[B-Greek] THIASARCH once only
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad2 at mac.com
Thu Dec 27 10:25:53 EST 2007
On Thursday, December 27, 2007, at 08:12AM, "Anita Clerke" <clerke at humanperformance.cc> wrote:
>Thank you Elizabeth for doing that search. It is much appreciated.
>
>Thank you too George for clarifying that the search I performed on
>CCE Library yielded a result that, although to me at first sight
>seemed to have been another early christian writers comment on the
>death of Polycarp, was in fact just a chapter from a book written
>just over a hundred years ago:
>History of the Origins of Christianity. Book VI. The Reigns of
>Hadrian and Antoninus Pius. (A.D. 117-161)Author: Renan, Joseph
>Ernest (1823-1892).
>
>I did realise at the time it wasn't the original MPol, that is: The
>letter of the Smyrnaeans or the Martyrdom of Polycarp
>Translated by J.B. Lightfoot. Adapt. and mod. (c) 1990. ATHENA DATA
>PRODUCTS http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/martyrdompolycarp-
>lightfoot.html 23/12/2007; but I certainly had thought the chapter
>titled "The Martyrdom of Polycarpus" was from an early Christian
>source. Thanks again.
>
>I am amazed that THIASARCH appears only once in all of Greek
>literature, Christian and non-Christian.
>Could it be that Lucian made a portmanteau in this particular
>instance? Given his extraordinary imagination I presume this is
>possible. At odds with this is the thought that if he had made a new
>word at this point, he may have been unlikely to have been so modest
>about it.
It's hardly reasonable to suppose that Lucian is the only author who
ever used this word -- and George said that clearly enough. It's hardly
the case that all the Greek literature of any period whatsoever has
survived. But it doesn't matter; the meaning of QIASARCHS is perfectly
clear from its elements. In this instance there's little to guess at in
the meaning of the elements QIASOS and ARCH of which the word
is compounded. A rather similar word is ARCHGOS in the GNT --
my memory may not be correct (I'm away from my home library at
the moment -- my recollection is that it appears only once in the GNT
-- in Hebrews 11 -- and that it's not seen elsewhere.
>Are there any other words used by Lucian that do not appear in any
>other extant literature?
>
>Did any of the Greek writers within a few hundred years of Lucian
>produce new words, and made a point of indicating that they had in
>fact done so?
You really do have to take into account that the evidence from which
we must make judgments about this sort of thing is really far too
scanty, proportionately speaking.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (ret)
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