Laudator Temporis Acti

Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), Memoirs of My Life, chapter IV:

In my French and Latin translations I adopted an excellent method, which from my own success I would recommend to the imitation of students. I chose some classic writer, such as Cicero and Vertot, the most approved for purity and elegance of style. I translated, for instance, an epistle of Cicero into French, and after throwing it aside till the words and phrases were obliterated from my memory, I re-translated my French into such Latin as I could find, and then compared each sentence of my imperfect version with the ease, the grace, the propriety of the Roman orator. A similar experiment was made on some pages of the Revolutions of Vertot; I turned them into Latin, returned them after a sufficient interval into my own French, and again scrutinized the resemblance or dissimilitude of the copy and the original. By degrees I was less ashamed, by degrees I was more satisfied with myself, and I persevered in the practice of these double translations, which filled several books, till I had acquired the knowledge of both idioms, and the command at least of a correct style.

Kathryn M. Ringrose, The Perfect Servant: Eunuchs and the Social Construction of Gender in Byzantium (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 38-39 (notes omitted):

Eunuchs are regularly described with a rather extensive language of negation that defines them in terms of what they are not. These adjectives of negation are readily apparent in Greek because they all begin with the alpha privative prefix. Eunuchs are beardless (ἀγένειος), low-born (ἀγεννής), fruitless or unable to bear fruit (ἄκαρπος), unmanly (ἄνανδρας  [sic, read ἄνανδρος]), ignorant of war (ἀπειροπόλεμος), not working (ἀργός or ἀεργός), sickly (ἀσθενής), unsuckled or unweaned (ἄθηλος), unwilling to share (ἀμετάδοτος), not gentle, cruel (ἀπηνής), insatiable (ἀπροσκορής), dishonored (ἄτιμος), unworthy (ἄχρηστος). Theophylaktos of Ohrid is aware of this negative rhetoric and specifically lists negative charges leveled against eunuchs. They are labeled as ill-omened (ἀπαίσιος οίωνιός), disorderly (ἄκοσμος), undignified (ἄσεμνος), and unsociable (ἀκοινώνητος).

In this context, ἄθηλος doesn't mean unsuckled or unweaned. Rather it means unfeminine, just as ἄνανδρος means unmasculine. See e.g. Cyril of Alexandria, Homily 19 (Contra Eunuchos, in Patrologia Graeca, vol. 77, col. 1109, and in Georgii Monachi Chronicon, ed. Carolus de Boor, vol. 2, p. 654):

εἰκότως οὖν ἄθηλοι, ἄνανδροι [cod. al. ἄνανδρες], ἀνδρόγυνοι, σιδηροκατάδικοι καὶ γυναικομανεῖς προσηγορεύθησαν.

Hat tip: Eric Thomson.

Labels: typographical and other errors