User talk:Davidiad: Difference between revisions

Roger Bagnall (pictured) says,

"The world is not really crawling with crooked papyrologists."

chives
2011 2012 2013

Dionysus

There's no point giving more reasons to this IP user at Dionysus; he's long past WP:3RR. See [1] for more of his behaviour. I already opened a complaint at WP:SPI. Just waiting for an admin to do something. --Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 00:45, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

• Gotcha. I'll just undo without explanation if I see it again.  davidiad { t } 00:49, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

Phineus (son of Belus)

I don't think there any source that says that Phineus was the son of Belus, what the sources say is that Phineus was the brother of Cepheus, so Phineus son of Belus requires a lot of original resarch by synthesis, as we must suppose: (1) that Phineus and Cepheus had the same father (2) that Cepheus is the son of Belus.

In the pt-wiki, I made this article as Phineus (uncle of Andromeda) which seems more likely to correpond to what is in the text of Ps. Apollodorus and Ovid, and I add a touch of poison by modern authors that think that Phineus was not the brother, but the brother-in-law, of Cepheus, since he and Cassiopea would both be children of Phoenix, the son of Agenor, and Cassiopea, the daughter of Arabus. Albmont (talk) 18:53, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Hi Albmont, thanks for this. Actually the sources cited in the first note give the genealogy. The explicit reference to Phineus' being the son of Belos isn't in the Bibliotheca, but in the scholia to Aeschylus—ὁ Εὐριπίδης εʹ φησὶ παῖδας εἶναι Βήλου, Αἴγυπτον, Δαναόν, Φοίνικα, Φινέα, Ἀγήνορα—and in Nonnus—Βῆλος ἐπασσυτέρην γενεὴν σπερμήνατο παίδων, | Φινέα καὶ Φοίνικα λιπόπτολιν. (These are cited by Dräger; Tzetzes give the same genealogy a few times, too.)  davidiad { t } 00:08, 12 October 2013 (UTC)

Thanks! These families are very confusing, I don't know how the ancient greeks constructed them, but it seems that they were trying to fit local legends and translate foreign names into the corresponding greek heroes. I once read a modern analyst speculate that the greeks were well aware of the pre-olympic chronology that the authors were using, namely, they were building and adjusting the genealogies in terms of generations. In this way, it makes sense to place Phineus as son of Belos (in the same generation of Cepheus) or in the next generation (as grandson of Agenor, brother of Belos). Albmont (talk) 12:58, 14 October 2013 (UTC)

The extended family of Belus looks especially like a rationalization of the heroic past and the presence within it of non-Greek strata. Later,  davidiad { t } 22:50, 14 October 2013 (UTC)

A is for …

I AfD'd Aeternae; could you just glance at it? I'm wondering whether it's a Greek name misunderstood by the (extremely thin) sources because of some similarity to the Latin adjective.

Also, I may have a key to the mystery of the Anthousai: see Tyche of Constantinople. It was unclear to me whether the reference meant that only this city's Tyche was called Anthousa, or whether Anthousai could thus be equivalent to Tychai. Cynwolfe (talk) 22:49, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

I saw that out of the corner of my eye the other day. I'll take a look presently as I just got back from a week of mind-numbing bug testing in Little Rock and could use some mindless word searching. That Tyche bit looks like a coincidence to me, but, who knows, maybe there's something behind it.  davidiad { t } 00:13, 12 October 2013 (UTC)

This has my flummoxed. I've done all the searches you've probably done, and scoured the Greek and a couple Latin Alexander texts and haven't come up with anything (not that searches of the Latin can be all that fool-proof.) My Greek searches involved searching for words in Ἰνδ- within 20 lines of words meaning head. My best guess would be that this is a medieval tradition, but the Google Books sources give me pause. It would be nice to see the reference in Rose, but that's not part of the preview. The citation system, however, does not give me much confidence. Aeternae is cited to reference 7, which is used in a number of entries, so it looks as though the book is simply citing other monster & fairy tomes, in this case Barber, A Dictionary of Fabulous Beasts. By the end of the weekend I'll probably !vote delete on the grounds that we lack context and presenting the article without that context leaves it squarely in tarot-nerd fan universe, implying that there's demonstrable antiquity to the topic. But it would be nice to see what's inside Barber.  davidiad { t } 17:33, 12 October 2013 (UTC)

I'm only checking my watchlist in passing these days, as I'm feeling rather pessimistic about the whole thing and am starting not to care. Cynwolfe (talk) 17:42, 14 October 2013 (UTC)

I hear ya.  davidiad { t } 22:48, 14 October 2013 (UTC)