Plut. Mor., Greek Questions 36 — Greek Questions

Plut. Mor., Greek Questions 36 — Greek Questions, Plutarch; served verbatim

Question 36. Why do the Eleian women in their hymns beseech Bacchus that he will come to their help with an ox’s foot? The hymns run thus: Come, O hero Bacchus, to thy holy temple placed by the sea; hasten with the Graces to thy temple with a neat’s foot. Then they redouble this, O worthy Bull!Solution. Was it because some call Bacchus Bull-begot, and some Bull? Or as some say ox-foot for a great foot; as the poet saith ox-eye for a great eye, and Βουλάϊος for haughty? Or is it rather, because the foot of an ox is innocent and his bearing horns on his head is pernicious, that so they desire the God may come to them mild and harmless? Or is it because many men are of opinion that this God presides over ploughing and sowing?

The Greek stands ready in the workroom; the English is served. Both faces will read together.

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Greek Questions, Plutarch — translated by Isaac Chauncy (rev. W. W. Goodwin), 1874
Apparatus shelf + pinned Perseus TEI — Plutarch's Morals (the Moralia), ed. William W. Goodwin, five volumes · 'Plutarch's Morals. Translated from the Greek by several hands. Corrected and revised by William W. Goodwin, Ph. D.', with an introduction by R. W. Emerson; Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1874 (five volumes; a minority of the TEI transcriptions were keyed from the same publisher's 1878 reprint)
license: public-domain (US: the Goodwin edition is an 1874 Boston publication of a 1684-1694 translation — title pages verified on all five shelf scans at acquisition; Perseus digital editions CC BY-SA 4.0, attribution recorded per ops/corpus-staging/SOURCES.md pattern)