Posted by Bret Devereaux

https://acoup.blog/2025/10/24/fireside-friday-october-24-2025/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=fireside-friday-october-24-2025

https://acoup.blog/?p=31969

Hey, folks! Fireside this week!

I don’t have a burning topic this week, but as I’ve mentioned, I’m teaching Latin 101 and 102 this semester (and next). One of the things that’s interesting about that is of course students learning vocabulary for the first time tend to learn pretty simple 1-to-1 definitions. That’s necessary and it mostly works just fine: mater is a direct equivalent to “mother,” oculus is a direct equivalent to “eye” and so on. But it gets trickier when you run into common words that are freighted with a lot of cultural meaning, what I’ve started telling my students are major load-bearing cultural value words. Those often have a complex set of definitions and implications with a lot more texture than any Latin 102 student is going to need (or necessarily be ready for).

But I thought here it might be a fun thing to run down some of these major load-bearing cultural value words in Latin that have come up and briefly talk about what they mean and why they’re load bearing. These sorts of big words tend to actually be really common – because they’re really important to the Romans who thus talk about them a lot.¹

We should start with the relationship between virtus (virtus, virtutis (m)), honos (honos/honor, honoris (m)), dignitas (dignitas, dignitatis, (f)) and auctoritas (auctoritas, auctoritatis, (f)), words that make a bit more sense understood together. Virtus literally means ‘manliness’ (from vir, viri (m), ‘man’), but by the time the Romans are writing to us its meaning has enlarged beyond that (and it has lost some of its gendered component – women can have virtus as a positive trait). Instead, its core idea is a mix of courage, vigor and strength: ambition, drive and the quality or ability to meet it. Virtus sometimes comes across as a sort of reckless thing which requires ‘constraining virtues’ to control and direct correctly.

Virtus as courage, drive, (positive) ambition compels a person towards the display of their quality in a testing or testing point (a certamen, ‘struggle, strife, testing’ or discrimen, ‘separating, turning-point, decision-point, crisis’). Success in that moment of testing, when witnessed by others (for this is an honor culture: deeds are to be witnessed!) is what produces honos (‘honor, respect,’ but also ‘[political or military] office’ or rewards for honor). Honos (also spelled honor, from where our word comes) is about recognition and acknowledgement and it was a real, visceral thing for the Romans: they describe it as bright and burning.² A person with sufficient honos required respect from those around them, while a person who was disgraced shrunk back and withered in public (or at least, was supposed to). A sufficient amount of honos produced dignitas (‘dignity, worth, authority’), which demanded respect, almost as a kind of relational forcefield: a person of dignitas required respectful treatment from everyone (including other people of dignitas) because of their achievements. A very large amount of honos produced also auctoritas (‘authority, influence’), a cultural-social demand for deference to the point of being able to direct the actions of others through shear force of honos (the idea being that they do what the man with auctoritas says not because he might threaten them, but simply because his overwhelming achievements and prestige cause them to).³

My students have also met amicitia (amicitia, amicitiae, (f), ‘friendship’) and beneificium (beneficium, beneficii, (n), ‘a favor, service, kindness’)), munus (munus, muneris, (n), service, office, gift) and donum (donum, doni (n), ‘gift’). As you can see, beneficium, munus and donum can all be translated as ‘gift’ but they are not pure synonyms: the shades of meaning are quite different. Donum has the ‘pure’ sense of ‘gift’ in its simple form. By contrast munus derives from the some place as munia (‘duties, official functions’) and so has that sense of an official service or obligation. It can mean a gift as well, often a public gift (that is, the gift of a high official or rich person to the public, like games or public buildings, often in the plural, munera).

Meanwhile you have beneficium, literally a ‘good making’ or ‘good deed’ (bene+facio, ‘a good doing’) the word is tied up with amicitia and patrocinium. The patron-client relationship which is so prominent in Roman society, consists in the exchange of beneficia (‘favors’) and officia (sing. officium, ‘service’)⁴ between two reciprocal but unequal parties. The difference is that an officium is a service done to one who is owed (by position or by previous favors) while a beneficium is a service or favor done to one who is not (yet) owed, but necessary in both words is the idea that these favors are given willingly, typically as part of a continuing relationship.

Now at Rome⁵ while patron-client relations were everywhere, between freeborn men, it was almost never appropriate to say so out loud. That would shame the junior party and as we’ve just seen honos matters a lot in this society: a good patron wouldn’t even want to so diminish their client. So the near-universal practice was instead to refer to patronage (patrocinium, clientela) relationships in terms of amicitia, ‘friendship.’ Consequently, while amicitia could be the relationship between you and your drinking buddies, it was also the public term for patronage relationships and for political alliances (many of which were effectively patronage relationships). So it does mean ‘friendship’ but covers a wider array of unequal relationships that involve the exchange of officia and beneficia.

And then you have the age-and-gender words. At the moment, my students have something of an incomplete set: they have puer (puer, pueri (m), ‘boy’) and puella (puella, puellae (f), ‘girl’) and iuvenis (iuvenis, iuvenis (m/f but usually m), ‘young men/women’), but not yet adulescens (adulescens, adulescentis, (m), ‘youths, yutes‘). They have vir (vir, viri (m), ‘man’), homo (homo, hominis (m/f but usually m), ‘human, male’) and femina (femina, feminae (f), ‘female’) but not yet mulier (mulier, mulieris (f), ‘woman’).

And you can actually learn a fair bit about a culture by looking at their age-and-gender words, because it tells you something about their categories.

We start with puer and puella, matching words for ‘boy’ and ‘girl.’ Except, note quite matching. There is, I should note, a fair bit of ‘give’ in the system I’m about to lay out, so take these as general rules, not an iron system. A puer stops being a puer around 14 or 15 when he received from his father the toga virilis (‘toga of manhood’) and is thus recognized as coming of age, at which point he’s an adulescens, ‘a youth.’ By contrast, puella is not an age-limited category, but essentially means ‘a girl pre-marriage’ (it can also be a term of affection for a romantic partner or at least a prospective one later in life), so generally marriage is the event that marks the transition from puella to uxor and mulier. Notably, adulescens can be used of women, but is only very rarely so.

For young men, adulescens is a ‘younger adult’ category while iuvenis is the ‘young (but less so)’ category. There’s a lot of blurring here, rather than a hard age break, but typically adulescentes are in their teens or early twenties while iuvenes are young men from their twenties through their thirties (so yes, a 35 year old man, in Roman thought, is still a ‘youth’). The next category up was senex (senex, senis, ‘old man, elder’)), the plural of which seniores declined the Roman census age classes 46 and up (and thus mostly out of military age).

Meanwhile, you have homo and femina, ‘man’ and ‘woman’ – Latin is absolutely a male-normative patriarchal language, so homo can mean both ‘man’ as distinct from ‘animal’ (and thus include all of humankind) but also ‘male’ as distinct from ‘female’. I tend to think of these words as more like ‘male’ and ‘female’ in that both can have a bit of a sneer to them: you don’t call someone you like a homo for the same reason that the newscaster reporting on, “three adult males were spotted leaving the scene” is not saying a nice thing about those three fellows.

Thus you have vir – man, as distinct from mere ‘male’ – a term of a bit more respect. Its nearest match for women is mulier (an adult woman, regardless of married status, though in Rome this is going to mostly mean widows and divorcees along with wives; never-marrieds are really rare in Roman culture). Mulier doesn’t quite carry the status that vir does – vir has real weight and is the root behind virtus. Instead, the weightier word here is matrona (matrona, matronae (f), matron, married woman, wife) which from a very early point has a sense of dignity and even social rank and so carries something closer to vir‘s sense of ‘gentleman’ with something like ‘lady,’ though honestly with even a bit more intensity (matrona can do the work for women that, in the republic, something like, ‘eques Romanus‘ “a Roman of the equestrian order” meaning “a Roman of wealth and status” does for men.). The fact that matrona derives from mater (‘mother’) also suggests something about Roman values and exactly what things get what sort of person status.

In any case, as a historian I often find I wished introductory Latin textbooks offered a bit more of this sort of thing here, taking the opportunity as they introduce those major load-bearing cultural value words to explain a little bit how they fit into the broader culture, but relatively few language textbooks do. I find I wish students learned a bit more Roman culture in Latin classes – at least compared to what I got – but then, of course, I am a historian, so I would.⁶

On to Recommendations:

The first story here is a bit of a bummer, but worth noting. I’ve been writing here about the jobs crisis in history and academia more broadly for some time, noting that it was a case of the system flooding, as it were, from the bottom up: lower ranked graduate programs became wholly non-competitive in a shrinking job market before the crisis impacted highly ranked programs (quite regardless of the quality of the historians involved, I might note). Well, the flooding has at last reached the upper-most decks: Harvard is cutting graduate programs across the Faculty of Arts and Sciences by anywhere from 50 to 75%. History graduate admissions there will plunge from 13 annually to just 5, and the cuts extend into the sciences as well, with a 75% reduction in Biology, for instance.

I know a lot of folks read this blog to escape contemporary politics, but I feel the need to note that this is a policy choice: it is the immediate result of the current administration’s war on higher education, which will make college both more expensive and less available and also worse as an education. But it is also the long-term result of a steady erosion in policy support of higher education, of substituting state funding with private loans, over decades. This was not the product of impersonal economic forces but rather remains the product of intentional political choices and we could chose differently (and indeed, did so in the past).

Meanwhile, I wrote – behind a paywall, alas – my take on the recent gathering of US general officers at Quantico for The Dispatch. I won’t rehash that here, but as I suppose many of you have guessed, I found very little to like, a lot to dislike and a bit to fear about the speeches given there, both of which represented stark breaks with the most successful parts of the American military tradition. Subsequent reporting has suggested the audience probably agreed. I remain profoundly concerned that the United States is careening in remarkably dangerous directions, but then I was suggesting this was the road the president would take us on, and he has.

Meanwhile, in ancient history, we have another Pasts Imperfect! Stephanie Wong writes briefly about the tradition of pumpkin carving, which is actually a tradition of turnip carving, because it originated before the pumpkin arrived in the Old World. The post also highlights the amazing “Braille for Ancient Languages” project, topical blogs by Amy Norgard and Joshua Nudell, and more! Well worth a look, as always.

Finally, for this week’s Book Recommendation, I’ want to recommend I’m going with a military history recommendation, J.A. Lynn, Giant of the Grand Siècle: The French Army: 1610-1715 (1997). Giant of the Grand Siècle fits into a category of military history that take a single army – the army of a single state in a single period – and attempt to describe it as an organization and an institution. Reading such an approach is really valuable for the student of military history looking to move beyond mere biography or campaign history to begin to understand not just war and warfare in a period.⁷ Lynn’s time period is especially interesting because it covers the beginning of the trend towards institutionalization: the creation of regular systems of inspection, standardization of uniforms, regularization of pay, the first fumbling steps towards standard training for officers and so on.

Lynn provides here a portrait – a snapshot in many respects (although in individual sections he notes clearly change over time) – of the French army of the 1600s and early 1700s, when France was the premier military power in Europe. The picture will be in some ways somewhat familiar – there are captains and colonels, companies and regiments – but at the same time strikingly alien to someone familiar with modern, post-institutionalization militaries. Commands of companies and regiments were still purchased (for the most part), their officers mostly aristocrats with years in service but little formal military education, with the expectation that captains and especially colonels would employ a significant portion of their aristocratic wealth to raising and maintaining the units they commanded. Officers still raised entire units at their own expense, while fraud in payments (officers pocketing the wages of non-existent or dead soldiers) was still a commonplace.

Rather than proceeding chronologically (which would have been terribly confusing) Lynn proceeds topically, beginning with administration (pay, logistics, taxes, lodgings), then command (officers, their background, training and culture), then life for the rank and file soldiers, and then finally closing with a discussion on the practice of war itself.⁸ The focus here is on institutions and organizational structures (how are units structured, who pays for what, how are men trained, who comes from what background, what royal officials are present and what can they do, etc.), not on individual battles or units or even the experience of combat. That may seem boring – and at times the book can be very dry – but it can be fascinating to dive into such a large and complex organization and try to understand how it works.

For someone looking to move beyond the surface level understanding of military history, I think ti is essential to read these sorts of treatments widely, across as many kinds of militaries as possible, in as many time periods as possible, to begin to get a sense of how different militaries behave as institutions, because each one is different.

And that’s it for this week! Next week, a surprise because I am not allowed to tell you about it yet.

https://acoup.blog/2025/10/24/fireside-friday-october-24-2025/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=fireside-friday-october-24-2025

https://acoup.blog/?p=31969