ABSTRACT
It is striking how constantly and naively scholars adopt the modern word “proverb” to translate the Greek παροιμία appearing in the title of one of the Clearchus’ fragmentary works ( Περὶ παροιμιῶν 1B no. 11). 1 Yet even a cursory survey of the paremiographic literature clearly shows that the term is inadequate for the disparate lemmata of the Byzantine collections, as well as the ancient fragments. Even in the prehistory of official paremiography, to which Clearchus belongs, the consensual translation appears inappropriate. To identify the possible content and stress the perspective of the paremiographic practice in the early Peripatos, where it seemed to be widespread, it is necessary to discard some prejudices and establish the pragmatic and socio-linguistic features of the παροιμίαι. It is easier to “stay at home” and use a conventional and idealized form and recognize a constant ontological reality beyond the minor differences in a folk “genre” intuitively considered as a cultural universal. But words are words, and meaning is use, as 480Wittgenstein said. Beyond the loose and disputed definition of “proverb,” 2 nobody would say that “an Arab flute-player” (Ἀράβιος αὐλητής: Diog. 1.28), “tears of blood” (Αἵμασι κλαίειν: Diog. 1.32), “easy prey” (Μυσῶν λείαν: Diog. 6.42 3 ) —or English expressions such as “curb your hilarity,” “spic and span” 4 or “duty calls”—are proverbs. However, such short syntagmas (two-word expressions) and stereotyped non-phrastic expressions, sometimes even reduced to a single word, 5 represent an essential part of the items in the paremiographic collections.
