Saturday, August 13, 2011

Appetitive: Praise with Homeric Terms

Back in the early days of my freshman Mediterranean humanities course, my classmates and I replaced common words for praise (like "kudos") with the Greek word τιμή (esteem, honor) which is so important in the Homeric epics. So instead of saying "awesome job" we would say silly things like "mad τιμή."

As I was reading Homer this morning, I happened upon the word κῦδος. This really surprised me because we all replaced "kudos" with the Greek, but it turns out κῦδος is a similar word to τιμή as it means "glory" or "renown."

Note: I have been working hard on some research on the Laws and I am planning on retelling the argument from my "Dates in the Platonic Corpus" series in a clearer fashion over the next few weeks as I work on editing my thesis. I do not think that I did justice to either the persuasive power of the Zuckert argument or the complexities of dating the Laws. I shall attempt to do a better job this time around.

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