Snakes, lions, scorpions, and a woman’s place, The resilience of Greek proverbs across time and space

This article explores the resilience and transformation of Greek proverbs from antiquity to the present, focusing on the formal and semantic shifts that have ensured their survival within European cultural traditions. After outlining the ancient theoretical background and the contributions of modern paremiology, the study analyzes the emblematic expressions “to nourish a snake in one’s bosom”, tracing its trajectory from Aesop’s fables through Latin, medieval, and Renaissance sources to contemporary political and media discourse. Attention is also given to some variants of this expression, used in classical antiquity (as the Latin Leonis “catulum ne alas”) and in modern times (cf. the Spanish “Cria cuervos, y te sacarán los ojos”). In its second part, the article examines a group of proverbs, namely misogynistic expressions that circulated in ancient Greece and survive today in the form of so-called anti-proverbs. This recently coined term refers to the creative manipulation of proverbial material in order to generate new formulations that invert or contest the moral of the original saying. Thus, the traditional Greek expressions that confined women to the domestic sphere have inspired a wide range of modern anti-proverbs such as “A woman’s place is . . . in any place she wants to be” or “A woman’s place is in the White House”.