Stephen Hughes wrote:S Walch wrote:Reading it, I would think it parallels John 1:1 more than anything (with regards to the meaning of προς),
You'll need to walk me through the stream here, I can't see a way to make the leap at this point of crossing. I considered that as a parallel, but couldn't find a clear sense of reference or directionaloty after getting to the level of abstraction.
When I first read the passage cited, my initial reaction was reading προς as meaning "with", of which one can only really recall John 1:1 immediately after thinking such - I don't believe there's a more famous passage where προς means "with" than that. That was about as close as the parallel got.
Stephen Hughes wrote:Do you mean that πρός in πρὸς ὑπόκρισιν is just an unmarked or commonplace adverbialiser for ὑπόκρισις, like "with" is for "compassion" or as ἐπί is in, "ἐπ’ ἀληθείας" (what I believe would be an understandable complementary antonym of πρός were simply an adverbialiser)?
Yes, this was my thinking. υποκριτικά wasn't around at the time of Phocylides. Guess we could understand προς here as something along the lines of "to the point of being" or "with a view to acting"
Stephen Hughes wrote:Before posting, I had vacillated between whether πρός was served as standard fare with the θωπεύειν (what information I couldn't get from LSJ), or whether its pungent acridity was better suited to dance every dance on the card with a somewhat lightweight partner like ὑπόκρισις. That is to say that the very pointedness of πρός in marking some reference marker that we have to squint to make out clearly suggests that the distant reference marker doesn't need to be well known or properly explained.
I've not yet been able to find any other place where θωπεύειν (or it's inflections) appear with προς except here in Phocylides. That's quite telling for what I can gather.
Stephen Hughes wrote:That is an interesting passage.
There are also hits for καθ᾽ ὑπόκρισιν and ἐς ὑπόκρισιν.
Perhaps the sense or connotation of θωπεύειν makes πρός rather than another more suitable here.
I also couldn't find any use of θωπεύειν with any other preposition either.
Either the Greek manuscripts are lacking in this case, or θωπευω is not used very much in the literature