stupidity; but the meaning is that Zeus himself is the son of a mighty intellect;
ἀρόνος, quasi
κόρος, not in the sense of a youth, but quasi
τὸ καθαρὸν καὶ ἀκήρατον τοῦ νοῦ, which in turn is begotten of Uranus, who is so called
ἀπὸ τοῦ ὁρᾶν τὰ ἄνω, from looking upwards; which, as philosophers say, is the way to have a pure mind. The earlier portion of Hesiod’s genealogy has escaped my memory, or I would try more conclusions of the same sort. “You talk like an oracle.” I caught the infection from Euthyphro, who gave me a long lecture which began at dawn, and has not only entered into my ears, but filled my soul, and my intention is to yield to the inspiration today; and tomorrow I will be exorcised by some priest or sophist. “Go on; I am anxious to hear the rest.” Now that we have a general notion, how shall we proceed? What names will afford the most crucial test of natural fitness? Those of heroes and ordinary men are often deceptive, because they are patronymics or expressions of a wish; let us try gods and demigods. Gods are so called,
ἀπὸ τοῦ θεῖν, from the verb “to run”; because the sun, moon, and stars run about the heaven; and they being the original gods of the Hellenes, as they still are of the Barbarians, their name is given to all Gods. The demons are the golden race of Hesiod, and by golden he means not literally golden, but good; and they are called demons, quasi
δαήμονες, which in old Attic was used for
δαίμονες—good men are well said to become
δαίμονες when they die, because they are knowing.
Ἥρως is the same word as
ἄρως: “the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair”; or perhaps they were a species of sophists or rhetoricians, and so called
ἀπὸ τοῦ ἐρωτᾶν, or
εέρειν, from their habit of spinning questions; for
εἴρειν is equivalent to
λέγειν. I get all this from Euthyphro; and now a new and ingenious idea comes into my mind, and, if I am not careful, I shall be wiser than I ought to be by tomorrow’s dawn. My idea is, that we may put in and pull out letters at pleasure and alter the accents (as, for example,
Διὶ φίλος may be turned into
Δίφιλος), and we may make words into sentences and sentences into words. The name
ἄνθρωπος is a case in point, for a letter has been omitted and the accent changed; the original meaning being
ὁ ἀναθρῶν ἃ ὄπωπεν—he who looks up at what he sees.
Ψυχὴ may be thought to be the reviving, or refreshing, or animating principle—
ἡ ἀναψύχουσα τὸ σῶμα; but I am afraid that Euthyphro and his disciples will scorn this derivation, and I must find another: shall we identify the soul with the “ordering mind” of Anaxagoras, and say that
ψυχὴ, quasi
φυσέχη =
ἣ φύσιν ἄχει or
ὀχεῖ?—this might easily be refined into
ψυχὴ. “That is a more artistic etymology.”
After ψυχὴ follows σῶμα; this, by a slight permutation, may be either = (1) the “grave” of the soul, or (2) may mean “that by which the soul signifies (σημαίνει) her wishes.” But more probably, the word is Orphic, and simply denotes that the body is the place of ward in which the soul suffers the penalty of sin—ἐν ᾧ σώζεται. “I should like to hear some more explanations of the names of the Gods, like that excellent one of Zeus.” The truest names of the Gods are those which they give themselves; but these are unknown to us. Less true are those by which we propitiate them, as men say in prayers, “May he graciously receive any name by which I call him.” And to avoid offence, I should like to let them know beforehand that we are not presuming to enquire about them, but only about the names which they usually bear. Let us begin with Hestia. What did he mean who gave the name Hestia? “That is a very difficult question.” O, my dear Hermogenes, I believe that there was a power of philosophy and talk among the first inventors of names, both in our own and in other languages; for even in foreign words a principle is discernible. Hestia is the same with ἐσία, which is an old form of οὐσία, and means the first principle of things: this agrees with the fact that to Hestia the first sacrifices are offered. There is also another reading—ὠσία, which implies that “pushing” (ὠθοῦν) is the first principle of all things. And here I seem to discover a delicate allusion to the flux of Heracleitus—that antediluvian philosopher who cannot walk twice in the same stream; and this flux of his may accomplish yet greater marvels. For the names Cronos and Rhea cannot have been accidental; the giver of them must have known something about the doctrine of Heracleitus. Moreover, there is a remarkable coincidence in the words of Hesiod, when he speaks of Oceanus, “the origin of Gods”; and in the verse of Orpheus, in which he describes Oceanus espousing his sister Tethys. Tethys is nothing more than the name of a spring—τὸ διαττώμενον καὶ ἠθούμενον. Poseidon is ποσίδεσμος, the chain of the feet, because you cannot walk on the sea—the ε is inserted by way of ornament; or perhaps the name may have been originally πολλείδων, meaning, that the God knew many things (πολλὰ εἰδώς): he may also be the shaker,
