"He gave back the gold, with the intention of begging off the anger of the god with it; 'fool, he did not even know what he was about to suffer, for the intent of the ever-living gods is not easily diverted.'"[1]
Paraitêsamenos. apedôke ton chruson, hôs paraitêsomenos tou theou di' autou ton cholon: nêpios, oude to êidei, ho peisesthai emellen: ou gar t' aipsa theôn trepetai noos aien eontôn.
The (unglossed) headword is the aorist middle participle, masculine singular nominative, of the verb
paraite/omai. For other forms of the same verb (used here in a slightly different sense) see
pi 504 to
pi 506 and
pi 508 to
pi 510.
The headword is presumably quoted from somewhere, but not from the quotation given, which contains the corresponding future participle instead. Possible sources include the source of
pi 504, where the headword appears. There the word is used in the more common sense of beseeching a person, but the form may have inspired a mistranscription here. In a passage that generated some commentary in the
scholia, Aelius Aristeides,
Panathenaic Oration 133, uses the participle in the current sense.
[1] A paraphrase of
Dionysius of Halicarnassus,
Roman Antiquities 20.9.2 (= Constantine Porphyrogenitus,
Excerpta de virtutibus 2.83), incorporating a quotation of
Homer,
Odyssey 3.146-7. The subject of the sentence is King Pyrrhus of Epirus (
pi 3232). The paraphrase mistakes the gender of the deity in question.
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