κεῖτο, χέλυν ἐρατὴν ἐπ’ ἀριστερὰ χειρὸς ἐέργων.
κεῖτο, χέλυν ἐρατὴν ἐπ’ ἀριστερὰ χειρὸς ἐέργων.
κεῖτο, χέλυν ἐρατὴν ἐπ’ ἀριστερὰ χειρὸς ἐέργων.
κεῖτο, χέλυν ἐρατὴν ἐπ’ ἀριστερὰ χειρὸς ἐέργων.
And probably the basis of the idea is the same. The really correct Greek expression for ‘on the left hand’ I take to beχειρὸς ἐξ ἀριστερᾶς, which is used by Euripides[681].
Sense altered in later Greek.
But in the later Greek the idea of the point of arrival prevailed over that of the point of departure: and, conventionally at least, theἐπιδέξια, with its equivalentἐνδέξια, came to mean simply ‘on the right,’ andἐπ’ ἀριστερὰ, ‘on the left.’ It is worth notice, that we have a like ambiguous use in English of the wordtowards. Sometimes towards the left means being on the left: sometimes it means moving from the right in the direction of the left: and a room ‘towards the south’ means one with its windows on the north, looking out over the south, like as the star Arctus looks out towards the left of Ulysses[682].