternates with ὑπό in apparent free variation. These other prepositions were thus situated in a place from which they could potentially oust ὑπό from its role as the agent marker. And ὑπό did indeed fall out of use in the end. As can be seen from modern Greek, it was ἀπό that eventually replaced ὑπό as the grammaticalized means of marking the agent. Scholarship on this development is scanty. For the most part, it is summarily stated that ἀπό simply took over from ὑπό, primarily on the basis of its occurrence in the Septuagint (LXX) and New Testament (NT). A fuller examination of the evidence, however, suggests that the development was not so straightforward. Although ἀπό does occur suggestively early in the LXX and NT, it is not the dominant agentive preposition in the papyri of late antiquity or the lower-register texts of the Byzantine period. It appears rather that παρά^+G was the immediate successor of ὑπό, and that ἀπό was not the primary agentive preposition until after the twelfth century AD. Because texts not influenced by classical language are so rare in the relevant period, the details of this change will remain obscure.