He who contradicts and chatters much is ill-fitted for learning what he ought.Robert Beekes, Etymological Dictionary of Greek (Leiden: Brill, 2010), p. 850 (s.v. λέσχη): See also Łukasz Niesiołowski-Spanò, "The Philistines as intermediaries between the Aegean and the Near East," in Thomas L. Thompson and Philippe Wajdenbaum, edd., The Bible and Hellenism: Greek Influence on Jewish and Early Christian Literature (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 89-101 (at 96-98), who regards Hebrew liškah as a loanword from Greek.
ὁ ἀντιλογεόμενος καὶ πολλὰ λεσχηνευόμενος ἀφυὴς ἐς μάθησιν ὧν χρή.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Thursday, November 16, 2023
Ill-Fitted for Learning
Democritus, fragment 85 (tr. Kathleen Freeman):