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Category: Ancient Greek
Where did the names of the gods come from in Greek mythology?
Many are Greek, though they’re old and obscure enough to be headscratchers. If they aren’t Greek, they certainly aren’t going to be Hebrew or Persian (Greeks were in Greece a long time before they were anywhere near either); the origins of non-Greek names are more readily sought in old Anatolian and Middle Eastern civilisations, like […]
Which Greek author wrote the Labours of Hercules in Greek mythology?
You know, I don’t know. Luckily, Wikipedia does: Labours of Hercules. Some ancients tells us that Peisander of Camirus wrote the official account of the labours as an epic. Some other ancients (via Clement of Alexandria) tells us that Peisander got his material from some other guy called Pisinus of Lindus. Neither of these particularly […]
Is eudaimonia the only word for happiness in ancient Greek?
Nicomachean Ethics OP’s excerpt: “Verbally there is a very general agreement; for both the general run of men and people of superior refinement say that it is happiness, and identify living well and faring well with being happy; but with regard to what happiness is they differ, and the many do not give the same […]
What is the importance of Megasthenes in the Greek short book “Indika”?
This is a very poorly phrased question, Anon; hard to tell what you’re after. Wikipedia: Megasthenes Megasthenes (/mᵻˈɡæsθᵻniːz/ mi-gas-thi-neez; Ancient Greek: Μεγασθένης, c. 350 – c. 290 BC) was a Greek ethnographer and explorer in the Hellenistic period, author of the work Indika. He was born in Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey) and became an ambassador […]
What is the Greek name of violet?
The flower violet is ἴον /íon/ in Ancient Greek. In Modern Greek, μενεξές /menekses/ < Turkish menekşe < Persian بنفشه /banafše/ and βιολέτα < Italian violetta are more common. Βιολέτα – Βικιπαίδεια EDIT: the colour: in Ancient Greek ἰάνθινος “violet-flowered” or ἰόεις. Just as well, because ἰώδης is “rust-coloured = verdigris, green” (from the similar […]
What language did the ancient Minoans of Crete speak? Was ancient Greek, or something very different?
Other respondents have answered about Linear A, of which we know only that is probably inspired Linear B, and it was very unlikely to have been Greek. We also have a few inscriptions, from Classical times, in Eteocretan language, a non-Greek language written in Greek characters. It’s reasonable to assume it’s the same language was […]
Greeks, which do you identify most with: Ancient Greece or the Byzantine Empire?
(Nice question, Aphrodisia Xanthopoulos! You and Aziz Dida should get together and plot more questions; the Greece feed has been getting boring lately.) OP’s question touches on the old dichotomy in Greek identity between Hellene and Romios (Roman); see for example Romios or Hellene? It’s a dichotomy that may be dying down now, as the […]
What does Hortalotarsus mean in Latin or Greek?
No explanation offered in the original paper On Hortalotarsus skirtopodus, a new saurischian fossil from Barkly East, Cape Colony, though the author does indicate it was all about the distinctive Tarsus (skeleton) (back of the foot). Nothing in Massospondylus, the accepted family name for the dinosaur. The Spanish Wikipedia on Hortalotarsus offers “tarsus of a […]
If atom is Ancient Greek for uncuttable, what is Ancient Greek for divisible?
Democritus was going with the notion that, if you kept cutting a substance in half (as Dimitra Triantafyllidou explains the verb), an atom is where you got to when you couldn’t split it any more. tmētos and a-tomos are both adjectives derived from different variants of temnō “cut, split”. There is no adjective *tomos “cuttable” […]
Why does the Greek alphabet have the letters Xi (ξ) and Psi (ψ)?
So… what did I find when I was looking at the history of the Greek alphabets, in Jeffrey’s monograph? http://www.opoudjis.net/unicode/… The second problem is that not all the sibilants were present in all the dialects. Most Greek scripts initially avoided xi, and wrote /ks/ as ΧΣ; Jeffery (1990:32) suspects the Ionians held on to it […]