Mommsen continues to reveal something of his personal feelings when talks about such things as nature furnishing the Romans with the perfect order for the family: the father at the head, and all others subordinate. He loves hyperbole, again and again informing us that the Romans accomplished nationhood and the family more perfectly than any other people.
His etymological games recur as well, and often make me wince. Because of a certain fixation with numbers as the basis of so much in Roman society, he wants soldiers to be the ‘thousand’ marchers, though the root may well be connected to the Sanskrit mil-, meaning ‘assemble.’ In that case, the soldiers, milites, would be those who go in formation, just as comites (companions) simply go together.
The reason I give these off-the-cuff etymologies (cp. my derivation of Latium as ‘wetland’ from *lat-) is to show the lack of real authority for his guesses (even if I do find mine more convincing). His attempt to connect populus (people) and popla (butcher) is also unfortunate.
The real value of the chapter is what he has to say about the essential foundation of Roman society and the distinction between one’s place in his family, under the pater familias, and within the community under the law.
Law was Mommsen’s real area of expertise, and it shows, keeping in mind that the whole picture is an idealized distillation of the facts intended to give a picture of the Roman constitution at its earliest stage.
This may a good point to remind ourselves that the theoretical, conjectural, and background work should largely be done by the end of volume one, and then we’ll be on to history proper. Stickit out. I think the payoff will be worth it.
Hi Dennis, I’m glad I caught your post before signing off for tonight. I also found Chapter 5 a bit of a slog but Roman law is something that does interest me, and I’m looking forward to more of that. In a sense, it is a bit comforting to realize that Mommsen ipse struggled to be the master of all the fields he wanted to synthesize in writing this history! I think you know more about etymologies than I do, so I was wondering what to make of his lex etymology – I had always assumed, but without really thinking about it, that lex was related to ligare and religio and words of that ilk, rather than to speaking (although of course the idea of legal speech acts, oaths, etc. as “binding” means that even speaking itself can enter into the world of ties that bind). School started for me today so things were a bit hectic, but I’ll be plunging back into Mommsen at some point tomorrow. Happy reading! :-)
Hi Laura,
When I studied the languages of ancient Italy as an undergraduate (reading Old Latin, Faliscan, Oscan, Umbrian, Etruscan, and an admixture of Latin and Gaulish) I don’t recall Mommsen’s name ever coming up in discussion or in bibliographies, eveb though he was an authority in his day, even writing on Oscan and Umbrian and coining the term Sabellian for the language group.
That just goes to show how much fields change. Linguistic science has come a long way since Mommsen’s philology, and real linguistic connections often seem less convincing on the surface than the sort of folk etymologies that Mommsen and I myself, I’m sure, are prone to see everywhere. A lot of this depends on minute study of the historical development of a language”s sound laws, and Mommsen doesn’t apply any real rigor here (witness his attempt to make the Ramnes the original Romans, as if they would have at once changed their pronunciation and spelling of the name for the whole people while retaining it for one tribe. Language doesn’t change that way).
Lex is normally derived from P.I.E. *lek-, the primary meaning of which was ‘gather,’ though its historical development is complicated. How do we get from ‘gather’ to its later meanings? Centuries of changes in usage.
In Latin the root usually means ‘gather’ or ‘read’ (legere), and in Greek ‘gather’ or ‘speak’ (legein, logos). But lex is supposed to be derived from *leg- in the same way as the verb legare, which means something like ‘to deputize’ or to invest someone with the authority to carry out a governmental task. A legatus would be one so invested: an ambassador.
If that’s unconvincing, the other possibility is that lex comes from *legh-, and like English ‘law’ means ‘that which has been laid down.’ (I wonder if *leg- couldn’t have had the same sense. What if lex referred either to the gathering of rules or to the reading of fixed rules to settle disputes?)
You mentioned religio, and it’s worth noting that Mommsen uses an unattested word (licere, ‘to summon’) to justify his interpretation of lictors as ‘messengers.’ Lictor and religio are both derived from *leig-, ‘bind.’ The lictor is presumably so called from the symbolic bundle of bound sticks which he carries (lictor has an agentive suffix, so he’s ‘the binder’; if Mommsen were right he should be ‘the summoner’ and not the ‘messenger’).
Thanks for all this great information, Dennis! I really appreciate learning about the etymologies of words; I know we have all kinds of other evidence for ancient Roman culture – physical evidence, the testimony of the Romans themselves – but I am very sympathetic to Mommsen’s efforts to use language for his historical reconstruction, and I had not realized how recent our knowledge of scientific etymology really is. But then I guess I shouldn’t be surprised – there was Grimm just starting to work out sound laws in the 19th century himself – Jacob Grimm’s dates are 1785-1863 and our Mommsen is 1817-1903, really just a generation than Jacob Grimm! I see we have an actual chapter on Roman religion coming up soon; I will be very interested to read that.