Beauty: The Fortunes of an Ancient Greek Idea by David Konstan

Author:David Konstan
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2014-02-04T16:00:00+00:00

I. Beauty in the Bible We have noted in Chapter 2 that the term most commonly taken to mean “beautiful” in classical Greek is the adjective kalós, although it has in fact a much wider semantic range and can also signify “honorable,” “noble,” and “good.” If one adds the definite article to the adjective, producing the phrase “the kalón,” the sense is equally broad and may indicate not just “the beautiful” or “beauty” but also, and more frequently, “virtue,” “honor,” and the like. Now, classical Greek did, as we saw, have a noun, kállos, that is closer to the modern sense of beauty. We have mentioned more than once the Theocritean verse that neatly illustrates the contrast between the narrow reference of [Kállos] and the wider use of the adjective kalós: “A boy’s beauty kállos is a kalón thing,” even though it is fleeting (23.32). We have seen too that there is a similar contrast in the Greek text of 1 Esdras 4:18. The Revised Standard Version (RSV) of the Bible translates:

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