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From Samuel Butler's translation of The Odyssey:

And how came false Aegisthus to kill so far better a man than himself?

What is the structure of this sentence?

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There are two constructions here which sound strange in Present-Day English but were still acceptable in Victorian literary English.

  1. The inversion of the subject with all verbs for questions acceptable and common right through Early Middle English (ca. 1660). It was only gradually superseded in Modern English by the Present-Day convention that restricts inversion to subject and auxiliary verbs. In fact that supersession is not yet complete: we still invert with BE even when BE is acting as a lexical verb rather than an auxiliary. In Butler's day inversion was still possible with lexical verbs such as HAVE and would which occur frequently as auxiliaries. The case of COME to is similar: this is an idiom in which COME followed by an infinitive marked with to acts as a sort of aspectual semi-modal meaning approximately happened to or succeeded in. Today we would say:

    How did false Aegisthus come to kill ... ? or
    How did false Aegisthus happen to kill ... ? or
    How did it happen that false Aegisthus killed ... ?

  2. We still use far in the sense as a stronger alternative to much to modify adjectives in the comparative grade, but not so often as in the 19th century:

    It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known. —Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
    Better far to live and die / Under the brave black flag I fly / Than to play a sanctimonious part / With a Pirate head and a Pirate heart. —W.S. Gilbert, The Pirates of Penzance

    what we have lost since then is the corresponding construction with so far ADJer:

    okShe is so much smarter than Katie that she will easily win the promotion.
    She is so far smarter than Katie that she will easily win the promotion.

    Today we restrict so far to modifying verbs or clauses, most often with only:

    She is only so far smarter than Katie that you can count on her to catch more accounting errors; but Katie is much more aware of personnel issues.

A modern paraphrase of Butler's sentence might be

How did false Aegisthus manage to kill a man so much better than he himself was?

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  • Perhaps you could provide an even more modern paraphrase, like what someone might actually say to another person? Jun 28, 2014 at 23:11
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    @CoolHandLouis Well, Homer's terms aren't much current any more. How'd that rat-bastard Aegistheus manage to take out a real badass like Agamemnon? Jun 29, 2014 at 0:47
  • Or, "How could a poser like Aegisthus ever kill a guy so much better than he was?"
    – Jim
    Jun 29, 2014 at 5:10

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