ARCHITECTURE AND TECHNOLOGY
INTRODUCTION
Vitruvius (c. 75–c. 15 BC) composed On Architecture, the only ancient work on the subject to survive into the modern world. It was based mainly on Greek architectural practice, from which the Romans were gradually departing, and did not go into the detail of topics like proportion and the ‘orders’. In ten books, it covered first principles, the layout of cities, building materials, temples, public and private buildings, finishing off (flooring, plasterwork, etc.), water supply, sundials, clocks and machines (see here). His central thesis was that buildings must be solid, useful and beautiful.
All our manuscripts of Vitruvius derive from a copy probably brought from Britain to Charlemagne’s court by Alcuin in the ninth century AD (see here). From the eleventh to the twelfth century, it was used as a practical guide to building, and much of the detail was altered to fit contemporary practice. During the Renaissance, his work, whose language is difficult and interpretation controversial, was used by Alberti and Raphael among others to form the basis of a humanistic and aesthetically pleasing architectural conception built around the idea of the orders and the precise proportional relationship of each element of them.
Our ‘architect’ derives from the Greek arkhitektôn (ἀρχιτεκτων). That meant a master-builder, the arkh- stem meaning ‘rule, sovereignty, mastery’ and tektôn, ‘carpenter, craftsman’. Romans took the word over, giving it a Roman ending – architectus. But a master builder was not necessarily the same as our architect. According to Vitruvius, an architectus (in our sense) needed to be educated to a high standard over a forbiddingly wide range of disciplines. Among these were draughtsmanship, geometry, optics (to get windows right), arithmetic (so that he could cost his work properly and measure accurately), history (to understand the significance of various architectural features), philosophy (to make him honest and trustworthy), physics (to control water flow in aqueducts, for example), medicine and climates (to ensure buildings were conducive to health), law, astronomy (he must know his north from his south), and mathematics and music, to have a good grasp of proportion and tuning (for example, getting the tension of catapults right). The consequences of the abandonment of Vitruvius’ architectural curriculum can be seen all around us.
Pliny the Elder (born c. AD 22), who was killed investigating the explosion of Vesuvius in AD 79, composed a thirty-seven-book encyclopedia of all contemporary knowledge, the Historiae Naturalis (‘On Natural History’), which survives in full. It covers astronomy, meteorology, geography, ethnography, anthropology, human physiognomy, zoology (mammals, snakes, birds, marine life, insects), botany (agriculture, horticulture – especially vine and olive – and medicine), pharmacology, magic, water, aquatic life, mining and mineralogy, especially in relation to art, gold and silver, statuary, painting, modelling, sculpture and precious stones. Enormously influential down the millennia – it was one of the first books to be printed in the Gutenberg revolution (1469) − it was a masterclass in collecting, cataloguing and arranging, as he said, ‘20,000 facts from more than 2,000 volumes’ (a serious underestimate).
After the Preface, Pliny provided in Book 1 a list of contents. It runs to seventy pages of Latin. To give some idea of the coverage, here is just one page of the contents from Book 9, on the ‘nature of animals arranged by parts of the body’:
(lvii–lx) Cheek-bones; nostrils; cheeks, lips, chin, jaws. (lxi–iv) Teeth – kinds of; species with teeth in one jaw only; with hollow teeth; snakes’ teeth, snakes’ poison; which bird has teeth; remarkable facts as to teeth; age of ruminants indicated by teeth. (lxv) Tongue – tongueless species; croaking of frogs; palate. (lxvi–viii) Tonsils; uvula, epiglottis, wind pipe, gullet, nape, neck, backbone, throat, jaws, stomach. (lxix–lxxi) Heart, blood, life; which species has largest heart, which smallest, which two hearts; when inspection of heart of victims began. (lxxii) Lungs – which species has largest, which smallest, which no internal organ besides lungs; cause of speed in animals. (lxxiii–vi) Liver – head of internal organs; its inspection by augurs; species with two livers, and their habitats; gall – what species have two, and where; what animals have none, which have gall elsewhere than in liver; its function; species whose gall grows and shrinks in size with moon; observation of these species by augurs, and marvellous portents. (lxxvii) Diaphragm; nature of laughter. (lxxviii) Stomach; species that have none; the only species that vomit. (lxxix) Smaller intestines, entrails, stomach, great gut; why some animals have voracious appetites. (lxxx–iii) Caul, spleen – species without spleen. Kidneys; habitat of species with four kidneys – with none; chest; ribs; bladder – animals without bladder; entrails; membranes. (lxxxiv–viii) Belly – the ‘parts,’ the womb, sows’ womb, paps; what species have suet, what tallow; nature of each; what species have no fat; marrow; species that have none; bones; prickles; species that have neither bones nor prickles; cartilages; sinews; species without sinews.
One feature stands out above all: Pliny’s interests in human needs and aspirations. Nature was there, he thought, to serve us, but needed to be respected in turn. Indeed, so respected that the more Pliny observed it, ‘the more difficult I found it to believe that any statement about it was impossible’.
He also composed six other works, all lost, amounting to another sixty-five volumes, while pursuing a political and military career across the Roman Empire in Europe and North Africa, before winding up as admiral of the fleet in the Bay of Naples. That was how he came to be present when Vesuvius went up. His first thought was to investigate it; then he received a letter begging for help from a friend and launched his warships to try to help. He managed to land at Stabiae, four miles south of Pompeii, and stayed most of the night, but when the courtyard started filling with pumice and ash and earthquakes shook the building, he was woken and went down to the shore to investigate the chance of escape by sea. Overcome by fumes, he collapsed there and died.
HELPING HAND
Imagine what it would have taken to build the Colosseum: forty-foot foundations covering six acres, the building 615 feet long, 510 feet wide, seating around 50,000 spectators in four tiers, 185 feet high in all, and about 100,000 cubic metres of marble (around 250,000 tons). Don’t even think about the supporting stonework, infill, the tiles, bricks, cement; the tens of thousands who must have worked on it, from the quarries in Tivoli twenty miles away to the workshops that produced the standardized stairs and seats, and the engineers, artists and decorators in the Colosseum itself. Imagine the wagons trundling through Roman streets night after night for ten years delivering the basic materials.
Human hands surely needed some help, and they got it. Greek mêkhanê (μηχανη) derived from mêkhos (μηχος), ‘remedy, expedient, means’, i.e. a clever way of dealing with otherwise very difficult problems. In Latin, it became machina. It did not wholly remove the need for the human hand but enabled humans to do certain things far more easily. Typical machinae (plural) – all made by hand, of course – included cranes, derricks, windlasses, revolving stages, mills, siege engines, stone-throwing ballistas and catapults, scaffolding, platforms, cages (to confine people, or cattle for treatment) and so on.
The architect Vitruvius devoted a whole book to machinae. He defined a machina as ‘a continuous piece of joinery oustandingly well suited to moving loads’. He mentioned devices for raising water (such as Archimedes’ screw and Ctesibius’ water pump), a water organ and a hodometer (‘road-measurer’: Greek hodos [ὁδος], ‘road’ + metron [μετρον], ‘measure’). This was a cogged device recording the distance it travelled. It calibrated the wheel diameter with a series of cogs such that every time the wheel and lower cog had turned 400 times, the upper cog turned once, releasing a pebble into a tin wth a loud rattle, announcing ‘one mile’.
But machines that worked automatically existed only in fantasy worlds. The Greek automatos (αὐτοματος) meant ‘acting of one’s own free will’, and of things ‘self-acting’, like the gates of Mount Olympus. Latin automatum (-on) meant what it means in English. The auto- root is the Greek for ‘self ’ – for example, ‘autopsy’, seeing (as in ‘optics’) for oneself; ‘automobile’, ‘moving by itself, self-propelling’. Compare ‘auto’ + ‘-crat’ (‘ruling’), + ‘-nomous’ (‘laws’), + ‘-graph’ (‘writing’).
CEMENT
It is not known exactly when Romans started using a form of cement made out of wet lime and volcanic ash, but by the first century AD it was widely used across the Empire. The ash is called ‘pozzolana’, or ‘pozzolan’, from Latin puteolanus, ‘from Puteoli’, a town near Vesuvius. This ‘volcanic’ cement was light compared with stone, had great strength and endurance (thousands of years, unlike modern concrete), could be poured into preformed shapes and would set underwater. Most commonly it was mixed with small stones or rubble and used as infill, to be finished off externally with a facing of materials such as bricks or marble. That, in fact, is where our term ‘cement’ comes from: Latin caementum, ‘rubble’, from caedo, ‘I crack, smash, break’. Such was the importance of this volcanic ash that it was transported all over the Mediterranean, for example to Caesarea Maritima in Israel and Alexandria.
RANDOM NETWORKS
There were various styles of Roman masonry. One was called ‘network’ masonry (reticulatum, from rete, ‘net’, the facing bricks angled against each other to produce a diamond-like pattern). Vitruvius commented that, while it was very popular because it looked so pretty, it tended to fall apart because there were so many seams in it. ‘Random’ masonry (incertum), however, was different: the courses of rubble filled in with lime and sand were so strong that they needed no brick facing at all and were simply ‘tidied up’ to look neat. This, said Vitruvius, lasted far longer. Its strength was partly down to the crystal structure of the volcanic ash that prevented tiny cracks from spreading.
ARCHES
The Latin arcus meant a ‘bow’ (as in bow and arrows), and so a rainbow, and then an arch or a vault. The arch was a key feature of Roman architecture. It had been known around the Mediterranean for a very long time, but Romans used it to revolutionize building. The point is that, because the arch is immensely strong, it can span very wide spaces indeed. Think of a Roman aqueduct: you could not build one of those with columns and a stone or wooden beam across the top! The result was huge self-standing buildings like the Colosseum, quite impossible with Greek column-and-crossbeam technology. Domes and barrel vaults (a single passageway formed out of a series of arches) are extensions of the same principle, equally exploited by Roman engineers. (For fornix, ‘arch’, see here.)
‘Arcade’, via seventeenth-century Italian, is a passageway formed out of a series of arches. It has nothing to do with Arcadia, a scrubby, mountainous region of southern Greece turned by the sixteenth-century Italian poet Jacopo Sannazaro into a rural paradise where, while happy shepherds enjoyed their innocent pleasures, he could vent his frustrations at his lost loves.
WORM-RIDDEN MOSAICS
Floors were regularly decorated with mosaics, both black-and-white and coloured. The pictures depicted by them often gave a clue to what the room was for, and in the Roman harbour town of Ostia acted as guides to the shops. Everyday mosaics were made of tesserae, small squares or cubes of stone or coloured glass, which were laid on site (whence our ‘tessellated’). They may be named after the Greek for ‘four’, tessares (see here), for having four corners.
Very small mosaic pieces, no more than four millimetres square, were constructed in frames in workshops, to be placed ready-made in walls. These tiny-cubed mosaics allowed for very fine, delicate work, almost resembling painting. Such work was called vermiculatum, ‘producing a wavy-line effect’, from vermiculus, ‘larva of a grub or maggot’ (from which we get ‘vermin’).
The Greek for ‘mosaic’ was lithostrôtos (λιθοστρωτος), ‘paved with stones’, especially of mosaic pavements. Pliny the Elder says that lithostrôta were first introduced into Italy by the famous luxury-loving dictator Sulla (c. 80 BC), but were then, as it were, unnaturally driven up out of the ground into vaulted ceilings (camara, see here). Pliny liked things to be in their ‘correct’ place.
Our ‘mosaic’ comes, via Italian, from Musa, the work of the Muse (see here).
LENTIL LENSES
Working with minute mosaics or precious stones with which to make jewellery was a severe strain on the eyes. The ancients did not grind lenses but used glass and crystal to focus light rays in order to start fires and magnify images. Pliny the Elder said that doctors used crystal balls to focus the sun’s rays and cauterize wounds. For magnification Romans used crystal, while Seneca commented that ‘even small and indistinct letters can be enlarged and seen more clearly through a glass or globe filled with water’. It is said (Pliny again) that Nero used a glass called smaragdus (source of our ‘emerald’) to watch gladiator fights. But it is highly unlikely that he is talking about sunglasses. Pliny may have been describing a green glass with good reflective qualities like a mirror, and Nero was experimenting with it.
Our ‘lens’, however, a shape convex on both sides, derives from Latin for a ‘lentil, lentil seed’: lens (lent-), a crop domesticated perhaps as long as 13,000 years ago. Pliny the Elder, talking about the ‘concave or convex’ shapes of precious stones, commented: ‘An elongated shape is most valuable; then what is called “like a lentil”; and then a flat, round shape.’ So the shape of the lentil is halfway between a long, thin stone and a round stone – convex on both sides. Nowadays, lenses of various shapes make possible spectacles and contact lenses, telescopes, cameras, projectors, photovoltaic cells, radio astronomy, radar and much more.
A VILLA’S CRUSTY WALL PANELS
Latin crusta had nothing to do with pies. It was applied to the hard covering of a shellfish (→ ‘crustacea’ such as crabs, lobsters, krill, barnacles, etc.) or insect or scab, and then to the thin marble panels that the wealthy used to cover floors or overlay walls in their villas. The marble was carefully cut with a saw, using fine sand to help its cutting edge. If one could not afford marble, the walls would be painted to look like marble.
Crusta also gives us ‘custard’, via French c(r)oustade. Lumpy custard we know, but crusty…! Meanwhile, villa, the Roman’s luxury country house complete with estate and farm, gives us ‘villain’. Late Latin produced villanus, a worker in a villa, i.e. a serf, a term which (via French) degraded into a scoundrel or villain.
GAPS IN CEILINGS
A particular luxury feature of Roman halls, basilicas and temples was ceilings inlaid with panels of wood that were decorated with gold leaf. Romans called such a panel a lacunar, literally ‘covering gaps’ (in the wooden beams of the roof structure). A lacuna in Latin meant ‘gap’, as it does in English.* Such ceilings added a luxurious eastern touch to Roman buildings, bringing to mind Greek temples or the Temple in Jerusalem. St Basil said that in death no gold-panelled ceilings would cover us, but the heavens, picked out with the indescribable brightness of stars.
‘Coffered’ is our technical term for such an inlaid ceiling, from the Greek kophinos (κοφινος), Latin cophinus, meaning originally a ‘basket’ (whence ‘coffin’). Our ‘ceiling’ is related to Latin celo, ‘I cover, hide’, though it may have been influenced by Latin caelum, ‘sky, heavens’ (whence our ‘celestial’).
IRON SUSPENDERS
The Greek for ‘magnet’ was magnêtis lithos (μαγνητις λιθος), ‘Magnesian stone’. These stones were pieces of iron ore that were naturally magnetized, and were so named because they were thought to have come from a town called Magnesia, either the one in Greece or the one in Asia Minor. Pliny the Elder tells us that the architect Timochares had begun to use such stone to build the vaulting of a temple in Alexandria. His aim was to suspend an iron statue within the vaulting so that it looked as if it was hanging in mid-air. Had he done so, he would have also found that it stayed in that position for only a very brief time indeed. Perhaps fortunately, he died before the work could be completed. Greeks also knew that the mineral amber had such properties: if rubbed by wool or fur, for example, it could attract light objects to stick to it.
The ancients were fascinated by magnetism: what hidden force was it that caused this attraction between two objects? The natural scientist Thales (sixth century BC) thought it was because there was some life force in the iron ore. The Roman poet-philosopher Lucretius (first century BC) thought the force in the iron ore sucked the air away between it and the object, creating a vacuum which drew the object towards it. We now know that electricity is at the heart of it.
The term ‘electricity’ was coined by Dr William Gilbert in AD 1600. He was working on the problem with amber and iron ore, and named this new force after the Greek for ‘amber’ – êlektron (ἠλεκτρον), Latin electrum. The magnetic compass, pointing north, was a Chinese invention (fourth or second century BC); such compasses were used in Europe from the thirteenth century AD.
LINTEL
A lintel stone is the one that makes up the threshold you step over to enter a building. It derives, via French, from Latin limitaris, which was all about setting limits: it also referred to the boundary between plots of lands. The German version of Hadrian’s Wall was called the limes Germanicus (‘the German boundary’) and it ran alongside the Rhine–Danube. It consisted simply of a ditch and a mound of earth, with a line of wooden stakes on top. It was designed to help protect the Romans from German invasion.
The Latin for ‘threshold’ was limen (limin-), which is the source of our ‘eliminate’ via the Latin elimino (eliminat-), ‘I turn out of doors’.
FORUM
Every town has, or had, a marketplace, a central point where shops, businesses, banks, courts and town administrations were located. In Latin, this was a forum. Its derivation is dubious (some try to associate it with Latin foris/foras, ‘out of doors’, source of ‘foreign’ and ‘forest’).
The Roman forum was low-lying and liable to flooding. This problem was solved by turning a river running through that area into a drain (the Cloaca Maxima), first by adding ditches and then by engineering it into a closed drain, complete with sewerage facilities. The geographer Strabo said of it in the first century AD:
The sewers, covered with a vault of tightly fitted stones, have room in some places for hay wagons to drive through them. And the quantity of water brought into the city by aqueducts is so great that rivers, as it were, flow through the city and the sewers; almost every house has water tanks, and service pipes, and plentiful streams of water… In short, the ancient Romans gave little thought to the beauty of Rome because they were occupied with other, greater and more necessary matters.
Cloaca, ‘drain, sewer’, derived from cluo, ‘I purify’. Our ‘sewer’ derives ultimately from Latin ex, ‘out of, away’ + aqua, ‘water’.
TWO-EDGED EXCREMENT
Our ‘excrement’, incidentally, derives from Latin excrementum, ‘bodily waste products’ (including urine and spit and giving our ‘excreta’); but excrementum also derived from a quite different Latin root, meaning ‘outgrowth’ – for instance, a beard! We can imagine the endless hilarity that wordplay evoked among Roman schoolchildren.
INSULA
Rome in the first century BC was a warren of winding streets and tenement blocks, six to eight storeys high, mostly built of mud-brick and timber, with cantilevered balconies, which were regularly subject to collapse and fire. Vitruvius recommended locating such blocks not head on to the prevailing winds but at an angle to them, thus breaking their force. At a time when experiments in fired brick were just beginning – a development of which Vitruvius strongly approved – he urged that mud-brick buildings should get proper protection by having tiled roofs with cornices to throw off the water.
Such tenements were called insulae (singular insula), ‘islands’, because they were free-standing, unattached to other buildings. Our ‘insulation’ isolates cables from their surroundings – and ‘isolate’, too, derives from insula. A ‘peninsula’ is an ‘almost [Latin paene] island’. Juvenal described life in one such tenement and in the winding, crowded, brawling streets below:
Think now about all those other perils
Of the night: how high it is to the roof up there
From which a tile falls and smashes your brains;
How many times broken, leaky jars
Fall from windows; how hard they strike and break
The pavement. You could be thought lazy and careless
If you go to dinner without writing a will.
There are as many deaths waiting for you
As there are open windows above your head.
Therefore you should hope and fervently pray
That they only dump their sewage on you…
Someone below is already shouting for water
and shifting his stuff; smoke is pouring out
of the third-floor attic, but you know
nothing of it; for if the alarm begins in the ground-floor,
the last to burn will be the man who has nothing
to shelter him from the rain but the tiles,
where the gentle doves lay their eggs.
TILES
A flat tile was a tegula, from tego (tect-), ‘I cover, shield, protect’; a semicircular tile, placed over the gaps between the flat tiles, was an imbrex (imbric-), from imber, ‘rain shower, storm’. Pliny the Elder tells us that one Butades was the first person to fix gargoyles on the end of the imbrices nearest the gutters.
On the matter of weather, ‘climate’ derives from Greek klima (κλιμα), ‘slope’ (of the earth), ‘region, latitude, astrological zone’. There were seven of these zones, related to the slope of the sun, each thought to govern a regional climate. See also on ‘climax’ (here) and ‘clinic’ (p. 279).
AQUEDUCTS
Latin duco (duct-) meant ‘I lead, guide, conduct’; combined with aqua, ‘water’, it produced aquaeductus, a water conductor. On the same principle, a viaduct is a road (via) conductor. We tend to associate the word ‘aqueduct’ with dramatic and beautiful arches bestriding a valley, but it refers to the whole length of the conduit, from source to outflow, much of which would be along channels or underground.
Romans did not invent aqueducts, but thanks to their building techniques (see here), they used them far more extensively than anyone else. Until quite recently, it was reckoned that aqueducts serving Rome, Cologne and Carthage were the longest, each of those great cities making use of aqueducts about fifty-five miles long. Now it seems that an aqueduct serving Constantinople far outstrips them – seventy-five miles as the crow flies, but 155 miles in all when the various twists and turns needed to negotiate difficult terrain are taken into account. Rome alone was served by eleven aqueducts (total mileage – 300), delivering well over 250 million gallons of water a day to its one million inhabitants. The largest aqueduct bridge is the Pont du Gard in France, which is some 300 yards long and 53 yards high. Tunnels ran to a mile and half long.
REMARKABLE WATERWORKS
The Romans were intensely proud of their capacity to deliver water over such distances. Pliny the Elder said:
If we take into careful consideration the abundant supplies of water in public buildings, baths, pools, open channels, private houses, gardens and country estates near the city; if we consider the distances traversed by the water before it arrives, the raising of arches, the tunnelling of mountains and the building of level routes across deep valleys, we shall readily admit that there has never been anything more remarkable in the whole world.
The Latin for Pliny’s ‘remarkable’ was mirandus, ‘worthy to be admired’. Our ‘mirror’ ultimately derives from its associated verb miror, ‘I am amazed, wonder at’: a means of admiring yourself.
The Roman senator Frontinus (c. AD 40−103) was put in charge of aqueducts (see curator, here) and wrote a treatise on the subject. Having described the aqueducts of Rome in detail, he said: ‘With such an array of indispensable structures carrying so many waters, compare, if you will, the idle pyramids or the useless, though much celebrated, works of the Greeks.’ (On ‘celebrity’, see here.)
GRADIENT
The point about a ‘gradient’, steep or shallow, is that it is measurable and in theory controllable. Latin gradior (gress-) reflects this: it meant ‘I walk, proceed’ but especially in a stately or deliberate manner (whence our ‘progress’ – proceeding forward). Cicero argued that men of reputation, ‘won not by popular acclaim but by the approval of good men, will proceed steadily towards death in confident spirit’.
In the absence of pumps, Romans relied on deliberately controlling the gradient to deliver the water safely to its destination without it bursting out of the fountains in the middle of towns at a million miles an hour. The main Carthage aqueduct has a very steep (28 per cent) slope over a four-mile stretch, superbly graded; by contrast, an exquisitely engineered six-mile stretch from the Pont du Gard has a slope of just 0.07 per cent.
HOT STUFF
The main purpose of such vast quantities of water being delivered into town centres was not to provide drinking water (no town could be founded without that being available in the first place); it was to supply Romans’ leisure needs. These were the huge public baths, one of Rome’s most important inventions: Latin (plural) balnea, derived from Greek balaneia (βαλανεια), or thermae, derived from Greek thermos (θερμος), ‘hot’. The baths had hot (calidus) rooms, cold (frigidus) and warm (tepidus) rooms, gymnasia, shops, brothels, even libraries. Once the water was available, it could of course be used for other things, such as supplying (at a cost) private homes.
GYMNASIA
Greeks and Romans exercised naked − Greek gumnos (γυμνος) − and Latin gymnasium derived from Greek gumnasion (γυμνασιον). Romans had a perfectly good word for ‘naked’, nudus, but being partial to most things Greek, chose to imitate Greek cultural practice and language. The cultural cringe, as some Romans saw it, is nothing new; but many Romans were proud of their absorption of Greek culture.
LATRINES
The function of what we call a lavatory is not well described by its derivation from lavo, ‘I wash’, but since the Romans used the same circumlocution (‘roundabout speak’) as well, it must obviously be OK: lavatrina (the -ina suffix indicating ‘place for an activity’), which was shortened to latrina.
On which theme: ‘laundry’ derives from lavandaria (plural), literally ‘things needing to be washed’. The -nd- infix in verbs indicated ‘needing to be’ – so agenda, ‘[things] needing to be discussed’, propaganda, ‘… to be propagated’, and so on.
FORNICATIO
Many inscriptions recorded the successful completion of facilities in a town. Here Lucius Betilienus Varus was thanked for constructing in his home town of Aletrium:
all the street-paths; the porticus (colonnade, portico) along which people walk to the stronghold; a playing-field; a sun-dial (horologium); a meat-market; the stucco-ing of the basilica; seats; a bathing-pool; a reservoir by the gate; an aqueduct about 340 feet long leading into the city and to the height, with arches (fornices) and good sound water-pipes.
The arches (singular fornix) are of interest. The story has it that prostitutes in Rome plied their trade underneath the arches, where (presumably) the lights were low, and thus – via fornicatio, ‘vaulting, arch’ – supplied us with ‘fornication’. But fornix also meant a ‘cell’ or ‘brothel’.
BASILICA
Named after the Greek for ‘king’ (basileus [βασιλευς]), a basilica was a large, oblong hall with internal colonnades or aisles on either side. The basilica was used as a law court and business centre. It was usually located next to the forum. The nave of the Basilica of Maxentius (AD 313), situated in the forum at Rome, was nearly 300 feet long and some 115 feet high. Its arches (arcus, ‘bow’) were 80 feet high and 76 feet wide.
In structure a basilica looks rather like a church. That is because early churches were designed like basilicas, to hold large congregations of the faithful in a location with good acoustics – quite unlike pagan temples (see here). The nave was the central space between the aisles, so called after Latin navis, ‘ship’, because the ceiling looked like an inverted hull. ‘Aisle’ derives from Latin ala, ‘wing’, used of a bird or an army. The semicircular apse at the end derives from Latin apsis, ‘arc described by a planet; segment of a circle’.
CIRCUS
‘Circuit training’ should mean going round and round in circles, and on a bad day it may feel like that. It derives from circumeo (circu(m)it), ‘I go round, surround’. The Latin ‘circus’ referred to the shape of the performing area: it meant ‘orbit in the sky; circular or oval space’. It referred in particular to the Circus Maximus, where the hugely popular chariot races were held in Rome.
Some did not approve. Tacitus in his Histories described the varying reactions in Rome to the death of Nero in AD 68, commenting that the senators and equites (p. 35) were delighted; decent people – those connected to the great houses, and clients (p. 71) and freedmen of those exiled by Nero – were hopeful; but ‘the plebs sordida, addicted to the circus and theatre, the worst slaves, and those who had lost all their property, shamelessly dependent as they were on Nero’s handouts, were very dejected’. One reason was that Nero was passionate about theatre and races and staged lots of events, some (to many people’s disgust) featuring himself. Latin sordida, derived from sordes, ‘dirt, filth’, was used of character, conduct and language too.
CROWD CONTROL
At racecourses, courts and theatres, Romans put up the barriers in order to control crowds. These often took the form of grilles or gratings in a lattice or criss-cross pattern. The poet Ovid wrote a poem about going to the races to try to win the favour of his girl. They sat down in the front row, but her legs were too short to reach the ground. So, gentleman that he was at least pretending to be, he suggested she inserts her toes into the grating.
The Latin word for this grille/grating was cancellus, also used of the criss-cross lines on an elephant’s hide, and is the source of our ‘cancel’ – which you do by using a pen to cross things out. It also gives us ‘chancellor’ – these days a powerful governmental or university official, originally a cancellarius, the doorkeeper guarding the emperor’s palace behind a grill, or a legal scribe sitting behind a grating separate from the crowds. The ‘chancel’ in a church was originally the lattice barrier that divided the choir and altar from the nave, and then became used of that protected space around the altar.
WATCHING OR HEARING?
The Latin for one who watched or observed was spectator, from specto (spectat-), ‘I see, watch, observe’, and was used in exactly the same sense as we use it, for those watching a play or game. Our ‘spectacle’ (spectaculum) usually has overtones of something special or ‘spectacular’ about it, as the Latin does. The Seven Wonders of the World were the septem spectacula. An ‘audience’ should, if English imitated Latin, mean something different, since it derives from Latin audio (audit-), ‘I hear, listen’. But rather like our ‘audition’, an ‘audience’ often involves more than simple listening.
MONUMENT
Those who study Latin will know that moneo (monit-) meant ‘I advise, warn’ (whence ‘admonition’, etc.), but they may be surprised to learn that moneo is at the root of monumentum. In fact, moneo is linked to memini, ‘I remember’, and the basic meaning is ‘I bring to the notice of, remind, tell of ’. And that is exactly what a monumentum does. Horace said, hopefully, of his poetry: ‘I have put up a monumentum more lasting than bronze.’
In AD 9 the Roman general Varus had lost three legions to the Germans. The then Roman emperor Augustus was devastated at the loss. In AD 16 Germanicus, the highly popular nephew of his unpopular and jealous uncle, the new emperor Tiberius, launched a successful revenge attack and erected a vast pile of enemy weapons under the tactful notice:
AFTER SUBDUING THE NATIONS BETWEEN THE RHINE AND THE ELBE, THE ARMY OF TIBERIUS CAESAR CONSECRATED THE MONUMENT TO MARS, JUPITER AND AUGUSTUS
The German leader was Arminius; in the sixteenth century, Luther (possibly) claimed that the name ‘Hermann’ derived from him.
STONE MONUMENTS
Latin lapis (lapid-) meant ‘stone’, and our ‘lapidary’ derives from lapidarius, which meant ‘concerned with stonecutting or quarrying’. ‘Lapidary’, however, also refers to a particular brief and pointed literary style – the sort of clipped, precise, elegant sentiments we find on inscriptions, where space is at a premium.
Eventually monuments and houses fall down (see ‘decrepit’, here). Cicero mentioned in a letter that ‘two of my shops have collapsed and the others are showing cracks, so that even the mice have moved elsewhere, to say nothing of the tenants’. Latin lapido meant ‘I shower with stones’, and the prefix di (s)- indicates separation (for instance, dismembering); so dilapido, a reinforced form of lapido, suggests a dilapidated house falling down, scattering stones over helpless passers-by.
CARPENTERS ON WHEELS
What job does the Latin carpentarius do? Not what you might think. The word derives from Latin carpentum, which meant a horse-drawn two-wheeled carriage, used especially by women in Rome. So a carpentarius was a carriage-maker, or cartwright. The historian Livy told the story that when the Romans were unable to raise the money to pay a vow to Apollo, the women came to the rescue by handing over all their gold ornaments. The Senate promptly gave them the right to be driven about in four-wheeled carriages during festivals and games days, and in carpenta during sacred and working days.
The carpentum had an arched covering to protect against rain and sun and guard female modesty. This covering was a camara or camera (Greek kamara [καμαρα]). Over time it came to mean an arched or vaulted room, source of our ‘chamber’, ‘comrade’ (one who shares the same room, → ‘camaraderie’) and of ‘camera’ in the sense of a chamber where private meetings are held – in camera, as we say.
The ‘camera obscura’ is a dark box or room with a hole, or more often a lens, in it. Light passes through the hole/lens and reproduces on a surface inside the box/room an image of the scene outside. The origins of photography are to be found here.
CANOPIES, GNATS AND HORS D’OEUVRES
What have canopies got to do with gnats? Greek for a ‘gnat’ was kônôps (κωνωψ), and a kônôpion (κωνωπιον) was a mosquito net. Romans turned this into conopium, meaning a bed provided with a mosquito net, whence (via French canapé) our ‘canopy’. In a brilliant satire on women, the Roman satirist Juvenal said that all women liked a bit of rough, and when a posh family sported its latest baby in its tortoiseshell cot and conopium, it often looked strangely like some thug from the gladiatorial ring.
Second question: what has a canapé (French ‘bed, couch’) got to do with canopies? A canapé was apparently so called because the garnish on top of the base resembled people sitting on a couch – a sort of up-market couch potato.
* Our ‘lake’ derives from lacus, a gap or hollow filled with water; Greek lakkos [λακκος] meant ‘pond, pit, reservoir’.