Hostname: page-component-76d6cb85b7-f97m6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-07-12T08:13:00.309Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

ΤΙΘΑΙΒΩΣΣΟΥΣΙ ΜΕΛΙΣΣΑΙ (HOMER, ODYSSEY 13.106)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2022

Alexander Nikolaev
Alexander Nikolaev*
Affiliation:
Boston University
*
alexander.s.nikolaev@gmail.com
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article examines the verb τιθαιβώσσω, a Homeric hapax legomenon of unknown meaning and etymology: it reviews its use in Hellenistic poetry and strives to provide a contextually plausible meaning for the verb (‘to sting’), as well as for the related adjective θιβρός (‘stinging, mordant, piquant’). It argues that τιθαιβώσσω is etymologically related to Latin fīgere ‘insert, pierce’, fībula ‘pin’, Lithuanian díegti ‘to poke, sting’, and Tocharian B tsākā- ‘to bite’.

Keywords

HomerAntimachusNicanderLycophronetymologyIndo-European reconstruction

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 72 , Issue 1 , May 2022 , pp. 39 - 52
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association

Greek τιθαιβώσσω is a rare verb, the exact meaning and etymology of which are unknown.Footnote 1 It has a typical profile of a ‘homerisches Wort’:Footnote 2 used once in the Odyssey, it is not attested in Greek literature again until Hellenistic times. This paper proposes a novel linguistic analysis of the word, starting neither with its meaning (which is uncertain) nor with alleged Indo-European cognates (which are even more uncertain) but rather with familiar morphological and phonological rules of Ancient Greek.

I

The verb is used in the Odyssey in the description of the cave of the Nymphs near which Odysseus awakes upon his arrival to Ithaca and in which he later hides the treasures he had received from the Phaeacians (13.103–6):

ἀγχόθι δ’ αὐτῆς ἄντρον ἐπήρατον ἠεροειδές,
ἱρὸν Νυμφάων αἳ νηϊάδες καλέονται.
ἐν δὲ κρητῆρές τε καὶ ἀμφιφορῆες ἔασιν
λάϊνοι· ἔνθα δ’ ἔπειτα τιθαιβώσσουσι μέλισσαι.
And near it a pleasant dusky cave,
sacred to the nymphs who are called Naiads.
In it are mixing bowls and amphoras
of stone, and bees τιθαιβώσσουσι there.

The context gives no clear indication of what the precise activity of the bees thus described might have been, while the ancient commentary offers the translation ‘to store up (honey)’: Schol. Q (Dindorf) τὴν βόσιν, τὴν τροφήν, ἀποτιθέασιν, ὅ ἐστι τὰ κηρία ‘they put away food, provisions, that is, honey’; Schol. V ἀποτίθενται τὴν βόσιν, ὅ ἐστι τὸ μέλι, οἷον θησαυρίζουσι τὰ κηρία καὶ νεοττοτροφοῦσιν ‘they put away for themselves food, that is, honey, as they preserve the honeycombs and feed young bees’.Footnote 3 According to an entry in Cyril's lexicon (fifth century c.e.) interpolated into Hesychius’ dictionary (fifth or sixth century c.e.), the implied object of the verb is μελίκηρον ‘honeycomb’.Footnote 4

The ancient translation ‘to store up (honey)’ is not implausible contextually and has been widely adopted for τιθαιβώσσω in modern translations and scholarship.Footnote 5 But how reliable is it? It is beyond doubt that to the ear of a Greek grammarian active in the third- or second-century Alexandria or Pergamum the first two syllables of τιθαιβώσσω would sound like a form of τίθημι, especially after the diphthong αι [ai̯] was monophthongized to [e],Footnote 6 while the second part (-βώσσω) would just as easily be associated with βώτωρ ‘shepherd’, βόσκω ‘lead to pasture’. The paraphrase of τιθαιβώσσω as τιθέναι ‘put’ + βόσιν ‘food’ found in the scholia is in all likelihood a folk etymology. There is therefore no reliance on the ancient tradition as far as the meaning of our verb at Od. 13.106 is concerned.

Outside of the Odyssey passage, the verb is entirely absent from Archaic and Classical Greek literature and resurfaces again in Hellenistic poetry. The passages containing τιθαιβώσσω are reviewed in the following section, even though none sheds light on the original meaning of the verb; τιθαιβώσσω makes an impression of being a learned intrusion, unlikely to have been part of anyone's active vocabulary at the time.

II

While one might expect a Hellenistic poet to use an obsolete Homeric expression to make an allusion to the Odyssey passage discussed above, not all attestations of τιθαιβώσσω seem specifically modelled on the Homeric phrase. The Homeric passage must have directly inspired the anonymous author of Pindar's metrical vitaFootnote 7 that contains the famous image of a honeycomb in the poet's mouth:Footnote 8 μέλισσά τις ὡς ἐπὶ σίμβλῳ | χείλεσι νηπιάχοισι τιθαιβώσσουσα ποτᾶτο (vv. 7–8, ed. Drachmann) ‘a bee came flying τιθαιβώσσουσα into his childish lips as if it was a beehive’. Here the verb is clearly used in the sense ‘put up honey’,Footnote 9 and the author of the vita may have used the rare Homeric word to create a complex intertextual reference emphasizing the parallel between the deep sleep from which Odysseus awoke next to the cave of the Nymphs and the deep sleep during which Pindar's poetic initiation took place.

In a fragment usually attributed to the poem Artemis, Antimachus of Colophon apparently used the verb in a more general meaning ‘to put away’: ἔνδοθ[ι] γ[ω]ρυτοῖο τιθα[ι]βώσσοισα κά[λυ]ψε (fr. 108 Matthews) ‘she hid (or: covered) τιθαιβώσσοισα into the quiver’;Footnote 10 the ancient commentator paraphrases the verb with τιθεῖσα καὶ ἀποθησαυρίζουσα.Footnote 11 Τhe object of τιθαιβώσσω is missing: the most straightforward solution would be arrows (as Cazzaniga argued),Footnote 12 but Matthews points out that quiver would not be thought a hiding-place (κάλυψε) for arrows and suggests that ‘[t]he reference may be to the goddess taking the offerings (λόχια) made to her (fr. 107) and storing them in her quiver’.Footnote 13 Especially under the latter analysis, Antimachus’ use of the verb would be essentially Homeric, under the assumption that the poet understood τιθαιβώσσω in the Odyssey passage to mean something similar to τίθημι. It is not coincidental that the verb applied by Homer to bees was chosen by Antimachus to refer to Artemis, since the goddess's association with the insect is well known:Footnote 14 the scholar-poet's penchant for recondite Homeric vocabulary prompted him to employ a verb that would invoke the image of bees for his learned readership.

The next passage to be examined comes from the Diomedes episode in Pseudo-Lycophron's Alexandra:Footnote 15 when Diomedes flees to Italy, the king of the Daunians recruits his services in a war against the Messapians in exchange for a share of the land but, when the king reneges on his promise, the hero curses the Apulian soil to be infertile until such time as an Aetolian (like himself) sows the land (621–2):

Δηοῦς ἀνεῖναι μήποτ’ ὄμπνιον στάχυν
γύας τιθαιβώσσοντος ἀρδηθμῷ Διός
It [sc. the land] should never produce Deo's bountiful grain,
although Zeus should irrigate the fields with showersFootnote 16

The intended sense of τιθαιβώσσω here is clearly ‘irrigate’, ‘fertilize’, which is rather different from the use of the verb in the Odyssey and in Antimachus. One may theorize that Lycophron understood the obscure Homeric verb to mean something like ‘to put (food) in’, hence ‘to feed’ and, by extension, ‘to water’ (the scholia to Lycophron use the same paraphrase τὴν βόσιν τίθεσθαι that we have already seen above). But much more significant is the mention of Deo, viz. Demeter,Footnote 17 earlier in the sentence, since this goddess also has known associations with bees: her priestesses and initiates were called μέλισσαι,Footnote 18 her daughter Persephone is called Μελιτώδης (Theoc. Id. 15.94), and Callimachus says Δηοῖ … ὕδωρ φορέουσι μέλισσαι (Hymn 2.110).Footnote 19 In this instance Lycophron's choice of the verb describing Zeus bringing water to the soil may have been specifically influenced by the Callimachean image of bees carrying water to Demeter.

Finally, in Nicander's Theriaca the verb τιθαιβώσσω is used of domestic fowl fostering their chicks (195–9):

μορφὴ δ’ ἰχνευτᾶο κινωπέτου οἷον ἀμυδρῆς
ἴκτιδος, ἥ τ’ ὄρνισι κατοικιδίῃσιν ὄλεθρον
μαίεται ἐξ ὕπνοιο συναρπάζουσα πετεύρων
ἔνθα λέχος τεύχονται ἐπίκριοι, ἢ καὶ ἀφαυρά
τέκνα τιθαιβώσσουσιν ὑπὸ πλευρῇσι θέρουσαι.
The form of this snake-tracking creature [sc. Ichneumon]
is that of the puny marten that seeks the destruction of domestic fowls,
snatching them from their perches as they sleep,
where they roost upon a beam or τιθαιβώσσουσιν their feeble chicks,
keeping them warm beneath their breast.Footnote 20

The verb appears to mean something like ‘nourish’ here.Footnote 21 It is extremely unlikely that this sense is original; in fact, there are several ways of explaining the usage of τιθαιβώσσω in this passage. Most likely, Nicander adopted the verb in this sense directly from Lycoph. Alex. 622 (where the verb is used to refer to nourishment of the fields): at Ther. 401 the poet uses another word from the same passage in the Alexandra—namely, ἀρδηθμός (perhaps Lycophron's own coinage). Nicander's use of τιθαιβώσσω may also be due to his own interpretation of the Homeric verb as ‘they put in (honey = food)’, hence ‘they feed’. Finally, folk etymology may have played a role: the Schol. Nic. Ther. 199 offer a derivation from τυτθὰ βόσκειν (‘nourish youth’), and it is not unreasonable to speculate that Nicander himself may have had this etymology in mind; another possibility is that the poet was thinking about an etymological connection with τιθηνέω (‘tend, foster, raise lovingly’).Footnote 22

This concludes our examination of the passages in which τιθαιβώσσω is attested. While the meaning of the verb in Od. 13.106 is uncertain, passages in later poetry are either directly dependent on the Homeric passage (Pindaric vita) or make an indirect reference to it: the reason both Antimachus and Lycophron use the rare verb τιθαιβώσσω is arguably its association with bees in Homer; Lycophron's usage, in turn, appears to have influenced Nicander. As is often the case in Hellenistic poetry, the choice of a rare lexical item is determined by considerations of intertextuality (with support from folk etymology) and not by its proper lexical meaning which remains unknown.

While it is probable that τιθαιβώσσω had become obsolete by Hellenistic times, it is also possible that the original meaning of the verb had been forgotten much earlier—namely, before Odyssey Book 13 was composed: no longer transparent to the singer, the verse-final phrase τιθαιβώσσουσι μέλισσαι could have been extracted from its original context (no longer available to us) and used in the description of the Cave of the Nymphs simply because the latter featured bees.Footnote 23 The poet of the Odyssey may indeed have thought that the verb meant something like ‘to store (honey)’, just as later commentators believed, even though this was not the etymological meaning of the verb. Such a misunderstanding would not be unprecedented: for instance, the basic meaning of the verb κορύσσω, -ομαι is ‘to put the helmet (κόρυς) on’ and, broadened, ‘to equip with weapons, arm oneself’, but at Il. 4.424 the verb is metaphorically used of a wave (κῦμα θαλάσσης) as it raises its head on the open water (πόντῳ μέν τε πρῶτα κορύσσεται). As Leumann (n. 2), 210 showed, the verb κορύσσεται in this verse was reinterpreted as meaning ‘swells up’ which gave rise to such unexpected usages as in Il. 21.306 κόρυσσε δὲ κῦμα ῥόοιο ‘(Skamandros) was lifting up the wave of his waters’ and Il. 2.273 πόλεμόν τε κορύσσων ‘arousing, stirring up the battle’.Footnote 24 To take another example from Leumann, the noun ἀλαλητός belongs to the same root as ἀλάομαι ‘to wander’, and the etymological meaning can still be discerned in Il. 16.78–9: οἳ δ’ ἀλαλητῷ | πᾶν πεδίον κατέχουσι (‘roaming [around the plain], they [sc. the Trojans] take hold of the entire plain’); since the connection between ἀλαλητός and ἀλάομαι was no longer transparent to the singers and since the immediately preceding lines mention the voice (ὄψ) of Hector, bursting out all round, ἀλαλητός was reinterpreted as meaning ‘war cry’.Footnote 25 In Il. 14.426 and 23.679 we find the verb δουπέω in an unexpected meaning ‘to die’ (vs the usual meaning ‘make a noise’, δοῦπος): Leumann (n. 2), 215–17 plausibly argues that we are dealing here with an epic adaptation of the phrase δούπησεν δὲ πεσών, misunderstood as ‘he fell and died’. Another example is the adjective ἀάατος ‘sunless’, used at Il. 14.271 as an epithet of the rivers of the Styx, and mechanically transferred to Od. 21.91 and 22.5 to qualify the bow-stringing contest simply by virtue of being a sinister epithet related to the Underworld.Footnote 26 If a ‘Leumannsches Missverständnis’Footnote 27 of a similar kind is responsible for the appearance of τιθαιβώσσουσι μέλισσαι at Od. 13.106, we must conclude that we know nothing about the meaning of τιθαιβώσσω except that the verb is used of honeybees; it could refer to any of the insects’ prototypical activities, including buzzing, dancing, collecting pollen and stinging.

III

Having reviewed the avatars of τιθαιβώσσω in Greek literature, we can now turn to the question of its origin. The ancient derivations from τὴν βόσιν τίθεσθαι or τυτθὰ βόσκειν can be safely discarded, and modern scholarship has mostly been agnostic as to the etymology of τιθαιβώσσω.Footnote 28 But even though the verb appears to be entirely isolated in Greek, the rules of word formation in Ancient Greek are known to us rather well, which makes it possible to ‘undo’ the morphological derivation step by step and identify the root of the verb.

Verbs in -ώσσω in Ancient Greek form a minuscule group which becomes even smaller once we set aside those verbs in which -ω- may belong to the root, such as πτώσσω ‘cower, hide for fear’.Footnote 29 The remaining verbs are denominative,Footnote 30 so we might start by entertaining that idea in the case of τιθαιβώσσω. One derivationally clear case among the verbs in -ώσσω is the Homeric ἀγρώσσω ‘catch by hunting’ derived from ἀγρώτης ‘hunter; hunting’:Footnote 31 the sequence -σσ- in ἀγρώσσω is the Ionic outcome of the sequence *-ti̯-. On the strength of this parallel we may posit an agent noun *τιθαιβώτης from which the verb τιθαιβώσσω was derived.Footnote 32

The next step in our linguistic exercise is to determine the possible starting point for the agent noun *τιθαιβώτης. Here the -ω- before the suffix points to a derivation from a contract verb; compare Homeric ἐ(ε)δνωτής ‘matchmaker’ from ἑδνόω ‘betroth’, which leads us to a hypothetical verb *τιθαιβόω.Footnote 33 The verb ὑπνώσσω ‘be sleepy’ next to ὑπνόω ‘sleep’ suggests that we are on the right track, even though the putative intermediate stage *ὑπνώτης happens not to be attested.

Νearly all -όω verbs in Greek are denominative; when they are derived from o-stem adjectives, they have factitive semantics (‘to make X’), for instance ἀλαόω ‘make blind’ from ἀλαός ‘blind’ or ὀρθόω ‘make straight’ from ὀρθός ‘straight’. But there is another type, usually dubbed ‘instrumental’ (‘to make provided with X’, ‘to provide with X’) and derived from o-stem or ā-stem nouns; compare βροτόω ‘make bloody, stain with blood’ from βρότος ‘blood’, πυργόω ‘equip with fortifications’ from πύργος ‘turret’, or χολόω ‘affect with anger’ from χόλος ‘anger’.Footnote 34 If the nominal stem from which reconstructed *τιθαιβόω was derived was an adjective, we have to operate with the factitive type (‘to make *τίθαιβος’); if the derivational basis was a noun *τίθαιβος,Footnote 35 the verb would belong to the ‘instrumental’ type (‘to provide with a *τίθαιβος’). Since we know neither the meaning of Greek τιθαιβώσσω nor the underlying Proto-Indo-European root, the choice between these two options has to be postponed until the next section.

To summarize the argument thus far, the stem formation of τιθαιβώσσω can be plausibly accounted for by positing the following derivational chain: *τίθαιβος (nomen actionis potentially concretized as a nomen rei actae)Footnote 36 → *τιθαιβόω (denominative verb) → *τιθαιβώτης (nomen agentis) → τιθαιβώσσω. Even though the postulated intermediate stages are not attested and we still do not know the meaning of the root, this derivation fully conforms to the laws of Greek word formation.Footnote 37

Given that neither *-βο- nor *-αιβο- are known suffixes in Greek, the only sensible segmentation of our hypothetical nominal stem is *τιθαιβ-ο-. This aligns nicely with the fact that the most common way of making deverbal nouns and adjectives in Greek and Proto-Indo-European was by adding a plain thematic suffix (*-o-) to the verbal root: cf. *leu̯bh-ó- ‘dear, beloved’ (English lief ‘beloved’, Old Russian l'ubъ ‘id.’, Italic *leuφo- ‘desired’ → Oscan loufi[r] ‘or’) from the root *leu̯bh- ‘to love, desire’ (Latin lubēre ‘to be desirable’), *bhei̯dh-ó- ‘trusted’ (Latin fīdus ‘trusty’) from the root *bhei̯dh- ‘to trust’ (Greek πείθω ‘I persuade’, Latin fīdere ‘to have confidence in’), *sróu̯-o- ‘flowing; a flow’ (Greek ῥόος ‘stream’, Vedic srāvaḥ ‘id.’) from the root *sreu̯- ‘to flow’ (Greek ῥέω) or *u̯ói̯k̑-o- ‘settling; a settlement’ (Greek οἶκος ‘house’, Vedic véśaḥ ‘house, brothel’, Latin uīcus ‘village, block of houses’) from the root *u̯ei̯k̑- ‘go inside’ (Vedic viśáti).Footnote 38

This leaves us with *τιθαιβ-, which is clearly too long to be a verbal root. However, verbal nouns can also be derived from characterized stems, including those with reduplication: cf. Greek διδαχή ‘instruction’ (from διδάσκω), ἱστός ‘mast; beam’ (from ἵστημι),Footnote 39 κεκραγμός ‘cry’ (from perfect κέκραγα), ὀπωπή ‘vision’ (from perfect ὄπωπα), or συνεοχμός ‘joining, joint’ (<*-hehokhmó- to the root of συνέχω).Footnote 40 Phonologically, an analysis as a reduplicated stem comes for *τιθαιβ- virtually unbidden, compare τίθημι from *θίθημι (the root θη-/θε-), aorist ἐτύθην from *ἐθύθην (from θύω ‘offer up’), or τιθήνη ‘wet nurse’ from *θιθήνᾱ (from θῆσθαι ‘to suckle’), showing a dissimilation of two aspirated stops (θ … θ > τ … θ).Footnote 41 The stem *τιθαιβ- can thus go back to *θι-θαιβ-, a reduplicated stem made from the root *θαιβ-.

IV

We are now in a position to tackle the question of a possible Indo-European etymology for the root *θαιβ-. The initial *th in the root is unproblematic: in this position it can only go back to Proto-Indo-European (henceforth, PIE) *dh. Things are somewhat more complicated with the final consonant: while Proto-Greek *b may in theory continue PIE *b,Footnote 42 this sound was extraordinarily rare in the proto-language,Footnote 43 while the usual source of Greek β is PIE *gw.Footnote 44 Finally, the vowel *a, too, can only be reconstructed with some amount of certainty in very few cases,Footnote 45 while most instances of Greek α continue a PIE ‘laryngeal’ sound reflected in Hittite as ḫ and usually denoted by the symbol *h2. Greek -αι- therefore in all likelihood goes back to PIE *-eh2i- > *-ah2i- which by the rules of ablaut would be expected to alternate with *-h2i- > *-ih2- (laryngeal metathesis in preconsonantal position)Footnote 46 > *ī.Footnote 47

It remains to put the pieces of the puzzle together and find a PIE root with a meaning compatible with activities of honeybees and the following formal characteristics: initial *dh, final gw and *ai̯ or long *ī in-between. Precisely such root underlies Latin fīgere ‘to insert, fix, pierce’ (infīgere ‘to drive [sharp objects] in’, confīgere ‘to fasten together’, etc.); the inscriptional form FIGIER (inf. pass.) in the Senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus (186 b.c.e., CIL I2 581.27) indicates that the long -ī- in the forms of the Latin verb cannot continue an old diphthong,Footnote 48 while Old Latin fīuere ‘to insert’ (Cat. via Paul. Fest. p. 92 M.)Footnote 49 and the noun fībula ‘pin’ (< *fīu̯ibula < *fīu̯edhla) show that the final consonant of the root goes back to PIE *-gʷ-.Footnote 50 The Latin root therefore continues *dʰīgʷ-.

The same proto-form *dʰīgʷ- < *dʰih2gʷ-Footnote 51 is reflected by Lithuanian díegti / diẽgti ‘to poke, sting, hurt, prick’ (= Latvian diêgt ‘to stab’), įdíegti ‘to sting’,Footnote 52 dygùs ‘prickly’, dýgti ‘sprout, erupt (of teeth)’, dyglỹs ‘thorn’,Footnote 53 Οld Εnglish díc ‘ditch, pit’ (and perhaps Modern English dig), and Old High German dîh ‘moles, gurges’.Footnote 54 All these cognates have in common the idea of sticking a sharp object in by making a hole (hence such meanings as ‘to pierce’, ‘to plant’, ‘to dig’, etc.).

The crucial comparandum is provided by Tocharian AB tsākā-, which means both ‘to bite’ and ‘to pierce’.Footnote 55 Linguistic archaisms preserved in Tocharian as well as common innovations shared by the rest of the Indo-European languages have led scholars to believe that Tocharian languages were the second branch to have separated from the other Indo-European languages after Anatolian (Hittite, Luwian, etc.).Footnote 56 It is therefore quite likely that Tocharian tsākā- preserved the original meaning of the root (‘to bite’), while in other Indo-European languages the meaning of the root was broadened to include piercing, poking, planting and digging.Footnote 57 If Greek τιθαιβώσσω goes back to a PIE root with the meaning ‘to bite’, the connection with bees at Od. 13.106 becomes clear under the theory that the Greek verb originally meant ‘to sting’.Footnote 58

Formally, *dʰih2gʷ- (< *dhh2igw-) is best seen as a zero grade of PIE *dheh2igw-Footnote 59 of the same complex structure as, for example, *gweh2id- > Greek φαιδρός ‘bright’, Lithuanian gaidrùs ‘bright, clear’.Footnote 60 A reduplicated stem *dhi-dheh2igw- ‘to bite’Footnote 61 made from this root would make a plausible point of origin for Proto-Greek *t(h)ithai̯gw-o- ‘act of biting; a bite, a sting’, hence denominative verb *τιθαιβόω ‘to provide with a bite’ → ‘to sting’Footnote 62 from which first an agent noun *τιθαιβώτης ‘stinger, stinging insect’ and then a verb τιθαιβώσσω ‘to sting’ can be derived by familiar sound laws and rules of word formation.

V

The zero grade *dʰīgʷ- (< *dʰih2gʷ-) ‘pierce, bite’ attested in Latin, Germanic, Baltic and Tocharian may also be reflected in Greek: *dʰīgʷ- is expected to give *tʰīb- and this is exactly what we find in the adjective θιβρόςFootnote 63 attested only in Hellenistic poets and in personal names.Footnote 64 The etymology of this word is unknown and its meaning is unclear.Footnote 65 It will be appropriate to start with the two passages from Nicander where we have sufficient context (Ther. 35, Alex. 554–6):

θιβρὴν δ’ ἐξελάσεις ὀφίων ἐπιλωβέα κῆρα
You may expel the θιβρήν and harmful doom that snakes bringFootnote 66
ναὶ μὴν ῥητίνη τε καὶ ἱερὰ ἔργα μελίσσης
ῥίζα ε χαλβανόεσσα καὶ ὤεα θιβρὰ χελύνης
ἀλθαίνει τότε νέρθε πυρὸς ζαφελοῖο κεραίῃς
Again, pine-resin and the sacred produce of the bee
and the root of all-heal and the θιβρά eggs of the tortoise
are curative when you mix them on a hot fire

A scholium on Nic. Ther. 35a (Crugnola) translates θιβρός as ‘hot’ and presumably for this reason Gow and Schofield (n. 20 above) translate θιβρὴν κῆρα as ‘hot doom’.Footnote 67 But just as in the case of τιθαιβώσσω, there is no reliance on the ancient tradition: the paraphrase ‘hot’ may simply be due to the similarity of θιβρός to both θερμός and τέφρᾱ. For ὤεα θιβρὰ χελύνης in the Alexipharmaca Gow and Schofield choose ‘delicate eggs of the tortoise’,Footnote 68 possibly based on Hsch. θ 580 (Latte–Cunningham) θιβρόν⋅ τρυφερόν and perhaps on the fact that turtle eggs tend to be very pliable.Footnote 69

It is a priori not very likely that the poet used the same word in two such divergent senses as ‘hot’ and ‘delicate’. Now that the possibility of deriving θιβρός from the same root as τιθαιβώσσω ‘sting’ has been recognized, an alternative interpretation comes virtually unbidden: the meaning of θιβρός may have been ‘stinging, biting, mordant’, something equally well-suited for sharp pain caused by snake's venom and for slightly sharp, piquant taste of turtle eggs.Footnote 70

If the word θιβρός belonged to the same semantic field as ὀξύς, δριμύς, or πικρός and referred to various unpleasant sensory experiences, the use of the word in two more Hellenistic fragments becomes clear. The same scholium on Nic. Ther. 35a cites Callim. fr. 654 Pfeiffer θιβρῆς Κύπριδος ἁρμονίηςFootnote 71 and Euphorion, fr. 115 Lightfoot θιβρήν τε Σεμίραμιν.Footnote 72 Arena (n. 64 above) aptly compared the Callimachean fragment with Empedocles' fr. 122.2 DK Ἁρμονίη θεμερῶπις and marshalled other arguments in favour of the view that for Hellenistic poets the word θιβρός was confused with and influenced by another rare word θεμερός ‘solemn, august, venerable’. This is in principle possible, but a more economical solution would be to accept that in these two fragments Aphrodite and Semiramis are described as ‘stinging’, ‘biting’, or ‘bitter’. Both the goddess and the queen are emblematic of Eros,Footnote 73 and it requires no detailed substantiation that for Greeks Eros could be stinging or bitter: one only needs to think of Sappho's Ἔρος … γλυκύπικρον (fr. 130 Voigt)Footnote 74 or Aeschylus’ δηξίθυμον ἔρωτος ἄνθος ‘heart-stinging flower of love’ (Ag. 743).Footnote 75 It may even be possible to go a bit further and surmise that the word θιβρός carried the specific connotation of bee sting: for Eros imagined as a honey-bee flitting about the flowers, cf. ποτ᾿ εὗρον | ἐν τοῖς ῥόδοις Ἔρωτα ‘once I found Eros among the roses’ (Anac. 6.1–2 West),Footnote 76 and a specific association between sting of love and sting of a bee is a common topos in post-Classical Greek poetry.Footnote 77

Hesychius’ lexicon offers a long series of interpretamenta for θιβρός, of which the one that does not seem to come from ancient exegesis on Callimachus, Euphorion, or Nicander offers additional support for the hypothesis put forth in this paragraph: θιβρήν⋅ … τινὲς δὲ χαλεπήν ‘according to some: painful’ (θ 579 Latte–Cunningham).

From a linguistic viewpoint, θιβρός ‘stinging’ (< *tʰīgʷro- < *dʰih2gʷ-ro-) forms a perfect counterpart to τιθαιβώσσω ‘sting’ (< *t(ʰ)itʰai̯gʷ- < *dʰi-dʰeh2igʷ-); the ablaut relationship between zero-grade allomorph *dʰih2gʷ- and full-grade allomorph *dʰeh2igʷ- is the same as between λιλαίομαι ‘desire’ (quasi *li-leh2i-) and λῑρός ‘shameless’ (< *lih2-ro- ‘desirous’) discussed in n. 47 above.

VI

So what is the meaning of τιθαιβώσσουσι μέλισσαι at Od. 13.106? As I suggested at the end of section III, it is entirely possible that this phrase was adopted from a hexametrical verse in which it was used in its original sense ‘honeybees sting’, but this meaning was no longer known to the poet of the Odyssey, who may have thought instead that the phrase meant ‘honeybees deposit (honey)’, assuming that τιθαιβώσσουσι was somehow a form of the same root as τίθημι. This is the ‘Leumannsches Missverständnis’ theory. But there is another option which, to me, appears more intriguing: the sense of τιθαιβώσσω intended by the poet of the Odyssey may have been precisely ‘to sting’. The description of the Cave of the Nymphs cited in the beginning of this paper continues by saying that οὐδέ τι κείνῃ | ἄνδρες ἐσέρχονται, ἀλλ’ ἀθανάτων ὁδός ἐστιν ‘and men never enter by it, since it is a path of the immortals’ (Od. 13.111–12). The bees sting mortals but not the gods.

Footnotes

I would like to thank Boris Maslov, Alan Nussbaum, Michael Weiss and CQ's reader for comments on the earlier version of this paper, as well as the audience at the 151st Annual Meeting of the Society for Classical Studies where this idea was first presented on 3 January 2020. The Odyssey is cited after M.L. West (ed.), Homerus: Odyssea (Berlin, 2017); the English translation is by R. Lattimore, The Odyssey of Homer (New York, 1967).

References

1 Ebeling, H., Lexicon Homericum (Leipzig, 1885)Google Scholar, 2.330: ‘dubiae originis et significationis vocabulum’; Debrunner, A., ‘Zu den konsonantischen i̯o-Präsentien im Griechischen’, IF 21 (1907), 201–76Google Scholar, at 252: ‘ganz unerklärt’; H. Frisk, Griechisches etymologisches Wörterbuch (Heidelberg, 1960–72), 896: ‘schon wegen der schwer bestimmbaren Bed. etymologisch dunkel’; Skoda, F., Le redoublement expressif: un universal linguistique (Paris, 1982)Google Scholar, 214: ‘obscur’; Hoekstra, A., A Commentary on Homer's Odyssey (Oxford, 1989)Google Scholar, 2.171: ‘exact sense and etym. unknown’; Rengakos, A., ‘Lykophron als Homererklärer’, ZPE 102 (1994), 111–30Google Scholar, at 120: ‘das immer noch unerklärte Hapax’; P. Chantraine, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque (Paris, 20092), 1077: ‘expressif et obscur’; Beekes, R.S.P., Etymological Dictionary of Greek (Leiden, 2010), 1482Google Scholar: ‘origin ?’; Bowie, A.M., Homer Odyssey Books XIII and XIV (Cambridge, 2013), 116Google Scholar: ‘a very rare word, of unknown meaning and etymology’.

2 The reference is to Leumann, M., Homerische Wörter (Basel, 1950)Google Scholar, whose approach is discussed below.

3 Similar translations have been preserved in other grammatical literature, e.g. the Homeric lexicon by Apollonius Sophista (152.33 Bekker: τὴν τροφὴν ἀποθησαυρίζουσι ‘they lay food aside’) or the Etymologicum Magnum (758.16 Gaisford).

4 Hsch. τ 862 Hansen–Cunningham: τιθαιβώσσουσιν· ἐν ἀποτίθενται, ἀποθησαυρίζουσι τὴν τροφὴν αἱ μέλιτται, τὸν λεγόμενον μελίκηρον (‘the bees put away inside, preserve the provisions—namely, the honeycomb’).

5 For the sake of space, I am not citing all modern works of reference in which τιθαιβώσσω has been thus translated. One voice of dissent is by T.V. Gamkrelidze and V.V. Ivanov, Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans (Berlin and New York, 1995), 519, who render the verb as ‘they nest’, arguing that the stone vessels metaphorically represent beehives; in fact, clefts in rock form the natural abode of bees.

6 For the Koine the beginning of this sound change can be dated to the third century b.c.e.

7 This poem (Πινδάρου γένος δι’ ἐπῶν) is transmitted in several Pindaric manuscripts such as Laurentianus 32.37, Laurentianus 32.35 and Parisinus 2403.

8 For further discussion of the metaphor of a honeycomb in the mouth, see M. Lefkowitz, The Lives of the Greek Poets (Baltimore, 20122), 62, 176 n. 5; and for general association between bees and poets, see M. Davies and J. Kathirithamby, Greek Insects (Oxford, 1986), 70–2.

9 The same meaning must have been the one known to Porphyry, who explains τιθαιβώσσειν as τὸ τιθέναι τὴν βόσιν ‘putting away food’ (De antr. nymph. 18).

10 It is unclear what inferences can be drawn from Antimachus’ choice of an Aeolic form of the participle.

11 V.J. Matthews, Antimachus of Colophon (Leiden, 1996), 442.

12 Cazzaniga, I., ‘Osservazioni critiche intorno allo hypomnema antimacheo di Pap. Mil. Vogl. I 17, 33–6 (= fr. 182 Antimachi W.)’, PP 22 (1967), 63–74Google Scholar, at 72 n. 15.

13 Matthews (n. 11), 283.

14 Elderkin, G.W., ‘The bees of Artemis’, AJPh 60 (1939), 203–13Google Scholar remains magisterial; see also R.D. Carlson, ‘The honey bee and apian imagery in classical literature’ (Diss., University of Washington, 2015).

15 For the sake of simplicity, Pseudo-Lycophron is referred to as Lycophron below.

16 See Hornblower, S., Lykophron: Alexandra (Oxford, 2015), 266Google Scholar.

17 See Richardson, N.J., The Homeric Hymn to Demeter (Oxford, 1974), 167Google Scholar.

18 Cf. Pind. fr. 158 S.–M. ταῖς ἱεραῖσ<ι> μελίσσαις τέρπεται ‘(Demeter) delights in her priestesses’ (this fragment, cited in schol. Pind. Pyth. 4.106a, is followed by a clarification that μελίσσαις δὲ τὰς ἱερείας, κυρίως μὲν τὰς τῆς Δήμητρος). The Hellenistic poet of a hymn to Demeter addresses her priestesses (or initiates?) as μέλισσαι (SH 990.2). Apollodorus of Athens reports that the women participating in the Thesmophoria were called μέλισσαι (FGrHist 244 F 89). The scholiast on Theoc. Id. 15.94 explains Persephone's epithet Mελιτώδης by saying τὰς ἱερείας αὐτῆς καὶ τῆς Δήμητρος μελίσσας λέγεσθαι; similarly, Porphyry states τὰς Δήμητρος ἱερείας ὡς τῆς χθονίας θεᾶς μύστιδας Μελίσσας οἱ παλαιοὶ ἐκάλουν (De antr. nymph. 18). Finally, note Hsch. μ 719 (Latte–Cunningham) μέλισσαι· αἱ τῆς Δήμητρος μύστιδες (‘bees the initiatresses of Demeter’).

19 See Crane, G., ‘Bees without honey, and Callimachean taste’, AJPh 108 (1987), 399–403Google Scholar, who plausibly argues that μέλισσαι here should be understood as actual bees, not as priestesses of Demeter.

20 J.-M. Jacques (ed.), Nicandre: Œuvres. Tome 2: Les Thériaques (Paris, 2002); transl. A.S.F. Gow and A.F. Schofield, Nicander (Cambridge, 1953).

21 It is possible that νεοττοτροφοῦσιν ‘rear young birds’ listed in Schol. V as a paraphrase of τιθαιβώσσουσι at Od. 13.106 refers to the passage in Nicander.

22 From τιθήνη (‘nurse’), ultimately from the root of θῆσθαι.

23 The question why there should be bees in the Cave of the Nymphs lies outside the scope of this paper. It is possible that an analogy was sought with the bees who helped feed the infant Zeus in the Dictaean cave (Epimenides, fr. 4.70 EGM = BNJ 457 F 17), but the insects’ general association with purity, chastity and holiness is more likely to have played a role.

24 See G.S. Kirk, The Iliad: A Commentary. Volume 1: Books 1–4 (Cambridge, 1985), 378 and C. Brügger, M. Stoevesandt and E. Visser, Homers Ilias: Gesamtkommentar, vol. 2, fasc. 2 (Berlin, 20102), 86.

25 Leumann (n. 2), 211.

26 See Nikolaev, A., ‘Homeric ἀάατος: etymology and poetics’, Sprache 50 (2012–13), 182–23Google Scholar9, at 197–8.

27 ‘Leumannian misunderstanding’; so dubbed by Burkert, W., ‘ΘΕΩΝ ΟΠΙΝ ΟΥΚ ΑΛΕΓΟΝΤΕΣ’, MH 38 (1981)Google Scholar, 195–204 = Kleine Schriften (Göttingen, 2001), 1.95–104. While ‘Leumannsches Missverständnis’ is most frequently used to refer to the process that S. Reece, Homer's Winged Words (Leiden, 2009) has termed ‘junctural metanalysis’ (e.g. pre-Homeric [πολέμου] ἐπιδημίοο κρυόεντος resegmented as [πολέμου] ἐπιδημίο’ ὀκρυόεντος, hence Il. 9.64 ἐπιδημίου ὀκρυόεντος), Leumann's magisterial book contains discussions of many other processes that contributed to the creation of ‘Homeric words’.

28 See the references in n. 1 above. Few daring solutions that have been advanced do not stand scrutiny from the position of modern historical linguistics. For instance, C.A. Lobeck, Ῥηματικόν, siue uerborum graecorum et nominum uerbalium technologia (Königsberg, 1846), 248 assumed that ‘nourish’ was the original meaning and analysed τιθαιβώσσω as a ‘uerbum intensiuum’ made from the same root as τιθήνη ‘wet nurse’; this is impossible, since Latin fēmina ‘woman’ and other cognates of the Proto-Indo-European root ‘to suck’ make it clear that the -η- in the root of τιθήνη, θῆσθαι goes back to Proto-Greek *ē (and not *ā) and is therefore incompatible with the -αι- of τιθαιβώσσω. L. von Döderlein, Homerisches glossarium (Erlangen, 1850–8), 3.359 thought that the description of the cave in the Odyssey referred specifically to domesticated honey bees and proposed that τιθαιβώσσω with the alleged meaning ‘settle’ was etymologically related to τιθασός ‘cultivated’, which is improbable semantically, morphologically and phonetically (for Döderlein, the -β- in τιθαιβώσσω was a ‘hardened digamma’ used as a hiatus-filler). As to τιθασός, it is probably a foreign word; see Beekes (n. 1), 1482.

29 G. Klingenschmitt, Das altarmenische Verbum (Wiesbaden, 1982), 70 derives πτώσσω from a primary stem *ptoh2k-i̯e/o- and compared Armenian t‛ak‛č‛i- ‘to hide’, but the Armenian verb may also go back to the root of Latin tacēre, while πτώσσω can be analysed as a denominative verb derived from πτώξ ‘timid, hare’ (O. Hackstein, ‘Eine weitere griechisch-tocharische Gleichung: Griechisch πτῆξαι und tocharisch B pyāktsi’, Glotta 70 [1992], 136–65, at 137).

30 Homeric κνώσσω ‘to be asleep’ and Hsch. θ 812 Latte–Cunningham θρώσσει⋅ γεννᾷ, φοβεῖται both have uncertain etymologies and are excluded from the present consideration.

31 See E. Risch, Wortbildung der homerischen Sprache (Berlin and New York, 19742), 284. For an exhaustive discussion of secondary verbs in -ώσσω, see Debrunner (n. 1), 248–53.

32 For the agent noun suffix -της, see P. Chantraine, La formation des noms en grec ancien (Paris, 1933), 316 and the monographic treatment by A. Leukart, Die frühgriechischen Nomina auf -tās und -ās (Vienna, 1994).

33 While -της/-τᾱς had become the most productive of the agent noun forming suffixes very early in Attic-Ionic and by the fifth century in all other dialects, in Homeric Greek we still find what may have been the original distribution of the suffixes: -της is used with compounds, while -τήρ and -τωρ are used with simplex nouns (ἡγήτωρ ‘leader’ vs κυνηγέτης ‘hunter’, βοτήρ ‘herdsman’ vs συβώτης ‘swineherd’; Risch [n. 31], 28–9). However, the -της suffix does not necessarily indicate that *τιθαιβώτης should be analysed as a compound: the reason such a form would be acceptable even in the oldest Greek is simply that it looked like a compound because of its length; it is also possible for an original *τιθαιβώτηρ to have been remade as *τιθαιβώτης on the analogy to compounds with -βώτης. In sum, the agent noun *τιθαιβώτης does not violate morphological rules of Homeric Greek.

34 See E.F. Tucker, The Creation of Morphological Regularity: Early Greek Verbs in -éō, -áō, -óō, -úō, and -íō (Göttingen, 1990), 283–92. The formal difference between the two types would not have been perspicuous to a Greek, since factitives in general may have exactly the same meaning as instrumentals, e.g. αἰσχύνω ‘to furnish with αἶσχος’ (instr.) is equivalent to ‘to make αἰσχρόν’ (fact.), as noted by W.S. Barrett, Greek Lyric, Tragedy, and Textual Criticism: Collected Papers (Oxford, 2007), 344 n. 67.

35 The position of the accent in this hypothetical form cannot be ascertained. Another formation from which the verb *τιθαιβόω ‘to deposit’ is just as likely to have been derived would be ā-stem *τιθαίβη, cf. κορυφόομαι ‘rise up’, ‘be provided with a crest’ from κορυφή ‘top, peak, crest’. No decision can be made between *τίθαιβος and *τιθαίβη as putative derivational bases of *τιθαιβόω, and the choice is ultimately immaterial for the solution pursued in this paper. The presentation in the main text implicitly assumes *τιθαίβη as a viable alternative to *τίθαιβος.

36 In many languages verbal abstract nouns (nomina actionis) in addition to denoting an actual action may also be used to denote either concrete objects or results of said action (nomina rei actae): cf. English construction ‘the process of building something’ but also ‘a building’, forgery ‘the process of faking something’ but also ‘a fake’, Italian discendenza ‘the process of descending’ but also ‘offspring’, Greek ἀοιδή ‘the act of singing’ but also ‘a song’.

37 Across languages, chains of morphological derivation often become opaque to speakers and are abbreviated thanks to the workings of analogy. The verb ὑπνώσσω ‘be sleepy’ mentioned above may in fact have been derived directly from ὕπνος ‘sleep’ on the model of ἀγρώσσω ‘catch by hunting’ next to ἄγρᾱ ‘hunt’, ‘skipping’ the putative intermediate stage *ὑπνώτης (the absence of which therefore does not have to be viewed as an attestation gap after all); in other words, the speakers may have reanalysed the synchronic morphological relationship between ἀγρώσσω and ἄγρᾱ as direct derivation whereby the nominative singular ending was replaced by -ώσσω and left ἀγρώτης out of the derivation, even though historically the double -σσ- of ἀγρώσσω certainly goes back to the τ of ἀγρώτης followed by the suffix *-i̯e/o-. Similarly, τιθαιβώσσω may in theory have been formed directly from *τίθαιβος on the model of ὑπνώσσω : ὕπνος, etc.

38 See Risch (n. 31), 8–14 and for details A.J. Nussbaum, ‘Agentive and other derivatives of “τόμος-type” nouns’, in C. Le Feuvre et al. (edd.), Verbal Adjectives and Participles in Indo-European Languages (Bremen, 2017), 233–66.

39 See Chantraine (n. 32), 13.

40 See for the last example F. Solmsen, Untersuchungen zur griechischen Laut- und Verslehre (Strassburg, 1901), 256 and for additional examples E. Schwyzer, Griechische Grammatik (Munich, 1939), 1.423.

41 Grassmann's Law: A. Sihler, New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin (Oxford, 1995), 142–4.

42 Cf. βέλτερος ‘better, stronger’ < *bel-, Vedic balín- ‘strong’, Latin dē-bilis ‘weak’, Russian bol’šoi ‘big’.

43 See J. Clackson, Indo-European Linguistics (Cambridge, 2007), 46; M. Weiss, Outline of the Historical and Comparative Grammar of Latin (Ann Arbor, 20202), 37.

44 Cf. βαίνω ‘come’ < *gwm̥-i̯e/o-, Latin ueniō or βοῦς ‘cow’ < *gwóu̯s, Vedic gáu-, Latin bōs, Old English cū. See Sihler (n. 41), 161–2.

45 See Sihler (n. 41), 45; Clackson (n. 43), 36; Weiss (n. 43), 45.

46 For laryngeal metathesis, see M. Mayrhofer, Indogermanische Grammatik, vol. 1/2: Lautlehre (Heidelberg, 1986), 175. For instance, Greek πρᾱΰς ‘mild, gentle’ < *prāi̯u- goes back to the root *preh2i- the zero-grade of which appears as *prī- < *prih2- (instead of *prh2i-) in preconsonantal position (cf. Vedic prīṇā́ti ‘gratifies’).

47 Laryngeal consonants disappeared from most branches of Indo-European, but left important traces in the vowel system; in particular, any laryngeal lengthened the immediately preceding vowel before it was lost: cf. Greek δαίομαι ‘distribute’, Cretan δαῖσις ‘apportioning’ < *deh2i- vs Vedic dī- ‘divide, share’ < *dih2- (< *dh2i- with metathesis). Another example of alternation between -ai- (< *-eh2i-) and -ī- (< *-ih2- < *-h2i-) may be provided by Greek λιλαίομαι ‘desire’ compared by Solmsen, F., ‘Zur Geschichte des Dativs in den indogermanischen Sprachen’, ZVS 44 (1911), 161–223Google Scholar, at 171 to λαιδρός ‘bold, impudent’, to which we may add adj. λαιμός ‘wanton’ (Men. fr. 102 K.–A.) and reconstruct the root as *leh2i-, the zero grade of which would be found in λῑρός ‘shameless’ < *lih2-ro- (one wonders if Hittite laḫlaḫḫiya- ‘to be in [emotional] turmoil’ may belong to this PIE root). A similar alternation may be found in Greek αἱμύλος ‘seductive, binding’ (of words) vs ἱμάς ‘leather strap’, ῑ̔μονιά ‘rope’ going back to an n-stem *sīmon- < *sih2mon- (Vedic sīmán- ‘boundary’, Old English sīma ‘rope’) and further to PIE root *seh2i- ‘to bind’ (see M. Weiss, ‘On the prehistory of Greek desire’, HSPh 98 [1998], 51–6; M. Janda, Elysion: Entstehung und Entwicklung der griechischen Religion [Innsbruck, 2005], 46–7).

48 Contrast EXDEICATIS in the same inscription, line 22, from dīcere < PIE *dei̯k̑-.

49 Note also the gloss offīuēbant: claudebant seris ‘shut with bars’ (Abolita Glossary 132.1).

50 Word-medial -g- in Classical Latin present fīgere was introduced by analogy to the perfect. The most recent discussions of the Latin verb are B. Bock, Die einfach thematischen Präsentien in der dritten Konjugation des Lateinischen (Graz, 2008), 239–40; R. Garnier, Sur le vocalisme du verbe latin: étude synchronique et diachronique (Innsbruck, 2010), 398.

51 In theory, *dʰīgʷ- attested in Latin, Germanic and Baltic may go back to *dʰih1gʷ-, *dʰih2gʷ- or *dʰih3gʷ-, but Tocharian B tsākā- to be mentioned momentarily rules out *h1.

52 The Academic Dictionary of Lithuanian (Lietuvių kalbos žodynas) illustrates this meaning with a proverb that amusingly leads us back to Greek: bėk nuo grieko kaip nuo žalčio, nes, jei tu prisiartinsi, įdiegs tave ‘run away from a Greek as if from a snake: if they get closer, they will sting you’.

53 See W. Smoczyński, Słownik etymologiczny języka litewskiego (Vilnius, 2007), 109.

54 See A.L. Lloyd, O. Springer and R. Lühr, Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Althochdeutschen. Vol. 2: bî – ezzo (Göttingen, 1998), 630–4.

55 See D. Ringe, ‘Evidence for the position of Tocharian in the Indo-European family?’, Die Sprache 34 (1988–90), 59–123, at 71; D.Q. Adams, A Dictionary of Tocharian B: Revised and Greatly Enlarged (Amsterdam, 2013), 800.

56 See J.H. Jasanoff, ‘The impact of Hittite and Tocharian: rethinking Indo-European in the 20th century and beyond’, in J. Klein et al. (edd.), Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics (Berlin, 2017), 1.220–38.

57 It is possible that the meaning ‘to sting’ attested in Lithuanian is an archaism. Note also Latvian daîga 2 ‘kind of fly’ (K. Mühlenbach and J. Endzelin, Lettisch-deutsches Wörterbuch [Riga, 1923–36], 2.430).

58 Or ‘to bite’: even though Aristotle knew that female bees have a sting (e.g. Hist. an. 626a18), it is entirely possible that at the much earlier time when the Odyssey was composed Greeks still thought that bees and wasps bite and not sting. This hypothesis is borne out by the use of δάκνω of insects at Il. 17.572.

59 The disyllabic structure of *dheh2igw- is awkward, but such an extended root would not be unparalleled: beside *gweh2id- mentioned in the main text above cf. *seh1idh- (> Greek εἶθαρ ‘immediately, right on’) next to *sh1idh- > *sih1dh- (> Greek ῑ̓θύς ‘straight’: M. Peters, Untersuchungen zur Vertretung der indogermanischen Laryngale im Griechischen [Vienna, 1980], 86) or *u̯reh2igw- (> Greek ῥαιβός ‘bent inward’, Gothic wraiqs ‘crooked’: Frisk [n. 1], 639). In theory, *dheh2igw- may be viewed as a secondary root, viz. *dheh2(i)- with a Wurzelerweiterung *gw, cf. *leh1id- ‘let’ for which G. Klingenschmitt, Das altarmenische Verbum (Wiesbaden, 1982), 213 n. 69 proposed a connection with *leh1(i)- (cf. Alb. la ‘s/he let’); another example may be found in Latin saepēs ‘hedge’ and Greek αἰπύς ‘steep’ (< *‘mit einer Befestigung versehen’), on the basis of which M. Janda, ‘Etymologie von altgriechisch αἰπύς’, SPFB(klas) 6–7 (2001–2), 123–34 reconstructed *seh2ip- ‘bind’, clearly relatable to *seh2i- ‘bind’ discussed above, n. 47. (It is quite possible that root extensions like *-dh, *-gh, or *-gw represent fossilized second members of compounds: I. Balles, ‘Lang, rund und krumm: zu einigen indogermanischen Zusammenbildungen’, Die Sprache 48 [2009], 20–6.) The putative non-extended root *dheh2(i)- cannot be identified with certainty at present.

60 In H. Rix and M. Kümmel, Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben (Wiesbaden, 20012), 142 the root is reconstructed as *dhei̯Hgw- ‘to stick in’, but this is done solely on the evidence of Lithuanian díegti, Latvian diêgt and other forms in Baltic languages that point to Proto-Baltic *dei̯g-/*dai̯g- (similar reconstructions have been adopted in all standard etymological dictionaries of Baltic). If the reconstruction *dhei̯Hgw- is correct, Proto-Greek *t(h)ithai̯gwo- with its -ai̯- cannot be related to this root. But this reconstruction is phonotactically suspect. More importantly, as is acknowledged in the first footnote to the LIV lemma, the Proto-Baltic full grade *dei̯g- may be secondary; there are many examples of such secondary full grades in Baltic languages. For instance, Lithuanian seĩlas ‘noose, rope’ (< *sei̯-) can only be explained as a derivative of the root *seh2i- ‘bind’ discussed above in n. 47 under the assumption that a new full grade *sei̯- was created in Proto-Baltic to match the zero grade *sī- < *sih2- < *sh2i- ~ *seh2i-. Similarly, the only way to align Lithuanian ríeti ‘to scold’, Latvian riêt ‘to bark’ (< *rei̯-) with Russian rajat’ ‘to make a noise’ and Latvian rãt ‘to rebuke, scold’ (< PIE *reh2i-) is to posit a secondary full grade *rei̯-. Klingenschmitt (n. 59), 213 n. 69 plausibly analysed Lithuanian síekti ‘reach out’ (quasi *sei̯Hk̑-) and léisti ‘let down, let go’ (quasi *lei̯Hd-) as new full grades back-formed to zero-grade allomorphs *sih1k̑- and *lih1d- made from *seh1i-k̑- and *leh1i-d-, extended versions of *seh1i- and *leh1i-. Examples could be multiplied; the point is that Baltic evidence for *dei̯Hg- (to which one should add some Slavic forms overlooked in etymological dictionaries—namely, Slovenian and Croatian degáti se ‘to argue’ < Proto-Slavic *děgati, on which see O.N. Trubachev, ‘Ėtimologičeskij slovar’ G.A. Il'inskogo’, Voprosy jazykoznanija 1957/6, 91–6, at 95) is not incompatible with the reconstruction *dheh2igw- marshalled in the main text above.

61 In PIE, one would expect a present stem with i-reduplication to show a zero grade root; however, in the absence of direct comparanda for the reduplicated stem, it is entirely possible that *dhi-dheh2igw- (> Proto-Greek *t(h)ithai̯b-) is a product of remodelling of some sort: either athematic *dhe-dheh2igw- was remade as an i-reduplicated stem *dhi-dheh2igw- (compare *dhe-dheh1- >> *dhi-dheh1- > τίθημι) or thematic i-reduplicated *dhi-dhih2gw-e/o- was remade as an athematic stem *dhi-dheh2igw- (compare *s(t)i-sth2-e/o- >> *s(t)i-steh2- > ἵστημι). I thank M. Weiss for pointing this out to me.

62 As A. Nussbaum reminds me, there is more than one way of arriving at *τιθαιβόω, and while it is possible that the hypothetical nominal stem *τίθαιβος/*τιθαίβη ‘biting’ was concretized to ‘a bite/sting’ and served as a derivational basis for a factitive verb *τιθαιβόω ‘to make a bite/sting’, a different approach is just as possible: one could posit a nominal stem *τιθαιβός with a passive meaning ‘bitten, stung’ that would make an -όω present stem meaning ‘to render bitten/stung’, hence ‘to bite, to sting’. Compare e.g. θοός ‘sharp, sharpened, whetted’ vs θοόω ‘to make sharp’, on which see A. Nikolaev, ‘Greek θοός “sharp”, Hittite tuḫš- “to cut”’, in D. Gunkel et al. (edd.), Vina diem celebrent: Studies in Linguistics and Philology in Honor of Brent Vine (Ann Arbor, 2018), 267–75.

63 The natural quantity of the vowel -ι- in θιβ'ρός cannot be determined.

64 On Θίβρος, Θίβρων, Θίβραχος, see F. Bechtel, Die historischen Personennamen des Griechischen bis zur Kaiserzeit (Halle, 1917), 508 and Arena, R., ‘Considerationi intorno agli aggettivi θιβρός e θεμερός’, RIL 104 (1970), 307–14Google Scholar, at 309 n. 10. The earliest onomastic attestation is Σέβρον, viz. Θέβρον, in Alcm. fr. 1.3 PMGF.

65 Frisk (n. 1), 674: ‘wegen der unsicheren Bedeutung etymologisch mehrdeutig’; Chantraine (n. 1), 420 is similarly agnostic. Arena (n. 64), 314 derived θιβρός from PIE *dhegwh- ‘to be hot’, but this is linguistically impossible since Grassmann's Law (n. 41 above) affects the first of two aspirated stops: compare the regular development in *dhegwh-reh2 > Proto-Greek *thekwhrā > *tekwhrā > τέφρᾱ ‘ashes’. An etymological connection with Hsch. θ 233 Latte–Cunningham θεμερόν· σεμνόν and θεμερῶπις proposed by K. Tsantsanoglou, Of Golden Manes and Silvery Faces (Berlin, 2012), 11 likewise lacks conviction: there is no ‘normal syncope + assimilation process’ in Greek that would convert θεμερός to θιμβρός and then to θιβρός.

66 Transl. Gow and Schofield (n. 20), except that I hold back their translation of the word under discussion.

67 θιβρὴν δὲ τὴν θερμὴν καὶ ὀξεῖαν διὰ τὰς ἐξ αὐτῆς γινομένας φλεγμονάς (‘θιβρήν means hot and sharp, on account of the inflammation that results from it’).

68 Followed by J.-M. Jacques, Nicandre: Œuvres. Tome 3: Les Alexipharmaques (Paris, 2007), 51 ‘œufs délicats’.

69 A different way of understanding this passage is reflected in the scholium θιβρά⋅ θερμά. Indeed, νέρθε πυρός (questioned by Gow and Schofield [n. 20], 199) may refer to baking under the coals; cf. Schol. Alex. 555 Ábel and V'ari: ἑψηθέντα ἐπ’ ἀνθράκων. But this does not make the translation ‘hot eggs’ particularly plausible for the Alexipharmaka passage in which not just the eggs but all of the ingredients are said to be mixed on a fire.

70 An excellent parallel in English, suggested to me by B. Maslov, may be seen in the word tart, whose meanings, at least through its history, have ranged from ‘sharp, severe, painful’ to ‘sharp to the sense of taste, pungent’ to ‘acrimonious’ (of a person).

71 Or Ἁρμονίης; cf. Plut. Mor. 769A τὴν Ἀφροδίτην Ἄρμα καλοῦσιν.

72 Following the scholia, students of these fragments have translated θιβρή with ‘hot’, ‘burning’, or ‘sultry’, e.g. G. D'Alessio, Callimaco (Milan, 1996), 2.761: ‘della bruciante Cipride’; J.L. Lightfoot, Hellenistic Collection (Cambridge, MA, 2010), 357: ‘sultry Semiramis’; B. Acosta-Hughes and C. Cusset, Euphorion. Œuvre poétique et autres fragments (Paris, 2012), 170: ‘l'ardente Sémiramis’.

73 For Semiramis’ excessive lust, see e.g. Diod. Sic. 2.13.4.

74 On this epithet, see Horn, F., ‘“Bitter-sweet love”: a cognitive linguistic view of Sappho's Ἔρος γλυκύπικρος (frg. 130 Voigt)’, Poetica 48 (2016), 1–21Google Scholar, who critically reviews C. Calame's suggestion (The Poetics of Eros in Ancient Greece [Princeton, 1992], 16) that γλυκύπικρος should be understood as ‘sweet-stinging’.

75 δάκνω ‘bite’ is used both of insects (e.g. Il. 17.572) and of love, as in Aeschylus’ δηξίθυμον or in Soph. fr. 841 Radt τῳ δ᾿ ἔρωτος δῆγμα παιδικὸν προσῇ ‘but for him who has been stung by love for a boy’; I thank both B. Maslov and the anonymous reviewer for drawing my attention to this.

76 But the interpretation of Alcm. fr. 58 PMGF (Ἔρως … ἄκρ᾿ ἐπ᾿ ἄνθη καβαίνων ‘Eros coming down over the flower-tips’) is debated; see Calame, C., Alcman (Rome, 1983), 555–6Google Scholar.

77 E.g. Mel. Anth. Pal. 5.163 (= 4248–51 Gow–Page, HE) Ἀνθοδίαιτε μέλισσα … | ἦ σύ γε μηνύεις ὅτι καὶ γλυκὺ καὶ δυσύποιστον, | πικρὸν ἀεὶ κραδίᾳ, κέντρον Ἔρωτος ἔχει ‘O flower-nurtured honeybee … Is your message that she has Love's sting, both sweet and hard to bear, ever bitter to the heart?’; Strato, Anth. Pal. 12.249.1, 6 Βουποίητε μέλισσα … | κἠγὼ κέντρον ἔρωτος ἔχω ‘Ox-born bee … I, too, have a sting, even love's’; Anacreontea 35.15–16 πόσον δοκεῖς πονοῦσιν, | Ἔρως, ὅσους σὺ βάλλεις; ‘If the bee-sting is painful, what pain, Love, do you suppose all your victims suffer?’ Euripides’ comparison of Aphrodite/love to a bee flitting around (Hipp. 563–4) probably does not allude to stinging: Barrett, W.S., Euripides Hippolytos (Oxford, 1964), 266Google Scholar.