“waive” is from Old French guever (“abandon, give back”), probably (like all the best words) from Old Norse.
“wave” can be fairly reliably traced back to Middle High German weben (“to wave or undulate”).
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I finally understand the meaning of Res Publica which means the Public Affair. Modern people don’t understand this because it’s familiar to us (weird) and the meaning is so open and vague. Res Publica is anything about public life - as oppose to the private life (Res Privata) which is under the jurisdiction and rule of the paterfamilia.
To our ears, Republic means a state that is not under a monarchy, which is correct. But that’s not exactly what the Res Publica is to the Romans. It is a very universalist concept where one can be a “Roman” simply by participating in the system. At least, that is in theory. We knew how xenophobic the Romans are against talented barbarian people like Flavius Aetius - the vanquisher of the Huns. So the Res Publica can be under the stewardship of a dictator or a senate of 500 senators, for as long as there is a system that concerns itself with the universal public affairs of Romans. This is familiar to us living in the modern world, especially to countries like the United States where anyone can be an American. Mainly because they based it on Enlightenment values. And in turn, the Enlightenment people looked back to the Greco-Romans.
This stands in contrasts with medieval European kingdoms where the King of France was literally the landlord and you - filthy peasant - were just a renter living in this land. One of the reasons why the Enlightenment hated medieval Europe.
The Byzantines continued this tradition with the word Politeia. Under Byzantine context, it’s a direct translation of Res Publica, which again confuses me whenever I see Politeia being mentioned.
It only took me a while…
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One of the many interesting points raised in A DIstant Mirror (Barbara Tuchman) (which I think @Agemegos recommended to me originally) is that in the early mediæval period it was quite usual in Europe not really to care which country you were in or who the king was; it might change soon enough and life was more or less the same everywhere. So it was perfectly reasonable for the King of England to control a chunk of France as well. But by the end of that period, even the peasant was starting to think of himself as “a Frenchman” or “a Spaniard” and that made that kind of control much harder.
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There is a story my father tells of his hometown in Italy, a little place named “Carru.” It’s a tiny town, a few hundred people (and three churches, my father is quick to point out, each with enough gold inlay and trim to sink a ship), a single restaurant, one hotel with 3 rooms… a tiny little place.
Oh, and a castle. That factors into the story.
Anyway, this little town once had Napoleon and his army march through. The townsfolk saw the French army approaching and rushed into the castle, hoping to withstand the siege.
Napoleon arrived, found the town deserted, and assumed that the people had all fled. He marched his army down the main street, out the other side of town, and carried on his conquest of Italy. And the people of Carru rejoiced, realizing that Napoleon was too scared to fight the mighty warriors of Carru and therefore had left them alone.
Now, two salient points to this story:
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On my one (and only) visit to Carru, my father told us (my brother and I) this story and said “Just so you know, the people of Carru are very, very proud of the fact that several hundred years ago they defeated Napoleon. Just be aware.” I thought it was complete nonsense, but legitimately, several times (four? Five?) during our 2 day stay in the town, people talking to my father would mention it.
“Oh, you were born in this town? How lovely! Which house? Oh, yes, I remember your mother. And these are your sons? Do they know we were never conquered by Napoleon!?”
Hand to the heavens, multiple times. I was gabberflasted. It was centuries ago! Who cares!
Carru. Carru cares. -
The town of Carru has a castle, I believe I mentioned. See, most towns in Italy have a main street that runs down the middle of town to the most important building: the castle. Since the castle was where the lord lived, this makes sense… you need to be able to get to the lord for political reasons, and because you want easy access to the protection of the castle. Except Carru, for slightly unknown reasons, built its castle off the main street. The main road runs east-west, and the castle is to the south. But not only that, it’s on a little rocky outcropping (Carru is built on a little plateau) which is slightly lower than the land around it. Which means while on the main street of the town, you can’t see a castle. In fact, it looks very much like the town doesn’t have a castle. Therefore as Napoleon was marching through to someplace far more important, he probably thought “Huh, no castle, no people, they must realize they couldn’t defend this place and ran for the hills… right, on we go.” And the people of Carru, hiding in the castle, just heard the army arrive, pause, and leave. Boom, hundreds of years of Carru “defeating” Napoleon (specifically they said “Never conquered by Napoleon,” but you get the idea).
European history, man. What a trip.
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I’d like to point out that Kansas City was never conquered by Napoleon either. In fact, there were several occasions this occurred: yesterday, November 7th 1993, the day before yesterday, November 8th 1993… I could go on and on.
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On a related note, yesterday, everyone I was playing Powergrid with learned that Kansas City is not necessarily in Kansas.
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Yes, but did he ever try?
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Why would he not? Kansas City is called, by some, “Paris of the Plains”. Perhaps I should mention that this nickname (that is very questionable) was coined more than 100 years after his death.
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I’m so confused.
Napoleon owned (for lack of a better word) the land that Kansas City (either the one in Missouri or the one in Kansas) sits on today, but sold it to the United States, so he didn’t need to conquer it and decided against it anyway because he needed the cash for the other stuff he was doing.
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Uh… Flavius Aetius was the son of a Roman general and an aristocratic Roman mother. And at the time he was living, Roman senators existed in a wide variety of shades and their ancestors came from all over Europe, Asia and Africa, though, of course, mostly those parts of the continents which had convenient sea access to the Mediterranean, Mare Nostrum.
Roman politics involved a lot of name-calling and scurrilous rumours. Calling someone a barbarian was probably because their Greek had a provincial accent or they neglected the proper folding of their toga during some festival. Or because they did not have refined tastes in wine, rhetoric and poetry.
Romans had prejudices like other people, but their hot button issues weren’t the same as those trending on modern social media. At least not Western social media. As far as I know, just like the they were in Soviet times, Russians are very sensitive to an accusation of being nekulturny, which is essentially the same slur. It’s not implying that the origin of the uncultured person is foreign, it’s implying that they lack the civilized courtesies and taste for the finer things in life which all cultured people should possess.
Flavius Aetius was a military brat and then lived among Goths and Huns. Probably more than enough for people who spent their youth polishing their Attic Greek pronunciation and Latin rhetoric, while making sure to take the time to appreciate all the great tragedies, and know their philosophers, to call him a barbarian. In the same way that Sir Humphrey Appleby, though he would never be so impolitic to say so in so many words, believes in his heart that graduates of LSE are barbarians at the gates.
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I don’t know why I thought Aetius was a half barbarian. I mistook him for a different guy.
The barbarian tag was also thin when you look at proper barbarians like the Franks. These “super tribes” were highly Romanised by Late Antiquity.
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I remember learning in Latin that the word barbarian comes because the Romans thought the foreign languages sounded like “bar bar bar bar bar bar.”
And now whenever I meet someone named Barbara I laugh a little bit on the inside.
Bar bar bar bar a.
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Every couple of months my language discussions come back to the Barbara Rhubarb Bar Barbarians:
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Suzie Dent is a national treasure in the UK
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At a Finncon (science fiction convention), actually at the sauna afterwards and there may have been vodka involved, the Finnish and Swedish fans imitated what each other’s languages sounded like. Finns doing Swedes: “Hoom hoom, hom hoom”. Swedes doing Finns: “Ikki tikki tikki”.
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This is why I vexed my long time D&D group by starting “Bar Bar Bar; Barbarian” every time I would enter rage
“Swingin’ an Axe, Says his name is Max, just entered rage so you know we’ve got a chance; Barbarian”
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Essentially correct, with one minor adjustment. The term is onomatopoeic and formed out what incomprehensibile foreign speech sounded like, but it is a Greek word. Strictly speaking, it means someone unable to speak Greek, the lingua franca of the Classical world. Romans just borrowed the term.
And, yes, Roman senators were often mocked as barbarians by their peers because they could not speak Greek, or, more likely, their Greek was poor. There were Roman nationalists who exalted Latin above Greek, but generally speaking, Romans accepted Greek-speaking people from anywhere as civilized, if foreign, while a German tribesman fighting for Rome, who learned Latin while in the military, would be accurately described as a barbarian.
Because Greek-speaking merchants had been all over the known world, knowledge of Greek was a pretty good barometer for whether people were civilized. Even before the first Roman went to Gallia Transalpina, educated Gauls knew Greek, so Caesar did not view them as barbarians. As for the isle of Britain, though, there he met people whose leaders didn’t even speak Greek. They were monolingual and thus barbarians.
Cultures with no foreign trade and no knowledge of the wider world were not just foreign, they had a fundamentally different worldview from that of Mediterranean civilizations. Barbarian kings or warlords who were taken to Rome as captives might learn Latin, but that didn’t really transform them into civilized men, while learning Greek, poetry and philosophy might.
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Well the Latin word “res” has dozens of meanings but the most basic one is just “thing”. So it is a word they used a lot in different contexts.
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