Saturday, June 22, 2019
The Tongue
Euripides, Hippolytus 395-397 (tr. David Kovacs):
W.S. Barrett ad loc.:
Newer› ‹Older
For the tongue is not to be trusted: it knows well how to admonish the thoughts of others but gets from itself a great deal of trouble.Liddell-Scott-Jones (s.v. θυραῖος, sense I.3) translates θυραῖα here as "of strangers," but Kovacs prefers sense I.4: "of others."
γλώσσῃ γὰρ οὐδὲν πιστόν, ἣ θυραῖα μὲν
φρονήματ᾿ ἀνδρῶν νουθετεῖν ἐπίσταται,
αὐτὴ δ᾿ ὑφ᾿ αὑτῆς πλεῖστα κέκτηται κακά.
W.S. Barrett ad loc.:
θυραῖοϲ is a synonym of ἀλλότριοϲ (as οἰκεῖοϲ is of ἴδιοϲ: 1166), 'belonging to somone else', so that θυραῖα φρονήματα ἀνδρῶν = ἄλλων ἀνδρῶν φρονήματα, the mental processes of persons other than oneself.
