I want to make an observation on a Latin usage, as found in
Ammianus Marcellinus. I have not seen it commented on with regard either to
Ammianus or to other authors (surely somebody must have done so, though?). The
usage is a particular variation on the use of nomine (i.e. ‘by name’) alongside
a personal name when that person is introduced for the first time: a very
familiar construction, for example A Bear called Paddington: Ursus nomine
Paddington. This is definition 3 in the Oxford Latin Dictionary.
Ammianus has dozens of occurrences of the ablative nomine
both with place names and with personal names. As in English, it can occur at
any point where a name is introduced for the first time. However, one might
expect it to be more usual with unfamiliar names (so not ‘the city called
Alexandria’), and for toponyms, so indeed it is: the usage clusters in the
digression on Persia and the east, for example, is used for Syriac names within
the Roman east (Meiacarire, Abarne), or for the barbarous names of unfamiliar
rivers of northern Europe like the Main and the Neckar. Likewise, the 25 or so
contemporaries who are introduced this way (out of 480 odd whom Ammianus names)
often have odd foreign names. They include Persians (Nohodares), men of
Germanic origin (Sandan, Bainobaudes, Rando, Viderichus), and North Africans (Stachao,
Igmazen), and the perhaps slightly unusual slave name Apadaulus.
However, there are a few individuals who are introduced this
way more than once, which may seem unexpected: Maurus (the soldier who crowned
the emperor Julian with a torque in place of a diadem in Paris in early 360 at
20.4.18 and 31.10.21); Romanus (the corrupt count of Africa, at 27.9.1 and
29.5.2); and – no fewer than four times! – the Sarmatian general Victor
(24.4.13, 24.6.13, 31.12.6, 31.13.9). What do these have in common? The answer
is clearly that their names are also familiar adjectives or substantives meaning
‘(the) Roman’, ‘(the) Moor(ish)’ and ‘(the) victor(ious)’ respectively. Latin had no definite or indefinite article, and the distinction between capitals and minuscule
letters was not used to distinguish names from other words, so we seemingly
have here a usage of nomine to indicate that the word it follows is a
personal name. Let us look at the examples of Maurus and Romanus:
sed cum id quoque turpe
asseueraret,/ Maurus nomine quidam,/ postea comes/ qui rem male gessit apud
Succorum angustias,/ Petulantium tunc hastatus,/ abstractum sibi torquem…
capiti Iuliani imposuit./ (20.4.18)
successor Maurus nomine mittitur
comes/… (31.10.21)
quam rem militaris augebat
socordia/ et aliena inuadendi cupiditas/ maximeque Romani nomine comitis.
(27.9.2)
Zammac comiti nomine Romano
acceptus (29.5.2)
‘But when Julian asserted that
that too would be base [to wear his wife’s jewels as a diadem], a man called
Maurus [not ‘a certain Moor’] (later the Count who fought badly at the
pass of Succi, then standard bearer of the Petulantes) took off his torque… and
put it on Julian’s head.’
‘Count Maurus [not ‘a Moorish
general’] was sent to succeed him’
‘This was increased by the
soldiers’ idleness and passion for taking over other people’s property, and
particularly that of Count Romanus’ [not, ‘the Roman general]
‘Zammac, who was close to Count
Romanus’ [not, ‘the Roman general]
In the case of Victor, the ambiguity would potentially not
be so great, but nomine is used when he is called dux (24.4.13
and 24.6.13) or magister equitum (31.12.9) or comes (31.13.9).
The two nouns victor and dux in apposition would not necessarily
be normal Latin for ‘victorious general’ (Ammianus does not use uictor
adjectivally), but they might lead readers to a momentary double take (perhaps
there was also potential confusion with the regiment called the Victores?).
There are of course plenty of cases where Romanus and Victor are mentioned
without this use of nomine – when they are part of a list of names, when
they have already been mentioned, or simply when the narrative can make it
absolutely clear that we are dealing a personal name.
Once we have identified this usage it can also make sense of
a bundle of further examples. At 16.6.1, comes Verissimus nomine is count
Verissimus, not a very truthful general; at 18.3.2 the general Barbatio had a
wife called Assyria, not an Assyrian wife, just as at 28.1.8 the former vicarius
Chilo had a wife called Maxima, not an enormous wife. Julian greeted with a
kiss Celsus the governor of Cilicia, not the tall governor of Cilicia
(22.9.13). Count Theodosius summoned a man called Civilis to be vicarius
of Britain, not a polite man or a civilian (27.8.10, a case where the danger is
not so much of ambiguity but of temporary confusion). The name Iovianus would
not offer any ambiguity – there is no use of nomine for the emperor of
that name, for example – but when it is the name of a soldier (23.5.12), there
was potential confusion because there was a regiment called the Ioviani
(after whom, one presumes, the emperor Jovian had probably been named: his
father was their former commander). The name of the German king Hortarius only
requires nomine, one suspects, because it appears in the genitive where
there is potential confusion with the verb form hortari (17.10.5).
One case may merit a bit more thought. Immediately after Julian’s acclamation in
Paris, soldiers surrounded the palace because of a rumoured attempt on his
life:
strepituque immani excubitores perculsi/ et tribuni et domesticorum
comes Excubitor nomine/ ueritique uersabilis perfidiam militis/ euanuere metu
mortis subitae dispalati
The guards were alarmed by the terrible noise, along with the tribunes
and the Count of the Domestici called Excubitor, and fearing treachery
from the flighty soldiers, they vanished, scattered by their fear of imminent
death.
In a short article (‘Zu Ammian 20, 4, 21: Excubitor
nomine’, Chiron 5 (1975), 493-4), Joachim Szidat suggested that the comes
domesticorum Excubitor, an otherwise unattested person and otherwise
unattested name, may not have been called Excubitor at all. Rather, the use of nomine
here is a different one, he suggests: ‘nominally (but not in fact)’ (Oxford
Latin Dictionary, type 16b). He was nominally an excubitor, that is
an imperial guardsman, but in fact he ran off. This is certainly
attractive. It helps also to deal with the fact that there are no examples of
persons with that name. Unfortunately, however, there are two objections, and
two possible alternatives.
First, this use of nomine is not found elsewhere in
Ammianus. Secondly, we have just seen that it is a frequent habit of Ammianus
to use nomine to distinguish names from nouns when there might be
ambiguity, and this is just such a case. One might of course wonder whether both
senses could be present – that the general really was called Excubitor but that
Ammianus wanted to hint that really, he was no excubitor. Indeed I have
sometimes wondered whether Romanus nomine comes carries an undertone of
‘this supposedly Roman general’. Plays on names are not absent from the
work of Ammianus. However, one would have to suspect that the simplest
explanation is the best: that this is a use of nomine to make it clear
that an ambiguous word is a personal name. Szidat is probably wrong. There is
another, perhaps slim, possibility: this is the only sentence in the Res gestae where personal name or noun excubitor appears, and it appears twice. Could it be
that the unparalleled appearance of it as a personal name is a corruption
caused by a scribe rewriting the unusual
word he had written a few seconds earlier in place of a not dissimilar name? In which case, the name is lost.
Some of the cases
where Ammianus places nomine by toponyms may also arise from this usage: a castle called Sumere (25.6.4; not the
word for ‘to take’) or the city named Dura, not a hard city (25.6.9).
Does this exist elsewhere in Latin? Ammianus is of course a
remarkably likely author in whom to see such a phenomenon, featuring as he does a great
many names, in a narrative context, and in an age where people were likely to
be designated by only one name and distinctive markers like the Latin praenomen had dropped out of general use.
But I looked at Tacitus, Symmachus, and Sidonius. Tacitus generally uses nomine
alongside exotic names, but at Annals 2.39.1 note Agrippa Postumus’ freedman, nomine
Clemens, Clement by name. Symmachus does not usually use nomine with
personal names at all, but his three examples are all telling: Ep. 3.36 Pirata (not the pirate); 3.49 Sabinus (not the
Sabine); 4.24 Florentinus (not the Florentine). In Sidonius only one example, in
letter 4.12: lectorem... Constantem nomine (Constans the reader, not the
constant reader).
Since I am in
Munich, I had better go and see what the slips of the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae
have to say on the matter...
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