[B-Greek] Follow up to Mitch's AGAPAW and FILEW

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Sat Aug 16 12:48:55 EDT 2003


At 2:57 PM +0000 8/16/03, Mark Wilson wrote:
>I wrote in an earlier post the following:
>
>-------
>Antonius, in the funeral discourse addressed the Roman people over the body
>of Caesar in this way:
>
>EFILHSATE AUTON hWS PATERA, KAI HGAPHSATE hWS EUERGETHN
>
>- Trench, Synonyms of the NT, pg. 42, citing Dion Cassius, xliv, 48).
>-------
>
>To which Carl rightly pointed out that Antony would have uttered this in
>Latin. But this is
>Dion's take of the gist of Antony's utterance. And since it is generally
>stated that PIL-
>has the idea of "affections" inherent to it and AGAP- more the
>"contemplative" sense, I wonder
>if the following chart would not accurately represent how Greeks would have
>placed these
>two in a hierarchy:

Two points, both in reiteration of what I said or implied yesterday:

(1) It's FILEW, not PILEW; there is a verb PILEW a correlative form of
PILOW (from PILOS, "wool" or "felt") which means to "compress wool, make it
into felt" or secondarily, "compress, close up."

(2) I think such a distinction between the two verbs, as has been amply
demonstrated in prior list-correspondence, is dubious. Where the
distinction has been underscored in the GNT more than anywhere else by some
interpreters is in John 21, and although there are indeed some who still
assert that some important distinction is in play there, a growing
consensus seems to be holding that it just isn't there, that it's a matter
of word-play like the alternation of BOSKW and POIMAINW or of ARNIA and
PROBATA. The same may well be the case in Antonius' EPITAFIOS over Caesar:
that EFILHSATE and HGAPHSATE are fundamentally synonymous in a rhetorical
parallelism very much like what we commonly find in Hebrew poetry.
-- 

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/



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