παῖς

παῖς (pais, "PICE," rhyming with "ice") is the Greek word for a child — and, in the same breath, for a slave. The record gives it a broad, busy life: 2,864 occurrences across 131 works. It lives first in the historians and the philosophers of the city, then in epic. Herodotus's Histories leads with 324; Plato's Laws has 189; the Iliad 166; Xenophon's Cyropaedia 153; the Odyssey 121; Plato's Republic 101. This is a word at home wherever Greeks wrote about households, descent, and obedience.

The lexica agree on the doubleness that makes it hard. LSJ (Liddell–Scott–Jones, 1940) glosses it "child, son, daughter" and marks it "in relation to Descent" — the child reckoned from a father, opposed to τέκνον (teknon, "TEK-non," "offspring, what is born"). Beekes (Etymological Dictionary of Greek, Brill 2010) gives the fuller spread: "child, boy, son, slave, servant," and "more rarely, girl, daughter." Frisk (Griechisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 1960–72) matches it in German — "Kind, Knabe, Sohn, Sklave, Diener" ("child, boy, son, slave, servant"). The same word covers the son of the house and the servant in it; the young and the unfree share a name.

On the word's shape, three authorities are matched. Beekes, Chantraine (Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, 1968–80), and Frisk all treat it, and Chantraine notes the old two-syllable epic form πάϊς (páïs, "PAH-iss") already in Homer. The one glossed root candidate the record holds belongs to Beekes: *peh₂-u- ("few, little"). Frisk records a separate candidate, *pauo-, but attaches no meaning to it, and beyond that the derivation is unresolved in the record.

The cited surfaces run through the Greek New Testament — παῖδα (paîda, "servant/child") at Acts 3.13, 3.26, and 20.12, παιδός (paidós, "of the servant/child") at Acts 4.24 and 4.29 — and through Aeschylus's Agamemnon, where the παῖδες (paîdes, "children") recur across the murderous house.

When one word holds both the son and the slave, which did the Greeks hear first?