Speaking of Words
By MICHAEL FERBER
If you were a senator from the ancient Roman Republic who had managed to learn some English while riding in your time-chariot to visit Washington DC for the first time, you would be astonished, and quite amused, at how familiar things looked and sounded, over two thousand years later and across a great ocean.
A lovely temple in Greek style with eight Corinthian columns in the front has the words “Equal Justice Under Law” under the pediment. The first two words are just slightly misspelled Latin words, you might think, though the others you would have to look up in your English-Latin dictionary. There are statues flanking the stairs, one of a woman, the other of a man, both seated, both wearing Roman drapery. She on the left is holding a little statue of a blindfolded woman in her right hand, while her left arm rests on a book. He on the right is holding a tablet with the word “Lex” and a sheathed sword. You recognize that this is the sort of allegory that you Romans are good at, even without the give-away word. You have just looked up “law,” in fact, and found it means lex.
When you turn around you see a much larger building on a gentle hill with a huge disproportionate dome, but you know all about domes: you Romans invented them. You ask a local what that building is called and learn it is the Capitol, and among other things it houses the Senate. The Senate! Then it must be for you, or others like you, and a Capitol on a hill makes you think of the Capitoline Hill in Rome, where there is a temple of Jupiter. What is going on here? Is this a new Rome?
You join a group of tourists in the Capitol and enter a large chamber with over four hundred seats, and what do you see on the front walls? Fasces! Those bundles of rods bound together, with an axe sticking out of them, which lictors carry before high-ranking officials of your city. As you wander in and out of other buildings you see them everywhere. Inside another Greek temple with twelve Doric columns along the front is a huge statue of a seated man named Lincoln; on the front of the arms of his chair are more fasces.
You hear some chants and see there are groups of people marching about on the great lawn carrying signs, with such words as “election” and “candidate” and “constitution” and “President” and “veto” and “vote.” How weird! You know these words. In Rome a candidatus for office wears white, that is, candidus, to let you know he is pure and, well, candid. In Rome too we have more than one praesidens, a governor, one who “presides” over a council, that is, he sits in front (from prae “before” and sedere “sit”). Veto is a verb. It means “I forbid,” and it is spoken by tribunes who can stop legislation by the Senate.
On a wall of another building you see an announcement of a “Forum on the Future of the Republic.” Hmmm, you think, I was just at the Forum yesterday in Rome, where I bought a few figs from a fruitseller and listened to a couple of speeches. Do they have a Forum here too? And it looks like they will be giving speeches about the Republic of Rome, the res publica, the “public thing.” Even “future” is a Roman word!
By now you decide you need to do some research into this uncanny imitation of your city, so you find a bookshop and buy a book about Washington. As you are putting your change in your toga pocket you notice some writing on the back of the one-dollar bill. Above a pyramid topped by a human eye are two words: annuit coeptis. You know what it means: “He (or she) nods upon (or favors) the undertakings.” Who nods? What undertakings? Then it occurs to you that it is a near-quotation from Virgil’s Aeneid: the one who nods or favors is Jupiter and the undertakings are those of Aeneas’ son, who is about to launch an arrow at an enemy of the Trojans and beseeches the great god for help. Jupiter does indeed help, and eventually the Trojans conquer part of Italy and found the city of Rome.
Then below the pyramid are three more words: novus ordo seclorum. By Hercules, you know them too! They are a rearrangement of words in another poem by Virgil, the Fourth Eclogue, and it means “new cycle of the ages.” In the poem it is about the return of the great cycle of ages prophesied by the Cumaean Sibyl.
By now, dizzy with the discovery that these Americans are obsessed with your Rome and even Rome’s great poet, you find a quiet corner to read your book. In it you learn that the Founders of America all knew Latin and took the Roman Republic as a model for their own, having thrown off a British king much as your Roman forebears threw off an Etruscan one. Just as Aeneas led the few Trojan survivers of the war with the Greeks to a western land where, after a bloody war, they could establish themselves, so the American founders sailed west from England, displaced the natives, and fought a war with their British overlords.
Since most of the American settlers were “Christians”—a new sect you had recently heard about that was causing trouble in Judea—they might have inscribed the Biblical tales of the Promised Land into their mottos and seals, but the Founders wanted to keep Christian beliefs at a distance, lest they breed struggles among different Christian churches and stifle freedom of religion.
So they adopted a promised-land story from paganism, and they took pagan Rome as a source of ideas for establishing governments and especially for the words to describe them: agenda, amendment, assembly, census, civil, class, committee, confederation, conference, Congress, conscription, constitution, convention, delegate, dictator, election, imperial, magistrate, municipality, nation, office, petition, plebiscite, populace, referendum, representative, revolution, secession, society, state, suffrage, tribune, and vote, besides the ones you have met earlier in your visit, and many more.
After a few decades, all this Roman stuff spread to the towns of upstate New York, who named themselves Rome, Romulus, Italy, Utica, Syracuse, Virgil, Ovid, Cato, Cincinnatus, Cicero, Junius, Scipio, Pompey, and Minerva, to mention fewer than half of them. And the Americans continued to play Roman parts long after it would have been wise to give them up. John Wilkes Booth, for example, was an actor whose favorite part was Shakespeare’s Brutus, the assassin of Julius Caesar. As he shot the man whose statue now sits in the Doric temple, he shouted sic semper tyrannis!
As you read all this, you decide to hurry back to old Rome to warn them to be very careful about what examples they set. But the police have towed away your time-chariot and you are stuck here, leaving Rome to blunder on into emperors, corrupt family dynasties, and more wars.
I am happy to hear from readers with questions or comments: mferber@unh.edu.
Michael Ferber moved to New Hampshire in 1987 to join the English Department at UNH, from which he is now retired. Before that he earned his BA in Ancient Greek at Swarthmore College and his doctorate in English at Harvard, taught at Yale, and served on the staff of the Coalition for a New Foreign Policy in Washington, DC. In 1968 he stood trial in Federal Court in Boston for conspiracy to violate the draft law, with the pediatrician Benjamin Spock and three other men. He has published many books and articles on literature, and has a deep interest in linguistics. He is married to Susan Arnold; they have a daughter in San Francisco.