Subscribe to Blog via Email
January 2025 M T W T F S S 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
Category: Ancient Greek
If Salento’s Pizzica dance is Dionysian, could the Dabke be Minoan, given the Cretan religious influence in Gaza?
Let me try to unpack OP’s question. The Tarantella, known in Salento as pizzica, is a dance associated with a hysterical condition known as Tarantism (supposedly triggered by a tarantula bite). A couple of scholars have speculated that tarantism is a survival of Ancient Greek bacchanalian rites, which were driven underground by the Roman senate. […]
What were the four kingdoms that emerged during the Hellenistic Era?
Diadochi: The Diadochi (/daɪˈædəkaɪ/; plural of Latin Diadochus, from Greek: Διάδοχοι, Diádokhoi, “successors”) were the rival generals, families and friends of Alexander the Great who fought for control over his empire after his death in 323 BC. The Wars of the Diadochi mark the beginning of the Hellenistic period. … How many successors? Five Diadochi […]
Can modern day Greeks understand and read ancient scriptures in ancient ruins (Like this one?)
Variant of what the others have said. Ruins featuring Roman era Koine? There’ll be some faux amis, but the alphabet shape is recognisable, the grammar and vocabulary you can cope with if you’re educated. Ruins from 500 BC? The alphabet shapes vary from city to city; the ancient dialects can be very different from Attic. […]
What is the etymology of Gylippus? It has to do with horses, but what else?
Γύλιππος (Gýllipos) in Gerhard Köbler’s site is all I get, and all it says is “origin unclear”. It does indeed look like a compound of gyl– and hippos “horse”. There is no gyl– word in attested Greek. There are the diminutives gyl-arion and gyl-iskos referring to kinds of fish; and there is the noun gylios, […]
What is the difference between Cretan, Cypriot, Asia Minor (mostly Lydian and Trojan), Mycenaean, Classical, Hellenic, Hellenistic, and Modern Greeks?
Different regions and/or time periods of Greek culture. Not all of them involving ethnic Greeks. Mycenaean: Greek culture of 1500–1200 BC. Associated with the site of Mycenae. Cretan: Culture of Crete. No timeframe. Initially non-Hellenic. Cypriot. Culture of Cyprus. No timeframe. Initially non-Hellenic. Rhodian. Culture of Rhodes. No timeframe. Asia Minor. Culture of Asia Minor. […]
What is the etymology of “Laconia”?
Well, Chad Turner, Frisk and Chantraine are on the internet… Frisk (Lakōn): Krahe, in Indogermanische Forschungen 57:119, relates the name as suspected Illyrian to Lacinium, a promontory in Southern Italy, and Juno Lacinia. Chantraine (Lakedaimōn): Etymology unknown. There have been unsuccessful attempts to use the gloss in Hesychius “lakedama: bitter water made in the sea […]
Who is the other Hades and which are their family ties?
In this episode of Quora Jeopardy!, I find that the source OP is drawing on (Dimitris Sotiropoulos’ answer to Who is the other Hades and which are their family ties?, see comments) does not necessarily lead to the conclusion he is positing. The answer is drawn from the first successful Google hit I got on […]
How did terms such as stoicism and cynicism come to adopt totally different meanings from their original Greek definitions?
Sorry to answer by reference to Wikipedia, but, well, I think the answers are all there. We have ancient philosophical schools. We have popularisations of what those ancient philosophical schools were about, in education and in all-round educated discourse. We have people repurposing those popularisations, to express commonplace attitudes. To the extent that the meaning […]
What can be lost in translation from ancient Greek?
The allusions. Which are much more obvious in Ancient Greek, because it had several quite distinct literary dialects. If you want to allude to Homer, or to the tragedians, you can easily choose a word that occurs only in Homer, or a grammatical inflection that is antiquated. And literate Ancient Greeks were meant to be […]
What happened to the Greeks of the Seleucid Empire?
Where are the Seleucid Greeks? (InB4 Kalash people. We’re pretty sure they’re not Greeks.) One can only presume, they assimilated. The ruling class would have been Greek for a fair while; royalty certainly was. But there’s no reason to think the majority of Greeks didn’t intermarry. Not that we’d know much about it, because the […]