| 释义 |
Cimmerian, n. and a.|sɪˈmɪərɪən|
Also 6–7 Cym-, 7 Cymm-, Cim-, 20 Kimm-.
[f. L. Cimmeri-us (Gr. κιµµέριος) pertaining to the Cimmerii + -an.]
A. n. One of the Cimmerii:
a. A member of a nomadic people of antiquity, the earliest known inhabitants of the Crimea, who overran Asia Minor in the 7th century b.c.
1588Shakes. Tit. A. ii. iii. 72 Your swarth Cymerion. 1797Encycl. Brit. V. 9/1 [The Cimbri] are said to have been descended from the Asiatic Cimmerians. 1886Encycl. Brit. XXI. 577/1 The Cimmerians reached Asia Minor through Thrace. 1902Encycl. Brit. XXV. 720/1 The Phrygian power was broken in the 9th or 8th century b.c. by the Cimmerians, who entered Asia Minor through Armenia. 1950H. L. Lorimer Homer & Monuments ii. 52 The description of the country of the Kimmerians..would suit their settlements on the north coast of the Black Sea. Ibid. v. 286 The conflict between Kimmerian and Scyth in South Russia.
b. One of a people fabled by the ancients to live in perpetual darkness.
1871Bryant Odyss. xi, There the people dwell, Of the Cimmerians, in eternal cloud And darkness.
B. adj.
a. Of or pertaining to the ancient Cimmerii or their territories.
1862Chambers's Encycl. III. 35/1 The Cimmerian Bosporus (Strait of Yenikale). 1886Encycl. Brit. XXI. 577/1 The Dniester was the grave of the Cimmerian kings. 1917E. Pound in Poetry (Chicago) Aug. 251 To the Kimmerian lands and peopled cities..came we. 1950H. L. Lorimer Homer & Monuments v. 306 The result of Kimmerian and Scythian invasions. 1959Chambers's Encycl. III. 573/2 Cimmerii were a people who in the Homeric tradition dwelt beyond the ocean in perpetual darkness... They..were penned by the Scythians in the Crimea..and in the Taman peninsula; the ancient ‘Cimmerian Bosporus’ was the strait between these two lands.
b. Of or belonging to the legendary Cimmerii. Hence, proverbially used as a qualification of dense darkness, gloom, or night, or of things or persons shrouded in thick darkness.
1598Marston Pygmal. Sat. ii. 142 That such Cymerian darknes should inuolve A quaint conceit, that he could not resolue. 1632Milton L'Allegro 10 There under ebon shades..In dark Cimmerian desert ever dwell. 1781Gibbon Decl. & F. III. 206 The proverbial expression of Cimmerian darkness was originally borrowed from the description of Homer (in the eleventh book of the Odyssey). 1801Helen Williams Sk. Fr. Rep. i. xviii. 229 The Cimmerian night of the middle ages. 1880E. Kirke Garfield 15 A dense fog..shrouded the lonely mountain in Cimmerian darkness.
Hence Ciˈmmerianism, dense darkness (of ignorance, etc.); † Ciˈmmerianize v. trans., to make totally dark.
1630J. Taylor (Water P.) Peace of France Wks. iii. 111 Ded., The Leathean Den of obliuious Cimerianisme. 1824Blackw. Mag. XVI. 292 The awful cimmerianism of the philologer and classical critic of the Edinburgh Review. 1600Tourneur Trans. Metamorph. (1878) 187 This blacke Cymerianized night. |