ἱστορίαι Historiai
Plut. Mor., Symposiacs 8.6.5 Symposiacs, Plutarch; served verbatim
My brother Lamprias, being of a scoffing, jeering nature, said: Since we are in a trifling humor, I can show that the Latin names of these meals are a thousand times more proper than the Greek; δεῖπνον, suppler, they call coena (κοῖνα διὰ τὴν κοινωνίαν), from community; because they took their ἄριστον by themselves, but their coena with their friends. Ἄριστον, dinner, they call prandium, from the time of the day; for ἔνδιον signifies noon-tide, and to rest after dinner is expressed by ἐνδιάζειν; or else by prandium they denote a bit taken in the morning, πρὶν ἐνδεεῖς γενέσθαι, before they have need of any. And not to mention stragula from στρώματα, vinum from οἶνος, oleum from ἔλαιον, mel from μἐλι, gustare from γεύσασθαι, propinare from προπίνειν, and a great many more words which they have plainly borrowed from the Greeks,—who can deny but that they have taken their comessatio, banqueting, from our κῶμος, and miscere, to mingle, from the Greeks too? Thus in Homer, She in a bowl herself mixt (ἔμισγε) generous wine. They call a table mensam, from τῆς ἐν μέσω θέσεως, placing it in the middle; bread, panem, from satisfying πεῖναν, hunger; a garland, coronam, from κάρηνον, the head;—and Homer somewhat likens κράνος, a head-piece, to a garland;—caedere to beat, from δέρειν; and dentes, teeth, from ὀδόντας; lips they call labra, from λαμβάνειν τῆν βόραν δι’ αὐτῶν, taking our victuals with them. Therefore we must either hear such fooleries as these without laughing, or not give them so ready access by means of words....

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

← Plut. Mor., Symposiacs 8.6.4 contents Plut. Mor., Symposiacs 8.7.1 →

Filed here — the addresses this episode attests; counted by the house’s first pass
Homer — a life Lamprias — 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)