Saturday, May 28, 2022
Cucumbers of Antioch
Calvert Watkins (1933-2013), "Language, culture, or history?" in his Selected Writings, ed. Lisi Oliver, Vol. II: Culture and Poetics (Innsbruck: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Innsbruck, 1994 = Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Sprachwissenschaft, 80), pp. 663-673 (at 668):
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I pass now to a final example, which will illustrate what one of my teachers, Werner Jaeger, called the 'cucumbers of Antioch' argument. To explain: a question arose of the dating of a certain Greek text. Jaeger's reply was that anyone with a feeling for Greek style comparable to, say, Jaeger's, would know that the composition of the work in question must be dated to the last quarter of its century. But for others lacking this discriminatory faculty, he could point out that the text mentioned someone in Athens eating cucumbers from Antioch; and it was known independently that cucumbers were imported from Antioch to Athens only from the beginning of the last quarter of that century. So too we linguists may have recourse to 'argumentation from realia' in this detective-story fashion.See Werner Jaeger (1888-1961), "Diocles of Carystus: A New Pupil of Aristotle," in his Scripta Minora, Vol. II (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1960), pp. 243-265 (at 248 ff.).
