Sunday, April 1, 2007

Lysistrata

As a way of researching ancient Greek life, I've been compiling a list of common nouns mentioned in classical literature.

Here are some interesting ones:

leopard

midwife beetle (followed pregnant eagles to steal the eggs)

omlette

watchdog

2 comments:

Kay Cooke said...

You really are whetting my appetite to delve into the classics! Midwife beetles! And I wonder why leopards? I would have thought they were exclusively an African animal ...

Katherine Dolan said...

Apparently ancient Europe was rife with wildlife -- lions, bears, wolves, leopards...
And Greece at one point was bristling with trees -- it was deforested to become the desert it is today.