Greekling

Greek´ling

A little Greek, or one of small esteem or pretensions.

Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, published 1913 by G. & C. Merriam Co.

References in periodicals archive ?

Cicero contrasts Piso unfavourably with his 'Greekling', Philodemus, who he concedes is cultivated and writes witty verses.

PLEASURES PRINCIPLES: The Epicurean texts discovered in the library of the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum raise as many questions about the life of a wealthy Roman statesman as they answer

Babbitt (1908: 26) draws our attention to the fact that ancient India was devoured by "a too overpowering sense of the One," while Greece's failure to gain a "restraining sense of unity" led eventually to the very insidious malleability of the "hungry Greekling," whose image was rendered by Juvenal.

In quest for the romantic imagination (I): Irving Babbitt's synthesis

This was wonderful training in academic versatility and earned Jo-Marie the soubriquet (from the late Professor Smuts) of 'Juvenal's Greekling': prepared to fly, if told to do so.

Jo-Marie Claassen: an appreciation

His account begins with Homer's archaic Greece and traces classical civilization through the death of Hadrian, the Spanish-descended Roman emperor who embodied, through his "Greekling" tastes, the "common classicizing culture" that bound together the empire's far-flung elite.

Old-school history

"Graeculus," that is, "little Greek" or "Greekling," possesses a range of meanings for Cicero.

(8) If, for Cicero, the orator is the embodiment of the active life, a "doer of deeds," then his opposite is the idle (otiosus) Greekling. Contemporary Greeks, says Crassus, are "demoralized by sloth (otio)" (3.32.131), and that is why they make no progress in the arts they invented.

This contrast between the decorous, heroic Roman orator and the idle, chattering Greekling can be further amplified if one translates "Graeculus" not as "Greekling" or "little Greek," but as "Greek boy," for boys, except insofar as they are preparing to become men, are not well regarded in the De oratore.

Just as Cicero juxtaposes his heroic Roman orator to the idle, chattering, erudite, homosexual Greekling, the Renaissance writers on rhetoric Thomas Wilson, George Puttenham, and Antoine Furetiere also structure their thinking about decorum through a series of oppositions.

If Cicero uses the figure of the Greekling to stand for everything he means by indecorousness, Wilson, Puttenham, and Furetiere have a symbolic figure who serves much the same purpose for them: the learned clerk or pedant.

Outlandish fears: Defining decorum in renaissance rhetoric

Tonight, with snow finally unable to cover everything--that patch beneath the Norway spruce, for example--I think the "Greekling" Demosthenes's story is

Reading Cicero's 'De Oratore.' (poem)

Potentially, Caerellia could undo the work that Cicero had done to redeem philosophical discourse in the eyes of the Roman elite and could reduce it once again to being the idle--and, perhaps more worrisomely, the lascivious--pursuit of Greeklings. (67) Now, would this be a reasonable fear on Cicero's part?

Cicero's textual relations: the gendered circulation of De finibus

Alexandria, where sophisticated and citified Greeklings dreamed that they were shepherds in Arcadia.