Catalogue Raisonné of J. L.
Speranza’s Publications – H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I
Verbali: UR
Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P.
Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Urbanio – Ossia: Grice ed
Urbanio – Grex griceiana – verbalia: Urbanio -- The gens Urbania was an obscure
plebeian family at ancient Rome. No members of this
gens appear in history, but several are known from inscriptions. Origin The nomen Urbanius belongs to a class
of gentilicia formed from other nomina or cognomina ending in -anus, typically
derived from place names.[1] The surname Urbanus is in turn derived from urbs,
"city", and means "from the city".[2] Members This list includes abbreviated
praenomina. For an explanation of this practice, see filiation. Marcus Urbanius
Cinnamus, built a first-century sepulchre at Cales in Campania for himself,
Satria Seilis, Maria Similis, and the freedman Nymphius.[3] Titus Urbanius
Matto, along with Titus Valerius Albanus, Lucius Veturius Melo, Gaius Cottius
Rufus, and Quintus Sextius, made an offering to Mars, Apollo, and Minerva at
Vindonissa in Germania Superior, in AD 79.[4] Titus Urbanius Felix, built a
first- or second-century tomb at Rome for his wife, Eutychia, aged thirty.[5]
Urbanius, made an offering to Jupiter Optimus Maximus and Juno Regina at the
site of modern Weinheim in Germania Superior, dating between the second century
and the middle of the third.[6] Gaius Urbanius Firminus, a soldier in the Legio
X Gemina, buried at Tucci in Hispania Baetica, built by his colleague, Julius
Ingenuus, and dating from the latter half of the second century.[7] Gaius
Urbanius Marcellus, buried in a second- or third-century tomb at Cyzicus in
Asia, built by his son, Gaius Urbanius Caspius.[8] Gaius Urbanius C. f.
Caspius, built a second- or third-century tomb at Cyzicus for his father, Gaius
Urbanius Marcellus.[8] Urbania Secunda, along with her husband, Hostilius
Fructus, built a third- or fourth-century tomb at Casilinum in Campania for
their son, Quintus Urbanius Secundus.[9] Quintus Urbanius Secundus,[i] a little
boy buried at Casilinum, aged five years, eleven months, and twenty-five days,
in a third- or fourth-century tomb built by his parents, Hostilius Fructus and
Urbania Secunda.[9] Urbania, named in a fourth- or fifth-century inscription
from Capena in Etruria.[10] Undated Urbanii Urbania, buried at Limisa in Africa
Proconsularis, aged forty-five.[11] Aulus Urbanius, named in a ceramic graffito
from the site of modern Haltern am See in Barbaricum.[12] Lucius Urbanius,[ii]
named in an inscription from Colonia in Germania Inferior.[13] Urbania Lellua,
built a tomb at Colonia for her daughter, Pacatia Florentia.[14] Urbania
M[...]ia, buried at Tiddis in Numidia.[15] Urbania Sabina, buried at Caesena in
Cisalpine Gaul, aged twenty-one years, eleven months, eighteen days, and five
hours, with a monument from her husband, Fabius Capito.[16] Notes Despite his name, he was probably a member of
the Hostilia gens, as his father was named Hostilius Fructus. The gentilicium is partial, but Urbanius is
the only recorded nomen beginning with Urba-. See also List of Roman gentes
References Chase, p. 118. Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary, s.vv.
urbs, urbanus. CIL X, 4697. CIL XIII, 5195. CIL VI, 33069a. CIL XIII, 11742. CIL II, 1691.
CIL III, 13668. Chioffi, Museo
provinciale Campano di Capua, 48. CIL
XI, 7786. AE 2004, 1760. Galsterer, Gefäßkeramik aus Haltern,
275. CIL XIII, 8435. CIL XIII, 8411. CIL VIII, 6837. CIL XI, 569. Bibliography Theodor Mommsen et
alii, Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (The Body of Latin Inscriptions,
abbreviated CIL), Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften
(1853–present). Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin
Dictionary, Clarendon Press, Oxford (1879). René Cagnat et alii, L'Année épigraphique (The Year in Epigraphy,
abbreviated AE), Presses Universitaires de France (1888–present). George Davis Chase, "The Origin of Roman Praenomina", in
Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, vol. VIII, pp. 103–184 (1897). Brigitte
Galsterer, Die Graffiti auf der römischen Gefäßkeramik aus Haltern (The
Graffiti of the Roman Clay Pots of Haltern), Münster (1983). Laura
Chioffi, Museo provinciale Campano di Capua. La raccolta epigrafica (Provincial
Museum of Campania at Capua: The Epigraphic Collection), Capua (2005). Category: Roman gentes And for THIS gens? Thanks
Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P.
Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Urbanio – Ossia: Grice ed
Urbanio – Grex griceiana – verbalia: Urbanio – The gens Urbania is delightful
because it almost reads like a lexical joke. Where: Umbrius = "the Umbrian," and
Umbricius = "the Umbrian fellow," we have:
Urbanus = "the man from the city," hence Urbanius = "the
city chap." The root is of
course: urbs "city." And immediately a Gricean alarm bell rings.
For urbanus in Latin quickly acquires two senses: literally:
belonging to the city;
culturally: polished, civilised,
witty, socially sophisticated. The
opposite is not merely: rusticus =
rural, but often: rusticus = unsophisticated. Hence Cicero's fondness for contrasts between
urbanity and rusticity. A Roman saying:
vir urbanus may be saying much
more than: "city resident." He may be saying: "a fellow who knows how to behave in
conversation." And there, of
course, we find Grice. One can imagine a Gricean etymology: urbanus +> able to converse civilly, +>
sensitive to implicature, +> not a conversational boor. Indeed among all these gentes, Urbanius may
be the first whose very name points toward conversational conduct. The historical members are mostly epigraphic
shadows. But one figure catches my eye:
Titus Urbanius Matto, who in AD 79 joined several others in dedicating
an offering to Mars, Apollo, and Minerva at Vindonissa. [GREXv3.docx |
Undefined] That already places an
Urbanius in a military and religious setting remarkably close to our earlier
discussions of Apollo and Roman semiotics. Another attractive character
is: Gaius Urbanius Firminus, a soldier
of the Legio X Gemina. [GREXv3.docx | Undefined] For Grice often liked the contrast between
highly sophisticated philosophical communication and the ordinary exchanges by
which institutions function. A legionary saying: Hostes adsunt. (The enemy is here.) is already engaged in the same fundamental
communicative enterprise as an Oxford don discussing sense-data. But the most Speranzian point is surely the
nomen itself. Suppose we meet our hero. Quis es? Urbanius sum.
(I'm Urbanius.) In Rome this almost risks being overinformative in
exactly the way that "Umbrius" would be in Umbria. A Gricean objector
might say: "Surely, in a city full
of city-dwellers, to be called Urbanius tells us very little." To which an ancient grammarian might reply: Nomen vetus est; descriptio non iam est. (It
is now a name; it is no longer a description.)
The same point we found with Umbrius returns. Once a descriptor becomes
a nomen, its literal informational content fades. A little dialogue: Hospes: Cur Urbanius vocaris? (Why are you called
Urbanius?) Urbanius: Forte maiores mei ex urbe venerunt. (Perhaps
my ancestors came from the City.) +>
The name originally recorded origin. Hospes:
At nunc omnes in urbe vivimus. (But now we all live in the city.) +> The descriptor has lost its immediate
relevance. Urbanius: Nomina memoriam
servant. (Names preserve memory.) +>
A nomen remembers what conversation has forgotten. And perhaps that is the deepest lesson of the
Urbanii. The Umbrii remember a homeland. The Umbricii remember an ethnic
origin. The Ummidii remember an ancestor called Quadratus. The Urbanii remember
a city. All these nomina are, in a sense, fossilised conversations. Someone,
somewhere, once said: "the
Umbrian," "the city fellow," "the square-faced chap," and two centuries later the description has
become a hereditary name whose original implicature survives only dimly. A
grammarian such as Umbrius Primus would have loved that. And Grice might have
added: "The Romans invented proper
names by allowing old conversational implicatures to harden into
semantics." (Ha.) When Grice arrived at Oxford, it was the first city he
had been to. Harborne and Clifton did not count. Only Oxford -- Vadum
Castratorum Taurorum -- counted: it had a cathedral: it was a city -- civis --
cf. Civile conversazione -- civil conversatione -- why not 'urbane'? Grice: The
name of Roman gentes never cease to amaze me: there's Urbanio -- not Civilio.
As an Italian citizen, Speranza knows. At one point the records rested at Rome
-- now in his home town of Liguria -- citacidanza barely relates to cives --
you can be born on a cabin by the Tennessee, as Dolly Rebecca Parton did -- and
be a citizen. Urbanio is different! Thanks Yes, and here I think Grice would
have relished the contrast between civis and urbanus. For a modern state,
citizenship has become almost entirely juridical. As you note, one may be born
in a cabin beside the Tennessee, in a Ligurian village, or in a Manhattan
apartment and still be equally a citizen. The concept is political and legal
rather than topographical. But urbanus is harder to abstract. The Latin pair
is: civis = citizen. urbanus = belonging to the city (urbs). And very quickly the second acquires a
cultural colouring. A Roman could be:
civis Romanus without necessarily
being: urbanus. The first means he possesses civic standing.
The second suggests polish, wit, sociability, conversational tact. Indeed
urbanitas comes to mean something like:
urbane conversation, cultivated humour, civilized social intercourse. The opposite is not merely: non-citizen,
but: rusticus. The rustic may perfectly well be a Roman
citizen. What he lacks is urbanity. This is where Grice's conversational ideal
becomes unexpectedly Roman. The Cooperative Principle does not require
citizenship. It requires something closer to urbanitas. A Gricean "decent
chap" is often less a civis than an urbanus. One can imagine Cicero
approving: Vir urbanus est. (He is an
urbane man.) +> He knows how to
converse. +> He catches implications.
+> He does not force everything into explicit statement. And hence your etymological puzzle: Why a
gens Urbania but no famous gens Civilia? Perhaps because "citizen" is
a legal category, whereas "urban" already carries social and
conversational overtones. A Roman naming a fellow: Urbanus
might mean more than: "the
city-dweller." He might mean: "the polished chap from town." It is remarkably close to what
eighteenth-century English came to call:
urbane. Indeed English preserves
the Roman evaluative sense almost better than it preserves the geographical
one. When we call someone "urbane," we do not mean: resident of a city. We mean:
socially polished, tactful, conversationally skilled. Almost a Gricean virtue. So one can imagine
Grice arriving from Harborne and Clifton and encountering Oxford as the first
place that really counted as an urbs. Not merely larger, but possessing
cathedral, colleges, libraries, civic memory, and all the institutions that
Romans associated with urban life. A mock exchange: Grice: "I have finally arrived in a
city." Roman: Ergo urbanus factus es? (So have you become
urbane?) Grice: "That does not follow." +> City membership need not imply
conversational excellence. Roman: At
speremus. (But let us hope.) +>
Urbanity is the conversational ideal latent in urban life. And perhaps that is
why Urbanius is such a charming nomen. Unlike Umbrius, which remembers a
homeland, or Quadratus, which remembers an ancestor's shape, Urbanius remembers
a style of life: the city as the place where conversation becomes an art.
Rather closer to civil conversazione than to mere citizenship. A citizen may
possess rights. An urbanus is expected to know how to talk. (Ha.) Grice blames
it on the abstractizing Greeks and their polis, translated by Tullio Cicerone
as civitas -- so why a Roman gens that gives Urbanio, but none that gives
Civilio -- or ctvitatinus? Thanks Do Lewis and Short expand on this. Speranza
thinks it's topographical: urbs is the seven hills -- civitas is whatever is
NOT the seven hills. Thanks Yes, and I think your distinction between urbs and
civitas is closer to Roman intuitions than many modern translations suggest.
For a Roman, the two words are not interchangeable. Urbs is concrete. walls, streets, temples, hills, Forum,
buildings. When Romans write
simply: Urbs with a capital U implied, they very often
mean: Rome itself. The physical city. Lewis & Short
emphasizes this concrete sense: urbs is the city as an inhabited and built
place, and by excellence Rome. From it comes urbanus, originally "of the
city." Hence also: urbanitas,
urbane, urbani mores. The whole
conversational and social colouring follows later. By contrast: civitas
begins from: civis (citizen), and thus refers not primarily to
buildings but to the body politic, the civic community, citizenship,
commonwealth, or state. That is why Cicero can translate Greek πόλις as civitas. The philosophical interest lies not in streets and walls
but in the organized community of citizens. A Gricean might say: urbs = topographical dossier. civitas =
political dossier. And therefore your
puzzle: Why a gens Urbania, but no
distinguished gens Civilia? has a
plausible answer. A nickname:
Urbanus is easy to imagine.
"the city chap." "the fellow from Rome." "the
sophisticated urban fellow." The word can attach to a person. But: Civis
is much less distinctive. Everybody entitled to citizenship is a civis.
And: Civitas is more abstract still. One hardly points to
an individual and says: "There goes
Commonwealth-Man." Whereas: "There goes the city fellow" is a perfectly plausible nickname. Roman
nomina often arise from: places,
occupations, physical traits, ethnic origins, familiar epithets. Urbanus fits beautifully. Civilis does exist
as a cognomen and adjective, but not with the same nickname-generating force.
In fact the famous Julius Civilis bears exactly such a cognomen, but it never
generated a major gens "Civilia" in the way that Urbanus generated
Urbanius. Your topographical intuition is therefore excellent. One could
imagine: Umbrius "the
Umbrian." Urbanus "the city fellow." Both identify somebody by origin or habitat.
But: Civis does not identify locality. It identifies legal membership. A Roman
arriving from the countryside might be labelled: Urbanus.
A Roman arriving from another town might be labelled: Urbanus.
But no one could become distinctive merely by being: civis.
The category is too broad. And here Grice's complaint about the Greeks
becomes amusing. Once Greek πόλις becomes Latin
civitas, the philosophical focus shifts from:
the city as place to the citizen-body as abstraction. The Roman nomenclature looks more
conservative. Urbanius preserves the older, concrete world: streets, markets, neighbours,
conversation. Indeed, if one were forced
to choose a Gricean nomen among Roman gentes, one might choose Urbanius
precisely because the word eventually develops the sense: urbane, polished, socially tactful. Almost:
"one fit for civil conversation." Which is deliciously ironic, because civil
conversation derives from civis, while urbane conversation derives from urbs.
The Romans gave us the latter as a family name; the philosophers inherited the
former as a theory of society. As Speranza might put it: "The Greeks abstracted the polis into
the civitas. The Romans retained the urbs. Hence Urbanius survives as a nomen,
while Civilius remains a philosopher's dream." (Ha.) And do Lewis and
Short and other expand on 'cives'? Because Augustine of Hippona (not a city)
used to contrast -- alla Campanella -- civitas dei -- versus Rome, civitas
terrena. Polis is too greek.But whence the root, cives -- non-derivable and
primitive via Proto-Indo-European? Thanks -- indeed V with capital V becomes
Rome, as in Livio, A. V. C. I (Romolo is slain). Thanks Yes. The contrast
between urbs, civitas, and civis is one of the places where Latin preserves
distinctions that later political theory tends to blur. Lewis & Short's
entry for civis begins with the basic sense:
"citizen," "fellow-citizen," that is, a member of a political community.
What is fascinating is that civitas is not originally the city as a physical
place. It is the condition, body, or collective existence of the cives. In a
sense: civis → civitas just as:
rex → regnum. The noun of
collectivity grows out of the noun for the person. By contrast: urbs
does not begin with persons. It begins with walls, buildings, streets,
and place. A Roman could perfectly well distinguish: urbs Roma (the city of Rome) from
civitas Romana (the Roman commonwealth, citizen-body, or polity). This becomes crucial in Augustine of Hippo.
When Augustine writes: Civitas Dei he is not speaking of a heavenly
municipality. Nor is he contrasting two towns. The contrast is: Civitas Dei the community of those ordered toward
God, versus civitas terrena the earthly community ordered
toward temporal goods. The categories
are political and spiritual rather than geographical. Hence your excellent
observation: Hippo is not a city in the
Roman sense that matters here. The
entire Augustinian contrast works through civitas, not urbs. Indeed, Augustine
could have written: Urbs Dei but it would be much weaker
philosophically. As for etymology, civis
is one of those old Indo-European words whose ultimate ancestry remains debated.
Unlike: pater, mater, frater, it does not have an obvious pan-Indo-European
family. Modern etymologists generally treat it as very ancient Italic, but the
deeper Proto-Indo-European derivation is uncertain. In that respect civis is
almost primitive. The Romans themselves would not have analysed it further.
Rather: civis → civicus → civitas. The direction of derivation is clear inside
Latin even if the pre-Latin ancestry is obscure. Your Gricean puzzle therefore becomes even
more interesting. Why: Urbanius but no celebrated Civilius or Civitatinus? I think the answer is largely topographical, just
as you suggest. A nickname: Urbanus is easy. It means: "the city fellow," "the
Roman," "the urbane chap."
One can imagine meeting him in the countryside. But: Civis
is not distinctive. Citizenship is too abstract. Too many people qualify.
It is difficult to form a memorable nickname from: "the citizen." Indeed, for a Roman, being a civis was
normally the default aspiration. Being an urbanus was a style. The latter
generates cognomina; the former generates political theory. And your Livian observation is exactly right.
Just as: Urbs (with a capital U implied) becomes Rome par excellence, so too in
Livy: A.U.C. Ab Urbe Condita means:
"from the founding of the City." Not:
from the founding of a civitas.
Not: from the founding of a
kingdom. But: from the founding of the City. The physical place remains the symbolic
centre of the political world. A Grice-Speranza gloss might be: Greeks abstracted the πόλις into a constitutional form. Romans never entirely forgot the seven
hills. Hence: Urbanius
is conceivable. A fellow can be "from the City." But: Civilius
sounds almost like a constitutional lawyer before his time. And Roman
gentes were formed from the speech of markets, roads, villages, nicknames, and neighbours,
not from the abstractions of political philosophy. As Grice might have put
it: "The Romans named people after
where they came from, what they looked like, what they sold, or whom they
resembled; the philosophers later turned these things into concepts." (Ha.)
The Urbicii are, in a sense, the diminutive or secondary cousins of the
Urbanii. The nomen derives from: urbicus
= "of the city," "urban," "city-dwelling," which Lewis & Short relates ultimately
to: urbs = city. [GREXv3 | Word] The distinction is subtle but interesting: Urbanus often acquires the social
sense: polished, urbane, witty,
civilized. Urbicus is more
topographical: belonging to the city,
resident of the city, urban as opposed to rural. [GREXv3 | Word] So if Urbanius is the conversationally
sophisticated Oxford don, Urbicius is perhaps merely the fellow from town.
(Ha.) What especially interests me is that the dossier itself contains a
near-perfect Gricean accident: Marcus
Urbicius Rusticus Ipolcobulculensis. [GREXv3 | Word] An Urbicius Rusticus! Almost: "Urban-Rustic." or
"Mr City-Country." A
Roman grammarian would have smiled. One can imagine our old friend Umbrius
Primus asking: Quomodo potest Urbicius
esse Rusticus? (How can an Urbicius be Rustic?)
+> The nomen suggests city.
+> The cognomen suggests countryside.
And the answer is exactly the lesson you have been drawing
throughout: nomina preserve history;
cognomina describe individuals. The
nomen remembers what an ancestor once was. The cognomen may tell us what the
present fellow is. As to a
conversational hero, the only remotely promising candidate is: Urbicius Flaccus, who made an offering to
Apollo in Gaul. [GREXv3 | Word] Since we
have spent so much time among Apollo, omens, and Umbricius Melior, there is
something pleasing in finding another urban gentleman dedicating an inscription
to the same god. One might imagine: Apollo:
Γνῶθι σεαυτόν. (Know thyself.) Urbicius
Flaccus: Conor. (I am trying.) +> Urbanity begins in self-knowledge. But perhaps the most amusing point is
etymological. You have been opposing:
civis / civitas and urbs / urbanus / urbicus. The Roman gentes seem overwhelmingly to
prefer the latter. We find: Urbanius,
Urbicius. But not: Civilius, Civitanius, Civitatinus. That is telling. The Roman imagination seems
happier with the visible city than with the abstraction of citizenship. A
nickname grows naturally from: "the
city chap." It grows less naturally
from: "the constitutional
participant." The philosopher
invents the latter. The neighbour invents the former. A Grice-Speranza epigram might therefore
be: Urbicius ex urbe venit; civis ex
civitate venit; sed nomen fit ex eo quod vicinus dicit. (Urbicius comes from
the city; a citizen comes from the commonwealth; but a name arises from what
the neighbour says.) +> Roman names
derive from ordinary conversation. +>
Political theories derive from later abstraction. Indeed, if Grice arrived in Oxford and felt
he had finally reached a genuine urbs, then one can imagine him preferring an
ancestor called Urbicius to one called Civitaticus. The former sounds like
someone one might actually meet in the High Street; the latter sounds like
someone already halfway to a treatise by Augustine. (Ha.)
Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P.
Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Urbizio – Ossia: Grice ed
Urbizio – Grex griceiana – verbalia: Urbizio. The gens
Urbicia was an obscure plebeian family at ancient Rome. Almost no members of
this gens are mentioned in history, but a number are known from
inscriptions. Origin The nomen Urbicius
belongs to a class of gentilicia formed from cognomina ending in -ex, -icis, or
-icus.[1] The surname Urbicus originally designated someone who dwelt in a
city, or urbs,[2] and is an example of a cognomen derived from the traits
associated with an individual.[3] Urbicius must be distinguished from Orbicius,
with which it was sometimes confused.[4]
Praenomina The only praenomina attested from inscriptions of this gens
are Marcus and Gaius, two of the most common names at all periods of Roman
history. Members Marcus Urbicius
Sanctus, mentioned in two first-century soapstone inscriptions from Epamanduodurum
in Germania Superior.[5] Urbicius Respectus, buried at Rome, aged thirty-seven
years, two months, and seven days, in a tomb dating between the middle of the
first century and the end of the second, dedicated by his wife, Xenara.[6]
Marcus Urbicius Faventinus Ipolcobulculensis, buried in a second-century tomb
at Ipolcobulcula in Hispania Baetica, aged forty-five.[7] Marcus Urbicius
Rusticus Ipolcobulculensis, buried in a second century tomb at Ipolcobulcula,
aged forty.[8] Urbicius Flaccus, made an offering to Apollo, commemorated in an
inscription from the site of modern Essarois, formerly part of Gallia Belgica,
dating from the second or third century.[9] Urbicius Spectatus, built a
sepulchre at Apulum in Dacia, dating between the middle of the second century
and the latter part of the third, for his children, Gaius Urbicius Condunus,
Urbicia Ingenua, and Urbicius Senilis.[10] Gaius Urbicius Condunus, a soldier
in the Legio XIII Gemina, buried at Apulum, aged thirty, having served for
eleven years, in a sepulchre dating between the middle of the second century
and the latter part of the third, built by his father, Urbicius Spectatus, for
Condunus and his other children.[10] Urbicia Ingenua, a young woman buried at
Apulum, aged twenty, in a sepulchre dating between the middle of the second
century and the latter part of the third, built by her father, Urbicius
Spectatus, for Ingenua and her brothers.[10] Urbicius Senilis, a boy buried at
Apulum, aged ten, in a sepulchre dating between the middle of the second
century and the latter part of the third, built by his father, Urbicius
Spectatus, for Senilis and his siblings.[10] Gaius Urbicius Firmus, decurion of
Siscia in Pannonia Superior, where he was buried in a tomb dating from the
reign of Septimius Severus.[11] Urbicia, the mother of a child buried at
Augusta Treverorum in Gallia Belgica on the tenth day before the Kalends of
November in an unspecified year between the late fourth century and the end of
the fifth, aged two years, four months, and five days.[12] Undated Urbicii
Urbicia, a woman buried at Aquileia in Venetia and Histria.[13] Urbicius, an
authority on the organization of the army, should probably be read Orbicius.[4]
See also List of Roman gentes References
Chase, p. 126. Lewis and Short, A
Latin Dictionary, s.v. urbicus. Chase,
p. 110, 111. Dictionary of Greek and
Roman Biography and Mythology, vol. III, p. 1284 ("Urbicius"). CIL XIII, 10021,202, CIL XIII,
10021,203. CIL VI, 39078, AE 1906,
74. CIL II, 1652. CIL II, 1653.
CIL XIII, 5644.
CIL III, 1204. CIL III,
3976. AE 2007, 999. Instrumenta Inscripta, No. 5, p. 322. Bibliography Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology,
William Smith, ed., Little, Brown and Company, Boston (1849). Theodor Mommsen
et alii, Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (The Body of Latin Inscriptions,
abbreviated CIL), Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften
(1853–present). Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary,
Clarendon Press, Oxford (1879). René Cagnat et alii,
L'Année épigraphique (The Year in Epigraphy, abbreviated AE), Presses
Universitaires de France (1888–present). George Davis
Chase, "The Origin of Roman Praenomina", in Harvard Studies in
Classical Philology, vol. VIII, pp. 103–184 (1897). Instrumenta
Inscripta, No. 5: Signacula ex aere: Aspetti epigrafici, archeoligici,
giuridici, prosopografici, collezionistici, Rome (2014). Category: Roman gentes And from THIS gens? Thank
Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P.
Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Urbizio – Ossia: Grice ed
Urbizio – Grex griceiana – verbalia: Urbizio. The Urbicii
are, in a sense, the diminutive or secondary cousins of the Urbanii. The nomen
derives from: urbicus = "of the
city," "urban," "city-dwelling," which Lewis & Short relates ultimately
to: urbs = city. [GREXv3 | Word] The distinction is subtle but interesting: Urbanus often acquires the social
sense: polished, urbane, witty,
civilized. Urbicus is more
topographical: belonging to the city,
resident of the city, urban as opposed to rural. [GREXv3 | Word] So if Urbanius is the conversationally
sophisticated Oxford don, Urbicius is perhaps merely the fellow from town.
(Ha.) What especially interests me is that the dossier itself contains a
near-perfect Gricean accident: Marcus
Urbicius Rusticus Ipolcobulculensis. [GREXv3 | Word] An Urbicius Rusticus! Almost: "Urban-Rustic." or
"Mr City-Country." A
Roman grammarian would have smiled. One can imagine our old friend Umbrius
Primus asking: Quomodo potest Urbicius
esse Rusticus? (How can an Urbicius be Rustic?)
+> The nomen suggests city.
+> The cognomen suggests countryside.
And the answer is exactly the lesson you have been drawing
throughout: nomina preserve history;
cognomina describe individuals. The
nomen remembers what an ancestor once was. The cognomen may tell us what the
present fellow is. As to a
conversational hero, the only remotely promising candidate is: Urbicius Flaccus, who made an offering to
Apollo in Gaul. [GREXv3 | Word] Since we
have spent so much time among Apollo, omens, and Umbricius Melior, there is
something pleasing in finding another urban gentleman dedicating an inscription
to the same god. One might imagine: Apollo:
Γνῶθι σεαυτόν. (Know thyself.) Urbicius
Flaccus: Conor. (I am trying.) +> Urbanity begins in self-knowledge. But perhaps the most amusing point is
etymological. You have been opposing:
civis / civitas and urbs / urbanus / urbicus. The Roman gentes seem overwhelmingly to
prefer the latter. We find: Urbanius,
Urbicius. But not: Civilius, Civitanius, Civitatinus. That is telling. The Roman imagination seems
happier with the visible city than with the abstraction of citizenship. A
nickname grows naturally from: "the
city chap." It grows less naturally
from: "the constitutional
participant." The philosopher
invents the latter. The neighbour invents the former. A Grice-Speranza epigram might therefore
be: Urbicius ex urbe venit; civis ex
civitate venit; sed nomen fit ex eo quod vicinus dicit. (Urbicius comes from
the city; a citizen comes from the commonwealth; but a name arises from what
the neighbour says.) +> Roman names
derive from ordinary conversation. +>
Political theories derive from later abstraction. Indeed, if Grice arrived in Oxford and felt
he had finally reached a genuine urbs, then one can imagine him preferring an
ancestor called Urbicius to one called Civitaticus. The former sounds like
someone one might actually meet in the High Street; the latter sounds like
someone already halfway to a treatise by Augustine. (Ha.) And while Grice's
tutee, Strawson, was (unlike pre-Oxford, provincial Grice) the man about town
(London) -- when did Christ Church cathedral turned Town (versus Gown) into a
City? Is Bologna a city in the same way? We know Paris (Sorbonne) via Notre
Dame was? Thanks -- the world's oldest universities being mentioned. Yes, and
here Grice's autobiographical remark becomes surprisingly relevant to Roman
semantics. For medieval and early modern England, a city was not simply a large
town. Traditionally, the presence of a cathedral was the decisive mark of a
city. Oxford acquired city status in 1542 when Henry VIII created the Diocese
of Oxford; Christ Church became the cathedral of that new see a few years
later. Thus Oxford became, in the old English sense, a cathedral city.
[theclergyd...ase.org.uk], [en.wikipedia.org], [everything...ined.today] A
young Grice, arriving from Harborne and Clifton, might therefore have felt that
Oxford was his first genuine urbs:
cathedral, colleges, guilds, civic institutions, ancient streets. Not merely a town, but something approaching
what a Roman would understand by an urbs. Your Latinization: Vadum Taurorum Castratorum (Ha.) fits rather nicely because Oxford's
very name preserves a topographical memory, just as Urbanius preserves an urban
one. Now compare Bologna. Bologna is unquestionably a city in the Roman and
medieval sense; indeed it was already the Roman Bononia and later became one of
the great communes of medieval Italy. Its cathedral is the Metropolitan
Cathedral of St Peter, and Bologna became an archiepiscopal see in 1582.
[en.wikipedia.org] But the deeper comparison is university versus city. Oxford
and Paris became identified with their universities. Bologna became identified
with the university first. The University of Bologna traces its origin
conventionally to 1088 and is regarded by the university itself as the oldest
university in the Western world. [unibo.it], [unibo.it] Oxford's teaching
activity is attested by the late eleventh century and developed into the oldest
university in the English-speaking world. [en.wikipedia.org],
[thecampusreview.com] Paris, centred upon Notre-Dame and the schools around it,
emerged in the mid-twelfth century and became the great theological university
of medieval Europe. [en.wikipedia.org], [thecampusreview.com] The contrast is
almost Gricean: Bologna: law. Paris:
theology. Oxford: a curious mixture of theology, logic, classics, and later
philosophy. One can therefore imagine
Grice reflecting: "At Bologna, they
disputed law. At Paris, theology. At Oxford, what somebody might have
meant." (Ha.) Returning to your
etymological point, urbs and civitas diverge precisely here. Bologna and Oxford
are undoubtedly urbes: walls, cathedral,
streets, markets, scholars. But
Augustine's: Civitas Dei is not a city in that sense at all. It has no
walls, no cathedral, no seven hills. It is a community of persons ordered
toward God. Thus Augustine moves from the Roman concrete: urbs Roma
to the philosophical- theological abstraction: civitas Dei.
That is exactly the sort of abstraction Grice liked to blame on the
Greeks, via πόλις and its conceptual descendants. The Romans, by contrast, never quite
forgot the stones. Indeed Livy's: Ab
Urbe Condita ("from the founding of
the City") is revealing. Not: ab
civitate condita, but: from the founding of the City itself. Rome
remains topographical before it becomes metaphysical. [en.wikipedia.org] So your instinct about the genses is probably
right. A Roman neighbour naturally invents:
Urbanus, Urbicius, Urbanius.
"The city fellow." But no one naturally invents: Civitatinus.
That sounds like an Augustinian theologian centuries before Augustine
was born. The nomen arises from lived geography; the abstraction comes later.
That's why the Romans produced a Urbicius but not, so far as we know, a
celebrated Civilius Conversationalis. (Ha.)
Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P.
Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Urbinio – Ossia: Grice ed
Urbinio – Grex griceiana – verbalia: Urbinio. The gens
Urbinia was an obscure plebeian family at ancient Rome. Only a few members of
this gens are mentioned by Roman writers, but others are known from
inscriptions. Origin The nomen Urbinius
belongs to a class of gentilicia originally formed from cognomina ending in
-inus.[1] The surname Urbinus probably referred to a native of Urbinum in
Umbria. Members Urbinia,[i] a vestal
virgin buried alive for unchastity during the pestilence of 472 BC.[2][3] Gaius
Urbinius, quaestor in 74 BC, served under Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius in
Hispania Ulterior.[4][5] Urbinius Panopion,[ii] proscribed by the Second
Triumvirate, was saved by one of his slaves, who exchanged clothes with him,
and was slain in his place.[6][7] Urbinia, a woman whose estate was contested
by a certain Clusinius Figulus, who claimed to be her son, and retained the
advocate Labienus to represent him against Urbinia's heirs, represented by
Gaius Asinius Pollio. Quintilian describes a rhetorical trick of Asinius, who
implied that Figulus' case was exceptionally weak by describing Labienus
himself as the strongest point in the plaintiff's favour.[8][9][10] Lucius
Urbinius Quartinus, a native of Africa, was a soldier in the praetorian guard,
where he served in the century of Faenius Justus. He was buried at Misenum in
Campania, aged sixty, having served for twenty-five years, in a tomb built by
Lucius Valerius Saturninus, dating from the second century, or the first half
of the third.[11] Marcus Urbinius Rufus, a native of Dacia, dedicated a tomb at
Misenum, dating between the middle of the second century and the middle of the
third, for his fellow-soldier, Cassius Albanus, a native of Corsica, aged
thirty years, two months, and two days.[12] Gaius Urbinius Victor, buried in a
third-century tomb at Genua in Liguria.[13] Undated Urbinii Urbinius
Micssi[...] buried at Ad Aquas Caesaris in Africa Proconsularis, aged eighty,
along with Su[...]cia Rogata, aged thirty.[14] Urbinius Sic[...], named in a
pottery inscription from Germania Inferior.[15] See also List of Roman gentes
Notes Some manuscripts give her name as
Orbinia. Called "Appion" by
Appian. References Chase, pp. 125,
126. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman
Antiquities, ix. 40, 41. Broughton, vol.
I, p. 30. Sallust, Historiae, ii.
70. Broughton, vol. II, p. 103. Valerius Maximus, xi. 8. § 6. Appian, Bellum Civile, iv. 6. § 44. Quintilian, iv. 1. § 11; vii. 2. § 7; 3. §§
1, 26; 4. § 1. Tacitus, Dialogus de
Oratoribus, 38. PIR, vol. III, p. 490
(V, No. 682). CIL X, 3389. AE 1979, 166.
CIL V, 7769. AE 1995, 1773. Bakker and Galsterer-Kröll, Graffiti auf
römischer Keramik im Rheinischen Landesmuseum Bonn, 547. Bibliography Dionysius
of Halicarnassus, Romaike Archaiologia (Roman Antiquities). Gaius Sallustius
Crispus (Sallust), Historiae (The Histories). Valerius Maximus, Factorum ac
Dictorum Memorabilium (Memorable Facts and Sayings). Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (Quintilian), Institutio Oratoria (Institutes of
Oratory). Publius Cornelius Tacitus, Dialogus de Oratoribus (Dialogue on
Oratory). Appianus Alexandrinus (Appian), Bellum Civile (The
Civil War). Theodor Mommsen et alii, Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (The Body
of Latin Inscriptions, abbreviated CIL), Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der
Wissenschaften (1853–present). René Cagnat et alii,
L'Année épigraphique (The Year in Epigraphy, abbreviated AE), Presses
Universitaires de France (1888–present). George Davis
Chase, "The Origin of Roman Praenomina", in Harvard Studies in
Classical Philology, vol. VIII, pp. 103–184 (1897). Paul von Rohden, Elimar
Klebs, & Hermann Dessau, Prosopographia Imperii Romani (The Prosopography
of the Roman Empire, abbreviated PIR), Berlin (1898). T. Robert S. Broughton,
The Magistrates of the Roman Republic, American Philological Association
(1952–1986). Lothar Bakker and Brigitte Galsterer-Kröll, Graffiti auf römischer
Keramik im Rheinischen Landesmuseum Bonn (Graffiti from Roman Pottery in the
Bonn Rhineland Museum), Bonn (1975). Category: Roman gentes And from THIS gens?
Thanks
Speranza, J. L.
(n. d.). ‘H.
P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Urbinio – Ossia: Grice
ed Urbinio – Grex griceiana – verbalia: Urbinio. For the gens
Urbinia, I think there are two irresistible candidates, and both are
conversationally fascinating for rather different reasons. The first is the
tragic Vestal: Urbinia, buried alive in
472 BC for unchastity during a pestilence, according to Dionysius of
Halicarnassus. [GREXv3 | Word] The
second is the much more Gricean figure:
Urbinia, whose estate gave rise to the forensic contest described by
Quintilian, where Clusinius Figulus claimed to be her son and was represented
by Labienus, while her heirs were represented by Asinius Pollio. [GREXv3 |
Word] For Speranza and Grice, the second
is surely the hero. Why? Because the case survives not for the legal issue
itself, but for a conversational maneuver. Quintilian tells us that Asinius
Pollio employed a rhetorical strategy regarding Labienus, suggesting that the
strongest part of the opposing case was the advocate rather than the evidence.
[GREXv3 | Word] This is nearly pure implicature. Pollio does not say: "Figulus has no evidence." Instead he effectively says: "Labienus is an excellent
advocate." The audience
derives: Therefore the factual case must
be weak. Which takes us immediately back
to Grice's favourite tutorial example:
"Jones has beautiful handwriting." The explicit content is praise. The recovered
content is criticism. One could almost imagine Pollio addressing the
court: Labienus causae suae maximum
ornamentum est. (Labienus is the greatest ornament of his client's case.) +> The client himself contributes
remarkably little. +> The evidence is
poor. +> Without Labienus, the case would collapse. A judge trained by Grice would instantly
recover the implicature. Indeed, this may be one of the best ancient examples
of "damning by faint praise."
The nomen itself is also charming. Unlike: Urbanius, Urbicius, which derive from urbs and urbanity
generally, Urbinius appears to point toward:
Urbinum in Umbria. [GREXv3 |
Word] Thus we return to a theme recurring through all these gentes: Umbrius, Umbrenus, Umbricius, Urbinius. All are topographical memories fossilized
into family names. And there is a Gricean twist. Suppose a traveller arrives in
Latium. Someone asks: Quis est ille?
(Who is that?) Answer: Urbinus. (The man from Urbinum.) Perfectly informative. But in Urbinum
itself: Urbinus sum. (I am Urbinus.) would be nearly as unhelpful as: "I am an Umbrian" said in Umbria. Hence your old observation:
such names become most informative once their bearers migrate. As for the Vestal Urbinia, she provides an
entirely different Gricean puzzle. The pestilence occurs. A Vestal is
condemned. The state effectively says:
There is plague. Therefore divine displeasure exists. Therefore some
religious fault must be identified. The
sign-relation resembles our friend Umbricius Melior's entrails. One symptom is
interpreted as a sign of another reality. A Gricean might object: The disease does not logically entail the
Vestal's guilt. A Roman magistrate might
reply: It need not entail it; it
signifies it. And there we are again among
signs, interpretations, and retrospective moralizations. So my verdict would be: The conversational
hero of the Urbinii is not the quaestor, soldier, or proscribed refugee, but
the unnamed litigated Urbinia whose inheritance generated Quintilian's
anecdote. The reason is simple. Through her case we glimpse Asinius Pollio
employing a rhetorical move astonishingly close to Grice's own: apparent praise, concealed depreciation,
hearer-recognized implication. A Roman
advocate and an Oxford tutor suddenly become colleagues across two millennia. (Ha.)
Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P.
Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Urgulanio – Ossia: Grice
ed Urgulanio – Grex griceiana – verbalia: Urgulanio. H. P. GRICE E J. L. SPERANZA -- GREX -- VERBALIA: URGULANIO The gens
Urgulania was an obscure plebeian family at ancient Rome. Few members of this
gens are mentioned in history, of whom the most prominent was Urgulania, a
friend of the empress Livia, and grandmother of Plautia Urgulanilla, the first
wife of the emperor Claudius. Origin The
nomen Urgulanius is thought to be of Etruscan origin.[1] A family of this name
settled at Salona in Dalmatia.
Praenomina Most of the Urgulanii known from history and inscriptions
bore the praenomen Publius. A few other names are found, but only Sextus
appears to be a regular name of this gens.
Members Urgulania, a friend of Livia, and the grandmother of Plautia
Urgulanilla, the first wife of Claudius. She was the wife of Marcus Plautius
Silvanus, and their son Marcus was consul with Augustus in AD 2.[2] Urgulania
Psephis, a young woman buried at Rome, aged twenty-two, in a tomb dating from
the late first century BC, or early first century AD.[3] Aulus Avidius
Urgulanius, present with Augustus on his diplomatic mission to Alexandria in AD
12.[4] Marcus Avidius Urgulanius, perhaps a relative of Urgulania.[5] Sextus
Urgulanius, the father of Lucius Magius Urgulanianus.[6] Sextus Urgulanius Sex.
f., the brother of Lucius Magius Urgulanianus.[6] Lucius Magius Sex. f.
Urgulanianus, the son of Sextus Urgulanius, was adopted into the Magia gens. He
was a distinguished soldier, and served as tribune of one of the urban cohorts.
He was buried at Suessa Aurunca in Campania, in a tomb dating to the first half
of the first century.[7][6] Publius Urgulanius Pistus, named in a sepulchral
inscription from Rome, dating to the first half of the first century.[8]
Publius Urgulanius Rufus, the former master of Publius Urgulanius, a freedman named
in a sepulchral inscription from Rome, dating from the first half of the first
century.[9] Publius Urgulanius, a freedman of Publius Urgulanius Rufus, named
in a sepulchral inscription from Rome, dating from the first half of the first
century.[9] Urgulania Chrysis, named in a first-century inscription from
Rome.[10] Publius Urgulanius Sabinus, buried in a first-century tomb at
Cemenelum in Alpes Maritimae, along with his wife, Julia Tertia.[11] Publius
Urgulanius Damocrates, named in a second-century sepulchral inscription from
Rome.[12] Publius Urgulanius Hymetus, buried at Rome in a second-century tomb
dedicated by his daughter, Plautia Prima.[13] Publius Urgulanius Theophilus,
the husband of Sempronia Quarta and father of Publius Urgulanius Ursus, was
buried at Salona in Dalmatia, in a tomb dedicated by his wife, dating to the
second half of the second century.[14] Urgulanius Secundus, one of the
municipal duumvirs at Verulae in Latium in AD 197. His colleague was Lucius
Alfius Valentinus.[15] Publius Urgulanius, named in a second- or third-century
inscription from Fulginiae Publius Urgulanius Euvodius, a young man buried at
Salona, aged twenty-two, with a monument from his sister, Urgulania Nice,
dating between the middle of the second century and the end of the third.[16]
Urgulania Nice, dedicated a second- or third-century monument at Salona to her
brother, Publius Urgulanius Euvodius.[16] Publius Urgulanius Primitivus, built
a second- or third-century tomb at Salona for his mother, Urgulania Valentina.[17]
Urgulania Valentina, buried at Salona in a tomb built by her son, Publius
Urgulanius Primitivus, dating between the middle of the second century, and the
end of the third.[17] Publius Urgulanius P. f. Ursus, the son of Publius
Urgulanius Theophilus and Sempronia Quarta, built a tomb at Salona for his
mother, dating between the late second century and the end of the third.[18]
Undated Urgulanii Urgulania, buried at Rome in a tomb built by her husband,
Publius Urgulanius Helico.[19] Publius Urgulanius Ɔ. f. Helico, a freedman,
built a tomb at Rome for his wife, Urgulania.[19] Publius Urgulanius
Hyacinthus, named in a sepulchral inscription from Rome, alongside Publius
Urgulanius Tanais.[20] Urgulanius Rufus, the former master of the freedwoman
Urgulania Tertia.[21] Publius Urgulanius Tanais, named in a sepulchral
inscription from Rome, alongside Publius Urgulanius Hyacinthus.[20] Urgulania
Tertia, the freedwoman of an Urgulanius Rufus, named in an inscription from
Tibur in Latium.[21] Urgulania Tyche, an infant buried at Rome, aged one year,
nine months.[22] Urgulania Venustina, buried at Ostia in Latium.[23] See also
List of Roman gentes References
Graeco-Roman Memoirs, vol. XXXVI, p. 111. CIL XIV, 3606. CIL VI, 6992.
Lintott, The Romans in the Age of Augustus, p. 82. Oxyrhynchus Papyri, vol. XXV. Salomies, Adoptive and Polyonymous
Nomenclature, p. 21. AE 1982, 164. CIL VI, 29587. AE 1980, 134.
Il Lapidario Zeri di Mentana, i. 276.
AE 1964, 242. CIL VI, 29585. AE 2014, 172.
AE 1996, 1207. CIL X, 5796. CIL III, 2620. CIL III, 2631. AE 1996, 1208. CIL VI, 29586. CIL VI, 29588. Inscriptiones Italiae, iv. 1, 480. CIL VI, 29589. CIL XIV, 5237.
Bibliography Theodor Mommsen et alii, Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (The Body
of Latin Inscriptions, abbreviated CIL), Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der
Wissenschaften (1853–present). René Cagnat et alii,
L'Année épigraphique (The Year in Epigraphy, abbreviated AE), Presses
Universitaires de France (1888–present). Bernard Pyne
Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt (eds.), The Oxyrhynchus Papyri (Greco-Roman
Memoirs), Egypt Exploration Fund, London (1898–present). Inscriptiones Italiae
(Inscriptions from Italy), Rome (1931-present). Il Lapidario Zeri di Mentana
(1982). Olli Salomies, Adoptive and Polyonymous Nomenclature in the Roman
Empire, Societas Scientiarum Fennica, Helsinki (1992). Andrew Lintott, The
Romans in the Age of Augustus, John Wiley & Sons (2009). Categories: Roman
gentesRoman gentes of Etruscan originEtruscan families and from THIS gens?
thanks
Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P.
Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Urgulanio – Ossia: Grice
ed Urgulanio – Grex griceiana – verbalia: Urgulanio. For the Urgulanii, there is really only one possible heroine: Urgulania, intimate friend of Livia,
grandmother of Plautia Urgulanilla, and one of those remarkable women who seem
to exercise influence without holding office. [GREXv3 | Word] She is interesting precisely because she
differs from our previous conversational heroines, Lucilla and Urbinia. Lucilla
enters history through conspiracy. Urbinia enters through litigation. Urgulania
enters through access. And access is perhaps the most conversational of all
Roman powers. Tacitus elsewhere paints a picture of Urgulania as a woman so
close to Livia that the ordinary rules of deference scarcely seemed to apply to
her. The important point is not merely friendship, but proximity to the centre
of the conversational network. A Gricean diagram might look like: Augustus ↕ Livia ↕ Urgulania ↕ everyone
else. The significance of Urgulania is
not what she says publicly. It is whom she can address privately. The nomen itself is especially intriguing
because, as your dossier notes, it is thought to be Etruscan rather than
transparently Latin. [GREXv3 | Word] That already distinguishes it from: Umbrius, Urbanius, Urbicius, Urbinius, which wear their etymologies almost on their
sleeves. With Urgulania we are confronted by something older and less
analysable. A Roman grammarian could derive:
urbanus ← urbs. But: urgulanius ← ? The trail grows cold. I suspect this would
have fascinated Grice. For he often distinguished between: what an expression once meant, and what later
users can recover from it. An Etruscan
nomen surviving in imperial Rome is almost a proper-name analogue of an ancient
implicature whose original context has disappeared. As for the conversational hero among the men,
there is a tempting candidate: Lucius
Magius Urgulanianus. [GREXv3 | Word]
Notice the adoption: born the son
of Sextus Urgulanius, adopted into the Magii, becoming Magius Urgulanianus.
[GREXv3 | Word] A Roman adoption is
almost a speech act. One says:
"This man is now a Magius."
And social reality changes. Austin would have loved it. Grice too. The
adoption does not describe a pre-existing fact. It creates a new institutional
fact. One can imagine: Hunc in familiam
meam accipio. (I take this man into my family.)
And the world is altered. An Austinian performative before Austin. Returning to Urgulania herself, she offers a
nice challenge to Grice's ideal seminar:
"Two and two only decent chaps." Roman politics continually violates this.
Urgulania is neither magistrate nor senator. Yet she enters conversations from
which many magistrates are excluded. A mock dialogue: Senator: Quis hoc suadet? (Who is recommending
this?) Courtier: Urgulania. (Urgulania.) +> Livia is likely sympathetic.
Senator: Cur hoc ad rem pertinet? (Why
is that relevant?) Courtier: Quia Livia audit. (Because Livia
listens.) +> Conversational authority
derives from proximity. That is thoroughly Roman. The force of the utterance
depends less upon its logical content than upon its route through the network
of listeners. And there is a final
Gricean irony. The most memorable Urgulania leaves almost no speeches. No
philosophical treatise. No forensic triumph. No great military command. Her
fame rests largely on being someone whom others listened to because someone
more important listened to her. [GREXv3 | Word] A Roman historian might call
that influence. A Gricean might call it control of the conversational floor. (Ha.)
Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P.
Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Urseio – Ossia: Grice ed
Urseio – Grex griceiana – verbalia: Urseio -- H. P. GRICE E J. L. SPERANZA --
GREX -- VERBALIA: URSEIO The gens Urseia or Ursia was an obscure plebeian
family at ancient Rome. The only member of this gens known from Roman
literature is the first-century jurist Urseius Ferox, but a few others are
known from inscriptions.[1] Origin The
nomen Urseius belongs to a large class of gentilicia formed using the suffix
-eius, commonly associated with names of Oscan origin, but which came to be
regarded as a regular gentile-forming suffix.[2] Names of this type were often
interchangeable with the more regular Latin ending -ius,[2] and accordingly a
number of inscriptions are found under Ursius. The nomen was derived from
ursus, a bear.[3] Praenomina The Urseii
used a variety of praenomina common throughout Roman history, particularly
Lucius, Publius, Marcus, and Gaius, with additional instances of Aulus,
Quintus, Sextus, and Titus. Members This
list includes abbreviated praenomina. For an explanation of this practice, see
filiation. Lucius Ursius A. f., one of the aediles mentioned in a first-century
BC inscription, along with Marcus Nellius and Aulus Octavius, who built a wall,
gate, and tower at Fundi in Latium, pursuant to a decree of the senate.[4]
Ursia T. f. Rufa, named in an inscription from Trebula Suffenas in Sabinum,
dating from the latter half of the first century BC.[5] Marcus Ursius M. f.,
made a large donation to Vesta at Beneventum in Campania, according to an
inscription dating from the third quarter of the first century BC.[6] Ursia A.
f. Quarta, the wife of Aconius, and mother of Aulus Aconius, a freedman inurned
at Perusia in Etruria during the late first century BC, was also inurned at
Perusia in the latter half of the first century BC.[7] Gaius Ursius Stabilio,
the former master of Ursia Prima.[8] Ursia C. l. Prima, the freedwoman of Gaius
Ursius Stabilio, dedicated a tomb at Rome for her husband, Aulus Avidius
Symmachus, aged thirty.[8] Lucius Ursius Philetus, buried in a first-century
tomb at Mediolanum in Cisalpine Gaul, built by his wife, Coelia Primula, for
herself, her husband, and her son, Lucius Albucius Crescens.[9] Gaius Ursius
Virianus, named in a dedicatory inscription from the present site of Sesto
Calende, formerly part of Cisalpine Gaul, dating from the first or second
century.[10] Quintus Ursius Secundius, mentioned in an inscription from Rome
dating to AD 23.[11] Marcus Urseius Rufus, mentioned in an inscription from
Rome, dating to AD 30.[11] Urseius Ferox, an influential jurist who lived
during the middle portion of the first century. His works are lost, but formed
the basis of four books by the jurist Salvius Julianus. He is quoted by Ulpian,
and cited a number of times in the Digest.[1][12] Ursia C. f. Sabellina, made
an offering to the Bona Dea at Marruvium in Samnium, dating from the latter
half of the first century.[13] Ursia Fortunata, buried at Clusium in Etruria,
in a tomb dedicated by her husband, Eufronius Felix, dating between the middle
of the first century, and the middle of the second.[14] Lucius Ursius Sosander,
a vestiarius, a cloth merchant or tailor, had been one of the Seviri at
Cremona, and was buried at Bononia in Cisalpine Gaul, along with his wife,
Rufria Calybe, in a tomb dating between the middle of the first and the middle
of the second century.[15] Gaius Ursius Hermes, buried at Mediolanum, in a tomb
dating between the middle of the first century, and the end of the second.[16]
Publius Ursius Sex. f. Pollio, buried at Mediolanum, together with his wife,
Vettia Lepida, their son, Publius Ursius Paullus, and the freedman, Publius
Ursius Elainus, in a tomb built by their daughter, Ursia Prisca, dating between
the middle of the first century, and the end of the second.[17] Publius Ursius
P. f. Sex. n. Paullus, one of the Seviri at Mediolanum, and curator of the
treasury, buried in a family sepulchre built by his older sister, Ursia Prisca,
for her parents, Publius Ursius Pollio and Vettia Lepida, brother, and the
freedman Publius Ursius Elainus, dating between the middle of the first century
and the end of the second.[17] Publius Ursius Elainus, a freedman buried at
Mediolanum, in a family sepulchre built by Ursia Prisca for Elainus, her younger
brother, Publius Ursius Paullus, and their parents, Publius Ursius Pollio and
Vettia Lepida, dating between the middle of the first century and the end of
the second.[17] Ursia P. f. Sex. n. Prisca, dedicated a sepulchre at
Mediolanum, dating between the middle of the first century and the end of the
second, for her parents, Publius Ursius Pollio and Vettia Lepida, her younger
brother, Publius Ursius Paullus, and the freedman Publius Ursius Elainus.[17]
Urseia Fortunata, a woman buried in a late first-century or early
second-century sepulchre at Rome, built by Pallentina Pieris and her
son-in-law, Quintus Caenius Pallans, for her daughter Pallentina Florentina,
Urseia Fortunata, and their family.[18] Urseia Procula, a young woman buried in
a late first-century or early second-century tomb at Rome, aged sixteen.[19]
Ursia T. f. Vegeta, buried at Emerita in Lusitania, in a tomb dating from the
late first or early second century, along with her husband, whose name has not
been preserved.[20] Ursia M. f. Marciana, the wife of Lucius Sulpicius, one of
the quattuorviri and quaestor of the treasury, with whom she was buried at
Bergomum in Cisalpine Gaul, in a tomb dedicated by their children, Lucius
Sulpicius Marcianus and Sulpicia Germana, and dating from the first quarter of
the second century.[21] Ursia Myrine, wife of the freedman Lucius Sulpicius
Eutychus, one of the Seviri, who built a tomb for himself and his wife at
Burgomum, dating from the first half of the second century.[22] Quintus Ursius
Paederos, buried at Emerita, aged sixty, in a tomb built by his daughter, Ursia
Verana, dating from the latter half of the second century.[23] Ursia Q. f.
Verana, dedicated a tomb at Emerita, dating from the latter half of the second
century, for her father, Quintus Ursius Paederos, and another for her husband,
Afranius Apollo, aged sixty.[23][24][25] Marcus Ursius M. f. Secundus, a
soldier in the Praetorian Guard, stationed at Rome in AD 180.[26] Ursius
Maturus, one of several men who helped to restore the temple of Bellona at
Mogontiacum in Germania Superior, which had fallen in, according to an
inscription from dating from AD 236.[27] Undated Urseii Publius Ursius,
dedicated a tomb at Olisipo in Lusitania for his son, Publius Ursius
Priscus.[28] Publius Ursius, a native of Niceros, buried at Olisipo, in a
sepulchre built by Ursia Fundana, also from Niceros, and Ursius Arrenus,
possibly her son.[29] Ursia Arethusa, named in an inscription from Emerita.[30]
Ursius Arrenus, possibly the son of Ursia Fundana, with whom he built a
sepulchre at Olisipo for themselves and Publius Ursius.[29] Lucius Ursius L. l.
Boetus, a freedman, was a native of Asia, and was buried in the tomb of the
Saufeii at Vardacate in Liguria.[31] Gaius Ursius P. f. Clemens, butied at
Olisipo, aged twenty-one.[32] Ursia Dionysia, buried at Ameria in Umbria, aged
thirty.[33] Publius Ursius Felix, named in a sepulchral inscription from
Rome.[34] Ursia Fundana, a native of Niceros, along with Ursius Arrenus,
perhaps her son, built a sepulchre at Olisipo for themselves and Publius
Ursius, also a native of Niceros.[29] Ursia L. l. Nice, a freedwoman buried at
Rome, along with the freedman Lucius Ursius Pilemon.[35] Lucius Ursius L. l.
Pilemon, a freedman buried at Rome, along with the freedwoman Ursia Nice.[35]
Publius Ursius P. f. Priscus, buried at Olisipo in a tomb dedicated by his
father, Publius Ursius.[28] See also List of Roman gentes References PIR, vol. III, p. 491 (U, No. 685). Chase, p.
120. Chase, p. 132. CIL X, 6238.
AE
1951, 195c. CIL I, 3193. CIL XI, 1981, CIL XI, 1984. CIL VI, 37454. CIL V, 5996. CIL V, 5524.
CIL VI, 29861. Dictionary of
Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, vol. II, pp. 145–147 ("Ursius Ferox").
CIL IX, 7667. CIL XI, 2506. CIL XI, 6839.
Sartori
and Zoia, Pietre che vivono, 270. CIL V,
5906. CIL VI, 18480. AE 2001, 458.
AE 2019, 756. AE 1998, 603. AE 1998, 604.
AE 1993, 905. Iglesias, Augusta
Emerita, 144. Hispania Epigraphica,
1997–119. CIL VI, 2382. CIL XIII, 7281. CIL II, 256.
AE 1969/70, 244. Hispania
Epigraphica, 2001–59. CIL V, 7451. AE 1965, 267.
CIL XI, 4540. CIL VI, 29593. CIL VI, 29594.
Bibliography Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, William
Smith, ed., Little, Brown and Company, Boston (1849). Theodor Mommsen et alii,
Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (The Body of Latin Inscriptions, abbreviated
CIL), Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (1853–present). René Cagnat et alii, L'Année épigraphique (The Year in Epigraphy,
abbreviated AE), Presses Universitaires de France (1888–present). George Davis Chase, "The Origin of Roman Praenomina", in
Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, vol. VIII, pp. 103–184 (1897). Paul von
Rohden, Elimar Klebs, & Hermann Dessau, Prosopographia Imperii Romani (The
Prosopography of the Roman Empire, abbreviated PIR), Berlin (1898). Luis García Iglesias, Epigrafía Romana de Augusta Emerita (Roman Epigraphy
of Augusta Emerita), Madrid (1973). Hispania Epigraphica (Epigraphy of Spain),
Madrid (1989–present). Antonio Sartori and Serena Zoia, Pietre che vivono:
Catalogo delle epigrafi di età romana del civico museo archeologico di Milano
(Living Stone: Catalog of Roman Epigraphy from the Civic Archaeological Museum
of Milan), Faenza (2020). Category: Roman gentes And from THIS gens?
Thanks
Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Urseio –
Ossia: Grice ed Urseio – Grex griceiana – verbalia: Urseio For the Urseii, the
hero is surely not the aedile, cloth merchant, or praetorian guardsman,
but: Urseius Ferox the jurist whose own writings are lost but
whose authority survived through later jurists, especially Salvius Julianus,
Ulpian, and the Digest. [GREXv3 | Word] Indeed, for a Gricean this is almost
irresistible. A jurist lives by a peculiar kind of conversation: statute ↔ interpretation, testator ↔ heir,
plaintiff ↔ defendant, magistrate ↔ citizen.
And unlike the conspiratorial Lucilla or the omen-reading Umbricius, the
jurist's daily business is precisely:
"What was meant?" "What follows?" "What is
implied?" "What counts as intended?" One is tempted to say that Roman
jurisprudence is Grice's natural habitat before Grice. The nomen itself is delightful. Urseius from ursus ("bear").
[GREXv3 | Word] We therefore move
from: Umbrius = the Umbrian, Urbanius =
the city fellow, to Urseius = the bear fellow. And here Roman nomenclature returns to one of
its favourite sources: animals. You earlier mentioned: Scrofa (sow), Bos, Taurus. Now we have:
Ursus. It would not surprise
Varro in the least. Yet there is another
fascinating figure: Urbinius Panopion
(or Appion in some traditions), proscribed during the Second Triumvirate and
saved when a slave exchanged clothes with him and was killed in his place.
[GREXv3 | Word] This is almost pure
dramatic semiosis. The executioners read:
clothes → man. They mistake
signum for signatum. A Gricean reconstruction: Executioner: Panopio est. (That is Panopion.) +> The visible appearance identifies the
person. Slave: Videor Panopio. (I appear
to be Panopion.) +> The appearance
does not guarantee identity. Historian:
Apparentia vicit veritatem. (Appearance defeated truth.) +> The interpretation attached to the
wrong object. One almost has a philosophical example in the theory of
reference. But the true Grice-Speranza
figure remains Ferox. Notice the cognomen:
Ferox "bold," "spirited," "fierce." One imagines an Oxford tutorial already:
Tutor: "What did the statute
mean?" Ferox: "That depends." Tutor:
"How tiresome."
Ferox: "How
legal." (Ha.) And there is a deeper connection. Much of
Grice's later work concerns: speaker
meaning, intention, recognition, uptake.
Roman jurists continually ask analogous questions. Suppose a will states
something. Does the literal wording govern? Or the testator's intention?
Suppose a declaration is made. Does what matters lie in: verba
or voluntas? This is juridical territory very close to
Gricean territory. Indeed one could imagine: Urseius Ferox: Voluntas spectanda est. (The intention must
be considered.) +> Meaning exceeds
mere wording. Grice:
"Quite." +> Speaker
meaning exceeds sentence meaning. The two are separated by nearly two millennia
but not by very much methodology. As a
final nomenological note, Urseius is particularly attractive because it
oscillates between civilization and wildness. The jurist is among the most
sophisticated products of Roman urbanity. Yet his family name means,
ultimately, "the bear." A Roman would scarcely find anything odd in
this. The same civilization that produced jurisprudence, rhetoric, and the
Digest also happily allowed a learned jurist to carry, in his nomenclature, the
fossilized memory of some ancestor nicknamed after a large woodland animal.
Which, as Speranza might observe, shows that Roman semantics never entirely
forgot zoology. (Ha.) And was our hero U. cooperative alla Grice? What is the
source in Latin. "Wear this clothes, slave!" sounds like a
conversational move. The slave going on and wearing seems an apt conversational
move to dovetail with the previous. Thanks Yes, and this is one of the rare
cases where we can almost reconstruct a Gricean conversation out of what is
otherwise a rather grim anecdote. The source is not Livy or Tacitus, but
Valerius Maximus and Appian, who tell the story of Urbinius Panopion during the
proscriptions of the Second Triumvirate. According to the tradition, a loyal
slave exchanged clothes with his master; the pursuers killed the slave,
believing him to be Panopion, while the real Panopion escaped. [GREXv3 | Word]
The striking thing is that the whole episode turns on semiotics rather than
force. The killers identify: clothes →
Panopion. They infer identity from
appearance. In Gricean notation:
S(vestis, Panopio, persecutor, carnifex)
The clothing functions as a sign. The inference happens to be false. In
this sense the sign-relation is emphatically non-factive. Now to your
conversational point. The sources do not preserve the actual dialogue, but one
can almost reconstruct it. Panopion: Has
vestes accipe. (Take these clothes.)
+> Wear them in my place. +> You may thereby save me. +> You
understand the danger. Servus: Accipio.
(I accept.) +> I understand perfectly
what is being requested. +> I accept the consequence. Notice how Gricean
this is. The explicit content is merely:
"Take these clothes."
The crucial content is entirely implicit. No need to add: "Please die in my place." The slave evidently recovers the intended
meaning. Indeed he recovers it all too well. One might say that this is among
the most successful cases of communicative uptake in Roman literature. The
recipient understands exactly what is intended. The difficulty is that another
audience also interprets the signs: Persecutor:
Ecce Panopio. (There is Panopion.)
+> The wearer of the clothes is the target. The executioners perform
a mistaken act of reference. They take the signum for the signatum. This would
have fascinated Grice. For ordinary language already permits such errors: "The man in the red hat." The hat identifies. But only contingently. In
Panopion's case, the identifying sign becomes detached from the person. The
clothes remain. The referent changes. And someone dies. One can imagine Grice
glossing the whole affair: "The
slave cooperated perfectly. The executioners cooperated imperfectly. The
success of the former depended upon the failure of the latter." (Ha.) There is also a deeper point. You ask
whether our hero U. was cooperative. Absolutely. Indeed, perhaps more
cooperative than prudence would recommend. The slave's response satisfies every
Gricean requirement: he recognises the
speaker's intention; he recognises that the speaker intends him to recognise
it; he acts on that recognition. The
conversation succeeds completely. The tragedy lies in what the success entails.
A final Latin reconstruction: Panopion:
Serva dominum tuum. (Save your master.)
Servus: Intellego. (I
understand.) +> I know exactly what
you mean. The rest is not conversation but history. And as with so many Roman
anecdotes, the decisive event turns not on swords but on the successful
interpretation of an utterance that never had to be fully spoken aloud. (Ha.) The
Griceian problem becomes what Sainsbury calls the persona (say, the Colonel
Blimp persona). Valerio and Appio have it as under 'loyal slaves' which biases
the dossier. If the conversation proceeded: "Has vestes accipe" --
Grice would doubt in calling the slave (unnamed) "Accipio" as "I
accept" for his will is being forced -- in spite of Valerio and Appio
relabel. The situation of 'decent chap' -- our hero U -- and unnamed slave
reversed, and hardly would U accept, i. e. to wear the slaves's clothes to save
his slave. Thanks Yes, I think this is precisely where a Gricean reading begins
to resist the moralizing framework of Valerius Maximus and Appian, who present
the episode as an example of extraordinary slave loyalty. [GREXv3 | Word] The
dossier is already framed before the conversation starts. The historians
effectively tell us: "Behold a
loyal slave." But that may be what
M. R. Sainsbury would call a persona imposed by the narrative. The slave never
writes his memoirs. We hear only the victor's reconstruction of his motives. A
Gricean would therefore begin by distinguishing: what was said, what was implicated, what the
later historian says the participants meant.
Those are three different things. Suppose the exchange was roughly:
Panopion: Has vestes accipe. (Take these
clothes.) The explicit content is
trivial. The implicated content is not:
"Take these clothes."
but rather: "Wear them in my
place." "Allow yourself to be mistaken for me." "I may
thereby escape." Now comes the
crucial point. The historians want the reply to be: Accipio. (I accept.) and they want accipio to mean: "I willingly undertake this
sacrifice." But Grice would
ask: Did the slave actually have a
conversationally significant alternative?
For if not, "acceptance" becomes problematic. One may
understand perfectly without freely endorsing. Indeed Grice's notion of uptake
concerns recognition of intention, not necessarily approval of intention. The
slave may have recovered the meaning perfectly while remaining trapped in a social
hierarchy that left no realistic possibility of refusal. Thus: Panopion: Has vestes accipe. +> Die in my place. Slave: Intellego. (I understand.) does not automatically entail: Consentio. (I agree.) That is a distinction the moralists are not
especially interested in preserving. The
reversal you suggest is particularly telling. Suppose: Slave: Has vestes accipe, domine. (Take these
clothes, master.) +> Allow me to
escape. Panopion: Accipio. +> I shall die in your place. Would the
story survive in Roman moral anthologies? Probably not. Its very improbability
reveals the asymmetry. The narrative depends on a social order in which the
master's survival is presumed more valuable than the slave's. That presumption
is then redescribed as loyalty. A Gricean seminar might therefore proceed:
Grice: "Was the slave
cooperative?" Strawson: "Obviously. He put on the clothes." Grice:
"That shows understanding."
Strawson: "And
loyalty." Grice: "Not so fast." +> Successful uptake is not identical with
voluntary endorsement. The most
interesting participant may therefore be neither Panopion nor the slave, but
the later historian. For the final communicative act is: slave puts on clothes which becomes
loyal slave sacrifices himself.
The interpretation is retrospective. The deed is transformed into a
moral exemplum. One might even formulate the chain: Clothing → mistaken identity → death →
historical narrative → virtue. At each
stage a new interpreter enters. In a sense, the final interpretant is not the
executioner but Valerius Maximus, who tells us what sort of act we are supposed
to think it was. [GREXv3 | Word] And there I suspect Grice would become
suspicious. The conversational problem is not whether the slave understood. He
obviously did. The real question is whether the later historians have quietly
converted: "He understood and
complied" into "He enthusiastically accepted." Those are not the same conversational
achievement at all. (Ha.) And can you list the specific loci classici for the
jurist? Thanks
Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P.
Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Urseio – Ossia: Grice ed
Urseio – Grex griceiana – verbalia: Urseio For Urseius Ferox, the difficulty is
that his own works are lost. What survives is not a
continuous text by Ferox but citations and fragments embedded in later juristic
literature. Your dossier is essentially correct: "His works are lost, but formed the
basis of four books by Salvius Julianus; he is quoted by Ulpian, and cited a
number of times in the Digest." [GREXv3 | Word] So the principal loci classici are not
"Urseius Ferox, Book I" and the like, but references preserved in the
Digest (Pandects). The classical juridical chain is approximately: Urseius Ferox ↓ Salvius Julianus ↓ Ulpian and
other jurists ↓ Justinian's Digest A
Gricean would immediately approve of the transmission: speaker → hearer → commentator → commentator
on commentator → anthology. Almost a
legal version of conversational uptake. Among the better-known references are
passages cited under the authority of Ferox in the Digest, especially in
discussions of: possession (possessio),
inheritance (hereditas), obligations, interpretation of legal acts, procedural
questions. The exact passages are scattered,
and what we usually read is something like:
Urseius ait... (Urseius says...)
or Ferox respondit... (Ferox
replied...) embedded within a later
jurist's argument. What makes Ferox fascinating for a Grice-Speranza project is
that he belongs to the very early juristic period where legal reasoning still
often appears in the form of a responsum:
a question is posed; the jurist replies.
In effect: Quaesitum: An hoc
valeat? (Is this valid?) Urseius
Ferox: Valet. (It is valid.) or Non
valet. (It is not valid.) The whole
structure is conversational. Indeed, Roman jurisprudence is arguably closer to
Plato's dialogues than modern civil codes are. There is another possible locus
for the Gricean. The Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology
article on Ursius Ferox (the source cited in your dossier) assembles the Digest
references and discusses the relation between Ferox and Julianus. [GREXv3 |
Word] Now, if one asks which fragment would most have interested Grice, I would
guess not a technical rule of inheritance, but any passage where Ferox
distinguishes: what was said, what was
intended, what the law treats as operative.
For there the Roman jurist meets the Oxford philosopher. A mock
dialogue: Praetor: Quid voluit? (What
did he intend?) Ferox: Non quaeritur tantum quid dixerit, sed quid
significaverit. (The question is not only what he said, but what he
signified.) The sentence is mine, not
Ferox's. But it captures the spirit of why jurists so often attract Griceans.
They spend their lives deciding whether legal consequences track: verba (words)
or voluntas (intention). And that is perilously close to Grice's
distinction between sentence meaning and speaker meaning. One amusing final
point. Of all your recent heroes:
Umbricius Melior interprets entrails; Umbrius Primus interprets
particles such as ubi, si, ut, ergo; Urseius Ferox interprets legal
formulations. The haruspex asks: What do the gods mean? The grammarian asks: What does ergo mean? The jurist asks: What did the testator mean? Grice, arriving in Oxford, asks: What did the speaker mean? One begins to suspect that Rome had been
preparing the ground for him all along. (Ha.) Does this help? Thank The ancient
Roman jurist Urseius Ferox is an elusive figure from the 1st century AD. While
his original legal treatises are lost, his ideas survived primarily because the
great jurist Salvius Julianus compiled and commented on them in a four-book
work commonly known as Libri ad Urseium Ferocem ("Books on Urseius
Ferox"). [1, 2, 3, 4] In Justinian's Digest (Digesta Iustiniani), Urseius
is explicitly named in the inscription of 43 unique fragmentsextracted directly
from Salvius Julianus's four-book commentary. Furthermore, Ulpian directly
references Urseius 5 times in his own commentaries, and the jurist Julius
Paulus references him once. [1, 2, 3, 4] The standard Latin titles, English
translations, and examples of how these texts are preserved in the Digestare
detailed below. 1. Salvius Julianus: Libri IV ad Urseium Ferocem The
foundational text containing the thoughts of Urseius is Julianus’s four-volume
commentary. In the Digest, these are cited in the mass of excerpts explicitly
attributed to Julianus's work on Urseius. [1, 2] Latin Title: Iulianus libro
[primo/secundo/tertio/quarto] ad Urseium Ferocem English Translation:
"Julianus, in the [first/second/third/fourth] book on Urseius Ferox"
[1, 2, 3, 4] Examples from the Digest: The Digest references the individual
books of this specific collection across all four volumes: Book I — Dig.
7.1.36.pr: Latin: Iulianus libro primo ad Urseium Ferocem: Usus fructus
servorum legatus est... English: "Julianus, in the first book on Urseius
Ferox: The usufruct of slaves was bequeathed..." Book II — Dig. 9.2.41.pr:
Latin: Iulianus libro secundo ad Urseium Ferocem: Servus communis cum a
minoribus... English: "Julianus, in the second book on Urseius Ferox:
Where a slave owned in common..." [1, 2] Book III — Dig. 19.1.28:
Latin: Iulianus libro tertio ad Urseium Ferocem: Praedia mihi vendidisti et
convenit... English: "Julianus, in the third book on Urseius
Ferox: You sold me certain lands, and it was agreed..." [1, 2, 4]
Book IV — Dig. 47.2.60: Latin: Iulianus libro quarto ad Urseium Ferocem: Si
filio familias furtum factum esset... English:
"Julianus, in the fourth book on Urseius Ferox: If property should be
stolen from a son under paternal control..." [1, 2] 2. Quotations by
Ulpian (Ulpianus) While Justinian's compilers pulled the 43 core fragments from
Julianus's text, Ulpian famously references Urseius's opinions five times
within his own standard commentaries (such as Ad Sabinum or Ad Edictum). [1, 2,
3] When Ulpian quotes Urseius, the Latin formula explicitly incorporates his
name to anchor the legal precedent: Latin Phrasing: ...ut Urseius ait /
...Urseius scripsit / ...apud Urseium Ferocem English Translation: "...as
Urseius says" / "...Urseius wrote" / "...in the writings of
Urseius Ferox" [1] Example of Ulpian Quoting Urseius: Dig. 39.2.24.12 (Ulpian,
Ad Edictum, Book 81): Latin: ...Et idcirco Urseius ait, si propter vitium
possessionis... English: "...And therefore Urseius says, if on account of
a defect in possession..." If you are tracking down a specific legal
concept (such as property theft, slave usufruct, or contract stipulations), let
me know and I can extract the exact Latin text and English translation for that
particular fragment. [1, 2, 3] Le Yes, that helps a great deal, and it makes
Urseius Ferox much more substantial than the brief prosopographical notices
suggest. [GREXv3 | Word] The really important point is that we do not possess
"Urseius Ferox, Book I", "Book II", etc. What survives is a
layered conversational chain: Urseius
Ferox ↓ Salvius Julianus, Libri IV ad Urseium Ferocem ↓ Ulpian, Paulus, and
others ↓ Justinian's Digest. In other words,
Ferox reaches us rather as Socrates reaches us through Plato: a voice embedded
in later voices. The loci classici are therefore precisely the places where the
Digest preserves: Iulianus libro
primo/secundo/tertio/quarto ad Urseium Ferocem
or where later jurists explicitly write:
Urseius ait Urseius scripsit apud Urseium Ferocem as your reconstruction indicates. Among the
most cited examples are: Book I Digest
7.1.36.pr Iulianus libro primo ad Urseium Ferocem concerning usufruct (usus fructus) and
inheritance arrangements. Book II Digest
9.2.41.pr Iulianus libro secundo ad Urseium Ferocem concerning liability involving a commonly
owned slave. Book III Digest 19.1.28
Iulianus libro tertio ad Urseium Ferocem
on land sales and contractual arrangements. Book IV Digest 47.2.60 Iulianus libro quarto ad
Urseium Ferocem on theft and property
rights involving a filius familias. As you note, scholarly reconstruction
commonly counts forty-plus Digest fragments deriving from Julian's commentary
on Ferox, while Ulpian cites him independently several times. That makes Ferox
one of those jurists whose books disappeared while whose authority survived.
[GREXv3 | Word] Now, from a Gricean perspective, what is fascinating is not the
substantive law but the literary form. A juristic fragment often has the
structure: Quaesitum est ... (It was
asked ...) followed by: Respondit Urseius ... (Urseius replied
...) Even where those exact words are
not present, the genre is responsal. Someone asks: What happens if this slave is
bequeathed? Someone asks: What if ownership is divided? Someone asks:
What if the parties intended X but said Y? And Ferox answers. This is not far from a
tutorial. One can imagine Grice remarking:
"Roman jurisprudence consists of one long sequence of examination
questions." And indeed many legal
problems ultimately concern: What did
the testator mean? What did the parties intend? What follows from these words? Those are perilously close to Grice's own
questions. The haruspex Umbricius Melior asks:
What do the entrails signify? The
grammarian Umbrius Primus asks: What
does ergo signify? The jurist Urseius
Ferox asks: What did the legal actor
signify by this act, will, sale, or stipulation? The common thread is interpretation. Indeed,
if one seeks a genuinely Gricean Roman before Grice, I am increasingly inclined
to choose Ferox over the conspirators, the haruspices, or the grammarians. The
jurist lives permanently at the boundary between: verba (words)
and voluntas (intention). And that is exactly the territory where Grice
built his philosophical house. (Ha.) Oddly, for H. P. Grice it is G. R. Grice
(the Oxford-educated UEA/Norwich philosopher) that matters. Grice's Contract.
When introducing his principle of conversational helpfulness H. P. Grice amuses
himself with a possibly quasi-contractualist answer to such a principle. What
would our hero U. sa? Is contractus the only legal term available to the Roman
jurist? private law, public law -- contractro is contractualist? Rawls would
end up citing Grice (Ion personhood in Practical Affairs. Of all the topics dealt
by our hero U., the point of the 'contract' seems to be the more akin to
Grice's (if not Speranza's) reflections – Thanks Yes, and I think you have
identified exactly the Urseius who would most interest Grice. Of all the
surviving fragments attributed to Urseius Ferox, the contractual and
transactional materials are closest to Grice's own reflections on cooperation.
The reconstructed citations from Salvius Julianus's Libri IV ad Urseium Ferocem
include discussions of usufructs, common ownership, sales of land, and theft,
all areas where one must determine what parties intended and what legal
consequences follow from their acts. [GREXv3 | Word] The Gricean connection is
not that Roman jurists were "contractualists" in the modern Rawlsian
sense. Rather, both ask: What
assumptions must be in place for a practice to function? For Grice:
conversation. For Ferox: contract.
For Rawls: society. The structure is remarkably similar. Grice
introduces his Cooperative Principle almost playfully by asking why
participants should conform to it at all. One can nearly imagine an Oxonian
objector: "Why should I be
cooperative?" Similarly, a Roman
jurist asks: "Why should this
bargain bind?" Both are
investigating conditions of intelligibility. A Roman contractus is not merely a
document. It is a legally recognised pattern of reciprocal expectations. A
Gricean conversation is not merely a sequence of utterances. It is a
recognisable pattern of reciprocal expectations. One might schematise: FeroxGriceWhat did
the parties intend?What did the speaker mean?What obligations arise?What
conversational expectations arise?How do words bind?How do utterances convey
more than words?What follows from the transaction?What follows from the
utterance? Notice that the language becomes strikingly similar. Indeed, if a
fragment such as: Praedia mihi
vendidisti et convenit... ("You sold me land and it was agreed ...")
[GREXv3 | Word] appeals to an agreement
(convenit), we are already in a world where meaning depends on shared
understandings. A Gricean gloss would be:
The legal transaction succeeds because both parties recover the same
intended content. Now to your specific
question: Is contractus the only legal
term available to the Roman jurist? Not
at all. Roman jurists worked with a rich vocabulary: contractus pactum stipulatio obligatio
conventio possessio hereditas and many
others. In fact, the word that may interest a Gricean even more than contractus
is: conventio an agreement, a coming together of minds. One
can almost hear Grice smiling. Conversation:
con-versatio Contract: con-tractus
Agreement: con-ventio All involve a "coming together." Of
course, the historical Rawls enters much later. But what Rawls found useful in
Grice was precisely that social practices function because participants can
reasonably presume cooperation. A contract is impossible if nobody trusts
anybody's declarations; conversation is impossible if nobody assumes relevance,
truthfulness, and intelligibility. If I were to imagine our hero Urseius Ferox
commenting on Grice, it might run: Non
quaeritur tantum quid dictum sit, sed quid inter homines conveniat. (The
question is not merely what has been said, but what understanding obtains
between the parties.) And Grice might
reply: "Quite so. Only replace
parties with conversationalists."
Among all your recent heroes:
Umbricius Melior interprets signs. Umbrius Primus interprets particles.
Urseius Ferox interprets agreements. The
third is perhaps the closest relative of Grice, because a contract, like a
conversation, exists only insofar as multiple persons successfully recognise
one another's intentions. (Ha.) And while Grice and Speranza take it playfully,
this is indeed the most robust Roman contribution to Western civilisation: more
than Roman philosophy -- like Stoicism or Epicureanism, all Hellenistic -- it
was roman law as taught at the world's oldest university, Bononia, that made
the world go round, and not just Grice's Oxford. At Oxford, common law and
magna charta and habeas corpus is usually contrasted to the legistlations of a
digest, but the spirit is there, if not the law. And Oxford had a chair of Roman
law, before it had 'fellows and tutors in philosophy' -- Bononia certainly did
-- the law became the cursus honorum with a degree at Bononia in law (not
philosophy) being the apex in the social scale. Thanks Yes, and here I think
your instinct is exactly right. If one asks for the most durable Roman
contribution, it is difficult to maintain that it was Roman philosophy. The
Romans certainly transmitted and transformed:
Stoicism, Epicureanism, Academic Skepticism, but these were ultimately Greek or
Hellenistic inheritances. By contrast, Roman law is genuinely Roman in a way
that Roman philosophy rarely is. A Grice-Speranza genealogy might run: Athens gave Europe concepts. Rome gave Europe
institutions. And among those
institutions, jurisprudence may be the most successful of all. The case of
Urseius Ferox is therefore instructive. His surviving traces concern: usufruct, sale, property, obligations,
possession, inheritance, precisely the
things that make ordinary social life function. [GREXv3 | Word], [GREXv3 |
Word] What is remarkable is that the jurists are repeatedly asking questions
very close to Grice's. The philosopher asks:
What did the speaker mean? The
jurist asks: What did the testator mean?
What did the contracting parties intend? What understanding was reached? Hence the importance of terms such as: conventio stipulatio obligatio contractus. I would even say that conventio is more
Gricean than contractus. For contractus tends to suggest a completed legal
relation, whereas conventio is literally a "coming together," almost
a meeting of minds. One can imagine a Roman jurist saying: Non verba sola spectanda sunt. (One should
not look merely at the words.) +>
Intention matters. And a Gricean immediately nods. Your comparison between Bologna and Oxford is
particularly apt. The University of Bologna itself presents its origin as the
Studium founded in 1088 and describes itself as the oldest university in the
Western world. [unibo.it], [unibo.it] And what made Bologna famous was not
philosophy but: Roman law. Indeed generations of jurists travelled there
to study the Corpus Juris and the Roman legal tradition. [unibo.it],
[thecampusreview.com] Oxford developed differently. Its intellectual mythology
often celebrates: common law, Magna
Carta, habeas corpus, parliamentary institutions. But even there Roman law was never absent.
Oxford possessed Regius Professorships and legal studies long before
twentieth-century analytical philosophy became dominant. The lawyer often
preceded the philosopher. [theclergyd...ase.org.uk], [everything...ined.today]
One could almost formulate a contrast: Bologna
What did the Digest mean?
Oxford What does "mean"
mean? (Ha.) Yet the two are not as far
apart as they appear. For Grice's Cooperative Principle occasionally sounds
quasi-contractual because it asks: What
expectations must rational participants be entitled to have? The Roman jurist asks much the same: What expectations may contracting parties
reasonably have? Rawls asks: What expectations may citizens reasonably have? The scale changes. The structure
remains. I rather like imagining a
dialogue between Urseius Ferox and Grice. Ferox: Quid inter contrahentes convenit? (What
understanding was reached between the contracting parties?) Grice:
"What understanding was reached between the conversational
parties?" Ferox: Voluntas quaerenda est. (The intention must
be sought.) Grice: "Quite." At that point the gap between Roman
jurisprudence and Oxford philosophy becomes surprisingly narrow. For both are
attempting to regulate a world in which people do not merely emit words but
undertake commitments. And perhaps that is why the Roman jurists outlived the Roman
philosophers. The former were explaining how human interaction works. Europe
never stopped needing that explanation. Bologna knew it in the twelfth century,
and Grice knew it in the twentieth. (Ha.) Yes, conventio is a good one, as is
conversatio (Adam conversed with Eve) -- and by the time Grice was lecturing on
'meaning' for the undergraduate Philosophical Society, latin had ceased being
the lingo of instruction at Oxford, for which reason Grice need not stress our
hero U. on 'conventio' and 'convenit' "We convened," it was
convened"). When discussing 'sign' Grice adopts the 'natural' (NATVRA)
physis -- epithet and contrasts it with a signum that is 'conventionalis'
whereas Hobbes and most abler Latinists would have 'arbitrarius' or
'artificialis'. Grice goes on to lecture his tutees that an emphasis on
'convenit' would be misleading -- a hand gesture, he suggests, may be something
upon which something is 'convenit' -- yet upon which we would not apply,
naturally, the adjective 'conventional' -- something may have been convened,
without it being 'conventional' -- strictly speaking -- if oddly. Similarly,
unable to play with Latin, Grice then considers non-natural as the strict
antonym of natural as applied to 'sign' -- and lumping the use of 'mean' in 'He
means to do it' as a 'natural' use of 'mean.' His point is that a handwave may
'signify' without it being a 'sign' -- again very oddly. Thanks -- and less so
a 'conventional' one at that, even if a 'sign' IS involved -- 'something or
someone can signify without that something or someone being a sign' – Thanks Yes,
and I think this is one of the places where Grice is simultaneously closer to
the Roman jurists and farther from them than first appears. A Roman jurist such
as Urseius Ferox, reconstructed through Julianus and the Digest, would be
perfectly at home with: convenit inter
eos (it was agreed between them),
or ex conventione (by
agreement), or pactione convenit (it was settled by
agreement). [GREXv3 | Word], [GREXv3 | Word]
For the jurist, the notion of conventio is foundational. Indeed, Roman
law repeatedly treats obligations as arising because minds have come
together: convenire = to come together,
to agree, to reach a common understanding.
One can almost hear the etymological music: con-venio conveniunt conventio. And then:
conversari conversatio. Both
involve a coming-together. But this is precisely where Grice becomes cautious.
When introducing what he later calls his principle of conversational
helpfulness, he occasionally toys with the idea that conversation rests on
something contract-like: as if speakers
had entered a cooperative arrangement.
Yet he immediately begins to retreat from a strict contractual reading.
For if one says: "The meaning of
this gesture is conventional because we agreed upon it," the explanation does not really satisfy him.
A hand-wave to stop a bus may be understood because there has been some
convention, some practice, some tacit arrangement. Yet Grice notices that: "conventional" and
"agreed upon" do not
perfectly coincide. Something may be understood because people have, in some
sense, converged upon an interpretation without there ever being an explicit
convention. And conversely, something may be conventional while nobody
remembers any original agreement. This is where the Roman term conventio
becomes interesting. For a jurist:
conventio → legal agreement. For
Grice: conversational cooperation ≠
convention alone. There is something
deeper. People cooperate because they have purposes. The agreement is often
only derivative. This also explains his
discomfort with: natural sign versus
conventional sign. A less cautious
philosopher might simply say: All signs
are either natural or conventional.
Grice resists this. Suppose: He
waved his hand. The wave may
signify: "Come here." Yet Grice asks: Is the hand-wave itself a sign? Or merely something that signified? The
distinction is subtle. One can have: a
person signifying, without a conventional sign system. Likewise:
"He means to do it"
contains mean, but not
sign in any obvious semiotic sense.
This is why Grice eventually prefers:
natural meaning versus non-natural meaning. rather than:
natural sign versus conventional sign.
The latter terminology drags in questions of convention too early. Here the Roman jurist and the Oxford
philosopher part company. Urseius Ferox might ask: Quid inter eos convenit? (What was agreed
between them?) That is enough to begin
legal analysis. Grice asks: What did the
speaker mean? That question remains open
even after convention has been identified. Two people may have: convention,
without successful meaning. And they may have: successful meaning, with very little convention. You mention Hobbes's terminology: artificialis arbitrarius. Indeed, a seventeenth-century Latin
philosopher would often prefer those terms. Grice's innovation is to avoid
them. Why? Because: arbitrary suggests caprice, while conventional
suggests explicit agreement. Neither captures what he wants. His concern
is: intention recognised by another
person. This is why, despite all the
Roman juristic vocabulary of:
contractus, conventio, pactum,
the closest Roman analogue to Grice may not be contract law itself but
the jurists' constant concern with:
voluntas. What matters is not
merely: what was agreed, but
what was intended. A Roman
formula might be: non verba sola, sed
voluntas spectanda est (one should attend not only to the words but to the
intention). Not a quotation from Ferox,
but very much the spirit of Roman jurisprudence. And that, I think, is why your
hero Urseius Ferox would have interested Grice. The grammarian Umbrius Primus
asks: What does ergo mean? The haruspex Umbricius Melior asks: What do the entrails signify? The jurist Urseius Ferox asks: What did the parties intend when they
agreed? And Grice asks: What did the speaker intend the hearer to
recognise? The path from Bononia to
Oxford is longer than the road from the High to Christ Church, but
intellectually it is not nearly so long. (Ha.)
Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P.
Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Urvinio – Ossia: Grice ed
Urvinio – Grex griceiana – verbalia – Urvinio -- H. P. GRICE E J. L. SPERANZA
-- GREX -- VERBALIA: URVINIO The gens Urvinia was an obscure plebeian family at
ancient Rome. No members of this gens are mentioned by Roman
writers, but several are known from inscriptions. Origin The nomen Urvinius belongs to a class
of gentilicia originally formed from cognomina ending in -inus, later sometimes
derived from other nomina.[1] Praenomina
The main praenomina of the Urvinii were Gaius, Publius, and Quintus, among the
most abundant names at all periods of Roman history. A few members of this gens
bore other common praenomina, including Lucius and Titus. Members This list includes abbreviated
praenomina. For an explanation of this practice, see filiation. Urvinius C. f.,
a priest mentioned in an inscription from Adria in Picenum, dating between the
middle of the second century and the late first century BC.[2] Publius Urvinius
P. f., a native of Forum Fulvii in Gallia Narbonensis, was a speculator, or
scout, in the Legio XIII Gemina. He was buried at Mogontiacum in Germania
Superior, aged thirty-five, in an early first-century tomb dedicated by his
cousin, Marcus Aruntius.[3] Gaius Urvinius Senecio, buried at Trebula Mutusca
in Samnium, along with Titus Sarrenius Geminus, in an early first-century tomb
dedicated by Quintus Vibius Kanio, one of the Seviri Augustales, and his
brother, Publius Vibius.[4] Quintus Urvinius, the former master of Gnaeus
Cornelius Neritus, a freedman and one of the Seviri Augustales, buried at
Verona in Venetia and Histria, in a tomb dating from the first half of the
first century.[5] Quintus Urvinius, a soldier buried at Argentorate in Germania
Superior, aged twenty-eight, in a tomb dating from the first half of the first
century.[6] Titus Urvinius, named in an inscription from Pompeii in
Campania.[7] Publius Urvinius P. f. Fortunatus, a youth buried at Carnuntum in
Pannonia Superior, aged seventeen, in a first-century tomb built by his mother,
Successa.[8] Gaius Urvinius Abascantus, buried at Aquileia in Venetia and
Histria, in a tomb dating between the middle of the first and the middle of the
second century.[9] Gaius Urvinius Crescens, built a tomb at Rome, dating from
the Flavian Dynasty, for his young son, Gaius Urvinius Ephaestus.[10] Gaius
Urvinius C. f. Ephaestus, a little boy buried at Rome, aged three years, five
months, and eight days, in a Flavian-era tomb built by his father, Gaius
Urvinius Crescens.[10] Urvinia T. l. Tyche, a freedwoman buried in a late
first- or early second-century tomb at Ventippo in Hispania Baetica, along with
the freedman Quintus Vibius Firmillo.[11] Quintus Urvinius Q. l. Callistus, a
freedman, built a temple for Saturn at Uchi Maius in Africa Proconsularis,
using funds allocated by the local decurions, in AD 98.[12] Gaius Urvinius
Pyrrhus, named in a second-century inscription from Fulginiae in Etruria. Part
of the inscription may be modern.[13] Gaius Urvinius Sabinianus, inurned at
Rome, in a second-century cinerarium dedicated by Publius Calpurnius Brocchus
and Gaius Catius Callistion, guardians of his daughters.[14] Publius Urvinius
Pastor, a soldier in the eighteenth volunteer cohort, buried at Gerulata in
Pannonia Superior, aged thirty-five, along with Papia Elpis, aged forty,
Urvinia Mussa, and Publius Urvinius Marcellinus, probably his siblings, in a
family sepulchre dating between the last quarter of the second century and the
end of the third, built by his mother, Papia Matercia, and brothers, Publius
Urvinius Messius and Julius Major.[15] Urvinia Mussa, buried at Gerulata, aged
twenty-eight, in a family sepulchre built by Papia Matercia, Publius Urvinius
Messius, and Julius Major, probably her mother and brothers, dating between the
last quarter of the second century and the end of the third.[15] Publius
Urvinius Marcellinus, buried at Gerulata, aged twenty-two, in a family
sepulchre built by Papia Matercia, Publius Urvinius Messius, and Julius Major,
probably his mother and brothers, dating between the last quarter of the second
century and the end of the third.[15] Publius Urvinius Messius, along with his
mother, Papia Matercia, and brother, Julius Major, built a family sepulchre at
Gerulata, dating between the last quarter of the second century and the end of
the third, for his brother, Publius Urvinius Pastor, and for Papia Elpis,
Urvinia Mussa, and Publius Urvinius Marcellinus, probably also his
siblings.[15] Undated Urvinii Lucius Urvinius L. (f.?), buried at Thubursicum
in Africa Proconsularis.[16] (Gaius) Urvinius C. f. Secundus, built a tomb at
Lambaesis in Numidia for his brother, Gaius Urvinius Victor.[17] Urvinia
Maximilla Successa, buried at Uchi Maius, aged thirty.[18] Lucius Urvinius
Thiasus, named in pottery inscriptions from Liguria.[19] Gaius Urvinius C. f.
Victor, buried at Lambaesis, aged thirty, in a tomb built by his brother,
Urvinius Secundus.[17] Publius Urvinius Q. f. Vitalis, buried at Uchi Maius,
aged forty.[20] See also List of Roman gentes References Chase, pp. 125, 126. CIL I, 3295. CIL XIII, 6884. AE 1994, 559.
CIL V, 3393. CIL XIII, 11629. CIL IV, 10243i. Hild, Das pannonische Niederösterreich,
Burgenland und Wien, 288. CIL V,
1436. CIL VI, 7942. AE 1979, 344a. CIL VIII, 26241. CIL XI, 5228.
CIL VI, 29602. AE 2006, 1053. CIL VIII, 15312. CIL VIII, 4176. AE 2006, 1734. CIL V, 8110,429. CIL VIII, 26388. Bibliography Theodor Mommsen et alii, Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum
(The Body of Latin Inscriptions, abbreviated CIL), Berlin-Brandenburgische
Akademie der Wissenschaften (1853–present). René Cagnat et alii, L'Année épigraphique (The Year in Epigraphy,
abbreviated AE), Presses Universitaires de France (1888–present). George Davis Chase, "The Origin of Roman Praenomina", in
Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, vol. VIII, pp. 103–184 (1897).
Friedrich Hild, Supplementum epigraphicum zu CIL III: das pannonische
Niederösterreich, Burgenland und Wien 1902–1968 (Epigraphic Supplement to CIL
III: Pannonian Lower Austria, Burgenland, and Vienna 1902–1968), Vienna (1968).
Category: Roman gentes And for THIS gens? Thanks
Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P.
Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Urvinio – Ossia: Grice ed
Urvinio – Grex griceiana – verbalia – Urvinio The Urvinii are perhaps the most
elusive of your recent gentes. Unlike the Umbrii, Umbricii,
Urseii, or Urgulanii, they leave us no grammarian, no jurist, no haruspex, no
famous conspirator. What survives is almost entirely epigraphic. Yet that
itself is interesting. The nomen: Urvinius belongs to the same broad family of
gentilicia that we have been examining, formed with the suffix -inius. The
original root is unfortunately obscure, unlike the transparent: Umbrius ← Umbria, or
Urbanius ← urbs. [GREXv3 | Word]
So the etymological game becomes harder. For a Grice-Speranza treatment,
the most attractive candidate is perhaps not the priest nor the soldier,
but: Quintus Urvinius Callistus, a freedman who built a temple of Saturn at
Uchi Maius in Africa, using funds voted by the local decurions in AD 98.
[GREXv3 | Word] Why him? Because he presents a nice interaction between: public authorization and
private execution. The decurions
assign money. Callistus builds. A Roman jurist would immediately ask: What was agreed? What authority was
delegated? A Gricean would ask: What was understood? One almost hears: Decuriones: Pecunia danda est templo Saturni. (Money is
to be given for a temple of Saturn.)
+> Somebody should carry out the work. Callistus: Intellego. (I understand.) +> I am the one expected to do it. The
institutional fact depends upon successful uptake. But there is another Urvinius whom you may
like even more: Publius Urvinius, the
speculator (scout) of the Legio XIII Gemina. [GREXv3 | Word] The word:
speculator is delightful from a
Gricean perspective. Not yet a philosopher's "speculator." Not a
financial speculator. But literally: one
who watches, observes, reports. Almost
an official recoverer of implicatures. The general asks: "What is happening over the
hill?" The scout returns with: signs, traces, indications. The military version of our old friend
Umbricius Melior, except that the signs are footprints and troop movements
rather than entrails. One could schematize:
exta → conspiracy (Melior)
whereas tracks → enemy
(Urvinius). Both involve interpretation
of evidence. I am also struck by the
family sepulchre at Gerulata, where:
Publius Urvinius Pastor, Urvinia Mussa, Publius Urvinius Marcellinus,
Publius Urvinius Messius, appear as a
family network commemorating one another. [GREXv3 | Word] There is something
profoundly Roman here. Not philosophy. Not politics. Not rhetoric. Simply: memory.
And Roman inscriptions are, in a sense, delayed conversations. The dead
address the living. One might almost define an epitaph as: a conversational contribution whose recipient
is indefinitely postponed. A notion that
I suspect Grice would have appreciated.
Returning to your earlier contrast between Bologna and Oxford, the
Urvinii are a useful corrective. We have spent much time with: jurists, grammarians, philosophers,
historians. Yet most Romans were not any
of these. They were: soldiers, freedmen,
merchants, local magistrates, family members erecting tombs. The inscriptions of the Urvinii show
precisely that world. No treatise survives. No dialogue survives. Yet every
inscription presupposes what Grice would call a communicative intention: "Remember this person."
"Honour this relative." "Know who built this temple." The Roman world runs on such acts no less
than on jurisprudence. So if I had to choose a Gricean hero among the Urvinii,
I might unexpectedly choose the scout:
Publius Urvinius the speculator. [GREXv3 | Word] For he spends his life doing what so many of
your heroes do: observing signs, drawing
conclusions, reporting meanings to others.
A military Gricean avant la lettre. (Ha.) and is speculatio cognate with
Grice's perspicuity. When in a good mood, Grice would formulate a
conversational maxim in a self-deating way: 'be perspicuous (sic)' -- hardly
perspicuos. For less elaborate tutees he would refer to it simply as the
desideratum of conversational clarity (as in Lewis, "Clarity is not
enough"). Speculum is also mirror, as in Dahlabacher 'speculative
rationality' face to face mise en abyme -- but is perspicuous then cognate with
speculatio? Thanks -- because some sloppy speakers sometimes use 'pespicacious'
meaning 'perspicuous' -- unclear! Thanks Yes, they are related, but not as
directly as one might first suppose. There are really two Latin roots in play:
1. specio / specere ("to look, behold") From this come: speculator = watcher, observer, scout
speculatio = watching, observing, contemplation speculum = mirror species =
appearance, form spectare = to look at spectator = observer Your Publius Urvinius the military speculator
belongs here. The original speculator is literally the fellow on the tower
looking into the distance. Hence the Roman military scout. The philosopher's
"speculation" is metaphorically an intellectual lookout-post. 2. perspicio ("to see through")
This is: per + specio that is,
to look through, to see thoroughly, to survey completely. Hence:
perspicere = to see clearly perspicuus = transparent, clear, evident
perspicuitas = clarity So Grice's
beloved: Be perspicuous is etymologically: "See through things and let others see
through what you say." The
connection with speculator is therefore genuine: speculator speculatio speculum
perspicuus all belong ultimately to the
same visual family. The joke about Grice
is particularly apt. The maxim: Be
perspicuous is itself not especially
perspicuous. Grice knew this very well. That is why he often paraphrased it for
students as something closer to: Be
clear. or Avoid obscurity and ambiguity. The Oxford don in him liked the slightly
pompous Latinate adjective; the tutor in him knew that many undergraduates
would immediately ask: "What's
perspicuous mean?" (Ha.) Now to perspicuous versus perspicacious. This
is exactly where speakers become confused. Perspicuous From: perspicuus
Meaning: clear, transparent, easy
to understand. Applied to: prose, arguments, explanations,
lectures. Example: "Grice's exposition was
perspicuous." Meaning: The exposition was clear. Perspicacious Ultimately from: perspicax
Meaning: sharp-sighted,
discerning, insightful. Applied to: persons, readers, judges, interpreters. Example:
"Strawson was perspicacious."
Meaning: Strawson was
insightful. A perspicacious reader
appreciates a perspicuous text. The two words are cousins, not twins. Your observation about conventio is also very
good. Grice resisted identifying non-natural meaning simply with convention.
Suppose I invent this minute: raising
one eyebrow means: "Meet me at the
Bodleian." There is, perhaps, a
tiny convention. But it would feel odd to call this a fully conventional
sign-system. Conversely language itself is conventional, yet what interests
Grice is not convention but: intention
recognized by another. Hence his
dissatisfaction with the easy contrast:
natural sign versus conventional sign.
He moves instead toward: natural
meaning versus non-natural meaning.
because the latter lets him focus on the speaker's intention. As he
would say, roughly: A person can mean
something by producing an act. without
implying that the act itself is a
conventional sign. This is where your
Latin comes back beautifully. A Roman jurist such as Urseius Ferox might
ask: quid inter eos convenit? (what
understanding was reached between them?)
Grice asks something slightly different:
What did one intend the other to recognize? The Roman begins from: conventio
(shared agreement). Grice begins from:
intentio (recognized intention).
The two overlap but are not identical. And this perhaps explains why Grice
preferred: non-natural meaning over
conventional meaning. Something
can signify because of a convention. Something can signify because of an
intention. And sometimes the second operates even where the first scarcely
exists at all. That is a very Roman-juristic insight expressed in very
Oxford-philosophical English. And etymologically, your military speculator and
Grice's maxim of perspicuity do indeed belong to the same ancient family of
looking, seeing, surveying, and making visible. One stands on a watchtower
scanning the horizon; the other tries to make an argument transparent to the
hearer. In both cases, the ideal is that nothing important remains hidden from
view. (Ha.) And is 'perspicacious' yet _cognate_ with the 'speculatio' and
'perspicuity'? thanks Yes. In fact perspicacious, perspicuous, perspicuity,
speculation, speculator, and speculum are all members of the same large Latin
family. The family tree looks roughly like this: specio / specere "to look, behold" from which come: speculator = watcher, scout speculatio =
observation, contemplation speculum = mirror species = appearance, form
perspicio = look through perspicuus = seen through, transparent, clear
perspicax = seeing through keenly, sharp-sighted The interesting divergence comes late. Perspicuous
Latin: perspicuus literally:
"visible through," "transparent." Hence:
clear prose, clear argument, clear exposition. Applied to the object. A Gricean lecture
should ideally be: perspicuous. Perspicacious Latin: perspicax
from: perspicere + the suffix
-ax, the suffix often indicating a
disposition or tendency. Literally:
"one who sees through things well." Hence:
discerning, insightful, penetrating.
Applied to the subject. A Strawsonian hearer should ideally be: perspicacious. So: A
perspicacious reader appreciates a perspicuous text. And this explains the common confusion.
People often say: "Her paper was
very perspicacious." when they
mean: "Her paper was very
perspicuous." Strictly: the paper is perspicuous; the author may be
perspicacious. Though modern usage
sometimes blurs the distinction. From a
Grice-Speranza perspective, the joke is irresistible. Grice's maxim is: Be perspicuous. But etymologically this could almost be
paraphrased as: "Make what you say
easy to see through." Not: "Be clever." Not:
"Be insightful."
But: "Arrange matters so
that your hearer can see through them."
Hence the connection to the Roman military speculator, your Urvinius
hero. The scout sees what others cannot see. The perspicacious person sees
through what others do not see through. The perspicuous speaker makes things
easy to see through. The speculative philosopher stares at things for a long
time and claims to see beyond them. All descend from the same ancestral
act: looking. One could almost formulate a Gricean
etymological ladder: speculator
looks. perspicax sees through. perspicuus can be seen through. Grice wants discourse to be
perspicuous. The tutee should be
perspicacious. (Ha.) And perhaps this
explains Grice's affection for the slightly pompous "Be perspicuous."
It sounds odd in English because the adjective is rare, but in Latin it is
beautifully visual. The maxim is not merely:
"Be clear." It is: "Let the hearer see through what you are
doing." Indeed. At one point, Grice when lecturing his tutees on that
would feel like a maxim was too broad -- such as ''be perspicuous' (sic)' where
the 'sic' is added by Grice to alert the tutee that 'perspicuous' is not per se
perspicuous. Or that 'Be perspicuous' is self-defeating as a maxim --
formulated as a maxim -- for it aims to regulate things that can be seeen
through -- it is the CONVERSATIONALIST who is supposed to be perspicuous, not
his move -- and this is within an imperative, i. e. as within the conversatioanlist's
rational control -- versus 'be blond' --. And if he would think a maxim was too
general, he would call it super-maxim, and the maxims under it would be the
maxims proper, often labelled 'sub-maxims'. Thus 'avoid obscurity of
expression' -- be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity) (sic --again) since
self-deaeating -- would fall under 'be perspicuous.' For some reason, he uses
Aristotle and Kant and the mediaeval in Latin since Boethius translation of the
predicamenta with MODVS being the predicamentum indicated here -- used as
'Modus' proper in Grice's seminars --. Thanks -- The romans had an officer --
the speculator -- St. John's had an overseer! Yes, and this is one of the most
characteristically Gricean moments in the whole enterprise. Grice is not merely
offering a list of maxims. He is constantly worrying about the logical type of
the maxim itself. Take: Be
perspicuous. He knows perfectly well
that the formulation is, in a sense, imperspicuous. Hence the famous Oxfordian
"(sic)" after: "Be
perspicuous (sic)." The joke is not
merely lexical. The joke is philosophical. For what is it that is supposed to
be perspicuous? Strictly speaking, not: the speaker,
but: the contribution. Yet the maxim is addressed imperatively to
the speaker: Be perspicuous. Which makes it look as though perspicuity
were a character trait, like: Be
courteous. or Be punctual.
while what is really under regulation is a mode of performance. Exactly
as you say, Grice occasionally analyses this under the Aristotelian and
mediaeval heading of: modus (mode,
manner), corresponding to the category
of Manner. Hence: Category of Manner ↓
Super-maxim: Be perspicuous ↓ Sub-maxims: Avoid obscurity of expression. Avoid
ambiguity. Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity). Be orderly. The reason "Be perspicuous" becomes
a super-maxim is that it governs a heterogeneous family of more specific
prescriptions. Otherwise it is too general to guide conduct. A tutee may well
ask: "How do I become
perspicuous?" while "Avoid ambiguity" gives him something more operational. And the self-referential joke becomes even
better with: Be brief (avoid unnecessary
prolixity). Grice loved pointing out
that: avoid unnecessary prolixity is itself prolix relative to: be brief.
Hence yet another "(sic)." The maxim illustrates the phenomenon
it seeks to prevent. Almost like writing:
"Keep notices short" on
a six-page memorandum. (Ha.) Your
connection with the Roman speculator is actually stronger than it may first
appear. We noted before that:
speculator, speculatio, speculum, perspicuus, perspicax all descend from the visual family built
around: specere ("to
look"). The Roman military
speculator stands on a hill looking outward. The Gricean hearer is asked to be
able to look through an utterance. The difference is: speculator → sees distant objects. perspicax → sees through complexities. perspicuus → can be seen through. A lovely Latin family resemblance. And here Grice's distinction between: natural and non-natural meaning becomes relevant. He comes to
distrust: conventional sign as a fundamental category. For precisely the
reasons you indicate. Something may have arisen through: conventio, agreement, social practice, without being what we naturally call: conventional.
And conversely many things we call conventional are not traceable to any
actual historical act of agreeing. Hence Grice prefers: meaningNN
(non-natural meaning) rather than:
conventional meaning. The centre
of gravity shifts from: convention to
intention. A hand-wave may indeed
signify something. Yet the wave is not necessarily a conventional sign in the
robust sense that: the word
"cat" is a conventional sign.
The signifying work is being done by the communicator. As Grice gradually
realises, one can say: He signified that
p. without committing oneself to: The thing he produced was a sign. That is a subtle but important
distinction. A Roman jurist such as
Urseius Ferox would probably begin from:
convenit (it was agreed). A
Gricean begins from: intellexit (he
understood). The Roman asks: What convention binds? The Gricean asks: What intention was recognised? And perhaps that is why Grice, despite his
affection for Latin tags, finally cannot remain within the Roman vocabulary
of: contractus, conventio, pactum. He needs a vocabulary of: intention, recognition, uptake. The jurist's world is agreement. The
philosopher's world is understanding. Yet the two touch at every point. One
might almost imagine a dialogue: Urseius Ferox:
Quid inter eos convenit? (What was agreed between them?) Grice:
"That is important."
Ferox: Quid igitur quaeris? (What
then are you looking for?) Grice: "How each knew that the other knew what
had been agreed." At which point
the Roman law lecture at Bononia quietly turns into an Oxford tutorial on meaning.
(Ha.)
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