seeing upon the earth’; ‘this man... who has hit me and boasts of it
and claims that I will not see the sun’s bright light for much longer’; ‘leave
the light of the sun’; ‘she is no longer under the sun’.^38 Old Norse has the
expression sjá sik‘see oneself ’ (Gylf. 45).
To be born is to come into the light, πρ: φο ́ ωσδε (Il. 16. 188, cf. 19. 103,
118), $ φα ́ ο (Pind. Ol. 6. 44), in luminis oras (Enn. Ann. 135 et al.), an thit
lioht (Hêliand 626). An alternative expression, shared by Greek and Norse, is
‘come to one’s mother’s knees’: Hes. Th. 460 μητρ: πρ: γο3ναθ’ κοιτο;
Sigurðarkviða 45 of komz fyr kné móður. It reflects the widespread and
ancient practice of giving birth in a kneeling position.
The father’s role as begetter is sometimes emphasized by coupling the two
words. In the Rigveda (1. 164. 33 and often) we find the pairing pita ̄ ́ janita ̄ ́
‘father begetter’, just like the etymological counterparts in Avestan (Y. 44. 3
za ̨θa ̄ pta ̄), Greek (Eur. Ion 136 γεντωρ πατ ρ; elsewhere + γενν σα
πατ ρ and similar phrases), and Latin (Enn. Ann. 108 o pater o genitor).
Instead of saying ‘you are a congenital so-and-so’, Indic and Greek poets
may say ‘your father (or mother) bore you to be a.. .’: RV 1. 129. 11 ádha ̄ hí
tva ̄ janita ̄ ́ ... raks
̇
ohánam
̇tva ̄ jı ̄ ́janad, ‘for that is why your sire sired you as a
gremlin-slayer’;Il. 13. 777 $πε? ο1δ με πα ́ μπαν α, να ́ λκιδα γενατο μ τηρ, ‘for
my mother did not give birth to me as a coward’, cf. 6. 24, Od. 1. 223, 6. 25, 21.
172; Hymn. Herm. 160 f. ‘your father has begotten you to be a great nuisance
to mortal men and the immortal gods’. An analogous idiom is ‘the gods
made’ (someone to be what he is): RV 7. 16. 12, ‘him the gods made the
sacrifice-priest, the observant, the conveyor of offerings’, cf. 1. 31. 11; 7. 17. 6;
- 18; Od. 17. 271 (the lyre), ‘which the gods made to be the companion of
the feast’; 23. 166 f. ‘the dwellers in Olympus made your heart hard beyond
all women’; Hes. Th. 600 f.; Enn. Ann. 107 qualem te patriae custodem di
genuerunt!
Where human emotions are described, we find a good deal of common
ground in the kind of language used in different branches of the tradition,
and this may to some extent reflect Indo-European idiom. On the other hand
there is little that points to its being peculiarly Indo-European, and similar
phraseology sometimes appears in Near Eastern literatures. Emotions tend to
be represented as external forces that come to one, enter one, or seize one.^39
- 18; Od. 17. 271 (the lyre), ‘which the gods made to be the companion of
(^38) Il. 1. 88, 5. 119, 18. 11; Eur. Alc. 393 f. More in Durante (1976), 116 f. Naturally these
associations are not exclusively Indo-European. In the Old Babylonian Gilgamesh epic
(Meissner fr. i 12′–15′, p. 276 George) the hero, addressing the Sun-god, says ‘I shall sleep for all
time: let my eyes (now) look on the sun, let me have my fill of light... When might a dead man
see the sun’s radiance?’
(^39) See the material collected by Durante (1976), 138–40, and for Semitic parallels West
(1997), 234.
- Phrase and Figure 87