Roads

Not “Rhodes”… that’s coming later…

Oct 12, 2024

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Roads

(Not Rhodes… that’s coming later)

“[Heracles] who once came here for the mares of Laomedon
With only six ships and a few men,
And sacked Troy and emptied her streets [aguias]
ὅς ποτε δεῦρ’ ἐλθὼν ἕνεχ’ ἵππων Λαομέδοντος
ἓξ οἴῃς σὺν νηυσὶ καὶ ἀνδράσι παυροτέροισιν
Ἰλίου ἐξαλάπαξε πόλιν, χήρωσε δ’ ἀγυιάς·
— Homer, Iliad, 5.640-5.642

Highways, roads, streets, paths, tracks… these are much on our mind as we do our best to walk across a good chunk of Greece. So, this seemed like a good opportunity to sort out some of the vocabulary of roads, in Greek both Ancient and Modern.

The passage of the Iliad, Book 5 (above) recounts the first time Troy was sacked, by Heracles that time.

(Everything happens at least twice in mythology… did you know that Helen was kidnapped twice? Before Paris got to her, it was Theseus and his disreputable friend, the Lapith Pirithous, who kidnapper her as a child.)

Homer uses ἀγυιά (aguia) to refer to the streets of a city.

ΟΔΟΣ (Odos)

But the word for “road” or “street” that everyone learns in First Year Ancient Greek is ὁδός, hodos. We learn it because it gives us odometer and the Biblical book of Exodos, and also because it is one of the relatively rare feminine 2nd Declension nouns.

And modern Greek seems to use **οδός (odos, note the lack of an ‘h’, since Greek lost the Aspirate over the centries) for the streets of a city. For example, there is Οδός Αιóλου, Aiolou Street, named after Theseus’ father in Athens. But also, little tiny—very tiny—streets in itty-bitty rural villages like Vitina in Arcadia are labelled with ΟΔΟΣ.

Ὁδός (hodos) turns up on Homer and other ancient literature, but it seems usually to be a road outside of town, not a city street, as in this vivid simile about bees along a trail:

They are like a swarm of wasps or bees, holed up
In a hive they have made near a trail through cliffs.
οἳ δ’, ὥς τε σφῆκες μέσον αἰόλοι ἠὲ μέλισσαι
οἰκία ποιήσωνται ὁδῷ ἔπι παιπαλοέσσῃ
— Homer, Iliad, 12.167-12.168 (Lombardo, trans.)
(Not purely an ancient problem! See, AD 2024, North Carolina.)

Pindar mentions a ὁδός ἁμαξιτός (hodos amaxitos), a “wagon road”, in Nemean Odes 6.56.

And there is the very famous τρίοδος (triodos), the “place where three roads come together”, where Oedipus ran into his father.

In Sophocles’s play, Oedipus Tyrannos, no one actually says triodos, as far as I can tell, but the poet and his characters definitely use hodos to mean “road out in the country”. So when Oedipus, in a state of growing agitation, questions his wife about the past, he asks:

Οἰδίπους
καὶ ποῦ ʼσθʼ ὁ χῶρος οὗτος οὗ τόδʼ ἦν πάθος;
Ἰοκάστη
Φωκὶς μὲν ἡ γῆ κλῄζεται, σχιστὴ δʼ ὁδὸς
ἐς ταὐτὸ Δελφῶν κἀπὸ Δαυλίας ἄγει.
Oedipus
And where was this land, where this terrible event happened?
Jocasta
The land called Phocis, and at a divided road
The same one that goes from Daulis to Delphi.
— Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannos 732–734

Later, we get the “triple” aspect of the fateful road when Oedipus recounts to Jokasta his version of events:

καί σοι, γύναι, τἀληθὲς ἐξερῶ. τριπλῆς
ὅτʼ ἦ κελεύθου τῆσδʼ ὁδοιπορῶν πέλας,
And to you, wife, I will say the truth. When I was hiking (ὁδοιπορῶν, odoiporōn “road-walking”), near this triple path [κελεύθου, keleuthos]…
— Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus (800–801)

So that’s ὁδός, hodos! Remember, Ancient Greek students, it is second declension, with -ος -ου endings, but it is feminine: ἡ ὁδός, τῆς ὁδοῦ.

ΜΟΝΟΠΑΤΙ (Monopati)

As we hike around Greece in the 21st Century, often we are not on an odos but on a monopati.

Ancient Greek does not seem to have monopati, but we can see where it comes from. In Iliad 20, Poseidon tells Athena that they should…

κιόντες ἐκ πάτου ἐς σκοπιήν…
Go off the path to some scenic overlook…
Homer, Iliad, 20.137

And in Book 6, Homer says that the hero Bellerephon, when he became hateful to the gods, wandered around, πάτον ἀνθρώπων ἀλεείνων (“shunning the path of men”) (Iliad 6.202)

πάτος [ᾰ], ὁ, is a “beaten track; footpath” in Ancient Greek, so our μονόπατι is a mono-patos, a “single-track”.

ΔΡΟΜΟΣ (Dromos), ΚΩΜΑ (Κōma), ΠΕΖΟΣ (Pezos)

Three more ancient words, and we should be able to jump to the final section, the incredible taxonomy of highways, roads, trails, tracks, and paths that any decent Greek hiking map will distinguish!

Ancient Greek δρόμος (dromos) is a “running place”, from the aorist stem of τρέχω, (δραμ-) (trechō, dram-).

In Odyssey, Book 4, Telemachus very wisely and politely declines Menelaus’ offer of a gift of horses, because ἐν δʼ Ἰθάκῃ οὔτʼ ἂρ δρόμοι εὐρέες οὔτε τι λειμών, “in Ithaca there are neither wide places for horses to run, nor any meadows.” (Odyssey, 4.605).

The most famous use of this word dromos is in the compound ἱππόδρομος (hippodromos), the “hippodrome” or track for chariot-racing, the most famous of which was in Constantinople.

This “-drome” ending comes into English (and Modern Greek) in lots of forms—“velodrome”, “aerodrome”, and as we saw here in the very touristy part of Rhodes, ΚΑΡΤΑΔΡΟΜΟΣ (kartodromos), “go-cart track”, next to the mini-golf and the waterpark.

And let’s throw in κῶμα, kōma (kōma), an earth-work, dirt-mound, or dyke. In Book 1 of Herodotus, we read that Hypargus, one of the Persian King Cyrus’s generals, capturing the Asian Greek cities “by means of earthworks” (αἵρεε τὰς πόλιας χώμασι) (Herodotus, 1.162).

In Modern Greek, it has come to mean just “dirt”, generally, as in ΚΩΜΑ ΓΙΑ ΚΗΠΟ, garden soil, advertised in garden-centers along any road leading into the countryside.

And one more, πέζος, pezos (pezos). This meant “on foot”, as in Iliad 8.59, which lumps the whole Trojan army, as it comes out of the gates to fight, into πεζοί θʼ ἱππῆές τε, “those on foot and the horses”.

Greek Road-Vocabulary, AD 2024

A “car” is an αυτοκίνητο, pronounced aftokinitiko; this is of course a “self-mover”, something that is “audo-kinetic”, or “auto-mobile”, of course. Amusingly, this word appears in Ancient Greek! αὐτοκίνητος, ον, shows up in Aristotle’s Physics, and a number of other less-often-read works: “the thing that moves with nothing moving it.” We rented a Toyota Avgo (“Egg”) for driving around Rhodes. With only three cylinders, it barely qualified as an αυτοκίνητο.

The roads that you might drive on range from the most modern highways you can imagine down to dirt tracks. For getting from town to town, you might go on a major highways, Αυτοκινητόδρομοι (aftokinitodromi, “car-racetrack”) or on Εθνικές Οδοί (ethnikes odi, “National roads”). Their main difference is that motorways (Greek: Αυτοκινητόδρομοι) adhere to higher quality construction standards than National Roads (Greek: Εθνικές Οδοί).

The biggest kind of road is the δρόμος δύο λωρίδων κυκλοφορίας, “fast-road with two tracks for ciculation”. These are the ones with tolls.

This is a super-set of the ασφαλτοστροωμένος δρόμος, “asphalt-paved fast-road”. [Ἄσφαλτος, asphaltos]](http://folio2.furman.edu/lsj/?urn=urn:cite2:hmt:lsj.chicago_md:n16875) is a good ancient word, used, among other things, to describe the “pitch” that Noah used to waterproof the Ark (Genesis 6.14). A smaller paved road is a δευτερύων ασφαλτόδρομος (defterion asphaltodromos), “secondary paved road.”

Of dirt roads χωματόδρομοι, as Aristotle might have said, there are four types. A “main dirt road” is a κύριος χωματόδρομος (kirios chōmatodromos) (literally, a “lordly dirt road”). Of lesser stature is a δευτερύων χωματόδρομος, “secondary dirt road”. More rugged yet is your δευτερωύων χωματόδρομος μόνο για 4x4, “secondary dirt road only for a 4x4.” Amy and I walked a fair number of miles on examples of the δευτερωύων χωματόδρομος κακής βατότητας, “secondary dirt road of bad condition for going along it.”

Those are all roads for αυτοκίνητα. For folks on foot, our πεζοί, there is an equally well-developed taxonomy.

Inside towns, especially those built on the sides of hills (which seem to be all of them, based on what we’ve seen), you have πεζόδρομοι, “pedestrian ways”, winding narrowly among houses.

If one of these is bigger, perhaps a maintained remnant of ancient road, it is a διαμορφωμένο μονοπατί (diamorphōmeno monopati), a “wide-laid trail”.

Up in the mountains or down in the gorges (which are many and are called φαράγγια (pharangia), with the singular being φαράγγι, pharangi), you hope to find a φανερό μονοπάτι, a “well-defined path”.

Alas, very often as you hike around the remoter mountains of Greece, you will find yourself on an ασαφές μονοπάτι (asaphes monopati). Students of ancient Greek will recognize ἀσαφής -ές, “unclear”. So this is the “unclear, indistinct path”. Use your compass; go slowly; and keep your head!

Happily, Greece, like most of Europe, is sufficiently heavily settled that you can’t really walk two miles in any direction without coming to some road, either a lovely ασφαλτοστροωμένος δρόμος, or at least a χωματόδρομος where you can be sure that a local will come by, in the ubiquitout 1982 red Datsun pickup, to tend his goats; these folks, like country folks in the Carolinas, will move heaven and earth to help you if you are polite.

Christopher’s Substack

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