RELIGION

INTRODUCTION

In the late second century AD, one Celsus (about whom we otherwise know nothing) published in Greek The True Word (Ho Alêthês Logos, Ὁ Ἀληθης Λογος). His aim was to refute Christian doctrine. It does not survive in full, but quotations from it survive in Origen, a Christian writer who in his Against Celsus set out to destroy his argument. Celsus’ work gives a fascinating insight into how a pagan saw Christianity and at the same time what paganism meant to a pagan. The sorts of problems Celsus raised were:

•A mortal would obviously want to become a god, but why should a god want to become a mortal?

•Why would a god be interested in the ‘sinners and the refuse’ of society?

•Why would a god choose a poor woman of no royal ancestry as a mother?

•Why would a god allow humans to mock and crucify him?

•How could a dead human become an immortal god?

•Why should anyone accept transparently absurd tales of death and resurrection? (There was nothing irreverent about asking serious questions about gods.)

•Since Christians worshipped two gods (Jesus and his father), why object to polytheism?

•Why worship a corpse while attacking those of us who make grand statues of our deities?

And so on, in similar vein.

For a pagan it is clear that a god had no need of humans: the world was designed for the gods’ benefit, not ours. Gods likewise were of an aristocratic frame of mind, having no interest in the lower orders. In fact, no human could expect anything as a matter of right from the deities. All error-prone man could do was acknowledge the deity through ritual, keep his fingers crossed and be prepared to endure whatever life threw at him. Something like justice might be seen to be done at some stage, but one could never tell. No one was guaranteed anything like lasting happiness in this fragile, uncertain life, let alone after it. It is no surprise, then, that a far more hopeful religion such as Christianity should prove so appealing.

Nevertheless, pagans still had hope (expressed in the myth of Pandora’s box), and there were fellow human beings, all in the same boat, to whom one could turn for consolation. And at least worship of the gods, through state and local festivals, promised a good time for all: gladiatorial fights, theatrical and musical performances and chariot races at one level, sacrifices, food, drink and sex at the other.

A good example is the festival of the ancient Roman goddess Anna Perenna. It fell on the Ides of March, the first full moon of the year (reckoned by the old Roman calendar). Ovid described it as follows in his Fasti, celebrating the Roman year:

On the Ides, the merry festival of Anna Perenna is held
Not far from your banks, river Tiber.
The plebs come and, scattered about on the grass,
Lie down, every man, with his girl.
Some take their luck in the open, others pitch tents,
Some use branches to make leafy huts,
While others stake out reeds to make rigid pillars,
And stretch out their togas over the top.
The sun and wine warm them up, and they pray
To live as many years as the cups they drink, keeping count.
You will find there a man who drinks up Nestor’s years,
A woman as old as the Sibyl – in her cups.
There they sing the songs they’ve heard in the theatres,
Their ready hands beating time with the words;
Then they put down the bowl, and do a rough dance,
The trim girl cavorting with her hair loose.
Home they come, staggering, a sight for the crowd to see,
Who call them ‘blessed’ when they come across them.

Nestor and the Sibyl were renowned for their age; ‘blessed’ was a word reserved for gods!

One of the ways Romans made sense of their religion was to regard contemporary rituals as practices that had been developed from time immemorial. Their very age gave them their authority. When Ovid began his Fasti, he said he was celebrating ‘Times and their reasons’ (tempora cum causis), i.e. what festivals happened at what times and why this was the case. This was, of course, to align the ritual calendar with history, which also dealt with times and reasons; and Ovid found the reasons buried deep in Rome’s past. So whatever one made of the gods, no one could deny their ancient historical standing; and in the light of that, and Rome’s obvious success as a state, perhaps it might be a good idea to continue worshipping them in the good old way.

None of this prevented fierce philosophical debate about the nature of divinity. The poet Lucretius thought the gods were simply atoms, having little interest in us; Cicero had severe doubts about the value of the auspices and of prophecy in general. In a long discussion he pointed out, among much else, that if divination was the foreknowledge and foretelling of events that happened by chance, it could not, by definition, be predicted: otherwise it could not be said to have happened ‘by chance’. If an event were truly to happen ‘by chance’, Cicero went on, even the gods would not be able to predict it: so how could a diviner? Divinatio was therefore impossible if everything was controlled by chance. Let us then assume, Cicero argued, that everything was controlled by Fate. In that case, it was hard to see what advantages divinatio could bring: for if something was fated, it would happen, come what may. No amount of divination could help a person to avoid it. And so on.

But this was not to deny the importance of religio. Ancients did not believe that the gods made the world. Far from it: they were made by the world, as the world itself developed out of chaos. So gods were in fact part of the same material, natural world as men were. Understand nature, therefore, and you would understand the gods. For Cicero, it was superstition that was the problem and needed to be ‘torn up by the roots’: for superstition ‘pursues you at every turn, when you listen to a prophet or an omen, offer sacrifice, watch the birds, consult an astrologer, see lightning. Since these signs are given all the time, no one who believes them can ever be at peace.’

DEUS

What do the day, a journal, Diana, Zeus, Iup(p)iter (Jupiter), Jove, and the Latin for a god (deus) all have in common? Answer: the same Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root.

That root is *dieus- (the asterisk indicates that this word has been reconstructed by working back from existing words to the presumed PIE root). It seems to have meant ‘light, day’, very appropriate for Jupiter and Zeus, who were gods of the bright sky. We can see how ‘Zeus’ (who in Greek was pronounced ‘Sdeus’) and Latin deus line up with *dieus. But what about Iuppiter? Iuppiter is in fact a combination of *dieus + pater (‘bright sky’ + ‘father’). He sometimes appears in Latin as Diespiter.

No surprise, then, that the Latin for ‘day’ was dies. Diurnus meant ‘daily’ and is the source of our ‘journal’, and diarium was indeed a ‘diary’. Further, there is a ‘v’ lurking in *dieus, which produced the stem di(v)-, as in divinus and the goddess Di(v)ana.

That ‘v’ appears again in the stem of Iuppiter, which was Iov-, whence our ‘Jove’. In astrology, birth under the planet Jupiter bestowed a cheerful frame of mind (→ ‘jovial’). The Roman god Mercurius (Mercury) had a reputation for fickleness. Those born under his sign are ‘mercurial’.

BINDING RITUAL

The derivation of the Latin religio is not clear to us; but some Romans associated it with religo, ‘I bind fast, hold firmly in place’. If so, it came from the same family as obligo, ‘I secure, assign, pledge, make morally or legally liable’, the source of our ‘obligation’ (see here). Religio, then, made binding demands on you. Cicero talked of it in terms of ‘justice [iustitia] regarding the gods’. That ‘justice’ took the form not of faith or belief but of cult.

ANCIENT PRACTICES?

In Latin superstitio meant ‘irrational religious awe or credulity’. It derives, bafflingly, from sto, ‘I stand’, and super, ‘over, above’; and its adjective superstes meant ‘survivor’. Perhaps superstitio implied practices of ancient times, theoretically long out of date?

The first-century BC statesman Cicero saw ‘religio as a term of respect, superstitio one of contempt’. He defined superstitio as ‘pointless fear of the gods’, and contrasted those who explained the world ‘through the superstitions of fortune-telling hags’ with those who did so ‘through explanations based on natural causes’.

In other words, the gods had ordered the universe so that it was comprehensible; and religio, with its various cults and ritual, reflected that ordered comprehensibility. Admittedly, Cicero still had doubts about taking auspices, for example, but thought on balance they were ‘harmless’. But the Roman authorities took superstitio very seriously if it seemed to threaten Roman order: magic books, the use of drugs for sinister ends, alternative religions (such as Christianity and Druidism) could all evoke the state’s intervention.

FASCINATING STUFF

Literature tells us much about such superstitious practices: astrology, witchcraft, calling up the dead, curse tablets and voodoo dolls were all commonplace. In his Characters, Theophrastus (fourth century BC) described ‘the superstitious man’ as someone who went far beyond normal religious devotion; one, for instance, who would not walk on if a weasel crossed his path unless someone went before him, or until he had thrown three stones across the road.

The poet Tibullus (first century BC) told how a witch had given him a spell with which he could bamboozle his lover’s husband:

I’ve seen her bringing stars down from the sky,
Reverse fast-flowing rivers with her song.
Her spells can split the ground, lure up the dead,
Summon bones from smoking pyres…

The Latin for ‘casting a spell’ was fascinatio, and a thing that cast a spell was a fascinum, ‘evil spell, bewitchment’. Fascinum also meant ‘penis’ and ‘phallic amulet, worn round the neck as a charm’. Pliny the Elder described the protective power of the god Fascinus, from whom the neuter noun fascinum derived:

Infants are guarded by Fascinus, and so too are generals. Fascinus, dangling from under the chariot of a general celebrating a triumph, protects him from envy. The worship of Fascinus is overseen by the Vestal Virgins.

Lucky them.

NO MATCH FOR VESTAL VIRGINS

The Roman goddess of the domestic hearth (see here) was Vesta; and that was the term applied to her temples and any location where sacred fire was burning. Hence the match ‘Swan Vestas’. The purpose of the cult of Vesta was to ensure Rome’s permanence, and the prime responsibility of the Vestal Virgins was to keep Rome’s sacred fire burning. One of the sacred objects which they worshipped was a large erect fascinum (see above).

The Vestals did not live the life of pagan nuns in a pagan nunnery. They were women of patrician background, often chosen as young as six, and lived in a magnificent house, with every facility at hand. Their high status ensured that they were protected by their own lictors (see here) wherever they went and were regularly visited by emperors and senators alike; and they had secular as well as religious functions to perform. They were also expected to demonstrate the appropriate feminine virtues of modesty and purity as well as ritual piety. Punishment for letting the fire go out was a beating; for losing their virginity, being buried alive.

MAGIC

The Magoi (Μαγοι, biblical ‘Magi’) were priests and wise men from Persia (Iran) who, according to St Matthew, attended the birth of Jesus. Our ‘magic’ derives from Magoi, via Greek magikos (μαγικος) and Latin magicus.

Pliny the Elder, drawing on what he thought to be the earliest book on magic by the Persian Osthanes, mentioned superstitions like divination by ‘water, globes, air, stars, lamps, basins, axes… as well as interviews with ghosts and those in the underworld’. He castigated the emperor Nero for being fascinated by magic: ‘His main ambition was to give orders to the gods… no one supported magic arts more keenly.’ But Pliny then said that Nero did in fact give it all up – which proves magic must all be nonsense, given how much time, money and effort he had dedicated to it.

A DIVINE TERMINATOR

Latin numen (our ‘numinous’) meant literally ‘nod’ and came to have a religious significance as a ‘divine or supernatural power or influence, divine presence, deity’. When two young Trojans in Aeneas’ army proposed a daring expedition against enemies in Italy, an old soldier praised the god under whose numen Troy had been sheltered for continuing to look after them. Ovid talked of places you saw of which you could say ‘there is a numen here’. Objects too could be imbued with numen. One example was the stone used as a boundary marker, confirming who owned what. The god Terminus was the deity of such stones. Terminus came to mean ‘remotest limit, furthest point’, and the point at which an activity or process stopped.

CULT

Cicero defined religio as cultus deorum: ‘cult/worship of the gods’. Cultus derived from colo, ‘I inhabit, cultivate, adorn, look after, care for, practise, foster’, and embraced knowledge about, and active caring for, everything to do with the gods, from their holy places, such as temples and shrines, to the ceremonies and rituals with which they were worshipped, including those enjoyed by early trade unions. These were professional associations of bakers and leather-workers and social clubs (for examples, funerary clubs, to pay for one’s burial), which met under the cultus of a divinity.

Since emperors were included among the gods, they too received cult. In praising the emperor Trajan, Pliny the Younger condemned the cultus which attended the worship of the earlier emperor Domitian: ‘Shows and riotous entertainment, the dancing and howling, effeminate screams and antics, approved by Senate, consul and actor alike.’ He contrasted these ‘disgusting public theatricals’ with the more serious and respectful cultus that Trajan preferred.

CEREMONY AND RITUAL

Roman religion was deeply influenced by their neighbours the Etruscans, and Romans thought that caerimonia (‘sanctity’, ‘religious rites’; our ‘ceremony’) derived from various rituals carried out by Etruscan priests from the town of Caere. These ceremonies had to be carried out in the right way and at the right place and time, and ritus (‘rites’) were the correct procedures that made up a ceremony.

Incidentally, ritus has no connection with English ‘right’, a word of Germanic origin related to kings (compare Reich, ‘kingdom’, ‘reign’, ‘state’); but ritus is perhaps connected with ‘arithmetic’ (Greek arithmos [ἀριθμος], ‘number’) in the sense of numbering, i.e. counting things off in the correct order.

TEMPLE

Templum is perhaps connected with the Greek temnô (τεμνω, ‘I cut’) and temenos (τεμενος, ‘a place cut off, sanctuary’). When, for example, a priest examined the flight of birds to try to divine the will of the gods, the first thing he did was to use the correct procedure to ‘cut’ or mark out a space in the sky – the templum – where the relevant birds would appear. On land, a templum was a piece of ground marked out for the gods, and then the building constructed on it. The Roman Senate was built on one such area, and its meetings were always liable to be blocked or stopped by a divine sign of some sort. Our word ‘template’ – a pattern or gauge for shaping a piece of work – derives from templum. So does ‘contemplate’, as in someone watching attentively for an augury from a templum (see here).

It was not necessary for a temple to be a grand, imposing building. It was a home for a god and could be a simple ‘one-roomed house’ with the god’s statue inside (see here). Temples were not designed to hold huge congregations: worship was usually carried on outside, often at the altar.

CULT STATUES

Our ‘statue’ derives from Latin statua, whose root was sto (stat-), ‘I stand’, and was something fixed in the ground to remain upright (your stature − statura − was and is your height in an upright position). To throw a statua to the ground was to deny its very nature, a tremendous insult. When Roman emperors were thrown out of office in disgrace, their statues were usually uprooted – together with their status (same derivation), their ‘standing’ in the world.

A cult statue was normally called a simulacrum, a simulated image (simulo, ‘I pretend, counterfeit’), because you could not tell what a deity looked like; by contrast, the usual term for a human statue was imago, a ‘representation’, ‘reflection’, as in a mirror. A speciality of Roman cult statues was that they tended to act human during crises, when they had the habit of sweating, weeping or talking. But during the Empire such activity gradually ceased as intellectuals rationalized the occurrences. Plutarch put sweating, weeping and bleeding (common in Greek cult statues) down to the effects of different sorts of mould.

SHRINES AND THEIR FANS

A ‘shrine’ is a receptacle for sacred objects, usually a box, chest or repository for relics or a dead body. One Latin term for it was sacrarium, from sacro, ‘I set apart for the service of a god’, as in sacer (sacr-), ‘duly consecrated to, the property of, a deity’. The shrine was a place where objects belonging to the deity were kept, ‘even in a private home’, said one legal authority. Our notion of ‘the sacred’ is not quite the same.

Another term for ‘shrine’ was fanum, a word connected with festus, a day set apart for the gods (see ‘festival’, here). The person in charge of a fanum was a fanaticus, a term also used to describe religious fanatics. It may, in shortened form, be the origin of our ‘fan’.

By contrast, Latin profanus meant basically ‘not dedicated for religious use’ or ‘removed from divine use’. Pliny the Elder talked of a cliff in Libya dedicated to the south wind which, if touched by human hand, became profanus. The angry south wind would respond by causing a sandstorm.

SANCTUARIES

Any holy place could also act as a sanctuary, that is, a place of refuge. In Greece, theoretically, any criminal could expect to be safe there; but in Rome sanctuary was confined to refugees from other states (and much later, maltreated slaves) – a tactic the first king Romulus adopted, we are told, to enlarge the population of the city. Our ‘asylum’ derives from the temple of the god Asylaeus, which Romulus used for the purpose.

The Latin sanctuarium – a place like sacrarium where sacred, or private, confidential things were kept – derived from sanctus and the verb sancio (sanct-), meaning ‘I solemnly ratify, confirm, sanction, prescribe by law’. In other words, sanctus (‘inviolate, under divine protection’) had something of a legal force to it, and was particularly used of human institutions (for example, laws, oaths, special places like the treasury where Rome’s war reserve was kept) and people by virtue of their office. Note sacrosanctus (our ‘sacrosanct’) – a combination of sacer reinforced with sanctus!

To disturb the sanctity of a place was to violate it (violo [violat-]), while polluo (pollut-) meant ‘I make foul, infect’ (whence our ‘pollution’).

BURNT OFFERINGS

For Romans an altaria was a burnt offering, or the altar itself (it seems to be connected with a Latin word ‘to burn’). It was always out in the open air next to a temple and the place where the god was worshipped. Jews too made burnt offerings on altars, but when Christianity adopted the terminology, it changed its meaning: the altar became the table where the Eucharist was celebrated, and ‘sacrifice’ related to the life and death of Christ.

SACRIFICE

When Agamemnon ‘sacri-ficed’ his daughter Iphigeneia, he literally ‘made her sacred’ – sacer, ‘sacred’ + ficio, ‘I make, do’ (facio in compounds becomes -ficio or -fico). Rather as a templum marked out a space dedicated to the gods, sacrifice marked out some object dedicated to the deity. The object in question could be anything from a cake left on an altar or wine spilt on the ground, to an animal killed and burned or – in Iphigeneia’s case – a human (though human sacrifice is barely heard of in the classical world, hence Lucretius’ extreme disgust). Sacrifice was a complex ritual, part of which involved scattering a barley-and-salt cake (Latin mola) over the victima. The verb immolo meant ‘I scatter mola over a victim’ and hence ‘I kill a victim’, and so is the origin of English ‘immolate’. A ‘hecatomb’ was technically a sacrifice of a hundred oxen, a massive operation, though we rarely hear of it in practice (Greek hekaton [ἑκατον], ‘hundred’ + bous [βους], ‘ox’).

CARNIVAL!

When Greeks sacrificed an animal, they burned some of it for the god and ate the rest. This was one of the occasions when they would eat meat, a special treat. Our ‘carnival’ is associated with meat-eating – or rather, giving it up. Latin caro (carn-) meant ‘flesh, meat’ (→ ‘carnage’, ‘carnivore’); and levare, ‘to remove’. The old Italian carnelevare meant ‘removing meat’, and that became carnevale, the word to describe Shrove Tuesday, the last day before Lent. The ‘popular’ derivation – Carne, vale! (‘Meat, farewell!’) – is mistaken.

ORACLES

Like all ancients, Romans were keen to ascertain the god’s will. This could be done in any number of ways. The Latin oro meant ‘I pray to, beseech, supplicate’, and an oraculum, a place where prayers were said (whence ‘oracle’), was also the divine utterance in response to the prayer. Such responses were always made through the agency of a priest or priestess.

But there were many other ways of contacting the gods or finding the gods contacting you, including omens, dreams, astrology, magic and the Sibylline books. These last had been bought by the Roman king Tarquin (c. 600 BC) from a Sibyl (a woman with prophetic powers) and were consulted when trouble threatened. They recommended carrying out rituals of one sort or another to appease the gods.

SIGNS AND PORTENTS

The ancient world was full of signa, ‘signs’. A signum meant basically ‘a mark written or impressed’ to signify ownership, a ‘distinguishing feature’, or an ‘indication’. It seems to be linked to seco (sect-), ‘I cut’ (whence ‘section’), presumably in the sense ‘inscribe’ or ‘engrave’. A signum might or might not be significant of divine activity. Cicero mentioned the Roman general Gaius Flaminius, who ‘ignored prophetic signs and was responsible for a catastrophic disaster’ when he was defeated by Hannibal at Lake Trasimene in 217 BC.

A portentum was what a god portended, i.e. indicated by portents. It was always something unnatural or monstrous. Pliny the Elder was most concerned about such unnatural occurrences and blamed the Greeks for even mentioning them:

I personally do not mention abortion-inducing practices, let alone love-potions, remembering as I do that the famous general Lucullus was killed by a love-potion, nor yet any other magic portenta, unless it be by way of warning or denunciation, especially as I have utterly condemned all faith in such practices.

AUGURY

The behaviour of birds was seen as a particularly potent indicator of divine (dis)pleasure. The religious official who adopted this technique was called an augur, whose derivation is a mystery, or an auspex (auis, ‘bird’ + spex, ‘watcher’, from the spec- root, → ‘inspect’, etc.). An augury gained from avian behaviour was an auspicium, whence our ‘auspices, auspicious’.

To take a bird augury, pitch a tent at dawn on a high hill, face south (Greeks faced north), hold a knotless stick in your right hand, pray to the gods, and identify landmarks to help mark off a section of the sky (see templum, above) into the four quarters north, south, east and west. Transfer the stick to your left hand, and wait. Birds flying left to right are propitious, right to left unpropitious. Ravens, crows, owls and hens give their augury by noise; eagles, vultures and lammergeyers by flight (very satisfactory if they come in twelves); woodpeckers and lapwings by both.

VICTIMS

Another popular method of ascertaining the will of the gods was to examine the entrails – for example, the liver, heart or lungs – of a slaughtered animal. The technical term for this animal, used only in relation to animals, not humans, was victima: it is connected with a Sanskrit word meaning ‘holy’. The priest in charge was called a haruspex, ‘gut-inspector’, the haru- being associated with a Sanskrit word meaning ‘guts’.

The liver of a sheep was a popular entrail for inspection, probably because a sheep was relatively cheap and has a smooth liver on which it is easy to spot defects. The ancients were also well aware that blood was vital for life, and the liver is a very blood-packed organ, so life-and-death issues hung on it. There survives a bronze model of a liver, marked with ‘good’ and ‘bad’ areas. Folds in a liver could, apparently, be good. Augustus sacrificed on the first day he came to power, and Pliny the Elder said of the outcome: ‘the livers of six victims had the bottom of their tissue folded back inwards, interpreted to mean that he would double his power within the year.’ A good omen!

OMENS, PRODIGIES AND EXPIATION

The derivation of omen is obscure, but in Latin it meant something that foreshadowed the outcome of an event, good or bad (it gives rise to ‘ominous’ and ‘abominate’, from abominor: ‘I try to avert an omen or eventuality by prayer, detest’). In supporting a memorial in honour of a friend who, despite severe illness, agreed to go on an embassy that was the death of him, Cicero reported that, as he left on that fatal embassy, ‘he spoke to me in a way that seemed an omen of his fate’; and in a marriage hymn the poet Catullus talked of conducting the bride across the threshold ‘with a good omen’.

The Latin saying nomen omen (‘the name [is] an omen’) suggested that a person’s name could play a part in determining some aspect of his or her character, life, etc. So if your name is (say) ‘Barber’ or ‘Savage’ or ‘Peacock’ or ‘Craven’, there is a chance your life will somehow be shaped by it.

PRODIGIES

A prodigium was an unnatural event, suggesting a disaster was about to strike (and so any amazing or monstrous event, or person, hence our ‘child prodigy’).

Expiatio (whence our ‘expiation’, ‘expiate’) meant in Latin ‘performing a ceremony of purification to avert any disaster’. It was a common response to baffling events. Expiatio drives from the verb pio (stem piat-), ‘I appease [a god], I perform rites of expiation’.

Romans kept careful records of such ominous events and how they responded to them, in order to prepare for similar occurrences in the future. Not surprisingly, words such as prodigium and expiatio occurred regularly when such events were being described. For example, in 200 BC the temple of Persephone at Locri (in south Italy) was robbed. The Senate demanded it be fully investigated and sacrifices performed. The historian Livy went on:

The concern to expiate the sacrilege was inflamed by the announcement of prodigies that had occurred all over the country at the same time [flames in the sky… sun shining red… strange noises in temples… lamb born with pig’s head… pig born with man’s feet… a colt with five feet] and a child of uncertain sex was born, and a sixteen-year-old of indeterminate sex discovered. Nature seemed to be confusing the species. These hermaphrodites, abominated beyond all others, were ordered to be taken out to sea, as a similar prodigy had previously.

FROM PIETY TO A PITIFUL PITTANCE

The verb pio, ‘I appease’, is also connected with the adjective pius in Latin (our ‘pious’), meaning ‘dutiful/loyal/faithful to gods, country and family’. Pietas (our ‘piety’) is from the same stem.

Incidentally, pietas also gives us ‘pity’ and ‘piteous’, via French pitié, ‘compassion’ − a quite different meaning from the Latin. It gives us ‘pittance’, too, a pathetically small amount of money. In Old French a pitance was the food that pious charitable foundations gave to monks.

STAR LAWS

We make a firm distinction between astronomy and astrology. The ancients did not. For them, the scientific study of the stars, in as far as the Greeks were capable of it, was both astronomia (ἀστρονομια) – the astr- stem meaning ‘star’ and the nom- stem meaning ‘law, statute’ – and astrologia (ἀστρολογια), of which the log- stem meant ‘reason, rational account’. The Romans took over both words, and again used both to refer to a ‘scientific’ study. At the same time, however, like the Greeks, the Romans gave an additional, unique meaning to astrologia: the observation and study of the stars to predict human affairs – what we mean by ‘astrology’.

HEAVENLY FIRE

Meteors, comets and other flashing lights in the sky were of special interest to the ancients, since they were taken to portend some momentous event, often a disaster.* Meteors, derived from the Greek meteôros (μετεωρος), simply meant things ‘up in the air’ (as in the monasteries of the Meteora in Greece). Comets leave a trail and so were ‘long-haired’, which is what Greek komêtês (κομητης), and Latin cometes, meant. In this category Pliny the Elder records a ‘spark seen to fall from the sky, increasing in size till it became as large as the moon, diffusing a sort of cloudy daylight, and then changing into a torch and returning to the sky’.

The Latin for ‘spark’ was scintilla, whence ‘scintillate’, but also (via French estincelle) sparkly ‘tinsel’ and ‘stencil’, which originally involved decorating with bright colours.

CLOAKING THE HEAVENS

The Greek word for ‘eclipse’, ekleipsis (ἐκλειψις), meant ‘failure, cessation’; in the case of the sun, a failure of light. The Romans took their word eclipsis directly from it. Pliny the Elder cited the Greek thinker Thales from Miletus (seventh century BC) as the first man to predict an eclipse, and credited Sulpicius Gallus with being the first Roman to predict solar and lunar eclipses – he predicted an eclipse on the day before the battle of Pydna (168 BC) against the Greek king Perseus.

Eclipses generally caused panic. The essayist Plutarch (second century AD) told a lovely story about the fifth-century BC Athenian statesman Pericles. He was about to set off with his navy when a solar eclipse occurred. In the ensuing panic, Pericles immediately took off his cloak and wrapped it around his helmsman’s eyes, asking whether he thought that was an omen. ‘Don’t be daft’, replied the helmsman. ‘Same difference’, said Pericles. ‘The eclipse has just been caused by something bigger than this cloak.’

Pericles drew this information from his friend, the philosopher Anaxagoras, who correctly explained solar eclipses as the result of the moon crossing the face of the sun. He also argued that the stars were fiery stones and the moon shone by light reflected from the sun, which was a mass of red-hot metal.

WHIRLING GALAXIES

At one level the heavenly bodies were felt to be divine (though not by Epicureans, p. 135) – hence the names of the planets – and so given characteristics: some were male, some female, some friendly to humans, others not, and so on. But that did not prevent thinkers speculating about their part in creation. Simple observation of the sun, moon and stars suggested the idea of a rotating universe. The thinker Anaxagoras thought that originally the universe was a mixture of all its ingredients (that is, everything that made it up), which, at some stage, started to rotate. This motion expanded the ingredients, separated them out and caused them to recombine, and the result was our universe in all its variety. Not, then, a big bang, but a big whirl of stars and galaxies.

Our ‘galaxy’ derives from the Greek for ‘milk’ − gala (galakt-) [γαλα, γαλακτ–] – because Greeks so named the Milky Way. For them it was a galaxias kuklos [γαλαξιας κυκλος], the ‘Milky Circle’, galaxias for short; it was the Romans who called it the Milky Way (lactea via, → ‘lactation’, etc.). Once it was thought that the Milky Way made up the whole universe. Now, thanks to modern astronomy, we know it is but one of billions upon billions of such galaxies, though how milky they are is another question.

NEBULAS

Claudius Ptolemy (c. AD 150) saw in space what he thought were clouds of some sort and gave them the Latin name for ‘cloud’ – nebula. Collecting such clouds became a favourite sport of astronomers from the eighteenth century onwards. Some were indeed clouds of dust and gases, but others were in fact distant galaxies of stars – for instance, what was called the Andromeda Nebula. It now appears that nebulas and stars are very closely associated.

TIME AND PLACE

In the ancient world it was vital that ritual be carried out at the right time and place. Consequently, the calendar was of great importance. The poet Ovid composed his Fasti (‘days that were fastus; list of festival days’, p. 190) to record the seasonal dates on the Roman calendar and explain why they were there and how they had come about (see here).

But more than that: as well as feasts, rituals, foundations of temples and so on, Ovid recorded important moments in the history of Rome. He included not only its great military triumphs but also significant dates and moments in the rise to power of the emperor Augustus and in the lives of his family. Ovid thought it convenient to confirm that Roman history, and the first Roman emperor’s history, were stamped firmly on the annual round of ritual celebrations.

This sense of the importance of dates survived into the church calendar. Arguments still exist between different branches of Christianity on the dates of Christmas and Easter, for example.

DAYS OF THE WEEK

Our ‘calendar’ derives from Latin Kalendae, the word for the first day of the Roman month. Romans had an eight-day week, labelled A B C D E F G H. They marked each day of each month with an indication of the religious festivals, banquets, games, holidays and so on that took place, and whether official state business could or could not be done on it. To give an idea of how it worked, here is a reconstruction of one week in one such calendar, painted on plaster in a house in Antium and dating to the first century BC:

A	K[alendae]	APR[ilis]	F[astus]
B	F
C	C[omitialis]
D	C
E	NON[es]	N[efastus]	To Public Fortune
F	N
G	N
H	N

Key:

Kalendae: first day of the month.

Fastus: a day, ordained by priests, on which the courts could sit. Latin fas meant ‘that which was permitted by divine law’.

Comitialis: a day on which public assemblies (comitia) could meet, and courts could sit. Our ‘committee’ derives from Latin committo (commiss-), ‘I bring/join together’ (see here).

NONes: fifth day of the month.

Nefastus: a day, ordained by priests, on which no public assemblies could meet nor courts sit.

To Public Fortune: there were three temples to Fortune on the Roman hill called the Quirinal. This day would see the ceremonial re-dedication of one of them.

Incidentally, our ‘red-letter’ days are so called because special days were marked with red in the Roman calendar.

HOLIDAYS, FEASTS AND FESTIVALS

A ‘holiday’ is a ‘holy day’, a religious festival, and all holidays in Rome were connected with a religious cult. Feasting together was typical of such Roman holiday celebrations, usually paid for by a member of the wealthy local elite. His generosity raised his status in the community and gave the plebs a brief taste of the aristocratic life. Such ‘perks’ were called commoda (‘benefits’, as in our ‘commodities’, from commodus, ‘advantageous, convenient’). Our ‘feast’ derives from Latin festus, a word also related to Latin feriae, ‘holiday’, and means ‘keeping a festival day or holiday’, so ‘festive’, ‘merry’. Holy days, feasting and merriment are part of our culture too (see Anna Perenna, here).

THE LUNATIC CALENDAR

The ancients were farmers, and farming is season-dependent. Respecting the power of the gods, they tied the farming year closely in with religious ritual, which demanded that all ritual take place at the right time.

Now, the ancients knew that the seasons coincided with the time it took the sun to complete its annual course (the ‘solar’ cycle of 365.25 days – Latin sol, ‘sun’). The problem was that they counted time by the moon, and the average ‘lunar’ month lasts 29.53 days (luna, ‘moon’). Twelve of these make only 354 days, so the full lunar cycle left a shortfall of eleven days on the solar year. So every three years, the calendar was a month ‘late’, and spring festivals were soon being celebrated in mid-winter. Lunacy!

ADDING MONTHS

Those who stayed with lunar months, therefore, needed to adjust. As early as 2400 BC we hear of Babylonians (in modern-day Iraq) occasionally ‘intercalating’ a month (i.e. adding it within the year) to keep the calendar in time with the seasons (Latin intercalo, ‘I summon in between’). Greeks intercalated seven months over a nineteen-year cycle. It was in fact the Egyptians who made the breakthrough: they abandoned the link between the twelve-month lunar cycle and the year, and in its place created twelve thirty-day months, plus five days, giving 365 days − a very close shot indeed.

Julius Caesar copied the Egyptians to produce the ‘Julian’ calendar of 365 days, plus one day every fourth year – nearly right, but now superseded by the ‘Gregorian’ calendar introduced by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582.

CALENDAR: MONTHS OF THE YEAR

In early times, the Roman calendar functioned only during the working year – that is, March to December. So it originally had only ten months. The twelve-month year, common elsewhere, was perhaps introduced in 153 BC. January was named after Janus, the god who looked both ways, forward and back;* February, from Februa, month of ‘expiation’; March, after the god Mars, start of the fighting season; April (not known); May, after Maius, some ancient unknown deity; June, after the goddess Juno; July, after Julius Caesar (previously Quintilis, ‘fifth’, counting from March); August, after the emperor Augustus (previously Sextilis, ‘sixth’); and then Septem -ber, Octo-ber, Novem-ber, Decem-ber, from the Latin for ‘seven’, ‘eight’, ‘nine’ and ‘ten’.

CALENDAR: DAYS OF THE MONTH

Or, as the Romans spelled it, Kalendarium – one of only ten words in Latin beginning with ‘k’, all also spelled with ‘c’. The days of each month were determined by three fixed points in that month:

1.Kalendae (the Kalends), the
first day of the month;

2.Nonae (the Nones), the fifth day of the month (in March, May, July and October, the seventh);

3.Idus (the Ides), the thirteenth day of the month (in March, May, July and October, the fifteenth).

Unless the day fell on a named date (such as 1 October: Kal. Oct.), all dates were expressed as follows: the xth day before the next fixed date – for example, the third day before the Kalends of August. The exception was the day before a fixed day, expressed by pridie, e.g. prid. Kal. Mai., ‘the day before the first of May’.

MODERN RELIGIOUS TERMINOLOGY

As we have seen (here), Christians regularly took over Roman (and Greek) religious words and reused them in Christian terms (for example, ‘sacrifice’, ‘sacrament’), giving them quite different significance. Another example is D.O.M., often seen on Roman inscriptions: Deo Optimo Maximo, ‘[dedicated to] God Greatest Best’, i.e. Jupiter, a very ancient form of address. Christians happily took it over, referring to the Christian deity.

But Christians also took over many wholly secular Greek and Latin words which had nothing to do with pagan religion at all. As you will see from the following examples, the Greek words were usually transliterated by the Roman church straight into Latin and entered our language either via Old English (after England was Christianized) or via French. Here are some examples:

Acolyte: derived from Greek akolouthos (ἀκολουθος), literally a ‘follower’, it became acolythus in Late Latin and in ecclesiastical parlance, a minor assistant in religious ceremonies.

Angel: Greek angelos (ἀγγελος) meant simply ‘messenger’. It had nothing to do with divine beings. Latin transliterated it directly as angelus. Add the Greek prefix eu- (εὐ), ‘good, well’, to yield Greek euangelistês (εὐαγγελιστης), Latin euangelista, ‘evangelist’, originally a preacher of the gospel, i.e. bringer of good news.*

Apostle: the Greek apostolos (ἀποστολος) meant ‘one sent out’ and was used to mean ‘envoy’ or ‘commander’ (Latin apostolus).

Bishop: Greek episkopos (ἐπισκοπος) meant ‘overseer’, of slaves or builders, for example; ‘watchman, look-out, guardian, tutor, supervisor’. It became Latin episcopus, and via early English [e] biscop, ‘bishop’. The Spanish is obispo and the French évêque (!) – Greek p softened to v, while ê = es.

Blaspheme: Greek blasphêmeô (βλασφημεω) meant ‘I speak irreverently, slander’, especially of gods; blas- may derive from a word meaning ‘hurtful’, the phêm- root means ‘say, speak’, → Latin fama (p. 161). Our ‘blame’ derives from it, via Late Latin blasphemo.

Calvary: the Aramaic name for the mount where Christ was crucified was Gulgalta. In the Greek of the New Testament this became Golgothas (Γολγοθας) and was then immediately glossed as meaning ‘place of the skull’ (kranion, κρανιον, → ‘cranium’). This may be because it was a place of execution or a cemetery or (in some traditions) where Adam’s skull was buried. When translating the text, St Jerome saw the gloss, ignored the real name, and turned Golgothas into Calvaria, the Latin for ‘skull’, a word derived from Latin calvus, ‘bald’!

Cardinal: derives from Latin cardo, ‘hinge’, ‘pivot’, ‘axis’, from which came cardinalis, ‘serving as a hinge’ (architecturally).

Church: Greek kurios (κυριος) meant ‘in authority over’. It was used of, for example, a husband over a wife. As a noun it meant ‘lord, master’, especially of the household. Applying kurios to the Lord Jesus, Christians created [dôma] kuriakon ([δωμα] κυριακον), ‘[house of] the Lord’. This became in Old English cirice (German Kirche), from which came our ‘church’. Note, incidentally, Kurie, eleison (Κυριε, ἐλεισον) – ‘Lord, have mercy’. Kurie was used when addressing someone.

In fact the most common word for ‘church’ was the Greek ekklêsia (ἐκκλησια), Latin ecclesia (whence French église and our ‘ecclesiastical’). In Greek that meant a ‘summoned assembly’. It was the technical term for the democratic assembly of all Athenian male citizens over eighteen. Between them, they made every decision about how Athens should be run. Ekklêsia derives from the Greek ekkaleô (ἐκκαλεω), ‘I call out, summon’.

The clergy: the Latin for ‘priest’ is sacerdos (→ ‘sacerdotal’) – someone ‘made sacred’. Our ‘priest’ probably derives, perhaps via Old English preost, from the Late Latin presbyter, ‘elder’ (Greek presbuteros, πρεσβυτερος). Another suggestion is that it derives from Latin praepositus, ‘placed in front, at the head’ – source of our ‘preposition’!

Our ‘clergyman’, ‘cleric’ and ‘clerk’ all derive via Late Latin clericus from the Greek klêros (κληρος). This meant ‘lot, voting token’; then ‘an allotment, piece of land’. It is not precisely clear how these became associated with clerics.

Devil: the Greek diabolos (διαβολος, Latin diabolus) comes from diaballô (διαβαλλω), meaning ‘I slander, accuse, misrepresent’. It became deofol in Old English, whence ‘devil’.

Grace: our ‘grace’, in the sense of God’s unmerited goodwill or favour, derives from Latin gratia. Its Greek equivalent was kharis (χαρις).* Both words had meanings rooted in the idea of reciprocity, i.e. the voluntary, unforced returning of benefits (or injuries) tit-for-tat. This was a key feature of ancient social values. Christianity put a quite different gloss on the idea: God’s favours, freely given, were impossible to reciprocate.

Incarnation: the Latin caro (stem carn-) meant ‘flesh, meat’. The church invented the word incarnatio (‘the act of being in-fleshed’) to describe Christ being made man. The word does not appear in the Bible; it was first used around 1300. See ‘carnival’ (here).

Pagan: this derives from Latin paganus, ‘countryman, peasant’. But it also meant ‘civilian’ as opposed to ‘soldier’. Apparently, when Christians began calling themselves ‘soldiers for Christ’, paganus was applied to those who were not such soldiers, and therefore must be ‘heathens’. It might be thought that pagans got their own back by calling Christians ‘cretins’, for that is the derivation of the word. But (apparently) it was first used in the eighteenth century to refer to mentally disabled people, not to abuse them but to remind people that they were humans after all.

Redemption: redemptio in Latin basically meant ‘purchase, the act of buying’; but it also meant the ‘act of ransoming/buying back’, ‘procuring the release of ’, the root of the Christian usage.

Renunciation: nuntio meant ‘I announce’, and renuntio, ‘I report back’. But the prefix re- had another force – that of withdrawal or reversal. So it also meant ‘I send a message cancelling a previous engagement’ and so ‘I call off, withdraw from’ a friendship or alliance, ‘I give up, renounce’.

Sacrament: in Latin a sacramentum was an oath, particularly an oath of military allegiance, or solemn duty. Christians first used it to refer to a ceremony such as baptism which bound man and God together in an unbreakable bond.

Vicars, dioceses (and dukes): in the late third century AD, the emperor Diocletian faced a major financial crisis. In order to increase the tax take, he greatly enlarged bureaucracy across the Roman Empire. He replaced the original forty-two provinces with 120 areas, grouped into twelve ‘dioceses’ (dioikêsis [διοικησις], ‘administration’). Each diocese was overseen by a vicarius, ‘deputy, substitute’, an official taking over the role of a praetorian prefect (a vicar is Christ’s ‘substitute’ on earth). Military command of these new regions was handed to duces, ‘leaders, generals’, whence our ‘dukes’.

* Our word ‘Elysium’, taken directly from Latin, derives from the ancient Greek [έν]ηλυσιος ([en]êlusios), meaning ‘struck by lightning’ and therefore removed from worldly use.

* From Janus came ianua, ‘door’, which does roughly the same; the leaf of a door was valva, source of our ‘valve’, which also opens and shuts.

* It is worth noting here that the Greek suffix -istês (-ιστης), Latin -ista, English ‘-ist’ means ‘someone who acts in some capacity’ – for example, flautist, jurist, florist.

* Our ‘charity’ derives from Latin caritas ‘high price; love, affection’. The ‘charity’ of St Paul’s ‘faith, hope and charity’ is in Greek agapê (ἀγαπη), ‘Christian love’, translated as caritas by St Jerome in his Vulgate; the church also interpreted caritas as ‘compassion’, especially for the poor.