[B-Greek] The music of Homeric verse

Eric Inman eric.inman at wescorpflex.com
Mon Apr 20 19:45:12 EDT 2009


The word POLUFLOISBOIO reminds me of the word "polyphoisbic" that I thought I remembered reading years ago in a book about Gallipoli. I thought I remembered it quoting an English poem in which the poet had coined the word, meaning multicolored, to refer to the rainbow colors cast by the spray of a boat. I also remember being able to look it up in a very large dictionary that has since been thrown out. So now I'm wondering if the word really was "polyphloisbic," which I can find now but which means loud-roaring. Since Gallipoli is in the same area as Troy I imagine the book and/or the poem made some references to the Iliad. I don't know if the poet was trying to coin a word similar to "polyphloisbic" of if I'm not remembering correctly. If anyone has heard of that word, please let me know.

Eric Inman

On Apr 20, 2009, at 6:16 AM, Carl Conrad wrote:

> Maybe I just want to see if our list software is still working after
> the hiatal silence of the weekend. While what I call attention to is
> admittedly tangential to the study of Biblical Greek and the Biblical
> Greek text, it is a tangent that I have consistently heretofore urged
> B-Greekers to pursue, on grounds that, for readers of any Greek
> literature, the Homeric poetry is a wellspring deserving of fresh
> visits by mid-life learners as well as old codgers like myself.
> Michael Gilleland's blog-entry of April 19 is entitled "Para Thina
> Poluphloisboio Thalasses" (παρὰ θῖνα
> πολυφλοισβοῖο θαλάσσης = PARA QINA POLUFLOISBOIO
> QALASSHS) -- "along the strand of the much-roaring sea." I can still
> vividly recall the first time I encountered, as a sophomore in the
> fall of 1953, this recurrent formula in line 34 of Book 1 of the
> Iliad, where the aged priest of Apollo, Chryses, cursed and sent off
> fruitless in his endeavor to ransom his daughter, Chryseis, makes his
> way despondently over the sands of the Trojan littoral. It is a
> majestic-sounding roll of syllables, and it constitutes one of the
> reasons why it is worthwhile reading more than a restricted corpus of
> texts composed within a century and a half of the long life-span of
> Greek literature. At any rate, the snippet cited by the Laudator
> Temporis Acti is from a traveler''s reflections on ways in which the
> ancient Greek experience of the sights and sounds of the sea found
> echoes in the music of Homeric poetry:
>
> http://laudatortemporisacti.blogspot.com/2009/04/para-thina-poluphloisboio-thalasses.html
> = http://tinyurl.com/cv4jed
> tp://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-greek




---
B-Greek home page: http://www.ibiblio.org/bgreek
B-Greek mailing list
B-Greek at lists.ibiblio.org
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-greek




More information about the B-Greek mailing list