Cause I have just begun ancient Greek self-study, so I got some puzzled, please kindly help me a little bit
. I learn the book A reading course in Homeric Greek of Raymond Schoder. I tried many times but still not get the meaning of this below proverb:
ομοιον εστιν ομοιω φιλον
My word analysis is as below
ομοιoν = acc, like to - similar to [+dat]
εστιν = verb, be
ομοιω = dat, like to - similar to
φιλον = acc, friend [friendly]
φίλος also takes the dative. “A similar thing is dear to a similar thing.” Like likes like. It’s not opposites that attract, but things that are similar to each other.
Althought the grammatical meaning of the sentence is clear. But its thought’s still quite far from my thinking-way, cause I am a Vietnamese. “A similar thing is dear to a similar thing” will be a strange speaking way in my native language.
However, in Vietnamese, we have a similar proverb: “Buffalo seeks buffalo, horse seeks horse”