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).
FESTIVE SPECTACLES
One other area of responsibility for the aedile was the organization of the games during Roman holidays, i.e. festivals for the gods. Festus was the word for a holiday in a god’s honour (giving us ‘festival’, ‘feast’, etc. – it is related to fanum, ‘shrine’). Putting on magnificent shows on such occasions was a sure-fire vote-winner with the people, and could do the up-and-coming aedile a great deal of political good. Spectaculum was the word used of a sight or spectacular performance (specto, ‘I watch, spectate’). The seven wonders of the world were all spectacula (plural).
QUAESTOR
Quaero (quaest-) in Latin meant ‘I try to find, look out for, seek’. It provides us with ‘question’, ‘enquire’, ‘inquisition’ and so on. Originally, it seems that the magistratus known as quaestor was part of a criminal investigation board, but over time his role became a mainly financial one. Quaestors often accompanied provincial governors abroad to run their finance offices, but could also serve in a judicial capacity too.
PRAETOR
The praetor was the magistratus who ‘led, went ahead’ (prae-eo, ‘I go in advance’). It was primarily a military term, as in leading the attack, and was in fact the original word for what was to become consul, the top office of all. The praetor’s main function in Rome became judicial: he ran the legal services.
We talk today of leading politicians having a ‘praetorian guard’. This refers back to the Roman emperor’s highly prestigious special force garrisoned in Rome to ‘go before’ and so protect the emperor’s person, and also to act as his eyes and ears in case of trouble.
CONSUL
The top magistratus, of whom there were always two (Romans, after their experience of kings, traditionally feared single rulers), was consul. Its derivation is not entirely certain, but it may be connected with consilium, a noun meaning ‘discussion, advice, decision, diplomacy, strategy, good sense’. All these were activities or qualities vital for a head of state who had to co-operate with the other consul (→ our ‘counsel’). In war, they were in supreme military command; in peace, they had extensive administrative and legal powers.
Do not confuse ‘counsel’ with ‘council’. The source of ‘council’ is Latin concilium, ‘assembly, association, company’, itself derived from concilio, ‘I bring together, unite’, as in ‘conciliation’. Reconcilio meant ‘I bring back into agreement, harmony; re-establish, restore’. Cicero wrote to a friend, whose decrees had seemed to attack the interests of the ever-sensitive publicani (see here), begging him to ‘do all in your power to reconcile them to you, or at least mollify them’. He knew what political trouble these tax-collectors could cause if anyone tried to protect the provincials from their depredations.
CURATOR
In today’s world, a ‘curator’ is someone who selects/organizes/ arranges/displays anything, from a lobster roll to stuff on the web (where everything is now ‘content’, implying it contains something, and ‘content strategists’ toil selflessly night and day in the urgent task of ‘curating’ it all).
In the ancient world a curator was someone with a proper job incurring heavy responsibilities: he was in charge of public works. There were curatores of the corn and olive-oil supplies, the river Tiber, public funds, public buildings, roads, aqueducts and public games. A senatorial decree (AD 11) for maintaining the water supply survives, showing the powers and duties of such boards. This system was adopted across the Empire, to the great benefit of local communities.
Curatores could also be appointed to deal with specific crises. In AD 79 Mount Vesuvius erupted, laying waste to the land all around it. The emperor Titus appointed curatores chosen from among ex-consuls ‘to take charge of the restoration of Campania’. Some of the work was funded by the sale of the property of those who died and left no heirs. Our ‘volcano’ derives from the Roman god of fire Vulcanus; and ‘crater’ via Latin crater(a) from Greek kratêr (κρατηρ), meaning a large bowl in which wine was mixed with water for distribution into cups, and also the mouth of a volcano.
Cura in Latin is the origin of our ‘care’ (compare ‘manicure’, care for the manus, ‘hand’). A ‘sinecure’ is a job or position sine cura, ‘without care’, i.e. money for old rope. ‘Sincere’ is often held to derive from sine cera, ‘without wax’, i.e. the real thing (the reference is to the Roman habit of mending broken pots with wax and selling them on as if new). This is not true, alas (‘alas’, from Latin a, lassum via French, ‘ah, weary, wretched!’, → ‘lassitude’).
THE IMAGE OF THE NOBILITY
One indication of the control that the wealthy exerted over Roman society was the regularity with which their families held the consulship. Such families were called nobilis, meaning ‘generally known’ and so ‘renowned, famous’. Over any reasonable period of time, 70 to 90 per cent of consuls would come from noble families.
This caused real problems for any novus homo (‘new man’, → ‘novel’, ‘innovate’), i.e. of non-noble family. Cicero was one such, becoming consul in 63 BC and boasting about it for ever more. But the noble families were well aware of their superiority.
In 63 BC Cicero was attacked by Metellus Nepos, of the very noble Metelli family. Cicero, as consul, replied in kind. Then Nepos’ brother Metellus Celer stepped in with a letter, as follows:
I would have expected, given our mutual interests and our restored good-will, that I would not be damaged with such derision, nor would my brother Metellus be threatened in his person and property by you because of what he said. Even if respect for him himself was not enough to restrain you, the dignity of our family and my services to you and to the state ought to have been enough to hold you back… Since you have done all this quite unreasonably and without the benignity due to our ancestors, do not be surprised if you live to regret it. I had not expected such inconstancy in you towards me and the members of my family.
Ouch! There are parallels between ancient Romans and the modern Mafia.
EXPERIENCE OF HIGH OFFICE
Over time Romans became relatively relaxed about the background of those who held office. The only condition was: were they and their families committed to the Roman way of doing things? So emperors came from all over the Empire. Septimius Severus (emperor AD 193–211) was of North African descent and shpoke Latin with a shlight local acshent, so he may have pronounched hish own name Sheptimius Sheverush. It did not hold him back.
Our ‘office’ derives from Latin officium, which basically meant a ‘beneficial act or service carried out as an obligation or duty’ (ops [op-], ‘help, resources’ + -ficio, ‘I make’). It expanded into meaning one’s ‘job, function, task’, but that sense of duty about it was never entirely lost. Cicero’s dialogue De officiis (‘On Duties’) was a discussion of the proper obligations of the state and the individual.
Unlike today’s politicians, Roman ‘magistrates’ (see here) had in theory to be elected to, and work their way through, a series of highly practical administrative posts in order to reach the top, i.e. become consul. Anyone who reached the top would, at one stage or other, have had to run the city of Rome; learned financial administration at home and possibly abroad; and overseen Rome’s legal services. From the moment they put their foot on the lowest rung, they would also have been a member of the Senate. So by the time they reached the top job, they would have built up a huge range of contacts and experience in responsible positions, all highly relevant to the functioning of the state.
Our words ‘experience’, ‘experiment’ and ‘expert’ all derive from the Latin experior (expert-), ‘I try out, put to the test’, related to the Greek πειρα (peira), ‘an attempt’, which gives us ‘empirical’ (‘based on experience’). Romans were put thoroughly to the test before being entrusted with the job of high office.
ROMAN PRIORITIES
The great Scipio Africanus, conqueror of Hannibal, gave a sense of how a Roman nobilis conceived of the route to power. It all began from innocentia, ‘freedom from guilt, integrity’. He said:
ex [from] innocentia nascitur [‘is born’] dignitas, ex dignitate honor, ex honore imperium [‘the right to give order and expect to be obeyed’], ex imperio libertas
The verb nascor (nat-) meant ‘I am born, come into being’, and is the source of our ‘nature, native, nativity’, etc. Dignitas meant ‘fitness for a task; rank; respect’; honor meant ‘marks of esteem’, especially ‘high public office’; and libertas that freedom which meant you were your own master and no one could tell you what to do.
One of the things Romans feared about Julius Caesar was that in his position as dictator his power became such that the libertas of the wealthy classes was being terminally threatened. Latin dictator derives from dicto: ‘I say repeatedly; I dictate’ (implying ‘and you listen and take it down’). A dictator was a legal magistratus, appointed in Rome only at times of emergency. But Caesar’s ambition seemed to extend well beyond that. As Cicero saw when he wrote to his friend Atticus in 54 BC, well before Caesar became dictator for life in 44 BC and was assassinated a month later: ‘Hurry back to Rome and experience the empty husk of our old Roman republic! See bribes being openly paid and sniff the smell of dictatorship.’
AMBITION
Getting to the top of the greasy pole (i.e. consul) was every ancient politician’s aim. To reach that goal in a world where communications consisted of talking face to face or writing (see here), he had to spend a long time on the hoof.
Latin ambitus derived from ambio, ‘I go round and round, canvassing for support’. Cicero said of elections that ‘the public are moved by favours, yield to pleas and elect those by whom they are most assiduously canvassed’. But there was a sting in the tail: ambitus did indeed mean ‘desire for advancement’, but also ‘bribery, corruption, graft’. Cicero pointed out the difficulties when such cases came to court: ‘for on a charge of ambitus, it is rarely given that generosity and kindness can be distinguished from graft and hand-outs.’
Someone standing for election was a candidatus, whence our ‘candidate’. It derives from Latin candidus (our ‘candid’) meaning ‘white, fair, lucky, good-natured, innocent’: Roman candidates wore specially whitened togas. In late October 54 BC Cicero wrote to his friend Atticus saying, ‘all the candidati for consul are being prosecuted for ambitus’!
A CIVILIZED WORLD
Whatever the trials and tribulations of the wealthy, for the average Roman in the forum what counted was citizenship. This was automatically conferred if you were the son or daughter of a Roman father and mother; or of parents with the right to produce citizen children, e.g. a Roman father marrying a foreign woman who enjoyed such a privilege.
The Latin for ‘citizen’ was civis (→ ‘civic’, ‘civilization’). Appropriately enough, it is linguistically associated with Proto-Indo-European words meaning ‘home, family, marriage’. Citizenship bestowed on sons a range of rights, including voting rights and standing for office; and on daughters no political rights but the right to marry a citizen, demand a divorce, own property, engage in business and partake in various features of public life, especially religious rituals. ‘Divorce’ derives from divortium, ‘where a road, river branches; turning point; incompatibility’ – it comes from the same source as ‘diversion’, which could be one way of looking at it.
Romans saw property rights as central to the workings of a civilized, united world. ‘Property’ derives from proprius – ‘one’s own absolutely or in perpetuity’. Cicero said:
There are those who pose as friends of the people, and who for that reason try to have laws passed to drive owners out of their homes, or propose that money given as a loan should be given as a gift to those who borrowed it. Such people are undermining the foundations of the republic. First of all, they are destroying harmony, which cannot exist when money is taken away from one party and handed over to another; and second, they do away with fairness, which is utterly subverted, if the rights of property are not respected. For, as I said above, it is the special function of the state and the city to guarantee to every man the free and undisturbed control of his own particular property.
CENSORS AND CENSUS
We tend to associate ‘censor’ with ‘censorship’. For a Roman a censor was primarily an official appointed to ensure the official state ordo was kept. Every five years, all free males were required to present themselves before the censors. There they publicly stated their full name, age, name of their father/patronus (see here), place of residence, occupation and amount of their property. On that basis they would be assigned to a classis. Their wives and children would not be included in the registration, though their existence would be stated.
Further – and more in line with our view of a censor – the censors had a duty of moral oversight of the population. Anyone who did not seem to be living up to the required standards, in public or in private, had a note made of it and put by his name: nota, ‘distinguishing mark, brand, stamp; grade, class’. We would call it a stigma, Greek στιγμα taken straight into Latin, meaning a ‘tattoo with a hot needle on runaway slaves and criminals; general mark of condemnation’. A senator who did not come up to scratch was removed from the Senate.
Since censors had a detailed understanding of individuals’ situations, they also leased out government contracts for work, and had control over state-owned assets and collected revenue from them. Such contracts would go to private partnerships of the wealthy (see here). No surprise that censor derives from censeo, ‘I give as a considered opinion, evaluate, assess’.
DELEGATING POWER
In Julius Caesar’s account of his conquest of Gaul, one man (apart from Caesar) stood out above all others for his military ability: Titus Labienus. He had made a career in politics up to the rank of praetor, but joined Caesar’s army in the rank of legatus; indeed, he is the only legatus named by Caesar during his first campaign in Gaul (in 58 BC), and pulled off brilliant victories throughout the campaign, as Caesar reports.
The post of legatus was no demotion (indeed, in 52 BC Caesar made Labienus governor of part of Gaul). It had developed from the second century BC, when it became the custom for a provincial governor or general to take with him to his province senators to act as back-up when he needed it. Derived from lex (leg-), ‘law’, the legatus (→ our ‘legate’, ‘legation’) was someone legally commissioned to act on his leader’s behalf, either in charge of troops or ships, or as an ambassador or envoy.* He was a man, in other words, to whom a governor’s or general’s powers were delegated, i.e. legally entrusted away from (de-) the governor himself. Such positions were much sought after by young senators making their way up the greasy pole. In Gaul, Labienus was effectively Caesar’s second-in-command. Under the emperor Augustus, the position of legatus became one of great authority, e.g. imperial governor.
DIPLOMAS
One of the roles the legatus fulfilled was that of what we call a diplomat (a term that emerged in the eighteenth century). The Greek διπλωμα, Latin diploma, meant ‘folded in two’. It could be found in the works of the philosopher Aristotle describing the parallel streams of the Milky Way, and in the medical writings of Soranus evoking the position of the foetus in the mother’s womb. It was usually an official letter of some sort. It could be a receipt for the payment of taxes. It could be a licence to use the public postal system. Mostly, though, it was a recommendation of this sort: ‘I am pleased to inform you that the bearer of this letter is a bona fide Roman citizen and would be pleased if you would allow him to go wherever he wants.’ In other words, it was a passport.
PROTOCOL
Nowadays, a protocol is usually a record of an original diplomatic agreement, or a document forming the basis of a legal treaty, or a set of official procedures. It derives from Greek prôtokollon (πρωτοκολλον) – the first of the glued sheets of a scroll (prôtos, ‘first’, kollô [κολλω], ‘I glue’). In the ancient world, it listed and authenticated the content of the scroll. The emperor Justinian (c. AD 482–565), concerned about forgery, passed a law stating:
We also add to the present law that lawyers shall not draw up legal summaries on any other sheet than the one [called the prôtokollon] which bears at the head the title of ‘Our Most Glorious Count of the Imperial Largesses’; the date of the execution of the document; and whatever else it is customary to write there. Lawyers must not abridge the protocol.
The connectivity protein ‘collagen’ and ‘collage’ all derive from kollô (see here).
* It is something of a tautology to talk about first principles: there cannot be second ones.
* Incidentally, we have no idea what the derivation of the Latin provincia is.
* A ‘legacy’ is something legally entrusted to you in a will.