EIDÔLON (GREEK) Reference library
Gérard Simon
Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon
...family. Besides eikôn (image, representation, as well as comparison and indication), we find verbs such as eiskô [ εἴσϰω ], “to make similar,” “to compare to” (in Homer and Sappho), and eikazô , “to represent by an image,” “to deduce from a comparison,” “to conjecture.” The group formed by eikazô and its related terms, according to Chantraine (RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque , s.v. eoika ), “illustrates the shift from the sense of ‘image, resemblance’ to that of ‘comparison, conjecture.’ ” Eikasia [ εἰϰασια ], for example,...
