θεός ~ θεοῦ (noun c.): god, goddess
νεκρός ~ νεκροῦ (noun m.): corpse, dead man
οὐρανός ~ οὐρανοῦ (noun m.): sky, heaven
εὔνοια ~ εὐνοίας (noun f.): good will, gift
δαίμων ~ δαίμονος (noun m.): divine being
These are the proverbs (and there are always more proverbs at the blog):
Χυτρεοῦς θεός.
Νεκρὸν ἰατρεύειν.
Εἰς οὐρανὸν τοξεύεις.
Ἄκαιρος εὔνοι' οὐδὲν ἔχθρας διαφέρει.
Πόλις γὰρ εὖ πράσσουσα δαίμονας τίει.
And now, some commentary:
Χυτρεοῦς θεός.
A clay god.
This proverbial phrase refers to a god who is useless, not worthy of worship and unable to come to your aid. The adjective χυτρεοῦς is from the noun, χύτρα, a clay pot used for cooking.
Νεκρὸν ἰατρεύειν.
To doctor a dead man.
This is one of those proverbial fool's errands: doctoring is not going to do any good for someone who is already dead. There's also this compound saying: νεκρὸν ἰατρεύειν καὶ γέροντα νουθετεῖν ταὐτόν, "to doctor the dead and to chastise an old man is the same thing," i.e. both are hopeless causes.
Εἰς οὐρανὸν τοξεύεις.
You're shooting an arrow at the sky.
This Greek saying appears as part of a delightful list of ἀδύνατα, "impossibilities," sometimes included as part of Plutarch's Moralia, and it also appears in the ancient Greek proverb collections. Of course, there is no way you can hit the sky with an arrow, so this is a fool's errand. Even worse, the arrow can fall back down and hit you. Compare the saying in the Biblical book of Ecclesiasticus:
"If one cast a stone on high, it will fall upon his own head." Compare also a saying you saw in an earlier blog post: Εἰς οὐρανὸν πτύεις.
Ἄκαιρος εὔνοι' οὐδὲν ἔχθρας διαφέρει.
Affection at the wrong time is no different from hatred.
The saying is cited in Zenobius, who explains that these are the words Hippolytus speaks to Phaedra, rebuking his stepmother's unnatural affection towards him, although there is no extant Greek play about Hippolytus in which this expression is found. Note that the adjective ἄκαιρος, like other alpha-privative and many other compound adjectives, is both masculine and feminine in gender; in this saying, it is feminine: ἄκαιρος εὔνοια.
Πόλις γὰρ εὖ πράσσουσα δαίμονας τίει.
A city that is flourishing honors its divinities.
The words are spoken by Eteocles in Aeschylus's Seven Against Thebes. He is begging the gods to spare his city, including the divine curse, Ἐρινύς, pronounced by his father Oedipus. A city that is destroyed, Eteocles argues, cannot honor its gods, but a city that is flourishing can indeed honor its gods, which means it is in the gods' interests for the city to flourish.
And here's a random proverb and a random LOLCat too:
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