Wednesday, March 27, 2024
Think Thoughts of Home
Homer, Odyssey 10.472-474 (tr. Peter Green):
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Are you out of your mind? High time to think of your homelandW.B. Stanford ad loc.:
if it's truly your destiny to be saved and to return
to your high-roofed house and to your own native country.
δαιμόνι᾽, ἤδη νῦν μιμνήσκεο πατρίδος αἴης,
εἴ τοι θέσφατόν ἐστι σαωθῆναι καὶ ἱκέσθαι
οἶκον ἐς ὑψόροφον καὶ σὴν ἐς πατρίδα γαῖαν.
δαιμόνιος is used of a person who is doing something so abnormal or incomprehensible as to suggest supernatural influence: sometimes almost 'Are you mad?'I don't have access to Elisabeth Brunius-Nilsson, Δαιμόνιε: An Inquiry into a Mode of Apostrophe in Old Greek Literature (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1955). See also H. Paul Brown, "A Pragmatic and Sociolinguistic Account of δαιµόνιε in Early Greek Epic," Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 51 (2011) 498–528.
