Saturday, March 02, 2013
By the Fire-Side
Thanks to Ian Jackson for another example of hearth-side dining, this one rather different in tone—Xenophanes, fragment 22, tr. Kathleen Freeman in Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 25:
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One should hold such converse by the fire-side in the winter season, lying on a soft couch, well-fed, drinking sweet wine, nibbling peas: 'Who are you among men, and where from? How old are you, my good friend? What age were you when the Mede came?'J.H. Lesher, Xenophanes of Colophon, Fragments: A Text and Translation with a Commentary (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992; rpt. 2001), p. 72 (on line 4):
πὰρ πυρὶ χρὴ τοιαῦτα λέγειν χειμῶνος ἐν ὥρῃ
ἐν κλίνῃ μαλακῇ κατακείμενον, ἔμπλεον ὄντα,
πίνοντα γλυκὺν οἶνον, ἐπιτρώγοντ᾽ ἐρεβίνθους·
'τίς πόθεν εἶς ἀνδρῶν, πόσα τοι ἔτἐ ἐστί, φέριστε;
πηλίκος ἦσθ᾽ ὅθ᾽ ὁ Μῆδος ἀφίκετο;'
πόθεν (pothen): D-K: 'von wem bist du,' Heitsch: 'von wem stammst du ('from whom...'); as Heitsch explains 'pothen is not the place, but parents and family' (143); cf. Odyssey 17.373 and 19.162: εἰπὲ τεὸν γένος ὁππόθεν ἐσσί.Related posts:
