I also thought I'd share with you this marble relief (Lirioni, c.1730) which is on one's left as one enters the Basilica.
It commemorates the attempted assassination of Pope Marinus I (882-884) during Mass. However, as soon as the assassin crossed the threshold of the church he was stricken blind and rendered incapable of fulfilling his task.
7 comments:
My Greek is a bit rusty, but I would say: "Trust, brother, (that) he who dies well is (born) anew."
I largely agree, though I had been taking the "kalo:s" with the "tharson" rather than with the "thne:sko:n", thus: "Be of good confidence (that) he who dies is born again." Since the "that" isn't expressed in the Greek, you could take it either way.
On a side note, the first word, "tharson," is not a real Greek form, as far as I know. The imperative of "tharseo:" should be "tharsei" or "tharse:son". Perhaps it's a later form, though. (If anyone else has any theories, I'd be happy to hear them.)
One should never exclude the possibility of a spelling mistake. These are, sometimes, immortalised in stone.
At the risk of demonstrating that my Greek is really rusty: isn't "tharson" the regular imperativus aoristi of "tharseo:"?
Gregor:
"tharseo:" follows the typical pattern of principal parts for epsilon-contracts: "tharseo:, tharse:so:, etharse:sa, tetharse:ka," etc. (In Attic, of course, the "-rs" in the middle becomes "-rr-", so "tharreo:" and so forth.) Thus, the aorist imperative should be "tharse:son".
Classical Greek uses only the present imperative ("tharsei"), but in koine the aorist imperative is attested a number of times as "tharse:son". There are no attestations of an imperative "tharson" in the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (I checked, just to be sure.) Anyway, I'm willing to write this off as coming from a variant aorist stem ("etharsa" for the regular "etharse:sa"), and just call it a peculiar form of the aorist imperative, since I don't see what else it could be.
Sorry to clog up the com-box with all this dreary philology.
Could it be the vocative of a name Tharson (omega in nominative, omicron in the vocaztive)? Dunno if koine preserves this distinction.
Sorry--now that I've seen the context further down, what I said is irrelevant.
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