These are the proverbs (and there are always more proverbs at the blog):
Ξυρεῖς λέοντα.
Πόνον σπείρεις.
Πάντα λίθον κινεῖν.
Ἄτλας τὸν οὐρανόν.
Νεκρῷ λέγεις μύθους εἰς οὖς.
And now, some commentary:
Ξυρεῖς λέοντα.
You are shaving the lion.
This is a proverbial expression to warn someone that they are doing something that is dangerous. In Plato's Republic it appears in this form: ξυρεῖν ἐπιχειρεῖν λέοντα, "to attempt to shave the lion," literally putting your hand (ἐπι-χειρεῖν) to the task of shaving the lion. Compare the English saying, "to beard the lion in his own den," which similarly refers to a dangerous undertaking.Πόνον σπείρεις.
You're sowing work.
In other words, you are doing work which is only going to result in more work; you are making trouble for yourself which is only going to lead to more trouble. So, πόνον σπείρειν is in a sense even worse than πέτρας σπείρειν, "to sow rocks" (see earlier blog post), because rocks just lie there in the ground and produce no yield; the idea with πόνον σπείρεις is that you are going to harvest nothing but more work as a result of your work.
Πάντα λίθον κινεῖν.
To move every stone.
Compare the English saying "to leave no stone unturned." The historian Joannes Zonaras marks this as a proverbial expression: πάντα λίθον κινῶν, τὸ τῆς παροιμίας (παροιμία = proverb), as does Nicephorus Gregoras, πάντα λίθον κινῶν, τὸ τοῦ λόγου. From the λίθ- root, we get words like lithography and neolithic in English.
Ἄτλας τὸν οὐρανόν.
Atlas (holds up) the sky.
In this saying, the Greek can let the nominative and accusative cases convey the meaning, with the verb being implied but not stated; that's harder to do in English. After the Titanomachy (the war between the Titans and the Olympians, which the Titans lost), Atlas the Titan was condemned to forever hold the heavens upon his shoulders; you can read more at Wikipedia: Atlas. At one point, Atlas did get Heracles to take on the burden instead, promising that if Heracles would hold up the sky, he would retrieve the apples that grew in the garden of the his daughters, the Hesperides. However, when Atlas returned with the apples, Heracles then tricked him into holding up the heavens again, which Atlas is presumably doing unto this day. As Erasmus explains, the proverb thus refers to people who get involved with powerful, dangerous people and thus bring trouble upon themselves, as in the story of Atlas and Heracles.
It is from the name of this Titan that we get the English word "atlas" as in a collection of maps of the world; more about the etymology of "atlas" in English.
Νεκρῷ λέγεις μύθους εἰς οὖς.
You're telling stories to the ears of a dead man.
In other words: you're wasting your breath because your audience is not listening, cannot listen, etc. Note the use of the dative, νεκρῷ, with a body part, οὖς; Greek regularly uses the dative case to express possession of body parts. The Greek word μῦθος originally meant any kind of speech or saying; then it came to mean more specifically a story or tale, and only later did the word "myth" come to suggest a fictional tale, a story that did not actually happen. What we call Aesop's fables in English were referred to both as μῦθοι and also as λόγοι in Greek (λόγος being another Greek word with a wide range of meanings). As with so many Greek words, the etymology of μῦθος remains a mystery.
And here's a random proverb too:
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