ἱστορίαι Historiai
Plut. Mor., Symposiacs 8.6.4 Symposiacs, Plutarch; served verbatim
Then Theon interrupting him said: By no means, if we must trust those who have delivered down to us the ancients’ way of living. For they say that those being used to work, and very temperate in a morning, ate a bit of bread dipped in wine, and nothing else, and that they called that meal ἀκράτισμα, from the ἄκρατον (wine). Their supper they called ὄψον, because returning from their business they took it ὀψέ (late). Upon this we began to enquire whence those meals δεῖπνον and ἄριστον took their names. In Homer ἄριστον and ἀκράτισμα seem to be the same meal. For he says that Eumaeus provided ἄριστον by the break of day; and it is probable that ἄριστον was so called from αἴριον, because provided in the morning; and δεῖπνον was so named from διαναπαύειν τῶν πόνων, easing men from their labor. For men used to take their δεῖπνον after they had finished their business, or whilst they were about it. And this may be gathered from Homer, when he says, Then when the woodman doth his supper dress. But some perhaps will derive ἄριστον from ῥᾷστον, easiest provided, because that meal is usually made upon what is ready and at hand; and δεῖπνον from διαπεπονημένον, labored, because of the pains used in dressing it.

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

← Plut. Mor., Symposiacs 8.6.3 contents Plut. Mor., Symposiacs 8.6.5 →

Filed here — the addresses this episode attests; counted by the house’s first pass
Homer — a life Theon — a candidate entry

Symposiacs, Plutarch — translated by Thomas Creech (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)