harpe

Forms

harpē f (genitive harpēs); first declension^[1] Manuscripts also write it arpe.^[2]

Etymology

It is borrowed from Ancient Greek ἅρπη (hárpē, “sickle; a bird of prey”).^[3][4][5][1] Köbler compares the Greek word with Proto-Indo-European *ser- (“sickle, hook”).^[6]

Earliest recorded meaning

Its first author is Ovid, who uses it for the curved sword with which Perseus had killed Medusa: vertit in hunc harpen spectatam caede Medusae, “he turned against him the sickle-sword proved by Medusa's death”.^[3][2][6]

Semantic evolution

The TLL divides its uses between a real sickle or knife, as in Valerius Flaccus, where Hecate brings a sickle hardened in the Styx, and a sword curved like a sickle, the falchion of Mercury and Perseus in Ovid, Lucan and Valerius Flaccus.^[2][7] Servius explains the hooked sword of Virgil's Oscans as the harpe that Perseus used.^[2] Glossaries render it as falcastrum, a hook-shaped blade.^[2]

Pliny the Elder names a harpe among the sea birds that are at enmity with other birds;^[3] the OLD leaves the bird unidentified,^[3] Lewis & Short and Georges take it for a falcon,^[4][7] and the TLL doubts the reading of the passage.^[2]

Timeline

• 43 BC–18 AD – Ovid uses it for Perseus' sword.^[3][2][6]
• 39–65 AD – Lucan calls the sword of Mercury Cyllenis harpe.^[3][2][6]
• 23/24–79 AD – Pliny the Elder names a sea bird harpe.^[3][4][6]
• end of the 1st century AD – Valerius Flaccus uses it of a sickle and of Mercury's sword.^[3][2][6]
• c. 400 AD – Servius describes it as a sword shaped like a sickle.^[2][6]

Meanings

Noun

1. A sickle; a sword with a curved, sickle-like blade, a scimitar or falchion (especially that of Mercury and Perseus).^[3][4][2]
2. An unidentified sea bird of prey.^[3][4]

References

1. ^ a b c d Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Thesaurus linguae Latinae (1900–), Leipzig: Teubner; Berlin: De Gruyter; open-access ed., Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften
3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Glare, P. G. W., ed. (2012), Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
4. ^ a b c d e Lewis, Charlton T.; Short, Charles (1879), A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
5. ^ Saalfeld, Günther Alexander (1874), Index Graecorum vocabulorum in linguam latinam translatorum, Berlin: Weidmann
6. ^ a b c d e f g Köbler, Gerhard (2010), Lateinisches Abkunfts- und Wirkungswörterbuch für Altertum und Mittelalter, online ed., koeblergerhard.de
7. ^ a b Georges, Karl Ernst (1913–1918), Ausführliches lateinisch-deutsches Handwörterbuch, 8th ed., ed. Heinrich Georges, Hannover; Leipzig: Hahn