David T. West

Trāditiō nōn laus cinerum est sed flamma colenda. Tradition is not the worship of ashes but a flame to be cherished.

Roman Helmet Guy is a moron. Here's why: The word is a compound adjective formed by the prefix poly- (from polys, meaning “many”, “multiple”, or “great in number”) + the noun tropos + the adjectival ending -os. Tropos itself derives from the verb trepō (τρέπω), “to turn, to twist, to change direction”. Its IE root trep- carries the core sense of “turning” or “bending”. In Greek, tropos literally means “a turn”, “a twist”, “a way”, “a direction”, or “a path”, and only secondarily “manner”, “character”, “method” or “habit”. Thus the literal etymological force of polytropos is “having many turns” or “of many twistings/ways” aka a single word that fuses multiplicity (poly-) with the idea of deviation, adaptation, and change (tropos). It is not a simple descriptor; it encodes the notion of something that constantly “turns” or “shifts”, whether geographically or mentally. Per the standard reference Liddell-Scott-Jones Greek-English Lexicon, the word carries two intertwined layers of meaning:Literal / physical: “much-turned”, “much-wandering”, “much-traveled”, “roaming widely”. This is precisely how Odysseus is understood in Odyssey 1.1 (“ἄνδρα … πολύτροπον”) and again at 10.330 (Circe addressing him). Metaphorical / characterological: “versatile”, “of many devices”, “resourceful”, “wily”, “shifty”, “adaptable”. Examples: Hermes (Homeric Hymn to Hermes), Plato (Hippias Minor 364e–365a, where he contrasts the “polytropos” Odysseus with the “simple” Achilles), Thucydides (versatility of mind), Plutarch (on Alcibiades). Later texts can shade into “fickle” or “changeable”. The adverb polytropōs simply means “in many ways” or “variously”. In Modern Greek the word survives as a learned term meaning “resourceful,” “inventive,” “intricate,” or “complicated”, with the same double edge. Homer places polytropos in the very first line of the Odyssey (“Ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον…”) precisely because the word is deliberately ambiguous. It invites a double reading that no single English adjective can fully replicate: Literal: the hero who has literally “turned” through countless places; Trojan War, stormy seas, islands, underworld, back to Ithaca. Metaphorical: the hero whose mind and character are full of twists; cunning, shape-shifting, never straightforward, endlessly adaptive. This is not accidental. Homer is announcing a new kind of hero: not the straight-line, uncomplicated warrior (Achilles, “the simplest and most truthful”, in Plato’s words), but the multifaceted, many-layered, non-linear survivor. Polytropos is the ancient Greek way of saying “complicated man”. Emily Wilson’s choice of “complicated” is therefore not a simplification or a betrayal of the Greek; it is a defensible modern English rendering that captures the core etymological and conceptual force of the word. “Complicated” preserves the sense of “many turns”, “not straightforward”, “full of twists”; both in Odysseus’s journey and in his character, while remaining immediately intelligible to contemporary readers. English simply has no single native word that packs the same literal + metaphorical punch as the Greek compound. “Man of many ways,” “versatile,” “wily,” or “of many devices” all require footnotes or sound archaic; “complicated” does the job cleanly. They attack Wilson for choosing “complicated”. Who? Peoople who do not read ancient Greek (and certainly not fluently). They are reacting to a surface-level English word without grasping the layered ambiguity Homer himself built into polytropos. Someone who cannot read the original line, who has never parsed the etymology of tropos, and who has never seen how later Greek authors exploited the same double meaning is simply not in a position to lecture a professional classicist on what the Greek “really” means. Wilson did a good translation. She's is genuinely a good scholar. They, on the other hand, are ποικιλοτρόπως, πολυτρόπως, παντοτρόπως, διαρκώς, και εντελώς αμετατρόπως ηλίθιοι.

Did the Romans speak Latin? The medieval and humanist controversy. * Part 1. The Latin language, as we find it in the best writers, was the form used by educated people in the city of Rome around the first century BC. It is referred to as Sermo Urbanus, Elegans, Urbanitas, Oratio Romana, or simply Sermo Latinus: (Br. 75, 261; 3 De or. 11, 40–41; Qt. VIII, 1. 3; Var. Ling. Latin. I–III). Other Romans, who lacked formal education and lived especially in the countryside, as well as slaves and foreigners, used a simpler kind of speech. Compared with the urban variety, it was sometimes corrupted by grammatical mistakes (solecisms) and foreign or incorrect forms (barbarisms). This type of speech is called sermo plebeius, vulgaris, or familiar: (3 De or. 37, 150; Qt. VIII, 2, 1; 3, 16; Sen. Controv. III, praef; Gell. XI, XIX, 13). Moreover, this kind of speech could also appear in a somewhat more refined form, namely when it was used by a more educated person in everyday conversation or in private letters. In such contexts, as Marcus Tullius Cicero says, “cotidianis verbis texere solemus” (Cic. Fam. IX, 21). (Cf. Cic. Or. 5, 20; Quintilianus I, 6, 1: “est sua loquentibus observatio, sua scribentibus”.) It should also be noted what Cicero says about rustic and rural expressions: “Rustica vox et agrestis quosdam delectat, quo magis antiquitatem, si ita sonet, eorum sermo retinere videatur” (3. De Or. 11, 42). The closer a given form of speech came to this ideal of urbanity, the purer and more genuinely “Latin” it was considered. The further it departed from that model, the more it was judged corrupt and flawed, and thus labeled “vulgar.” While the urban variety is directly attested in literary works, examples of vulgar speech can be identified either through descriptions by authors or through inscriptions that have survived to our time, most notably those preserved on the walls of Pompeii. From all this, we may confidently conclude the following: there truly was a distinction between “urban speech” and “rustic or vulgar speech.” However, this distinction does not mean that the Romans had two separate languages. Rather, they had one single Latin language, whose proper forms and rules some observed more carefully and others more loosely. This is not difficult to understand, since the same thing happens even in our own time. If someone listens to a judge delivering a formal judgment in court and to an uneducated man speaking in the marketplace, he will clearly notice that both are using the same language. Yet one follows the standards and elegance of proper expression, while the other uses words more freely and with less correctness. In the Middle Ages, however, the difference between the Latin preserved in literature and the everyday spoken language became so great that they came to be regarded as two entirely different languages. Latin was no longer learned at home or through daily use, but through formal study with the help of teachers. As a result, learned men began to form mistaken ideas about the speech of the ancients. They believed that, just as in their own time there were already two languages, one common and domestic (such as French, Italian, Spanish, etc.), and another, Latin (which they also called “Grammatica,” because Grammatica was the name of the first of the liberal arts in the medieval trivium), so too in ancient times the Romans must have had two completely distinct languages: one vulgar, which arose naturally, and another, namely Latin, which was not natural but artificially constructed and devised. This mistaken view, which continued to find supporters and defenders up to the fifteenth century, arose from the fact that those scholars assumed the conditions of their own time to have existed in the age of the ancients as well, as if they were projecting into the past what they saw before their eyes in the present. Moreover, it was not easy for them to think otherwise, since access to the works of ancient authors was becoming increasingly rare: many texts already lay hidden under dust in the libraries of monasteries, while other traces, carved in stone, remained buried beneath the ground. From this situation there arose, among learned men of the Middle Ages, several theories about the Latin language, especially concerning the purpose for which the Romans had devised it. Three principal views emerged: the first that of Aegidius Romanus (Giles of Rome) (1243–1316), a student of Thomas Aquinas at the University of Paris; the second that of Dante Alighieri (1265–1321); and the third that of Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374). In the following post, we will discuss the first theory proposed by Giles of Rome.

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