Question: What is a scion? Why is the son of Chalcodon called a scion of Ares?
Answer: The literal meaning of the Greek word "ozos" here is "shoot, twig, scion." It can mean "offspring, descendant," but that's not what it means here; the phrase "scion of Ares" just means "warlike, martial"; I suppose the expression could imply that the individual displayed a taste for fighting and a talent for acquiring the skills of a warrior from early childhood.
It's like in the song, "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy," where the singer says he's a "real live nephew of my Uncle Sam." The kinship is metaphorical.
Question: In California teachers have to pass the CBEST before they are allowed to teach. What was the equivalent test in ancient Rome?
Answer: Suetonius tells us in his Life of Tiberius (chapter 70.3) that the emperor
used to test grammatici [schoolteachers who taught traditional Greek and Roman literature] (a class of persons which, as we have said, he often cultivated, by means of questions of approximately this type: "Who was Hecuba's mother? What was Achilles' name among the maidens? What song were the Sirens accustomed to sing?"
Question: Are Greek names the names of things? You are translating the names as nouns and adjectives.
Answer: Greek names usually aren't names of things, or adjectives; they sound like the names of things, or like adjectives.
For example, sôs ("safe") is an adjective; crátos ("rule") is a noun; but there is no adjective "socrátes," just the proper noun "Socrátes," which sounds like it might mean "enjoying secure rule" or something.
On the other hand, sometimes a word can be both an adjective and a name, or a common and a proper noun: For example: céphalos = a kind of mullet and (Latinized) = Céphalus (husband of Procris; also an old man we meet early in Plato's Republic); another example is diogénes = Zeus-born and = Diogénes (the Cynic philosopher).
Question: Why, in your analysis of names, do you transliterate the Greek letter kappa as "k" and the Greek letter chi as "ch"?
Answer: In the transliteration of Greek common nouns, I use "k" for kappa and "ch" for chi because
1. In English, we use "k" for kappa and "ch" for chi in the names of the Greek letters, and
2. In Late ancient Greek and in Modern Greek, kappa and chi represent rather different sounds.
Question: Did the ancient Greeks have a goddess of Truth?
Answer: "Truth" is not, to my knowledge, a Greek goddess, exactly. There were apparently a few Greek philosophers who spoke of Truth personified, but that's all. I don't know of any temple of Truth. Parmenides, fragment 1 (Diels) speaks of Truth (Aletheia), personified. But Truth is not related to any character in the myths.
7 Jan 2005