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On σκορδαψός: gut-knot or eyesore? A tribute to BMGS*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 April 2016
Extract
Forty years ago, I contributed my first independent article to Volume 1 of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, ‘The lament of the Virgin in Byzantine literature and modern Greek folksong’. For this fortieth anniversary issue, dedicated to A. A. M. Bryer, I have, as in the closing words of Theodore Prodromos’ seventh letter to Aristenos (Πεϱὶ Γλώττης), nothing to offer but μικϱαῖς ἀντιδεξιοῦσα σταγόσι, καὶ ταύταις θολεϱαῖς (‘meagre and murky drops’),1 further sullied with speculation on possible meanings of a single rare word: skordapsos. Does it mean ‘gut-knot’ or ‘eyesore’? Is it a vulgar form of chordapsos, an affliction of the intestines (attested in early medical texts)? Or is it a later vernacular term for ‘eye disease’, for which garlic (skordo) was, and remains, a known curative? And does it matter?
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- Copyright © Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham, 2016
Footnotes
*
I should like to thank the following friends and colleagues for assistance and advice on σκορδαψός: Rosemary Bancroft, Elizabeth Craik, John Duffy, David Holton, Nikolaos Zagklas. Since my text and translation are still ‘work in progress’, I have not yet been able to work through all their comments, hence responsibility for outstanding differences, and all errors, are my own. Above all, I thank my editor, Ruth Macrides, for her infinite patience, and with κατάνυξη.
References
1 MPG 133, 1265A -1267B: words cited from concluding paragraph. For fuller analysis of this letter, its significance for Ptochoprodromos and for the rise of the vernacular tongue, see Alexiou, Margaret, ‘Of longings and loves: seven poems by Theodore Prodromos’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 69 (2016) [in press, 1–17]Google Scholar.
2 When I asked the Reviews Editor of the JHS why, unlike other leading classical periodicals, they failed to review my Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition (1974), he (yes, male) told me the book was considered ‘insufficiently Hellenic’. By contrast, my After Antiquity: Greek Language, Myth, and Metaphor (2002) was found to be too ‘broadly Greek’ (TLS 14.11. 2003, 10–11). More seriously, undergraduates (not at University of Birmingham), have been subjected to ridicule from professors should ever a modern Greek phoneme uttered in class besmirch the purity of their classical Greek.
3 See Byron MacDougall, this volume, pp. 136–150. I have not repeated here the same references contained in his chapter.
4 Krallis, D., ‘Harmless satire, stinging critique: notes and suggestions for reading the Timarion’, in Angelov, D. and Saxby, M. (eds), Power and Subversion in Byzantium (Farnham 2013) 221–45Google Scholar.
5 M. Alexiou and D. Cairns (eds), Greek Laughter and Tears: Antiquity and After, Edinburgh University Press (forthcoming).
6 Parani, M. G., Reconstructing the Reality of Images: Byzantine Material Culture and Religious Iconography (11th -15th centuries) (Leiden 2003) 253Google Scholar, 280, 292.
7 du Boulay, J., Cosmos, Life, and Liturgy in a Greek Orthodox Village: (Limni, Evia, Greece 2009)Google Scholar; Kain Hart, L., Time, Religion and Social Experience in Rural Greece. (Lanham, Md. 2002)Google Scholar; Hirschon, R., ‘Greek adults’ verbal play; or, How to train for caution’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 10.1 (1992) 35–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 For discussion of language, everyday life and emotion, see Maria Theodoropoulou, ‘The emotion seeks to be expressed: thoughts from a linguist's point of view’, in A. Chaniotis (ed.), Unveiling Emotions: Sources and Methods for the Study of the Emotions in the Greek World (Habes 52) (Stuttgart 2012). Her examples are from modern Greek, but her linguistic method could well be applied to Byzantine texts.
9 Hesseling, D.-C. and Pernot, H., eds., Poèmes prodromiques en grecque vulgaire (Amsterdam 1910)Google Scholar. Text, translation and context for both passages are given in M. Alexiou, ‘Ploys of performance: games and play in the Ptochoprodromic poems’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 53 (1999) 91–109.
10 Theophanes, Chronographia, ed. C. de Boor (Leipzig 1883, repr. Hildesheim 1980) 2 vols., I, 427.27.
11 Eideneier, H., Ptochoprodromos (Cologne 1991).Google Scholar
12 Koukoules, Ph., Βυζαντινῶν Βίος καὶ Πολιτισμός, VI (Athens 1955) 32Google Scholar.
13 Andriotis, N. P., Lexikon der Archaismen in neugriechischen Dialekten (Vienna 1974)Google Scholar no. 5425.
15 Eideneier, Πτωχοπρόδρομος (Herakleion 2012).