Ch 2 · Lesson 33Latin · Chapter 2 · Lesson 33 · Grammar primer
Age, sodes, furcifer: hurrying, pleading, insulting
Come on, please and you rogue, as Plautus wrote them, bellus for nice, and what Pompeii's walls and doorways said, included.
The short version
Latin had insults, and they had range
, furcifer!
Why?Hide
Plautus armed his stage scoundrels with furcifer and verbero, both flattening into gallows-rogue and someone who has earned a flogging. They are stock comic insults, not real threats, and they show up together for the sake of a double barrel.
A Pompeii wall complained about being written on
Admiror, , .
Why?Hide
Someone scratched a into a Pompeian wall grumbling that it had not collapsed under the weight of everyone's graffiti. It only works as a joke if the reader has just walked past forty other scrawled names, which is exactly the point.
Hurry up, and please
! is the bare command of , do, drive, used like come on. Agedum adds - for impatience: come on, will you.
Agedum, .- Come on, tell me.
is a casual please, worn down from , if you are willing. The ordinary polite word is , I ask:
| Latin | Register | Example |
|---|---|---|
| mate to mate | , . Tell me, please. |
| coaxing (comedy) | , . Please, come. |
| polite, neutral | , . Tell me, I beg you. |
Calling someone a name
Comedy needed insults it could shout across a stage, and it settled on two stock ones:
| Latin | Literally | Means |
|---|---|---|
furcifer | fork-carrier (a slave's yoke) | gallows-rogue, scoundrel |
verbero | one for the whip (verber) | someone who needs a flogging |
, furcifer!- Clear off, you rogue!
The two often come together, so the insult has two barrels.
The word for nice
Bellus, adverb belle, is colloquial Latin's nice or pretty. It turns up in comedy and in Cicero's private letters to Atticus, but rarely in his speeches: too breezy for the . Most etymologies take it as a diminutive of , good.
bella .- The girl is pretty.
What the walls said
Pompeii's walls carry thousands of scratched inscriptions: names, boasts, insults, gladiator scores, declarations of love. The House of the Tragic Poet still has its cave mosaic in the doorway:
.- Beware of the dog.
- .
The mosaic sits on the limen, the threshold of the ostium, the doorway: the first thing a visitor read.
the wall, where the graffiti went
And one wall complained, in , about everything written on it (it was copied in more than one place):
Admiror, , .- I am amazed, wall, that you have not collapsed.
Some Pompeian graffiti is far less printable, and so is Catullus' poem 16. Both are attested; neither is reproduced here.
Going further: The street words on one screen and the rest of the guide, when you want them. This lesson does not need them.
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Lesson 33 of 39 in this chapter