I need help understanding this analogy, which seems to be something like, just as Acheloios is to every stream, so oak trees are to any tree and acorns are to any fruit. I’m not sure if “oak” and “acorn” are the appropriate translations but it seemed to make the most sense, since the Oak of Zeus features prominently in the Dodonaean cult of Acheloios and Acheloios is occassionaly paired with acorns in ancient art.
instead of ‘sprinkling’; for just as the “scatterers” are casting the seeds
into the land, they are casting water. They say Acheloios [is the] water
for each river just as oaks (alt: trees) for every tree and acorns (alt: fruits) for all fruits.
The original passage from Euripides is as follows:
But if god or man should haply wish to save thee,
thou must atone for thy proud thoughts of
happier days now past by humbling thyself
and crouching prostrate at my knees, by sweeping out my halls,
and by learning, as thou sprinklest Acheloios
from a golden ewer, where thou now art.
Well, you have three clauses that parallel each other. Your translation is “They say all river water is Acheloios” - so they take the name of one river and apply it to all. Isn’t the same thing going on in the other examples? ὡς δρῦν πᾶν δένδρον - as an oak is…
Yes, thank you, I see now that it is indeed singular. Do you recommend “an oak” or “a tree”? The dual plurals for fruits is also a bit confusing but perhaps that justifies “acorns” and then helps the decision about “oak” versus “tree.”
Surely you have to say oak, because otherwise you’ll be using the same word for δρῦς and δένδρον, and then the passage won’t make sense in English. By the way, is “acorns” right for ἀκρόδρυα? Isn’t an acorn βάλανος?
“They say Acheloios for all river water, like oak for every tree, and acorns for all fruits.”
The LSJ’s tree argument quotes a scholium that I can’t look up just now (still cell-phoning in foreign countries): “δρῦν ἐκάλουν οἱ παλαιοὶ . . πᾶν δένδρον”
I would suspect that LSJ is actually backwards here, and that the LSJ scholium is not a definition, but in fact is saying the same thing as the scholium of this thread. They poetically labelled every tree with “δρῦς”. So not “originally tree” at all.
The LSJ is more confusing than it should be about δρῦς: “esp. Quercus Aegilops (φηγός) and Quercus Ilex (πρῖνος)”. They’re just saying the common Turkish and Greek oaks.
δρῦς apparently comes from the Indo-European word for tree (“tree” is actually a cognate), and only later came to mean specifically an oak. But the later Greeks wouldn’t have known that.
Quercus Ilex is quite different from the “English” oak (Quercus Robur), as it’s evergreen and the leaves are a different shape, so perhaps that’s why LSJ specified it. They both have acorns, though.
What should be quoted from Euripides is Andr.166-7 (no more and no less): σαίρειν τε δῶμα τοὐμὸν ἐκ χρυσηλάτων τευχέων χερὶ σπείρουσαν Ἀχελῴου δρόσον, “and to sweep my palace, sowing the dew of Acheloos from golden vessels.”
The note addresses two separate linguistic issues: (1) the metaphorical use of σπειρουσαν: sowing for sprinkling (αντι του ραινουσαν, just as it says), and (2) the catachrestic use of “Acheloos” for “water.”
The first is self-explanatory. The second offers analogs: “They call all river-water Acheloos just as they call every tree an oak and all fruits nuts.” (The only difficulty here is the minor one of how best to translate the terms. The Greek itself is quite straightforward.)
Yes, that is what Wiktionary says…but the Indo-European reconstruction relies on the Greek lexical research, not the other way around. It would be circular reasoning to use one to confirm the other. An etymology from a specific tree → trees in general is normal and expected. From general → specific is sort of weird.
Michael’s translation mostly agrees with mine, but he seems to conceive it slightly differently. My understanding is that the entry is about a set of specific terms that exist as poetic labels for more general terms, not a general practice of specific for the general. If this is a set list of terms, then it’s possible that the Acheloios link to oaks really is something present to the scholiast’s mind, and the Dodona reference not quite superfluous. Impossible to know, of course.