I’m partial to Robert Graves’s handling of the Greek myths. I was warned many years ago that his work was imaginative, rather than scholarly. But I continue to read him. He often finds what to my mind is the shortest, simplest explanation to a puzzle.
If you search for clues to the meaning of Achilles’s name, you’ll find all kinds of heroic possibilities. Graves points out that the -chilles part of the name is literally lips. The Greeks used the prefix a- to mean without or lacking. So lipless.
The world is full of false etymologies, and I’m not enough of a scholar to make any claim. I’d just say that the name fits. Homer depicts Achilles as a great man — but also a humorless one.
I think American literature is richer for having characters like Shoeless Joe Jackson around. I like characters who are lacking something. I’d read a story about a character named Lipless Joe, wouldn’t you?
• Source and note: Robert Graves, The Greek Myths: 2; Penguin Books, 1968, pp. 288. The word for lip is χειλον. If I were a scholar, I’d put a circumflex over the iota.
Liddell and Scott’s Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon suggests that the name Achilles is from ἄχος, pain, grief, “the grief of the hero being the subject” of the poem. The Oxford Classical Dictionary suggests that the name may derive from the name of a river. I like the pain and grief possibility, which pairs well with Odysseus — one who is hated.
ReplyDeleteLiddell and Scott is the gold standard. You had an interesting post on March 31 about David Markson and how we mourn the ancient texts that have been lost. Diogenes L. says Chrysippus wrote a series of books on etymology. I wish we had them, just for a better sense of how they thought.
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