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Word Study

Hesiodic Advice on Oinops

In our initial discussions we concentrated on the Homeric epics and identified some of the themes that appear in our focus passages. When we viewed together the main subjects surrounding the words appearing with oinops—pontos, ‘sea’, and bous, ‘ox’, we started to see a connection with seasonality, so we decided to look in more detail at the two oinops passages in Hesiodic Works and Days. Read more

Word Study

Oinops and Oxen

We had seen in ‘Oinops and the Wide Open Sea’ that most of the examples of oinops occurred with pontos, and many of them had to do with that dangerous stretch of water that had to be crossed. However, there were two occurrences of oinops with the word βοῦς [bous], meaning ‘ox’. How could an ox be ‘wine-dark’? But as we have seen, the word can mean ‘wine-faced’. Read more