It starts with:
ὅσα δὴ δέδηγμαι τὴν ἐμαυτοῦ καρδίαν,
ἥσθην δὲ βαιά, πάνυ δὲ βαιά, τέτταρα·
ἃ δʼ ὠδυνήθην, ψαμμακοσιογάργαρα.
The word δέδηγμαι, in Athenaze chapter 31 says it should be understood as δακνω, byte, it doesn’t make sense for me. The speeling is correct for δακνω, but I guess the word that fits better here is δέχομαι.
Is Athenaze right or not? How can δακνω make sense?
It is OK:
Greek Word Study Tool
How often I’ve been bitten to my very heart!
It can be translated like this, but what’s the meaning?
Julian, these are the opening lines of Aristophanes’ Acharnians. It’s Dikaiopolis’s lament about the sad state of Athens. Since quite a bit of the play is used in the book, you might want to read it in English or your preferred language. The line means something like “How often have I been hurt.”
I understood the way you said Mark, that’s why I thought the δεχομαι fits better, and the η just being an augment of the ε to fit in the trimeter.
“How much received my heart”.
The following lines looks like the answer.
Little enjoyed, countless troubles.
Moreover, looking in LSJ, I saw that δεχομαι with subject is rare, but Aristophanes uses this way, but still not easy.
The perfect of δέχομαι is δέδεγμαι, not δέδηγμαι. Metrically, the syllables -δηγμ- and -δεγμ- are equivalent in weight: both are heavy/long, so there would be no need to lengthen ε to η to fit the meter (which wouldn’t be permissible, anyway).
“Bitten in my heart” seems to make more sense intuitively than “received in my heart.” It’s a metaphor for experiencing grief.
Yeah, looking deeper starts to make more sense. Thank’s everyone for the explanation.
There are scholia on it. It’s interesting to me that part of the discussion is trying to justify “heart” being used to indicate the seat of this particular emotion.
“δέδηγμαι” δὲ ἀντὶ τοῦ ἠνίαμαι, λελύπημαι. καὶ Ὅμηρος· “δάκε δὲ φρένας Ἕκτορι μῦθος” καὶ “θυμοδακὴς μῦθος”.
My trans: δέδηγμαι is instead of “I am distressed” or “I am in grief”. Homer has “the story bit Hector in the phrenes” and “thymus-biting story”.
ἄλλως: καλῶς ἔφη “δέδηγμαι τὴν καρδίαν”, παρόσον περὶ τὴν καρδίαν συνίσταται τὰ τοῦ θυμοῦ καὶ τὰ τῆς ἡδονῆς, ὡς καὶ παρ’ Ὁμήρῳ Ὀδυσσεὺς θυμούμενος κατὰ τῶν μνηστήρων· “στῆθος δὲ πλήξας κραδίην ἠνίπαπε μύθῳ, τέτλαθι δὴ κραδίη” φάσκων.
My trans: Otherwise: “I am bitten in the heart” puts it nicely. Inasmuch as the things of the thymus and of pleasure stand together about the heart, as it also is from Homer when Odysseus is enraged against the suitors: “having struck his breast, he admonished his heart with speech, saying Bear up, my heart.”
It’s worthwhile noting that Aristophanes is poetry. Most of Athenaze is prose. I’m currently reading Medea in Mastronarde’s edition. In cases where the text is in doubt because of alternative readings in different manuscripts or where the text is obviously corrupt and must be corrected, Mastronarde sometimes points out, among other arguments, that a particular reading is more striking. “Bitten” is more striking than “received” and would be more appealing if the actual word were in doubt.
Very interesting this point. Another thing that we need to keep in mind is that it was made for theater and not for a book. So it’s possible sometimes the author to do a wordplay (imagine that you are hearing this in the theater), what is very feasable especially for a comedy. And only reading in the original language you can perceive this, what in most of the translations it’s impossible to express.
Yes there’s quite a lot of wordplay in ancient Greek comedy—mostly rather feeble jokes—but I doubt that anyone in the theater would have mistaken Aristophanes’ δέδηγμαι for δέδεγμαι, which would be scarcely intelligible here. The Athenian audience was remarkably sensitive to mistakes in pronunciation. One ancient actor’s slip in a performance of Euripides’ Orestes became notorious, when instead of saying after the storm γαλήν’ ὁρῶ (“I see a calm”) he said γαλῆν ὁρῶ, “I see a polecat”—just a very slight difference in accentuation but he was mercilessly ridiculed by comic poets (unless the whole thing was a comic joke).
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παρ’ Ὁμήρῳ doesn’t mean “from Homer” (that would be genitive) but “in Homer.”
If you’re interested in the scholia—notes mostly drawn from ancient commentaries—the thing to read is Eleanor Dickie’s Ancient Greek Scholarship. You can learn a lot from it.
Another instance (if not apocryphal) of audience sensitivity to pronunciation:
He took the quotes from Homer, and παρὰ + dat. seems like a fine way to say that.
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On ε/η, The play was produced before the Eucleidian alphabet was introduced, so any written distinction between Ε and Η is a (very slightly) later interpretive tradition. The spoken language distinguished between the two sounds clearly, per Threatte’s Grammar of Attic Inscriptions.
He took the quotes from Homer, and παρὰ + dat. seems like a fine way to say that.
That’s fudge, Joel, and you know it. You simply misread the note. But never mind. I trust you’ll agree that reading Aristophanes’ play is more rewarding than reading the scholia, interesting though they can sometimes be.
I found dictionaries that gives the meaning of “afflict” too for δακνω.
Other exemple is in Acharnians line 18:
οὕτως ἐδήχθην ὑπὸ κονίας τὰς ὀφρῦς.
I found others examples in Homer too.
I use Logeion and Attikos apps, and the definition of DGE is much more comprehensive than LSJ, that I use most.
This is so bizarre. I could in fact see that the following quote was from Homer (excuse me, in Homer). In fact, I recently saw the line in the Phaedo (nearly said ‘knew it from’), which I read with a friend on Saturdays.
The Ionic alphabet was in use in Athens before 403 in literary works and inscriptions of a private character, but not in official public inscriptions. The reform of 403 BCE adopted the Ionic alphabet for official inscriptions. See A.C. Cassio ed., Storia delle lingue letterarie greche (2d ed. 2016), § 11.5.2, p. 335. So Aristophanes probably wrote ΔΕΔΗΓΜΑΙ, not ΔΕΔΕΓΜΑΙ.
JulianZ did well to compare 18 οὕτως ἐδήχθην ὑπὸ κονίας τὰς ὀφρῦς, for it has the same syntax—the 1st-person verb in the passive accompanied by an “acc. of respect” (τὰς ὀφρῦς ~ τὴν ἐμαυτοῦ καρδίαν). Where Greek speaks of being “bitten” we might speak of smarting or stinging.
He says “con ogni probabilità”, and makes no blanket statement: he does not appear to be making the statement that every literary work or inscription of private character used the Ionic script during the period before 403 BC, just that some did.
Even if we knew that the Ionic script was used for the play as first written, note Threatte’s discussion of ε and η, which claims that 460-430 (this play was 425), was the period of greatest confusion between ε and η in the Ionic script in Attica due to the multiple alphabets in use.
