Quid Pro Quo E-Book

Peter Jones

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Did you know that the word 'prestige' derives from the Latin word for 'illusion'? Or that 'infantry' stems from a Latin word meaning one who could not speak? In this original and highly entertaining book, Peter Jones reveals the roots of Latin words that are now common in the English language and shows how Romans actually used them in the ancient world. Covering every aspect of Roman life - from politics, philosophy, religion and the arts, to technology, warfare, medicine and botany - Quid Pro Quo highlights the vital role Latin has played in the creation of our vast vocabulary.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Preface

1. The Latin Language

2. Politics

3. Society

4. Justice

5. Business

6. Education and Philosophy

7. Writing and Literature

8. Religion

9. Architecture and Technology

10. Arts, Drama and Music

11. Warfare

12. Medicine

13. Botany

14. Epilogue

Bibliography

Index

PREFACE

Take the word ‘adrenalin’. This hormone, one of the most important in the body, is found in a gland located on top of the kidneys. The Latin stem renal- meant ‘to do with the kidneys’ and ad meant ‘near’. Hence ‘adrenalin’. But no Roman would have recognized the word. It was invented, using Latin stems, in 1901.

Take ‘microbe’. This derives from two ancient Greek words, mikros (‘small, short’) and bios (‘life’). No Greek would have recognized it. It was invented, using Greek stems, in 1881. And a very incompetent invention it was too, microbes being millions of years old.

English is full of such predominantly technical words, invented over the past 400 years. They were designed, in particular, to provide the specialized vocabulary required for the then developing disciplines of science and medicine, and the naming of flora and fauna. Indeed, if all of them were taken into account, you could say that English was 90 per cent Graeco-Latin!

Many such invented words will feature in chapters 12 and 13 because medicine and botany are so interestingly rich in them. Otherwise, and with the occasional exception, the subject of this book is English words derived, with minimal change, from Latin and ancient Greek words used by the Greeks and Romans themselves, whether in the same sense as we use them or not – words such as ‘plasma’, ‘electron’, ‘fornicate’, ‘prune’, ‘cement’, ‘agony’ and ‘poet’. In this respect my debt to the magnificent Oxford Latin Dictionary, edited by Peter Glare and his team, is very great indeed.

But it is not simply a book of words or lists of words, though there are a few summarizing lists here and there. The words have also been selected in order to give the reader some sense of the culture and history of the ancient Roman world, and of Rome’s connection with the ancient Greek world too. For the Romans took over and latinized many ancient Greek words, just as we have taken over and anglicized many Greek and Roman ones.

So the book has another great pleasure to offer: an easy introduction to the ancient Greek alphabet, the source of the Latin alphabet and ours too. As you will find, nearly half the Greek alphabet is almost identical with English.

It will work as follows: where a Latin word which we use derives directly from Greek, the Latin word will be quoted, its Greek original given in English letters, and then in Greek letters (‘transliterated’, in other words). For example, our ‘stomach’ derives, via Latin stomachus, from Greek stomakhos (στομαχος). A full Greek alphabet – a crisply economical twenty-four letters, as opposed to English’s absurdly bloated twenty-six – is provided on p. 23. It should prove a pleasantly harmless way to become acquainted with this enormously influential alphabet that in the eighth century BC first introduced to the West the independent representation of vowel sounds alongside consonants.

My grateful thanks are due to Alan Beale for much general linguistic help, and to Professors Philip van der Eijk and Kenneth Saunders for consultations on medical matters.

Peter Joneswww.classicsforall.org.uk

POLITICS

INTRODUCTION

As far as the West is concerned, Romans invented the idea both of republicanism and of empire, and it is mainly to Roman models rather than Greek, or any other, that Western governments and historians have traditionally looked when it came to thinking about their own political systems.

The republican system has entrenched three basic ideas into Western political thought: that citizens have the right to govern themselves; that they have the right to outsource that government to those elected by them and to change that government if they see fit; and, consequently, that the authority which the government wields is ultimately dependent on the will of the people. The result is that anyone who wants to stay in government has to do so in the people’s interest, and no one else’s.

Given the power that this potentially hands to the people – the ultimate model here was provided by fifth-century BC Athenian direct democracy – the system has increasingly developed means to try to ensure that it does not descend into mob rule; and over time the sense has developed that, however sovereign the people are, the state must to all intents and purposes hold the whip hand, but in accordance with the law. In other words, the judiciary, not any particular government of whatever stripe, has become the final guarantor and protector of the people’s freedoms and power.

What this all adds up to is that the purpose of and justification for government, and the sole grounds on which it survives in the form it does, is the public good. As we look around the world today, we in the West have cause to feel eternally thankful that, for all its fallibilities, strains and tensions, we have inherited such a system.

‘Empire’ is derived from Latin imperium, ‘the right to give orders’ – and the right to enforce obedience to them. That is why holders of imperium during the Republic, such as the consuls and praetors, were accompanied by attendants called lictores, each carrying a bundle of rods tied around an axe, a symbol of power and the means of its enforcement. These were called the fasces (whence ‘fascist’), and signalled their ultimate authority.

These fasces continued to symbolize power under the Empire too, but there was a difference. When Augustus became the first emperor in 27 BC, he became princeps: ‘first citizen’, literally ‘one who has taken first place’ (primus, ‘first’ + -ceps, ‘one who takes’, → our ‘principle’).* So his rule became known as the principate (principatus). He was also known, as were all subsequent emperors, as imperator. But the imperium he possessed came with a difference: it was maius imperium, ‘greater imperium’ – greater than anyone else’s. (Our ‘majesty’ derives from that mai- form: Latin maiestas, ‘the greater standing, dignity of a god or man’.)

Armed with this, as the Roman historian Tacitus saw, ‘Augustus drew into his own person the functions [see munia, here] of the Senate, magistratus [p. 38] and the laws’; and the historian added nullo adversante, ‘[with] no one objecting’. In other words, Augustus was, effectively, by universal acquiescence, a monarch, and proved the point by ensuring that his successor would come from within his extended family when he died in AD 14.

Not only that. Over the period of the Republic, Romans insisted that there be not one but two heads of state: hence, always two consuls who changed, in theory at least, every year. They would not tolerate the idea of too much power in the hands of one person. But with an emperor there was now one head of state, who also reconstituted, and made himself head of, the army. For the first time, it became a professional body, with terms and conditions of service, answerable only to him. Rome was now a military state, its people, army and law under the imperium of one man, and its empire too, which Rome continued to expand (Rome had been running provinces since 241 BC,* after it conquered Carthage in the first ‘Punic’ War over control of Sicily). When Augustus was asked how he was, he would reply, ‘I and the army are well.’

Empires can be run well or badly. The Roman Empire in the West, which (technically) lasted till AD 476, must have been doing something right, given that its army of about 300,000 controlled an empire of about fifty million people over an area of about two million square miles. Its light regulation – basically, pay us our taxes and permit our army to station itself where it will – and the enormous economic benefits it brought on the back of long periods of peace were all part of its secret. In AD 212 the emperor Caracalla declared that all free men in the Roman Empire would become full Roman citizens and all free women have the same rights as Roman women.

For all that, the association between empire and conquest turned out to be an unhappy one. The British argued that their conquests in America (1607–1789) did not make an empire but a ‘protectorate’. Yet they could hardly claim the Americans were ‘fellow citizens’; one commentator argued it was nothing but an exercise in domination, commerce and population settlement. Napoleon’s empire did not exactly improve the image. The empire of the British Raj in India (1858–1947) uneasily both centralized and decentralized power.

At the end of the day, it came down to a balance between power and liberty. Was the empire an indivisible whole, run by one central authority, over a free citizenry, as in the Roman Empire, or not? Such an entity could claim justification. But in these days of the nation state, the closest we can get to that construct is the confederation of free states, reaching free agreement on the nature of that confederation (con/cum, ‘with, joined’ + foedus [foeder-], ‘treaty’). The days of empire are gone.

LATIN ITALIANS

‘Latins’ (Latini) was the name give to those Italians who lived in the tribal region called Latium. Since it was there that Rome was built, Romans were also Latini. And their language was lingua Latina – ‘the Latin tongue’.

The country that we call Italy was in Latin Italia (and still is). In early times (around the eighth century BC), Greeks dominated the south, Etruscans the centre, and Celts the north of the country. But by the first century BC, Rome controlled the lot and Latin had become the universal tongue, and it was then, under the first emperor Augustus (27 BC–AD 14), that the whole country began to be called Italia.

The derivation of Italia is not certain, but the current favourite is that Greeks arriving in the deep south were impressed by the area’s fertility, particularly its calves – for which we are told the Greek name was witalos (→ Oscan dialect viteliu and Latin vitulus). That, we are told, became Italia.

Another story is that an early king called Italus, master of the toe of Italy, expanded his power over the region and began to call it after himself.

PROTECTING THE SECRET NAME OF ROME

Romulus and Remus were sons of the war god Mars; they were suckled by a wolf. Romans were rather pleased by this story about their origins because it explained their love of war. What it did not do was explain why Rome was called Roma. So when they learned that Greeks associated Roma with the Greek word for ‘strength’, rhômê (ῥωμη), they were happy to accept the connection.

However, Pliny the Elder said that Rome ‘had another name, which it is sinful to mention except in ceremonies of sacred mysteries. When Valerius Soranus gave away the name which was kept secret for excellent reasons of state security, he soon paid the penalty.’ Infuriatingly, Valerius did not tell us. But he did write a (now lost) work about guardian protective spirits (Tutelae, p. 119); he might well have named the protective spirit of Rome there.

Anyway, later Romans tried to guess what this name might be. The Greek Erôs (Ἐρως, ‘Love’) was one suggestion, because in Latin that was amor, i.e. Roma, reversed; Flora, a goddess of flowers, was another; and Diva Angerona another: she was a goddess whose statue in Rome had her mouth bound, or her finger to her lips.

EVOKING THE DEITY

But why should Romans need a secret name for their protective deity? The theory was that, before one attacked a city, one would invite the gods who protected it to leave, assuring them that they would be given an honoured welcome by the conquering army. This process was called evocatio, from the Latin evoco, ‘I summon out’. But you could do that successfully only if you knew their names. A deity whose name was not known could not be evoked and would presumably stay and defend his/her city to the last.

THE CITY (OF ROME)

The Latin for ‘city’ was urbs (‘urban’, etc.); it also stood for ‘Rome’ (compare ‘the City’, which means the financial zone of London). According to Romans, only city-dwellers could be urbanus, ‘urbane’ (i.e. sophisticated, witty, smart). The Greek king Pyrrhus once heard that people had been talking disrespectfully of him at dinner. Challenging them, he was told it was nothing to what they would have said, had not the wine run out. Pyrrhus fell about laughing at this ‘urbanus justification of their drunken behaviour’ (for which the Latin was crapula, which led to our ‘crapulous’).

FROM REPUBLIC TO EMPIRE

We always think of Rome as the ultimate top-down society. But that was not the way it presented itself. From 509–31 BC, Rome was a republic.

Res publica, whence our ‘republic’, meant literally ‘the public’s possession/property/business’. A sense of common ownership of the state underlay the term. Army standards and many inscriptions were marked ‘SPQR’, or Senatus Populusque Romanus (‘The Senate and the Roman People’), confirming the relationship between ruler (the Senatus) and ruled. Cicero talked of the Roman people as ‘master of kings, conqueror and ruler of all nations’.

From 31 BC to its technical demise in AD 476 in the West (not the East), the Roman Empire was the imperium Romanum, the ‘command’ or ‘dominion’ exercised by the Romans through the Roman emperor – imperator (→ ‘imperial’).

PEOPLE AND PLEBS

This sense of common ownership of the state emerges in the Latin populus, an almost political term implying ‘people as the state’. Our idea of a state – derived from Latin status, ‘posture, stature, condition, situation, rank’ – is an entity distinct from those who inhabit it. Our ‘state’ has an absolute authority and powers and an identity all of its own; these remain constant, however much the population changes. This was not the Roman idea at all.

Plebs, on the other hand, was related to Greek plêthos (πληθος), ‘crowd’ (→ our ‘plethora’, literally ‘crowds’) and Latin plenus, ‘crowded, full’. It always meant a general ‘body of people’. So in Latin there was no such thing as a single ‘pleb’; one pleb would be a plebeius, ‘plebeian’.

PLEBISCITES

Politically, the plebs were those whose tribes in early Rome (traditionally 753–508 BC) did not provide advisers to the king. When the last king was driven out and Rome became a republic, those ‘patrician’ advisers, as they were called (from pater [patr-], ‘father’), formed the Senate; and the early years of the new republic were characterized by conflict between the patricians and the plebs on the subject of political and social equality. The historian Livy made a plebeian protest to a patrician:

Why don’t you pass a law to stop a plebeian living next to a patrician, or walking down the same street, or going to the same dinner party, or standing beside you in the same forum?

The establishment in 494 BC of special plebeian assemblies with their own tribunes evened up the game. In 287 BC resolutions passed by the assembly of the plebs were given the formal force of law, making them binding on all citizens. Such a law was called a plebiscitum, scitum meaning ‘resolution, decree, ordinance’. The sci - stem here meant ‘get to know, ascertain’ (→ ‘science’), and therefore ‘approve’. The resolution, in other words, had been thoroughly worked over by the plebeian assembly and approved by it, giving it its official status.

By the time of the Late Republic, plebeian families were on a par with everyone else. Famous Romans of plebeian family included Pompey and Cicero. It was all part of the state’s slow movement towards a political and social order acceptable to all.

DREGS OF THE WORLD

That said, all was not necessarily peace and light between the various groupings. For the historian Tacitus, the plebs were sordida (see here); for the statesman Cicero, in a letter referring disparagingly to Romans unsupportive of his generally traditional viewpoint, they were the faex urbis, ‘scum of the city’. Faex (faec-) meant ‘lees, suspended solid matter or impurities’, and is the source of our ‘faeces’. Romans, as all people everywhere at all times, were used to making judgements about, and so discriminating between, people, places, actions, and so on, and deciding some were good and some bad.

DISCRIMINATION

Discrimen, the source of our ‘discrimination’, was originally a spatial and temporal term. It meant a separating line, or structure, partition; a parting in the hair (!); an interval in time. It then came to mean ‘point in which things differ’ and so the ‘power of making distinctions’. The judgement a Roman made could be negative or positive, but discrimen in itself was a quite neutral term (in fact it comes from discerno, ‘I distinguish’, source of our ‘discernment’).

‘Discrimination’ as a condemnatory term came into use in the slavery debates in the late nineteenth century, and now seems the dominant sense of the word. Indeed, today’s use of ‘discrimination’ seems to signal another meaning of the Latin discrimen: ‘crisis, dangerous situation with much at stake’.

ORDER, ORDER

Our word ‘order’ derives from Latin ordior, ‘I place in rows’; the noun ordo (ordin-) originally meant a thread on a loom, and then a row of something, e.g. seats at the games. The word ordo went on to cover ‘a rank, standing, position, an assigned position, class, spatial arrangement; connected sequence, order of succession, professional body’.

All these were words suggestive of ordered rules and structures. And when you order someone, you are telling them to get themselves in the right position or rank, the position that the rules, or at least your rules, would demand that they be in – all part of the endless search for ‘systems so perfect that no one will ever need to be good’ (T. S. Eliot). Roman enthusiasm for order was epitomized in their class system and in their commitment to legal process (see here).

THE CLASS SYSTEM

From early on in the Republic, it seems, Romans were divided into seven classes (singular classis, source of our ‘class’) by wealth, i.e. the property they owned, to determine:

(i)into which classis they fell for voting purposes;

(ii)into which military rank they fell, by the amount of weaponry they could contribute; and

(iii)how much they had to pay, if necessary, in property tax each year.

The consequence of this classis system was an attempt to place an ordo on society, in which power resided with those in the top classes. When the patricians and the plebs came to argue about their relative places in society (see here), it was ‘a battle of the orders’.

THE ASSIDUOUS EQUESTRIAN

Only the rich owned horses, Latin equus (plural equi). If you were one of those, it is likely that you were in the top 1 or 2 per cent of Roman society and owned property worth 400,000 sesterces. As such, you were classified as an eques (plural equites), traditionally translated ‘knight’. It was from this grouping that senators would be chosen, as long as you had property worth one million sesterces.

If you thought an ‘assiduous’ person was diligent and hardworking, a Roman would only partly agree. Assiduus meant ‘settled on the land, landowning’, i.e. very rich. Since Romans liked making distinctions, the term was contrasted with those at the very bottom of the heap: the proletarii. These were the poorest in society, who were good for only one thing – producing proles: children.

There is an important point here: from Roman times until relatively recently, the economic well-being of children depended mostly on how much land (if any) their parents left them by inheritance. Today, by contrast, education and training are for most people the wealth-providers.

SUFFRAGE AND VOTES

The Latin for a vote was suffragium, whence our ‘suffrage(tte)’. Its derivation is quite obscure. In time, it also took on the meaning ‘influence on behalf of a candidate for election’, and even ‘bribe’! On hearing of the death of his young friend Avitus, Pliny the Younger mourned the lost potential and remembered ‘the time he took up the senator’s broad [purple] stripe in my house, my first, and now last, support for his election, our talks and discussions’.

Our ‘vote’ derives from Latin votum, which bore no relation to voting at all: it meant ‘vow, offering, prayer, pious wish’. Well, perhaps some relation.

THE NORM

Normality is a condition much to be desired, and the purpose of Rome’s imposition of ordo was to encourage it. Norma in Latin meant ‘right-angle, square’, used by builders, carpenters and surveyors to get things correctly and so securely lined up. It came to be used as an image to describe standard patterns of behaviour or practice, rules and regulations. Cicero could always use it against opponents: he mocked a descendant of the famously rigorous Cato the Elder for always ignoring the world’s complexities and ‘reducing life to the fixed norma of a system’. At the same time, Romans like Cicero always felt a deep respect for mos maiorum, ‘ancestral custom, convention’, hallowed by age, not system.

Today, big companies dodging taxes would say they were playing by the strict norma of the law; we might quote mos maiorum and talk of fairness, or the right way to do things.

‘O TEMPORA, O MORES’

‘The times [we live in]! The values [we live by]!’ Cicero’s famous exclamation was uttered during his assault on Catiline, who was threatening to overthrow the Roman state. Mos (mor-) meant ‘the way we do things, way of life; inherited customs, traditions, conventions; habit, character, disposition; style’. It is the source of our ‘morals, morality’. Cicero was linking time and ethics, a wish for a stable world whose values did not change.

In Latin, mos was associated with ancestors: mos maiorum meant ‘traditions of the ancestors’ (maior gives us ‘major’, literally ‘greater’: one’s ancestors were defined as ‘greater men’). There was something time-honoured about mos. In 92 BC, the censors summed it up: ‘Everything new, that is done contrary to the usage and the customs of our ancestors, seems not to be right.’ Vague that utterance may be, but it sums up the aura (‘breeze, air, breath, aroma’) around the idea of mos. It was felt to be the glue that held society together: consensus was at the heart of it.

Good Latin word, consensus: it derives from consentio (consens-), ‘I share in a feeling, am in harmony/unison/sympathy with’.

MAGISTRATES

A magistratus bore no relation to our ‘magistrate’. He was an elected official. Magis meant ‘greater’; magister meant ‘greater person’ (usually ‘teacher’); and the -atus ending indicated an office or function. So a magistratus was a ‘person in a greater office, with greater official power’. It is ironic that our elected officials in Parliament are called ‘ministers’, the Latin minus meaning ‘lesser’.

SENATUS

Senatus is a term that seems to imply rule by the old: it derives from senex, ‘old man’ + -atus, an ending indicating office or function (→ our ‘consulate’). Senators were also referred to as patres, ‘fathers’. But one could become a senator by the age of about thirty, and there seems to have been an unwritten agreement that by about sixty one was allowed to go back to private life (there was no concept of ‘retirement’).

Pliny the Younger wrote to his friend Pomponius Bassus: ‘It is our duty to commit our youth and adulthood to our country, but our last years are our own. The laws themselves suggest this, in permitting one greater in years to withdraw into leisure [otium, see here].’ What age that might have been is not clear: sources suggest sixty to sixty-five. But there was no compulsion about it, though the physical and mental infirmities of old age, especially in the ancient world, probably encouraged the elderly not to make fools of themselves before their younger colleagues.

Romans, of course, grew as decrepit and enfeebled in old age as we do. Latin decrepitus derives from crepo (crepit-), ‘I clatter, creak, crack, crackle’, and the de- prefix here means ‘completely’. ‘Houses creak before they fall down’, said the philosopher Seneca. So do humans.

TRIBUNE

It may be that Latin tribus, ‘tribe’, was connected with Latin tres, ‘three’ (→ our ‘tri-’ prefix, as in ‘tripartite’, ‘tripod’ and ‘trident’ with its three teeth [Latin dens, dent-]). If so, the word finds its origin in the three traditional ethnic divisions which made up early Rome. A tribunus was originally a leader of one of those tribes; and when the plebeian assembly was set up (see here), a tribunus of the plebs was appointed to act as its official representative with legal powers to protect the plebs from consular might and to veto senatorial legislation (Latin veto, ‘I forbid’). Today a ‘tribune’ is seen as a champion of people’s rights.

AEDILE

The Roman aedilis was the magistratus in charge of cleaning, repairing and overseeing the streets, markets and buildings of Rome. Aedes was Latin for a ‘room’ or ‘temple’, and in the plural (same word) a ‘house’ or ‘home’ (a collection of rooms). So the aedile was a ‘houseman’. Aedes seems to be associated with a Greek word meaning ‘flame, burn’ – perhaps referring to the centre of the home, the hearth (see here). Latin aedifico meant ‘I build’, from aedes + fico, ‘I make’. We get ‘edifice’ from this word, and also ‘edify’, in the sense of building character (see here).