Talk:υποκριτής

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1. an interpreter or expounder. See Plato, Tim. 72B especially of dreams, Luc. Samm. 17.
2. an actor. In Attic Greek. Plato, Republic 373 B, Symp 194B, Xenophon, etc.
3. a rhapsode, i.e., a dramatic reader of poetry, from the practice of presenting poetry, from odes to portions of the Homeric epics, as live performance in public celebrations.
4. a pretender, disssembler, hypocrite. in the later Greek language known as "demotic" or popular Greek, so, for instance, in the New Testament.

• See Liddell & Scott, Oxford 1901, p. 1631. - As the above entries indicate, the meaning of "hypocrite" or "pretender" was a meaning which was acquired by υποκρίτης fairly late in the classical tradition, in the Greek used in the early centuries A.D., thus, in the New Testament. In the language of Homer, it was used to refer to one who interprets dreams or oracles. By the 5th and 4th centuries b.c., the word meant, simply, an actor or a performer of poetry. See the related verb υποκρίνομαι, the middle form of υποκρίνω, which came to mean "acting" or "playing a role". See also Shakespeare's Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2, 544 ff. "Is it not monstrous that this player here/But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,/Could force his soul so to his own conceit/That from her working all his visage wann'd. . ." etc.

—Saltmarsh^{απάντηση} 18:19, 7 June 2010 (UTC)