Showing praise in Greek choral lyric and beyond (original) (raw)

American Journal of Philology 133 (2012) 543–572

This paper focuses on the use of the verb δείκνυμι in Greek choral lyric. in Alcman, Pindar, Bacchylides and Philodamus the verb is found construed with direct objects meaning ‘song’, ‘hymn’ or ‘poetry’ (ὕμνος, γάρυμα, μέλος, ἀρετά (= ἀρετᾶς κλέος), δῶρον Μωσᾶν, μουσικά). It is argued that in these instances δείκνυμι should be translated not as ‘display’ or ‘reveal’, but simply as ‘sing’: this usage finds an exact parallel in Vedic Sanskrit where the cognate root diś- is likewise used with ‘song of praise’ as its object (stóma-, námaükti-, gír-) and the subject is likewise a poet. It is through the lens of this comparison that the Greek contexts can be understood: δεῖξαι ὕμνον, μέλος, etc. is an archaism of the melic poetry that goes back to the Indo-European poetic language where the precursor of δείκνυμι encoded the relationship between laudandus and laudator; the poet was “showing forth” a song of praise as a gift to a deity or a patron, expecting rewards in return. In view of the correspondence between Greek and Vedic, the possibility has to be considered seriously that the use of Latin dīcō in Augustan poets of reciting or performing verse (dīcere carmen) as well as of praising (dīcere laudēs) continues the same inherited phraseology. This paper further argues that a Hittite cognate of the same root can be identified in tekrin tekrizzi (which denotes some kind of a speech act in a recently published text) and that the semantic development of the root *deyḱ- from “show” to “speak, sing” usually thought to have taken place independently in Italic and Germanic (Latin dīcō, etc.) happened already in the protolanguage, but this second meaning remained limited to the domain of the poetic language. Based on these results the paper offers a new interpretation of the unclear epic epithet ἀριδείκετος (ἀνδρῶν / λαῶν / ἀνάκτων #), whose traditional explanation as a metrically lengthened form of *ἀριδέκετος ‘well received’ (to δέκομαι) has always lacked conviction. Instead, this form (together with the proper name Ἀριδείκης found in epichoric prose inscriptions) can now be understood as “most famous”, “well worth praising (in song)”.