Note 345 — NAPOLEONIC RULE.

κύμβη, is a cup, usually, in Greek. M. le Pelletier gives κύμβος as a cavity or precipice. I find no such meaning as precipice. There is a great difficulty to settle the meaning here. Κύμβη means a cup, a boat, a wallet, and also, is like κύβη, the head. We should perhaps simplify the issue by confining ourselves strictly to the Latin word, Cymba, which is boat or skiff. Always a light boat, as in the Georgics, i. 136, where the little boats were made of alnos cavatas, the riverside alders hollowed out. It is rather a craft for a small lake than for the sea; as Ovid charmingly puts it:

But, then, what sense would it yield, “a man being between two boats, tied hand and foot?” Between two abysses, M. le Pelletier interprets; but, then, we do not find that, either in Greek or Latin, the word yields that meaning. He interprets it of Elba and St. Helena. But was an island ever called an abyss; I think as seldom as ever κύμβη meant one. Hesychius gives κοῖλος μυχός, a hollow recess, the penetralia of the women’s apartments, and he adds also βυθός, the depth of the sea, to explain κύμβος. In Martinius’s “Lexicon Etymol.,” there is a very curious quotation from Isidore, Bk. 19., which makes the cymba to be the space occupied by a ship in the displacement of the water beneath it. I think out of all this we may extract a meaning for the deux cymbes. As two places, or recessed prisons, hollowed out of the sea, he shall be put, bound hand and foot. The line, to scan correctly, should have the word et left out.