Lesche

Lesche (Greek λέσχη, plural: λέσχαι leschai ) referred to in antiquity a meeting room or a building where you can sit together, negotiate and talk could.

Function

In Homer and Hesiod, the Lesche was a warm, protected place, especially a forge, and an inn or lodging facility of the destitute, so sometimes decried as a rallying point of loafers and gossips. There they were often near the Greek market places and shrines.

Lesche but could also mean the meeting of a Council or a body corporate. In Sparta, each tribe had its own Lesche, obviously building of some importance. Pausanias mentions in particular the Lesche krotanon ( λέσχη Κροτανῶν ) and the Lesche poikile ( λέσχη ποικίλη ).

In Plutarch the Lesche appears as a place of idleness and whereabouts of the elderly, where they spend most of the day:

In short, the pump room as a moral institution. Elsewhere Plutarch mentions the Spartan Lesche the place of grim decision. Thither the newborn would namely brought by their fathers, lest the elders of the tribe they studied. Were the children's well-formed and free from deformity, so they were allowed to live, otherwise they were in a chasm on Mount Taygetos called Apothetai ( ἀποθεταί "File ", " segregation "; ἀπόθεσις of " exposing the children " ) thrown.

Lesche the Knidier

Next there was generally the temples of Apollo associated assembly and consultancy places that were dedicated to Apollo Leschenorios ( Λεσχηνόριος ).

The most famous such consecration is that of Knidier in Delphi, a rectangular hall building with 8 internal columns. The interior was adorned with famous paintings of Polygnotos. The right wall was the conquest of Troy and the departure of the Greeks, which left the visit of Odysseus in the underworld. The paintings have not survived, but the detailed description of Pausanias in their structure reconstruct, a task with which Goethe also employed.

Etymology

It was in the 19th century, a relationship suggested between the Greek word Lescha (ionic: Lesche ) and the Semitic lischkah (Hebrew: לשכה ) which designates a neighboring building of a temple for the common sacrificial meal, for example, several times in Jer 35 EU. The sound of the words suggests a borrowing of the Greek word from the Semitic, and a corresponding thesis was also erected.

An examination of Walter Burkert 1990 but comes to the conclusion that (if at all) it is the Hebrew word is a loan from Greek or other Indo-European language (possibly over the Philistines ) is. For such a direction of borrowing already speaks the Greek etymology of the root λεχ ( gr λεχος bed; German to " lie ", English " lie" ), while the word in the Semitic Region except in the Tanach is not occupied. Alternatively, a derivative of λέγω is (to speak, talk ) accepted.