Cultivated plants and domestic animals in their migration from Asia to Europe / by Victor Hehn ; edited by James Steven Stallybrass.
- Victor Hehn
- Date:
- 1891
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Cultivated plants and domestic animals in their migration from Asia to Europe / by Victor Hehn ; edited by James Steven Stallybrass. Source: Wellcome Collection.
449/530 page 449
![expressions a (3vf3Xia and rav (3v(3Xivav paaxdXav are correctly explained by Mazochi, the editor and explainer of the inscription, as meaning “ Byblic vine-plantation” (the Corp. Inscr. III., Nos. 5774 and 5775 agrees with him : “ Recte videtur Mazochius a vitis genere ex By bio Phoenicia repete7ido derivare, unde etiam (3v(3Xivog oIvoq ”). However it does not seem to us probable that this name goes back to such a remote, long-vanished antiquity, or that it contains a reminiscence of the Byblian, which were the earliest of all the Phoenician colonies. It might be less fanciful to suppose a reference to the Byblus material, for Homer is acquainted with the same adjective flu(3Xivog ; he applies it (Od. 21, 391) to a ship’s rope, which was therefore made of papyrus- bast. It remains to be asked, how a kind of wine could be named from that material ? Were the grapes dried on byblus mats and then pressed, yielding a kind of straw-wine, vinum passum? or did the vines climb up ropes of byblus, as in the neighbourhood of Brundusium in Italy at the time of Varro ? The latter supposition would be supported by the words of Hippys of Rhegium, in Athen. i. p. 31 : 'Imrtag (so he is called here) be 6 'Prjylvog tt)v tlXtov KaXovp.ivpv ap.tteXov BifiXiciv (prjcri fcaXiicdcu. Or were the vines tied to their props with byblus bands, so that the grapes could develop more freely ? Grotefend, in the Annali delT inst., vii. p. 275, and after him Gottling, derive also the Etruscan name of Bacchus, Fufluns, from (3vf3Xivog ; Corssen, in his Sprache der Etrusker, 1, 314, rejects this combination, as a Greek and Latin initial b is represented by /, never by f. What the real facts were about the Pra7nnian wine, which served for mixing, and is twice mentioned by Homer (II. 11, 638 ; Od. 10, 235), and whether that name signified a species of grape, or a mode of preparation, or a district, and if so, what district ? was evidently as little known by later expositors as what the /3if3Xivog really was—although there is no want of conjectures and assertions (see particularly, Athen. i. p. 30), and this Pramnian wine is now and then mentioned in the post-Homeric time, for example, by the Comic poet Ephippus : 0i\w ys TTpa/xvLov olvov Xs<rf3iov {Athen. i. p. 28). In remembering the Thracian, or properly Paeonian, mixed drink 7rapa(3ir/, brewed from millet with the addition of kovvZt], mentioned by Hecataeus, we are tempted to suppose that the adjective Pramnian was only another form of the same Thracian or Phrygian word. Note 27, page 74. If olvog, vinum, belonged, as Pott supposed, to the same root as viere, vitis, vitex, vhnen, vitta, irsa, iirvg, etc., the Greeks and Latins](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b24874309_0449.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
