Hey, folks! Fireside this week!<\/p>\n I don\u2019t have a burning topic this week, but as I\u2019ve mentioned, I\u2019m teaching Latin 101 and 102 this semester (and next). One of the things that\u2019s interesting about that is of course students learning vocabulary for the first time tend to learn pretty simple 1-to-1 definitions. That\u2019s necessary and it mostly works just fine: mater<\/em> is a direct equivalent to \u201cmother,\u201d oculus<\/em> is a direct equivalent to \u201ceye\u201d and so on. But it gets trickier when you run into common words that are freighted with a lot of cultural meaning, what I\u2019ve started telling my students are major load-bearing cultural value words<\/strong>. Those often have a complex set of definitions and implications with a lot more texture than any Latin 102 student is going to need (or necessarily be ready for).<\/p>\n But I thought here<\/em> it might be a fun thing to run down some of these major load-bearing cultural value words<\/strong> in Latin that have come up and briefly talk about what they mean and why they\u2019re load bearing. These sorts of big words tend to actually be really common \u2013 because they\u2019re really important to the Romans who thus talk about them a lot<\/em>.<\/p>\n We should start with the relationship between virtus<\/strong> (virtus<\/em>, virtutis<\/em> (m)), honos<\/strong> (honos\/honor<\/em>, honoris<\/em> (m)), dignitas<\/strong> (dignitas, dignitatis<\/em>, (f)) and auctoritas<\/strong> (auctoritas, auctoritatis<\/em>, (f)), words that make a bit more sense understood together. Virtus<\/em> literally means \u2018manliness\u2019 (from vir, viri<\/em> (m), \u2018man\u2019), but by the time the Romans are writing to us its meaning has enlarged beyond that (and it has lost some of its gendered component \u2013 women can have virtus<\/em> as a positive trait). Instead, its core idea is a mix of courage, vigor and strength: ambition, drive and the quality or ability to meet it. Virtus<\/em> sometimes comes across as a sort of reckless thing which requires \u2018constraining virtues\u2019 to control and direct correctly<\/a>.<\/p>\n Virtus<\/em> as courage, drive, (positive) ambition compels a person towards the display of their quality in a testing or testing point (a certamen<\/em>, \u2018struggle, strife, testing\u2019 or discrimen<\/em>, \u2018separating, turning-point, decision-point, crisis\u2019). Success in that moment of testing, when witnessed by others (for this is an honor culture: deeds are to be witnessed!) is what produces honos<\/em> (\u2018honor, respect,\u2019 but also \u2018[political or military] office\u2019 or rewards for honor). Honos<\/em> (also spelled honor<\/em>, from where our word comes) is about recognition and acknowledgement and it was a real, visceral thing for the Romans: they describe it as bright and burning. A person with sufficient honos<\/em> required respect from those around them, while a person who was disgraced shrunk back and withered in public (or at least, was supposed to). A sufficient amount of honos<\/em> produced dignitas<\/em> (\u2018dignity, worth, authority\u2019), which demanded respect, almost as a kind of relational forcefield: a person of dignitas<\/em> required respectful treatment from everyone (including other people of dignitas<\/em>) because of their achievements. A very large amount of honos<\/em> produced also auctoritas<\/em> (\u2018authority, influence\u2019), a cultural-social demand for deference to the point of being able to direct the actions of others through shear force of honos<\/em> (the idea being that they do what the man with auctoritas<\/em> says not because he might threaten them, but simply because his overwhelming achievements and prestige cause them to).<\/p>\n My students have also met amicitia<\/strong> (amicitia, amicitiae<\/em>, (f), \u2018friendship\u2019) and beneificium<\/strong> (beneficium, beneficii<\/em>, (n), \u2018a favor, service, kindness\u2019)), munus<\/strong> (munus, muneris<\/em>, (n), service, office, gift) and donum<\/strong> (donum, doni<\/em> (n), \u2018gift\u2019). As you can see, beneficium, munus <\/em>and donum<\/em> can all be translated as \u2018gift\u2019 but they are not pure synonyms: the shades of meaning are quite different. Donum<\/em> has the \u2018pure\u2019 sense of \u2018gift\u2019 in its simple form. By contrast munus<\/em> derives from the some place as munia<\/em> (\u2018duties, official functions\u2019) and so has that sense of an official service or obligation. It can<\/em> mean a gift as well, often a public gift (that is, the gift of a high official or rich person to the public, like games or public buildings, often in the plural, munera<\/em>).<\/p>\n Meanwhile you have beneficium<\/em>, literally a \u2018good making\u2019 or \u2018good deed\u2019 (bene<\/em>+facio<\/em>, \u2018a good doing\u2019) the word is tied up with amicitia<\/em> and patrocinium<\/em>. The patron-client relationship which is so prominent<\/strong> in Roman society, consists in the exchange of beneficia<\/em> (\u2018favors\u2019) and officia<\/em> (sing. officium<\/em>, \u2018service\u2019) between two reciprocal but unequal parties. The difference is that an officium<\/em> is a service done to one who is owed (by position or by previous favors) while a beneficium<\/em> is a service or favor done to one who is not (yet) owed, but necessary in both words is the idea that these favors are given willingly, typically as part of a continuing relationship.<\/p>\n Now at Rome while patron-client relations were everywhere<\/em>, between freeborn men, it was almost never appropriate to say so<\/em> out loud. That would shame the junior party and as we\u2019ve just seen honos<\/em> matters a lot in this society: a good patron wouldn\u2019t even want to so diminish their client. So the near-universal practice was instead to refer to patronage (patrocinium<\/em>, clientela<\/em>) relationships in terms of amicitia<\/em>, \u2018friendship.\u2019 Consequently, while amicitia<\/em> could be the relationship between you and your drinking buddies, it was also the public term for patronage relationships and for political alliances (many of which were effectively patronage relationships). So it does mean \u2018friendship\u2019 but covers a wider array of unequal<\/em> relationships that involve the exchange of officia<\/em> and beneficia<\/em>.<\/p>\n And then you have the age-and-gender words<\/strong>. At the moment, my students have something of an incomplete set: they have puer<\/em> (puer, pueri<\/em> (m), \u2018boy\u2019) and puella <\/em>(puella, puellae<\/em> (f), \u2018girl\u2019) and iuvenis<\/em> (iuvenis, iuvenis<\/em> (m\/f but usually m), \u2018young men\/women\u2019), but not yet adulescens<\/em> (adulescens, adulescentis<\/em>, (m), \u2018youths, yutes<\/a>\u2018). They have vir <\/em>(vir, viri<\/em> (m), \u2018man\u2019), homo<\/em> (homo, hominis<\/em> (m\/f but usually m), \u2018human, male\u2019) and femina<\/em> (femina, feminae<\/em> (f), \u2018female\u2019) but not yet mulier<\/em> (mulier, mulieris<\/em> (f), \u2018woman\u2019).<\/p>\n And you can actually learn a fair bit about a culture by looking at their age-and-gender words, because it tells you something about their categories.<\/p>\n We start with puer<\/em> and puella<\/em>, matching words for \u2018boy\u2019 and \u2018girl.\u2019 Except, note quite<\/em> matching. There is, I should note, a fair bit of \u2018give\u2019 in the system I\u2019m about to lay out, so take these as general rules, not an iron system. A puer<\/em> stops being a puer<\/em> around 14 or 15 when he received from his father the toga virilis<\/em> (\u2018toga of manhood\u2019) and is thus recognized as coming of age, at which point he\u2019s an adulescens<\/em>, \u2018a youth.\u2019 By contrast, puella<\/em> is not an age-limited category, but essentially means \u2018a girl pre-marriage\u2019 (it can also be a term of affection for a romantic partner or at least a prospective one later in life), so generally marriage is the event that marks the transition from puella<\/em> to uxor<\/em> and mulier<\/em>. Notably, adulescens<\/em> can be used of women, but is only very rarely so.<\/p>\n For young men, adulescens<\/em> is a \u2018younger adult\u2019 category while iuvenis<\/em> is the \u2018young (but less so)\u2019 category. There\u2019s a lot of blurring here, rather than a hard age break, but typically adulescentes <\/em>are in their teens or early twenties while iuvenes<\/em> are young men from their twenties through their thirties (so yes, a 35 year old man, in Roman thought, is still a \u2018youth\u2019). The next category up was senex<\/em> (senex<\/em>, senis<\/em>, \u2018old man, elder\u2019)), the plural of which seniores<\/em> declined the Roman census age classes 46 and up (and thus mostly out of military age).<\/p>\n Meanwhile, you have homo<\/em> and femina<\/em>, \u2018man\u2019 and \u2018woman\u2019 \u2013 Latin is absolutely a male-normative patriarchal language, so homo<\/em> can mean both \u2018man\u2019 as distinct from \u2018animal\u2019 (and thus include all of humankind) but also \u2018male\u2019 as distinct from \u2018female\u2019. I tend to think of these words as more like \u2018male\u2019 and \u2018female\u2019 in that both can have a bit of a sneer to them: you don\u2019t call someone you like a homo<\/em> for the same reason that the newscaster reporting on, \u201cthree adult males <\/em>were spotted leaving the scene\u201d is not saying a nice thing about those three fellows.<\/p>\n Thus you have vir<\/em> \u2013 man, as distinct from mere \u2018male\u2019 \u2013 a term of a bit more respect. Its nearest match for women is mulier<\/em> (an adult woman, regardless of married status, though in Rome this is going to mostly mean widows and divorcees along with wives; never-marrieds are really rare in Roman culture). Mulier<\/em> doesn\u2019t quite carry the status that vir<\/em> does \u2013 vir<\/em> has real weight and is the root behind virtus<\/em>. Instead, the weightier word here is matrona<\/em> (matrona, matronae<\/em> (f), matron, married woman, wife) which from a very early point has a sense of dignity and even social rank and so carries something closer to vir<\/em>\u2018s sense of \u2018gentleman\u2019 with something like \u2018lady,\u2019 though honestly with even a bit more intensity (matrona<\/em> can do the work for women that, in the republic, something like, \u2018eques Romanus<\/em>\u2018 \u201ca Roman of the equestrian order\u201d meaning \u201ca Roman of wealth and status\u201d does for men.). The fact that matrona<\/em> derives from mater<\/em> (\u2018mother\u2019) also suggests something about Roman values and exactly what things get what sort of person status.<\/p>\n In any case, as a historian I often find I wished introductory Latin textbooks offered a bit more of this sort of thing here, taking the opportunity as they introduce those major load-bearing cultural value words<\/strong> to explain a little bit how they fit into the broader culture, but relatively few language textbooks do. I find I wish students learned a bit more Roman culture in Latin classes \u2013 at least compared to what I got \u2013 but then, of course, I am a historian, so I would.<\/p>\n On to Recommendations<\/strong>:<\/p>\n The first story here is a bit of a bummer, but worth noting. I\u2019ve been writing here about the jobs crisis in history and academia more broadly for some time, noting that it was a case of the system flooding, as it were, from the bottom up: lower ranked graduate programs became wholly non-competitive in a shrinking job market before the crisis impacted highly ranked programs (quite regardless of the quality of the historians involved, I might note). Well, the flooding has at last reached the upper-most decks: Harvard is cutting graduate programs across the Faculty of Arts and Sciences by anywhere from 50 to 75%<\/a>. History graduate admissions there will plunge from 13 annually to just 5, and the cuts extend into the sciences as well, with a 75% reduction<\/em> in Biology, for instance.<\/p>\n I know a lot of folks read this blog to escape contemporary politics, but I feel the need to note that this is a policy choice<\/strong>: it is the immediate result of the current administration\u2019s war on higher education, which will make college both more expensive<\/em> and less available<\/em> and also worse as an education<\/em>. But it is also the long-term result of a steady erosion in policy support of higher education, of substituting state funding with private loans, over decades. This was not the product of impersonal economic forces but rather remains the product of intentional political choices<\/em><\/strong> and we could chose differently (and indeed, did so in the past).<\/p>\n Meanwhile, I wrote \u2013 behind a paywall, alas \u2013 my take on the recent gathering of US general officers at Quantico<\/a> for The Dispatch<\/em>. I won\u2019t rehash that here, but as I suppose many of you have guessed, I found very little to like, a lot to dislike and a bit to fear about the speeches given there, both of which represented stark breaks with the most successful parts of the American military tradition. Subsequent reporting has suggested the audience probably agreed<\/a>. I remain profoundly concerned that the United States is careening in remarkably dangerous directions, but then I was suggesting<\/a> this was the road the president would take us on, and he has.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, in ancient history, we have another Pasts Imperfect<\/em><\/a>! Stephanie Wong writes briefly about the tradition of pumpkin carving, which is actually a tradition of turnip<\/em> carving, because it originated before the pumpkin arrived in the Old World. The post also highlights the amazing \u201cBraille for Ancient Languages<\/a>\u201d project, topical blogs by Amy Norgard and Joshua Nudell, and more! Well worth a look, as always.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/acoup.blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/PXL_20251014_191555821.jpg?resize=771%2C1024&ssl=1\")
And yes, he is on a blanket that is on a cat bed. What you can\u2019t see is that cat bed is on another, different cat bed. My man sleeps in style.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n