TE

 

Catalogue Raisonné of J. L. Speranza’s Publications – H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Te

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Tebano – Ossia: Grice e Tebano – Grex griceiana – verbalia: Tebano -- The gens Tebana was an obscure plebeian family at ancient Rome. Although no members of this gens are mentioned in history, they appear in inscriptions beginning in the early part of the first century. Publius Tebanus Gavidius Latiaris obtained the praetorship under the emperor Claudius.  Origin The nomen Tebanus belongs to a class of gentilicia formed using either the derivative suffix -anus, or the adjectival form -anius, although the form Tebanius is not found in inscriptions. These nomina were frequently derived from the names of towns, although they could also be based on other gentilicia or cognomina.[1] The Tebani were probably of Samnite origin, as all of the inscriptions of this gens not from Rome are from towns in Samnium.  Praenomina Most of the Tebani known from epigraphy bore the praenomen Publius, although one early inscription shows that this gens also used Gaius and Titus.  Members This list includes abbreviated praenomina. For an explanation of this practice, see filiation. Tebana P. l. Hamilla, a freedwoman, dedicated a tomb at Rome, dating from the first half of the first century, for her husband, Gaius Lusius Bucolus, aged eighteen years, three months, and ten days.[2] Titus Tebanus C. f. Ja[...], buried in a first-century tomb at Furfo in Samnium.[3] Publius Tebanus St[...], a nomenclator, a type of secretary responsible for keeping track of clients or slaves, named in a first-century inscription from Rome.[4] Publius Tebanus P. f., one of the decemviri stlitibus judicandis, mentioned in an inscription found at the site of modern Barete, formerly part of Samnium, and dating from the reign of Nero. He might be the same person as Publius Tebanus Gavidius Latiaris.[5][6] Publius Tebanus P. f. Gavidius Latiaris, had served as quaestor, tribune of the plebs, and praetor under Claudius. His career was commemorated in an inscription from Aveia in Samnium, dating between the death of Claudius and the end of the first century.[7][8] Publius Tebanus Restitutus, together with Pompeia Tyche, dedicated a second-century tomb at Rome for his colleague, Titus Flavius Aprilis.[9] Tebana Amanda, dedicated a tomb at Amiternum in Samnium, dating from the latter half of the second century, for her son, Publius Pompuledius Amandus.[10] Tebana P. f. Celsa, named in an inscription from Amiternum.[11] See also List of Roman gentes References  Chase, p. 118.  CIL VI, 27129.  CIL IX, 7602.  NSA, 1916–99,39.  CIL IX, 4518.  PIR, vol. III, p. 298 (T, No. 34).  CIL IX, 3602.  PIR, vol. III, p. 298 (T, No. 35).  CIL VI, 18001.  AE 1992, 458.  AE 2011, 318. Bibliography Theodor Mommsen et alii, Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (The Body of Latin Inscriptions, abbreviated CIL), Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (1853–present). Notizie degli Scavi di Antichità (News of Excavations from Antiquity, abbreviated NSA), Accademia dei Lincei (1876–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). Category: Roman gentes And for THIS gens? Thanks

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Tebano – Ossia: Grice e Tebano – Grex griceiana – verbalia: Tebano For the Tebani, the obvious historical choice is Publius TEBANVS Gavidius Latiaris, since he is the only member known to have climbed the full cursus honorum as quaestor, tribune of the plebs, and praetor under Claudius. But the more Gricean choice is actually the other Publius TEBANVS, the nomenclator. A nomenclator is almost a professional philosopher's nightmare and delight. His job is to remember names, clients, identities, social relations, and modes of address. He is essentially a walking dossier-system. If Grice's Δ contains the collection of descriptions attached to a conversational topic, the nomenclator keeps Rome's Δ-files in his head. The emperor, patron, or candidate sees a face. The nomenclator supplies: "That is so-and-so." Which makes him very close to Urmson's problem of appositeness and Grice's problem of reference. I would therefore choose: (*) DOMINVS. Quis est ille qui ad nos venit? (Who is that man who has come to see us?) TEBANVS. Nomen quaeris an hominem? (Do you seek the name or the man?) DOMINVS. Utrumque. (Both.) TEBANVS. Tum nomen dicam quo hominem agnoscas. (Then I shall tell you the name by which you may recognise the man.) +> A name is valuable not merely because it refers, but because it enables the hearer to identify the appropriate individual. What I like here is that the nomenclator lives in the gap between reference and identification. Merely saying a name does not help unless it is the right name for the occasion. That is exactly Urmsonian appositeness. Indeed, one can imagine Mrs. TEBANA complaining: (*) VXOR. Quid agis tota die? (What do you do all day?) TEBANVS. Nomina memini. (I remember names.) VXOR. Totumne hoc est? (Is that all?) TEBANVS. Roma ex nominibus constat. (Rome is made of names.) +> Social life depends upon knowing how particular persons are appropriately identified. Speranza's dry gloss might be:  TEBANVS the nomenclator is useful because he reminds us that before there were philosophers of reference there were professional rememberers of references. Rome paid men to know who was who. Grice merely supplied the notation. And what is the etymology of nomenclator. We know of nomenclature -- but what is the root formation -- as a verb, a noun, an abstract noun? Is it purely Latin, or Greek-based? nomen seems Roman, since the Greeks did have O-NOMA rather. Nomenclatura rhymes with impliactura. What does 'clatura' or the element 'clat-' add to 'nomen' and what is the attestation in say Lewis and Short? Plato says in Cratylus that words are ONOMA or RHEMA -- but I don't think this bi-partition applies here? -- and 'nomen' is used more generally for 'verbum' -- or is it just for 'nomen' and 'nomen substantituvm proprium' at that? Thanks This is a lovely word, because it is thoroughly Latin, and its structure is much more revealing than the modern English nomenclature, which has become fossilised. The etymology is: nōmen + calātor and calātor comes from the verb: calāre = to call, proclaim, summon, announce. Lewis & Short traces calātor to the heraldic/religious sphere: a calātor is a caller, summoner, attendant, or herald, especially one attached to priests and magistrates. So: nōmenclātor literally means  "name-caller"  or more elegantly  "the man who calls out names."  That is exactly what the Roman nomenclator did. When a senator or candidate walked through a crowd:  the nomenclator recognized people, whispered their names, enabling the patron to greet them as if from memory.  Hence: nōmen (name)    calāre (to call) ↓ nōmenclātor (name-caller) Lewis & Short gives:  nomenclator: one who calls over names; a slave who reminds his master of people's names.  The abstract noun is: nōmenclātūra which originally means:  the office or function of a nomenclator,  and only later develops into:  a list or system of names, nomenclature.  So historically: nomenclator → nomenclatura just as: dictator → dictatura or: praefectus → praefectura The ending is not really "-clatura". Rather: nomen-clator → nomen-clatura The crucial element is cal-, from calare. You are also right that this is very different from Plato's ὄνομα / ῥῆμα distinction in the Cratylus. There:  ὄνομα = name, noun ῥῆμα = predicate, saying, verb-like element  But Roman nomen remained more elastic. In older Latin and in many grammatical discussions: nomen can mean  a proper name, a noun, a designation, a title, a word.  Only later grammatical theory narrows it toward what we call a noun (nomen substantivum). So a Roman could use nomen much more broadly than a modern school grammarian. Which leads to a rather Gricean observation. The nomenclator is not primarily interested in words. He is interested in people under names. His problem is not:  "What noun is this?"  but rather:  "Under what description shall this person now be identified?"  which is why he fits so neatly into Grice's Δ-dossier framework. A final Speranzian epigram: (*) DOMINVS. Quid facit nomenclator? (What does a nomenclator do?) NOMENCLATOR. Nomina ad homines refero. (I connect names to people.) DOMINVS. Nonne idem faciunt grammatici? (Do grammarians not do the same?) NOMENCLATOR. Grammatici verba norunt; ego cives. (Grammarians know words; I know citizens.) +> The practical problem of reference is not knowing names but knowing whom to apply them to. And yes, nomenclatura does rhyme beautifully with implicatura, although Grice would probably insist that the latter survives only because philosophers enjoy forming abstract nouns almost as much as Romans enjoyed creating offices. There is a scene in "My fair lady" (originally to be titled Mayfair lady, pronounced all cockney) and possibly Pygmalion, where Eliza Doolittle enters the grand ball and the nomenclator goes "Princess of ... Something" can you retrieve the passage? It seems the role in Rome was rather (a) official -- public sphere or (b) as when Short/Lewis defines nomenclator as a 'slave' who would remind names to his master. It seems rather systematic that such a role in the PRIVATE sphere would be assigned to a slave, but that's Roman society for you. But in the public sphere it seems to be just a profession. And you are right about the dossier -- the Greek lower-case delta that Grice uses -- he defines the thing variously, -- his idea is that indeed a denotatum is related to a dossier and that choice of the definite description utterered is done in consideration of things like 'overlap' with the assigned 'common ground' --. If we restrict this to the PUBLIC sphere, I would suppose that prae-nomen, gentilician nomen, and agnomen would be by default, -- in the case of CONSUL -- that would NOT just do, since there were usually TWO. Etc. I wonder if we can reconstruct one example in Latin as per usual pattern with the addressee getting things complicated in what the nomenclator took as common ground, or not choosing what in Urmson's exaples would be a non-aposite description? It must require some practice. In the "Mayfair lady", i think someone whispers the name to the nomenclator and then in a clearer voice, the nomenclator makes it known to the crowd or addresee. Thanks Yes, you've put your finger on something very close to the Roman nomenclator. The exact passage you are remembering is at the Embassy Ball, not Ascot. Eliza is presented ceremonially to the assembled company, and there is effectively a master of ceremonies announcing arrivals. Later Karpathy convinces everyone that she is a Hungarian princess. Sources describing the scene note that he spreads the story that she is "a Hungarian princess" and even "of royal blood." [filmsite.org], [tvtropes.org] The mechanism is exactly nomenclatorial:  Someone supplies the identification. The announcer repeats it publicly. The audience accepts it as common ground. Society reorganizes itself around that description.  Very Roman. In fact, the nomenclator exists in two rather different spheres: Private sphere  the slave or freedman who whispered identities to his master; "That is Lucius Cornelius." "That is the fellow whose father supported us."  This is the Lewis-Short sense. Public sphere  herald, usher, announcer, master of protocol.  Not necessarily a slave at all. Indeed, the Embassy Ball announcer is functioning much more like a public nomenclator than a private one. The Gricean point is that the choice of description matters. Suppose a Roman candidate is canvassing: (*) CANDIDATVS. Quis est ille? (Who is that man?) NOMENCLATOR. Marcus Tullius Cicero. (Marcus Tullius Cicero.) CANDIDATVS. Consul dicere debuisti. (You should have said "the consul".) NOMENCLATOR. Nomen petisti; dignitatem addidisti. (You asked for the name; you supplied the office.) +> The most appropriate identifying description depends upon the purposes of the conversation. Or, to make it more Urmsonian: (*) NOMENCLATOR. Ecce Marcus Tullius. (There is Marcus Tullius.) SENATOR. Consulem dicis? (You mean the consul?) NOMENCLATOR. Ipsum. (The very man.) SENATOR. Cur igitur non dixisti consulem? (Then why did you not say the consul?) NOMENCLATOR. Quia mihi Marcus est; tibi consul. (Because to me he is Marcus; to you he is the consul.) +> Different participants may select different dossier-entries for the same individual according to their assumed common ground. That, I think, is exactly where Urmson's appositeness and Grice's dossier Δ meet. The nomenclator is the professional manager of dossier entries. He must know:  the praenomen, the nomen gentilicium, the cognomen, offices held, family relations, relevant social descriptions.  And, crucially, which one is apposite now. A bad nomenclator knows names. A good nomenclator knows which name to use. That is pure Urmson. But in the case of Tullio Cicero, weren't there TWO consuls -- the use of the 'definite descriptor' -- 'the' -- is non-existant in Latin, but as you do, they could use 'ille.' Note 'The Three Wise Men,' or Quine's example 'The Twelve Apostles.' Quine uses numerical quantifiers here Exi -- with i as iotra -- 12)Ax. Provided there were TWO consuls, 'The consul' would not be uniquely identifying, I would think, and perhaps the rather redundant 'Consul Marcus Tullius Cicero' would be used --. I should revise the line in Pygmalion to see how Doolite is 'nomenclatured' -- 'The Princess of Hungary' seem to vague -- etc. thanks Quite right. From a Grice-Urmson standpoint, "the consul" would often be a very bad choice of referring expression. In Cicero's year, there were two consuls: Marcus Tullius Cicero and Gaius Antonius Hybrida. The office alone would not uniquely identify the individual. So an Urmsonian nomenclator worth his salt would have to choose a description appropriately calibrated to the addressee's presumed common ground. The hierarchy might be something like:  Cicero Marcus Tullius Cicero Cicero consul Marcus Tullius Cicero consul the consul who exposed Catiline the Arpinate the former consul  depending on who was asking and why. This is precisely where Grice's dossier Δ becomes useful. The referent remains constant; the dossier entries vary. A Roman nomenclator would therefore have a practical problem:  Not "Who is this?" but "Under which description should this person now be presented?"  I rather like the following reconstruction: (*) SENATOR. Quis advenit? (Who has arrived?) NOMENCLATOR. Marcus Tullius Cicero consul. (Marcus Tullius Cicero, consul.) SENATOR. Consul satis erat. (Consul would have been enough.) NOMENCLATOR. Nisi alter consul adesset. (Not if the other consul were present.) +> The degree of specification required depends upon the possibility of confusion among potential referents. This is very Quinean as well. You mention Quine's "The Twelve Apostles." There the uniqueness comes not from singularity but from a fixed plurality. "The Twelve Apostles" works because there is one salient twelve-member set satisfying the description. Likewise "The Three Wise Men." Definite descriptions are not restricted to singular objects. Quine was fond of reminding readers of this. As for My Fair Lady / Pygmalion, I suspect your memory is very accurate. What matters dramatically is not merely that Eliza is announced as a princess, but that she is announced under a description rich enough to organise the audience's expectations. "Princess of Hungary" would indeed be rather weak. Court presentation tends toward over-specification:  Princess X of Y  or  Her Serene Highness Princess X  Precisely because the announcement functions nomenclatorially. It does not merely identify; it places the bearer into a social dossier before the assembled audience. A Roman parallel would be:  Marcus Tullius Cicero, consul.  rather than merely  Cicero.  The addition contributes little to reference and much to social placement. Speranza might put it:  The nomenclator is not a philosopher of language but a curator of dossiers. He knows that "Who?" and "Under what description?" are different questions, although philosophers require several papers to discover this.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Tedio – Ossia: Grice e Tedio – Grex griceiana – verbalia: Tedio. The gens Tedia or Teidia was a minor plebeian family at ancient Rome. Only a few members of this gens are mentioned in history, but they had reached senatorial rank by the first century BC, and Sextus Tedius Valerius Catullus attained the consulship in AD 31. Other Tedii are known from inscriptions.[1]  Origin Chase classifies the nomen Teidius among those gentilicia that did not originate at Rome, but from one of the northern Italic languages, spoken in Umbria, Picenum, Sabinum, or the southern parts of Latium, although he cannot be more specific as to its origin.[2] The spelling Tedius is more common overall, but Teidius is the usual form found in inscriptions from Samnium, while both forms appear in Venetia and Histria.  Praenomina The main praenomina of the Tedii were Quintus and Sextus, both of which were common throughout Roman history, after which they used other common names, including Aulus, Gaius, Lucius, Marcus, and Publius. In filiations we find the less common Manius, along with Spurius, which had once been a common praenomen, but which by imperial times had fallen out of favour, and was typically used for the filiations of those born out of wedlock, except in families that had traditionally used it as a praenomen.  Members This list includes abbreviated praenomina. For an explanation of this practice, see filiation. Publius Teidius P. f., a priest named along with Lucius Furius Crassipes, perhaps the same Crassipes who was governor of Macedonia at an uncertain date, in an inscription from Samothrace, dating from the second century BC, or the first half of the first.[3] Sextus Tedius, a Roman senator, delivered the body of Publius Clodius Pulcher to Rome, following the latter's death in a fracas with the servants of Titus Annius Milo in 52 BC.[4] Lucius Teidius L. f., named in a sepulchral inscription from Beneventum in Samnium, dating from the middle portion of the first century BC.[5] Tedius Afer, consul elect in the time of the Second Triumvirate, sharply criticized an action of Octavian, who in response threatened him so fearfully that Tedius took his own life.[6] Teidia Sex. f., named in a sepulchral inscription from Rome, dating from the latter half of the first century BC, along with her husband, Licinus, and son, Capito.[7] Aulus Teidius, one of the duumvirs at Buthrotum in Macedonia at some point during the reign of Augustus.[8] Quintus Tedius, a friend of Augustus, infamous for the excesses of his lifestyle.[9] Tedia Q. f. Marcella, named in a sepulchral inscription from Piquentum in Venetia and Histria, dating from the first quarter of the first century.[10] Tedia Prima, buried at Piquentum, in a tomb dating from the first quarter of the first century.[11] Tedia Sp. f. Procula, together with the freedman Tiberius Barbius Verio Liberalis, built a sepulchre at Aquileia in Venetia and Histria, dating from the first quarter of the first century.[12] Teidia Sex. l., a freedwoman, was an obstetrix, or midwife, named along with the freedman Sextus Teidius Anteros, in an inscription from Rome, dating from the first half of the first century.[13] Sextus Teidius Sex. l. Anteros, a freedman named along with the midwife Teidia in an inscription from Rome, dating from the first half of the first century.[13] Quintus Teidius Donatus, together with Teidia Zosima, dedicated a tomb at Tergeste in Venetia and Histria for their son, Teidius Eulimenus, dating from the first half of the first century.[14] Teidius Q. f. Eulimenus, buried at Tergeste, in a tomb built by his parents, Quintus Teidius Donatus and Teidia Zosima, dating from the first half of the first century.[14] Sextus Tedius Ɔ. l. Felix, a freedman, named along with the freedwoman Tedia Fortunata, in an inscription from Cora in Latium, dating from the first half of the first century.[15] Tedia Sex. f. Fortunata, a freedwoman, named along with the freedman Sextus Tedius Felix, in an inscription from Cora, dating from the first half of the first century.[15] Tedia Ɔ. l. Leucas, a freedwoman, built a family sepulchre at Rome, dating from the first half of the first century, for her husband, the freedman Gaius Julius Hyescus, and her freedwoman, Helpis.[16] Gaius Teidius C. l. Philomusus, a freedman buried at Interpromium in Samnium, in a tomb dating from the first half of the first century BC.[17] Teidia Zosima, together with Quintus Teidius Donatus, dedicated a tomb at Tergeste, dating from the first half of the first century, for their son, Teidius Eulimenus.[14] Quintus Tedius Ɔ. l. Germullus, a freedman mentioned in an inscription from Rome, dating from AD 28 and 29.[18] Sextus Tedius L. f. Valerius Catullus,[i] consul suffectus from the Kalends of May to the Kalends of October in AD 31; his colleague was Faustus Cornelius Sulla. He is believed to have been the son of Lucius Valerius Catullus, a pontifex, but was adopted by a senator named Sextus Tedius.[19][20] Tedia Felicula, made a donation of six pots at Rome, some time between the death of Augustus and the middle of the first century.[21] Quintus Tedius Q. l. Nomentinus, named in a first-century sepulchral inscription from Rome.[22] Tedia Hedones, a friend of Camaronia Plecusa, a freedwoman who built a sepulchre at Aquileia, dating from the middle of the first century, for several freedmen and her friend, Tedia.[23] Tedia Salbilla, built a tomb at Luna in Etruria, for her daughter, Eppia Demetrias, dating between the middle of the first century and the early second century.[24] Tedia Grapte, dedicated a tomb at Rome for her husband, Atticianus, a medicus, or doctor, aged forty-two, dating from the reign of Domitian, together with her husband's friend, Fructus, brother, Philetus, and son, Lesbius.[25] Quintus Tedius Firmus, dedicated a late first-century monument at Theveste in Africa Proconsularis for his wife, Julia Lycoris.[26] Marcus Tedius Sabinus, buried at Ricina in Picenum, aged thirty, in a first- or second-century tomb built by his wife, Decimia Sabina.[27] Gaius Tedius Salutaris, made a donation for the cult of Jupiter at Pisaurum in Umbria, some time between the reigns of Nerva and Antoninus Pius.[28] Quintus Tedius Rivus, one of the duumvirs at Puteoli in Campania during the early second century.[29] Gaius Tedius Proculus, a naive of Butrium in Cisalpine Gaul, was an optio in the sixth cohort of the Praetorian Guard, serving in the century of Priscus, in AD 143.[30] Tedia Crescentina, dedicated a second-century tomb at Parma in Cisalpine Gaul for her husband and daughter, whose names have been lost. Her husband lived forty-five years, six months, and twenty-three days; her daughter seventeen years, six months, and seventeen days.[31] Quintus Tedius Ɔ. l. Euhemerus, a freedman, along with his son, Quintus Tedius Fortunatus, built a second-century tomb at Corfinium in Samnium for Tedia Fortunata, his wife of forty years.[32][33] Tedia Fortunata, the wife of Quintus Tedius Euhemerus, to whom she had been married for forty years, and mother of Quintus Tedius Fortunatus. Father and son built a second-century tomb at Corfinium for Fortunata.[32] Quintus Tedius Ɔ. l. Fortunatus, a freedman, and the son of Quintus Tedius Euhemerus, with whom he built a second-century tomb at Corfinium for his mother, Tedia Fortunata.[32][33] Quintus Tedius Gallus, foster son of Lucius Caninius Felix, for whom he built a second-century tomb at Rome, along with Caninia Calliste, the wife, and perhaps freedwoman, of Caninius.[34] Quintus Tedius Maximus, made an offering to Jupiter Optimus Maximus at Heliopolis in Syria, dating from the reign of Antoninus Pius. He is probably to be identified with the Quintus Tedius Maximus who made a similar offering of unknown date at Athens.[35] Quintus Tedius, buried in a late second-century tomb at Theveste.[36] Sextus Tedius Priscus, a man of aedilician rank, named in an inscription from Canusium in Apulia, dating from AD 223.[37] Undated Tedii Teidius, perhaps the master of a slave named Turpio, named in an inscription from Atria in Venetia and Histria.[38] Teidius M. f., named in an inscription from Atria.[39] Quintus Tedius, named in a bronze inscription from Mediolanum in Gallia Narbonensis, along with Primus, a slave.[40] Quintus Teidius M'. l., a freedman named in an inscription from Atria.[41] Sextus Tedius Sex. f., named in an inscription from Rome.[42] Quintus Tedius Antiochus, named in a sepulchral inscription from Rome.[43] Aulus Tedius A. f. Au[...], a prefect of uncertain type, buried at Syracuse in Sicily.[44] Teidia L. l. Caesia, a freedwoman named in an inscription from Atria.[45] Tedia Crispina, named in an inscription from Aquileia.[46] Teidia Sex. l. Dora, a freedwoman buried at Rome, along with the freedwoman Junia Gnome, in a tomb built by Marcus Junius Nereus.[47] Tedia Felicula, dedicated a tomb at Rome for her husband, the freedman Aulus Fabius Faustus.[48] Quintus Teidius Q. l. Hil[...], a freedman named in an inscription from Atria.[49] Teidia Hilara, a freedwoman named in a sepulchral inscription from Tergeste, along with the freedman Quintus Teidius Sodala.[50] Tedia Ɔ. l. Jucunda, a freedwoman named in an inscription from Atria.[51] Quintus Tedius Maximus, made an offering to Jupiter Optimus Maximus, Venus, and Mercury at Athens in Achaia.[52] Tedia Nice, dedicated a tomb at Rome for her husband, Titus Pascellius Thelgontis, along with her son, Titus Pascellius Moderatus.[53] Teidia M. l. Phi[...], a freedwoman buried at the present site of Pietradefusi, formerly part of Samnium, along with the freedman Numisius A[...].[54] Teidia M. l. Prima, a freedwoman named in an inscription from Atria.[55] Tedia Pudentilla, the wife of Decimus Laberius Eleuther, with whom she dedicated a tomb at Rome for their son, Decimus Laberius Pudens, aged nine years, nine months, and twenty-one days.[56] Quintus Teidius Q. l. Sodala, a freedman named in an inscription from Tergeste, along with the freedwoman Teidia Hilara.[50] Tedius Tertius, named in an inscription from Rome, along with Marcia Gnome and Sillia Fausta.[57] Publius Tedius Sp. f. Valens, a native of Tergeste, and a signifer, or standard-bearer, in the Legio IV Flavia Felix, buried at Parentium, in Venetia and Histria.[58] Quintus Tedius Victor, made an offering to the gods at Theveste.[59] See also List of Roman gentes Notes  Teidius in some inscriptions. References  Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, vol. III, p. 986 ("Tedius").  Chase, pp. 128, 129.  CIL III, 12318.  Asconius Pedianus, In Ciceronis Pro Milone, p. 33 (ed. Orelli).  CIL IX, 6289.  Suetonius, "The Life of Augustus", 27.  CIL VI, 21363.  CIA, 270.  Tacitus, Annales, i. 10.  CIL V, 458  CIL V, 459.  AE 217, 495.  CIL VI, 37810.  AE 1991, 755.  CIL X, 6551.  CIL VI, 27131.  CIL IX, 7080.  CIL VI, 10293.  Fasti Ostienses, CIL XIV, 244; Fasti Albenses, CIL IX, 7873; CIL VI, 2298, CIL X, 1233, CIL XIV, 2095, CIL XIV, 2466.  AE 1987, 163, AE 2011, 428.  CIL VI, 5029, CIL VI, 5030.  Slavich, Casa Museo dell'Antiquariato Ivan Bruschi, 50.  CIL V, 890.  CIL XI, 1369.  AE 2007, 236.  AE 1995, 1713.  CIL IX, 5780.  CIL XI, 6310.  AE 1999, 453.  CIL VI, 2379.  CIL XI, 1109.  CIL IX, 3271.  CIL IX, 7264.  CIL VI, 34775.  AE 1903, 268.  CIL VIII, 16639.  CIL IX, 338.  Tamaro, "Iscrizioni Inedite di Adria", 35.  Pais, Supplementa Italica, 487.  CIL V, 8116,45.  Pais, Supplementa Italica, 495.  CIL VI, 31121.  CIL VI, 27130.  AE 1989, 342h.  Tamaro, "Iscrizioni Inedite di Adria", 32.  Pais, Supplementa Italica, 247.  CIL VI, 36408.  CIL VI, 17529.  CIL V, 2366.  Monografija Grada Umaga, p. 92.  CIL V, 2365.  CIL III, 7280.  CIL VI, 23841.  CIL IX, 2103.  CIL V, 2367.  CIL VI, 20978.  CIL VI, 6697.  Inscriptiones Italiae, x. 2, 253.  CIL VIII, 16531. Bibliography Quintus Asconius Pedianus, Commentarius in Oratio Ciceronis Pro Milone (Commentary on Cicero's Oration Pro Milone). Publius Cornelius Tacitus, Annales. Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, De Vita Caesarum (Lives of the Caesars, or The Twelve Caesars). 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). Ettore Pais, Corporis Inscriptionum Latinarum Supplementa Italica (Italian Supplement to the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum), Rome (1884). 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). Inscriptiones Italiae (Inscriptions from Italy), Rome (1931-present). Bruna Forlati Tamaro, "Iscrizioni Inedite di Adria" (Unedited Inscriptions from Adria), in Epigraphica, vol. 18, pp. 50–76 (1956). Skënder Anamali, Hasan Ceka, and Élizabeth Deniaux, Corpus des Inscriptions Latines d'Albanie (The Body of Latin Inscriptions from Albania, abbreviated CIA), École Française de Rome (2009). Narcisa Bolšec Ferri et al., Monografija Grada Umaga (Monograph on the City of Umaga), Umag (2012). Carlo Slavich, La collezione epigrafica della Casa Museo dell'Antiquariato Ivan Bruschi di Arezzo (Opuscula Epigrafica), Edizioni Quasar, Rome (2019). Category: Roman gentes And for THIS gens? Thanks

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Tedio – Ossia: Grice e Tedio – Grex griceiana – verbalia: Tedio. For the Tedii, I think the most Grice-Speranza figure is neither the consul Sextus Tedius Valerius Catullus nor the unfortunate Tedius Afer, but rather Sextus Tedius, the senator who conveyed the body of Publius Clodius Pulcher back to Rome after his death in the clash with Milo. Why? Because he becomes, however briefly, a carrier of news, evidence, and political interpretation. A dead body is not merely a corpse. In Roman politics, it becomes an utterance. The question is:  What does this body mean?  To Milo's supporters: a regrettable accident. To Clodius' supporters: a murder. To the Roman crowd: a political fact requiring response. Tedius is therefore the intermediary between event and public uptake. A suitable dyad: (*) CIVIS. Quid Romam vehis? (What are you bringing to Rome?) TEDIVS. Corpus Clodii. (The body of Clodius.) CIVIS. Corpus tantum? (Only a body?) TEDIVS. Roma reliquum interpretabitur. (Rome will interpret the rest.) +> The political significance of an event is not contained wholly in the event itself, but emerges through public interpretation. This has a nice relation to the Tarquinius-poppy story. There:  the messenger transports a gesture; Sextus interprets it.  Here:  Tedius transports a body; Rome interprets it.  The object carried is not yet the meaning. The meaning is socially produced afterwards. One could even say, in a Gricean vein, that the corpse naturally means that Clodius is dead, but does not naturally mean that Milo is a murderer, that the Republic is endangered, or that riots should follow. Those latter conclusions arise from interpretation, political uptake, and competing dossiers. Speranza's dry gloss might be:  TEDIVS is useful because he reminds us that even a corpse requires a commentator. Death is a fact; scandal is an interpretation. Rome excelled at supplying the latter. And Grice uses the example of Salome showing the head of St. John the Baptist at least twice -- but then he was tutorial fellow of philosophy at St. John's. In 1948, in 'Meaning' -- as a sort of post-factum reflection on Peirce that seems to have gotten interested in 'meaning that...' (versus Latinate 'significare'). When responding to criticisms explicitly raised by Oxford colleagues like Urmson and Strawson (in that order), he repeats the example -- it is indeed the distinction between 'telling' and 'showing' -- and thus under 'alleged counterexamples' to the NECESSITY of the three-trong analysans -- this below is the second occurrence: This suggests dropping the requirement (for speaker's meaning) that U should intend A's production of response to be based on A's recognition of Us intention that A should produce the response; it suggests the retention merely of conditions (1) and (2). But this will not do: there are examples which require this condition: Herod, showing Salome the head of St. John the Baptist, can-not, I think, be said to have meant that St. John the Baptist was dead. Displaying a bandaged leg (in response to a squash invitation). In (b) the displayer could mean (1) that he cannot play squash or (dubiously) (2) that he has a bad leg the bandages might be fake) but not (3) that his leg is bandaged. The third condition seems to be required in order to protect us from counterintuitive results in these cases. Possible Remedies (i) We might retain the idea that the intended effect or response (for cases of meaning that it is the case that —indicative type) is activated belief, retaining in view the distinction between reaching this state (1) from assurance-deficiency and (2) from attention-deficiency, and stipulate that the third condition (that U intends the response to be elicited on the basis of a recognition of his intention to elicit that response) is operative omly when U intends to elicit activated belief by eliminating assurance-deficiency, not when he intends to do so by eliminating attention-deficiency. This idea might be extended to apply to imperative types of cases, too, provided that we can find cases of reminding someone to do something (restoring him to activated in-tention) in which Us intention that A should reach the state is similarly otiose, in which it is not to be expected that A's reaching the activated intention will be dependent on his recognition that U intends him to reach it. So the definition might read roughly as follows (*, is a mood marker, an auxiliary correlated with the propositional attitude w from a given range of propositional attitudes): "U means by uttering x that *P" = "U utters x intending that A should actively & that p that A should recognize that U intends (1) and (unless U intends the utterance of x merely to remedy attention-deficiency) that the fulfillment of (1) should be based on the fulfillment of (2)."-- note that while correlating it with the squash example, and keeping 'meaning that' as equivalent to 'implying that' or 'implicitly conveying that' -- Tedius explicilty conveys that Claudius is dead (as bandaged-leg man conveys that his leg is bandaged is not in public view) -- the 'meaning' is however -- something that is not automatically causally produced since 'recognition of intention' seems necessary. -- thus the extra meaning (or only meaning): "I cannot play squash" -- or Tedio: "What are we going to do with this?" -- as a matter of history: what did the Roman addressee in fact did? Thanks This is a very good Gricean connection, and I think it actually improves the choice of Sextus TEDIVS. What Grice notices in the Herod-Salome and bandaged leg examples is exactly that a distinction must be preserved between:  showing that p meaning that p  Herod can show Salome the head of John the Baptist. The head naturally means that John is dead. But Herod does not thereby mean that John is dead in Grice's technical sense. After all, Salome already knows perfectly well who ordered the execution. The display is doing something else. Likewise: (*) A. Cur non venis ad lusum pilae? (Why are you not coming to play squash?) B. Crus deligatum ostendit. (He shows his bandaged leg.) The bandage naturally indicates a bandaged leg. But what B means is more likely:  I cannot play.  not  My leg is bandaged.  because the latter is already visible. Now apply this to TEDIVS carrying the body of Clodius. The corpse naturally means:  Clodius is dead.  That much is factive. Nobody has to infer it politically. The interesting question is:  What did TEDIVS mean by bringing the body to Rome?  And here the answer is not automatically supplied by the corpse. The body does not naturally mean:  Milo is a murderer. The Republic is in danger. The people should riot. Revenge is required.  Those are further interpretations. The ancient outcome is well known: when Clodius' body arrived in Rome, his supporters carried it into the Forum; the crowd became inflamed; the funeral escalated into a political riot; the Curia Hostilia was burned. Asconius and Cicero's tradition preserve the explosive consequences of the body's arrival. The corpse became the centre of political interpretation. [GREXv3 | Word] Thus the real Gricean question is: Did TEDIVS merely show that Clodius was dead? or Did he mean that Rome ought to react? The historical crowd seems to have supplied the second. One could therefore refine the dyad: (*) CIVIS. Quid Romam vehis? (What are you bringing to Rome?) TEDIVS. Corpus Clodii. (The body of Clodius.) CIVIS. Mortuum video. (I see that he is dead.) TEDIVS. Quid de vivo re publica sentias, tu ipse statue. (What you think about the living Republic, you must decide for yourself.) +> The corpse shows that Clodius is dead; what Rome should conclude from that fact remains a matter of political interpretation. That is very close to the structure of Grice's examples. The head of John the Baptist. The bandaged leg. The corpse of Clodius. In each case there is a distinction between the fact exhibited and the further significance attributed to that fact. Speranza's gloss might be:  TEDIVS did not have to tell Rome that Clodius was dead. The corpse already did that. The question was whether the corpse meant anything else. Rome's answer was to burn the senate house. That was an interpretation, not a perception. Just for the record, the example as per Grice 'Meaning' 1948 -- can you double check if such oil on canvas of Salome is located at St. John's -- and why would St. John's college take the name from that? Note that here it is the FIRST alleged counter-example to Grice's own analysis of 'meaning that' -- significat quod' signat quod -- after lecturing on Peirce. 'Meaning' does not quite have a corresponding Latinate term -- but 'signat' and 'significat' do -- and Grice allows that 'what signifies does not have to be a sign' -- in this case it is Herod who 'signifies' -- not that St. John is dead,-- in fact Grice may be using this example just to prove the point that in this case it is NOT the case that Herod significat. Thanks. Grice: A first shot would be to suggest that "x meant something" would be true if x was intended by its utterer to induce a belief in some  "audience" and that to say what the belief was would be to say what  * meant This will not do. I might leave B's handkerchief near the scene of a murder in order to induce the detective to believe that B was the murderer; but we should not want to say that the handkerchief (or my leaving it there) meantwy anything or that I had meantoN by leaving it that B was the murderer. Clearly we must at least add that, for x to have meanty anything, not merely must it have been  "uttered" with the intention of inducing a certain belief but also the utterer must have intended an "audience" to recognize the intention behind the utterance. This, though perhaps better, is not good enough. Consider the following cases:  Herod presents Salome with the head of St. John the Baptist on a charger. Feeling faint, a child lets its mother see how pale it is (hoping that she may draw her own conclusions and help). I leave the china my daughter has broken lying around for my wife to see. Here we seem to have cases which satisfy the conditions so far given for meaningw For example, Herod intended to make Salome believe that St. John the Baptist was dead and no doubt also intended Salome to recognize that he intended her to believe that St. John the Baptist was dead. Similarly for the other cases. Yet 1 certainly do not think that we should want to say that we have here cases of meaning de-What we want to find is the difference between, for example, liberately and openly letting someone know" and "telling" and between "getting someone to think" and "relling."  The way out is perhaps as follows. Compare the following two cases:  I show Mr. X a photograph of Mr. Y displaying undue familiarity to Mrs. X. I draw a picture of Mr. Y behaving in this manner and show it to Mr. X. I find that I want to deny that in (1) the photograph (or my showing it to Mr. X) meantey anything at all; while I want to assert that in (2) the picture (or my drawing and showing it meant oy something (that Mr. Y had been unduly familiar), or at least that I had meant by it that Mr. Y had been unduly familiar. What is the difference between the two cases? Surely that in case (1) Mr. X's recognition of my intention to make him believe that there is something between Mr. Y and Mrs. X is (more or less) irrelevant to the production of this effect by the photograph. Mr. X would be led by the photograph at least to suspect Mrs. X even if, instead of showing it to him, 1 had left it in his room by accident; and I (the photograph shower) would not be unaware of this. But it will make a difference to the effect of my picture on Mr. X whether or not he takes me to be intending to inform him (make him believe something) about Mrs. X, and not to be just doodling or trying to produce a work of art.-- we can mutatis mutandi apply this to our 'hero' Tedio, as displayed in the forum -- what is the Latin source: Tedius ostendit corpus? Thanks UNlike Grice's biblical Semitic story, this one is pure Western-civilisation Graeco-Roman! Thanks This is a splendid Gricean case, because TEDIVS and Clodius sit exactly at the boundary between ostendere ("showing") and significare ("meaning"). First, on St John's College. The college is named after St John the Baptist, not St John the Evangelist. So Grice's repeated use of the Baptist's severed head is at least mildly amusing for a Tutorial Fellow of St John's. I am not aware of any famous oil painting of Salome with the Head of John the Baptist specifically housed at St John's College, Oxford. I would not want to assert that without checking a catalogue. What is certain is the dedication of the college to the Baptist. Now to Grice. In the 1948 paper, Herod's presentation of the head is introduced precisely as an objection to the first draft of the analysis. Grice's point is:  Herod intends Salome to believe John is dead. Herod intends Salome to recognize this intention. Yet we hesitate to say Herod meant that John was dead.  Why? Because the head itself already does the evidential work. The case is parallel to:  the photograph, the bandaged leg, the pale child.  The exhibited object naturally supports the conclusion. The conclusion is not dependent upon recognition of the producer's communicative intention. This is exactly where TEDIVS becomes interesting. The corpse of Clodius naturally means:  Clodius is dead.  Just as the severed head naturally means:  John the Baptist is dead.  That much is factive. But the politically interesting content is quite different:  Milo murdered Clodius.   Clodius deserves vengeance.   The Republic is endangered.   The people should act.  These are not shown by the corpse itself. They arise through civic interpretation. Indeed, Asconius' account of the aftermath has Clodius' body brought into Rome, displayed, and then becoming the focus of public agitation leading to disorder and the burning of the Curia. The corpse supplied the fact; the crowd supplied the political meaning. So one could almost rewrite Grice's example in Roman terms: (*) CIVIS. Quid ostendis? (What are you showing?) TEDIVS. Corpus Clodii. (The body of Clodius.) CIVIS. Mortuum esse video. (I see that he is dead.) TEDIVS. Id vides; quid ex eo sequatur, tu iudica. (That you see; what follows from it, you must judge.) +> The corpse shows that Clodius is dead; it does not itself determine what political conclusion ought to be drawn. Notice the structure. The first proposition:  Clodius is dead.  is analogous to:  John's head is on the charger.  The second proposition:  therefore X should happen.  belongs to political uptake. Now to your excellent linguistic point. You are quite right that Grice's "meaning that" is not comfortably rendered by any single Latin word. The nearest candidates are:  significare declarare ostendere indicare  But Grice's whole point is that:  ostendere ≠ significare  Showing is not yet saying. And that is exactly why Herod is useful. Herod does not tell Salome that John is dead. He shows her something from which she cannot help concluding that John is dead. Likewise TEDIVS need not tell Rome that Clodius is dead. The corpse already does that. The difficult question is whether TEDIVS meant anything beyond that. Speranza's dry conclusion might be:  Herod transports a head; TEDIVS transports a corpse. Neither thereby means what the object naturally proves. The interesting meaning begins only when the spectators start asking what they are expected to do about it. In the case of the bandaged leg, Grice adds: The bandage may be fake -- so we have to be careful because he had been giving a class on Perice's 'index' --. Surely, when we see Crawford with the head of St. John in the silent film, and Sarah Bernhardt in Wilde's Salome, we all know it is a fake. Exactly. The bandaged-leg case is where Grice becomes especially careful because he has just been discussing what Peirce would have called an index. A genuine bandaged leg may be evidence of an injury. But Grice immediately points out:  the bandages might be fake.  Therefore what is visible is only:  his leg is bandaged.  not necessarily:  his leg is injured.  The distinction is the whole point. A fake bandage can still be used to mean:  I cannot play squash.  because that latter proposition depends upon communicative intention and uptake, not upon the causal history of the leg. By contrast, the head of John the Baptist is a much stronger case. As presented in the story, Salome already knows perfectly well whose head it is. The evidential link is intended to be overwhelming. Yet Grice's point remains the same. What Herod shows is not identical with what Herod means. The exhibited object naturally supports:  John is dead.  But that proposition is not what interests Grice. The question is whether Herod, by exhibiting the head, is telling Salome anything. Grice's answer is: not obviously. The head functions rather like the photograph in the later example. A photograph may show Mr. Y embracing Mrs. X. That does not mean that the photographer thereby means that there is an affair. The evidential object itself does the work. This is why the St John example stands first among the alleged counterexamples. It is almost too good a case of: ostendere without significare. One could put it in the Latin we have been using: (*) SALOME. Quid mihi ostendis? (What are you showing me?) HERODES. Caput Ioannis. (The head of John.) SALOME. Mortuum esse video. (I see that he is dead.) HERODES. Id ego non dixi. (That I did not say.) +> The exhibited object supplies the conclusion independently of any communicative intention on the part of the exhibitor. Of course, dramatically, in Wilde, Bernhardt, Crawford, and all the great artistic treatments, we spectators immediately go beyond the mere proposition:  John is dead.  We ask:  Why is the head being shown? What reaction is expected? What does this display demand?  And there we have returned to Grice's distinction. The death is shown. The further significance is interpreted. That is precisely why the example survived from the 1948 Meaning paper into later discussions. It is one of Grice's clearest demonstrations that not every successful transmission of information is a case of "meaning that" in the technical sense. Herod can make Salome know without thereby telling her. With Crawford or actress in Wilde's Salome, we all know it is a fake -- as a bandaged leg. It would be otiose for Tedius to fake things with a real body. But a case can be constructed whereas some 'sign' or attribute iconically associated with Claudius is displayed -- or the mere utterance, "Milo killed Claudius" in Latin --. It is similiar with Cicero's head displayed for Marcus Antonius and his wife playing with it, and needling the tongue. "St John's head in a charger" --> St. John is dead (nothing 'meant' -- for Grice, as far as the placing of that eample goes --. In the second apparation in Utterer's meaning and intentions, he uses it to specify exactly the condition defficiency case --. Which may be closer to the Tedio's case. Thanks -- Grice was obsessed with fake 'indexes' -- which are then not indexes. He notes that Peirce often confuses this: a hole in a shirt 'means' a bullet has gone through. Incorrect, Grice corrects: the hole may have been fabricated. Similarly, 'Claudius is dead' (corpse displayed) does not yet inform -- killed by Milo -- but in this case, the Roman historians do take his act as 'communicative' in ways that Grice seems to be dismissing Herod's case as one -- strictly speaking, in terms of the addresee's recognition of the intention -- What is Salome going to do anyway? Thanks Yes, and I think this is exactly where the TEDIVS case becomes more philosophically interesting than the Herod-Salome case. Grice's point in Meaning (1948) is deliberately narrow. He is not asking:  Can information be conveyed?  He is asking:  Is this an instance of meaningᴺᴺ ("non-natural meaning")?  Herod is introduced precisely as a case where:  Salome sees the head. Salome concludes John is dead. Herod intended her to conclude that.  Yet Grice resists saying:  Herod meant that John was dead.  Why? Because the head itself supplies the evidential connection. Indeed, as you observe, in Wilde, Bernhardt, Crawford, or any theatrical performance, we know perfectly well that the head is fake. But within the dramatic fiction the head functions as if genuine. It is still treated as an exhibited fact rather than a communicated proposition. The later "bandaged leg" example sharpens the issue. The leg is bandaged. But:  the bandage may be fake; the injury may be fake; the inability to play squash may be fake.  Therefore Grice carefully separates:  his leg is bandaged  from  he has an injured leg  from  he cannot play squash.  Only the last begins looking like a genuine piece of communicated content. Now compare TEDIVS. The corpse naturally supports:  Clodius is dead.  But Roman politics immediately asks a second question:  What is Rome supposed to do about this?  That is much closer to Grice's concern. The corpse alone does not naturally mean:  Milo murdered him unjustly.  or  The people should riot.  or  The senate has failed.  or  Vengeance is required.  Those conclusions arise through uptake. And here TEDIVS differs from Herod. Salome's options are limited. She already wanted John's death. The display largely completes a transaction. Rome, however, has to decide how to interpret Clodius' death. The corpse becomes not merely evidence but a focus of public deliberation. So one might formulate the distinction like this: (*) CIVIS. Corpus ostendis. (You are showing a body.) TEDIVS. Ita. (Yes.) CIVIS. Mortuum esse intellego. (I understand that he is dead.) TEDIVS. Id facile est; quid deinde faciendum sit difficilius. (That is easy; what is to be done next is harder.) +> Recognition of a fact does not by itself determine the practical conclusion that ought to follow. That, I think, is where Grice and the Roman historians diverge slightly. Grice uses Herod to show that showing is not yet meaningᴺᴺ. The Roman historians are interested precisely in what happens after the showing. For them, the corpse becomes politically communicative because the crowd attributes significance to it. So the corpse naturally means:  Clodius is dead.  But the crowd may take TEDIVS to mean:  The death demands a response.  Whether TEDIVS actually meant that is another question entirely. Speranza's dry version might be:  Herod presents a head; Salome obtains confirmation. TEDIVS presents a corpse; Rome obtains a constitutional crisis. Grice is interested in the first step. The historians are interested in the second.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Teio – Ossia: Grice e Teio – Grex griceiana – verbalia: Teio -- TEIO The gens Teia was an obscure plebeian family at ancient Rome. No members of this gens appear in history, but a number are known from inscriptions.  Praenomina The Teii used a variety of common praenomina, including Gaius, Lucius, Publius, Quintus, and Sextus. There are also two examples of the old praenomen Spurius, which had become scarce by imperial times, and one of the feminine praenomen Maxima.  Members This list includes abbreviated praenomina. For an explanation of this practice, see filiation. Teia L. f. Galla, buried in a first-century tomb at Venafrum in Sabinum, aged twenty-five, along with her husband, Titus Titucius Florianus.[1] Teia Ɔ l. Attice, a freedwoman named in a sepulchral inscription from Allifae in Samnium, dating from the middle part of the first century.[2] Sextus Teius Januarius, buried in a first- or second-century tomb at Aquileia in Venetia and Histria, built by his wife, the freedwoman Titania Charis.[3] Lucius Teius L. (f.?), buried in a second-century tomb at Luceria in Apulia, along with Teia Sperata, Lucius Sertius, and Arventia.[4] Teia L. (f.?) Sperata, buried in a second-century tomb at Luceria, along with Lucius Teius, Lucius Sertius, and Arventia.[4] Publius Teius Asclepius, together with his wife, Teia Zoe, built a second- or third-century family sepulchre at Rome for their son, Publius Teius Rufus, the Vestal Teia Rufina, and Teia Asclepiodote.[5] Teia Zoe, the wife of Publius Teius Asclepius, with whom she built a second- or third-century family sepulchre at Rome for their son, Publius Teius Rufus, the Vestal Teia Rufina, and Teia Asclepiodote.[5] Publius Teius P. f. Rufus, the son of Publius Teius Asclepius and Teia Zoe, who built a second- or third-century family sepulchre at Rome for him, the Vestal Teia Rufina, and Teia Asclepiodote.[5] Teia Rufina, one of the Vestals, buried in a second- or third-century family sepulchre at Rome, built by Publius Teius Asclepius and his wife, Teia Zoe.[6][5][7] Teia Asclepiodote, buried in a second- or third-century family sepulchre at Rome, built by Publius Teius Asclepius and his wife, Teia Zoe, for their son, Publius Teius Rufus, the Vestal Teia Rufina, and Teia Asclepiodote.[5] Teia Threpte, buried along with the Vestal Cunaria Rufina, in a second- or third-century tomb at Rome, built by her brother, Glyptus.[8] Teius Olympus, dedicated a tomb at Rome, dating between the middle of the second century and the end of the third, for his wife, Fabia Fybe.[i][9] Teius Ursio, dedicated a tomb at Delminium in Dalmatia, dating between the middle of the second century and the end of the third, for his wife, Lavo, aged thirty.[10] Sp. Teius Ligdamus, dedicated a tomb at Atina in Campania, dating between the late second century and the end of the third, for his son, Spurius Teius Arelonius.[11] Sp. Teius Sp. f. Arelonius, buried at Pertosa, aged twenty-four, in a tomb built by his father, Spurius Teius Ligdamus, dating between the late second century and the end of the third.[11] Undated Teii Teia, buried at Ossonoba in Lusitania.[12] Teius, buried at Marcomades Selorum in Africa Proconsularis, aged seventy.[13] Maxsuma Teia, daughter of Arconus, was a native of Turgalium. She was buried at Norba in Lusitania, aged twenty.[14] Teia Q. f. Galla, buried at Pisaurum in Umbria, along with Lucius Staius Nema.[15] Quintus Teius C. f. Paternus, a youth buried at Norba, aged fifteen.[16] Gaius Teius Proclus, buried at Norba, aged seventy-five.[17] Notes  Presumably Phoebe. See also List of Roman gentes References  CIL X, 4917.  CIL IX, 2385.  Brusin, Inscriptiones Aquileiae, i. 680.  CIL IX, 890.  CIL VI, 27132a.  PIR, vol. III, p. 299 (T, No. 40).  CIL VI, 27133.  CIL VI, 27134.  CIL X, 2467.  CIL III, 14320,08.  Inscriptiones Italiae, iii. 1, 286.  CIL II, 6.  Africa Italiana, 1928/29-198,34.  CIL II, 5307.  EDCS, No. 105.  CIL II, 714.  Ortega, Corpus de Inscripciones Latinas de Cáceres, i. 8. Bibliography Theodor Mommsen et alii, Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (The Body of Latin Inscriptions, abbreviated CIL), Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (1853–present). Paul von Rohden, Elimar Klebs, & Hermann Dessau, Prosopographia Imperii Romani (The Prosopography of the Roman Empire, abbreviated PIR), Berlin (1898). Africa Italiana: Rivista di Storia e d'Arte a Cura del Ministero delle Colonie (Italian Africa: History and Art Magazine of the Colonial Ministry), Istituto Italiano d'Arti Grafiche, Bergamo (1927–1941). Inscriptiones Italiae (Inscriptions from Italy), Rome (1931-present). Giovanni Battista Brusin, Inscriptiones Aquileiae (Inscriptions of Aquileia), Udine (1991–1993). Julio Esteban Ortega, Corpus de Inscripciones Latinas de Cáceres (The Body of Latin Inscriptions from Caceres), Universidad de Extremadura (2007–2013). Manfred Clauss, Anne Kolb, & Wolfgang A. Slaby, Epigraphik Datenbank Clauss/Slaby (abbreviated EDCS). Category: Roman gentes And for THIS gens? Thanks

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Teio – Ossia: Grice e Teio – Grex griceiana – verbalia: Teio For the Teii, I would choose TEIA Rufina, the Vestal. Not because Vestals are rare (though they are), but because a Vestal is almost the perfect Grice-Speranza figure for the distinction between status, signification, and inference. A Vestal's presence signifies many things to Rome:  purity, continuity, religious legitimacy, civic trust.  But none of these are "naturally" signified in the way smoke signifies fire. The girl herself is not an index in Peirce's sense. Rather, Rome has collectively agreed to treat the office as meaningful. Thus TEIA Rufina lets us return to the old Gricean distinction:  natural signification, non-natural signification.  A suitable dyad: (*) CIVIS. Unde scis hanc esse Vestalem? (How do you know that she is a Vestal?) TEIA RVFINA. Vestem vides; officium intellegis. (You see the garment; you understand the office.) +> The visible signs do not naturally signify civic sanctity; they acquire that significance through public recognition of an institution. This is what I like about the case. Contrast:  a corpse naturally means death, smoke naturally means fire,  but  a Vestal's dress does not naturally mean chastity, a magistrate's toga praetexta does not naturally mean authority, a consul's fasces do not naturally mean sovereignty.  These are conventional and institutional significations. The addressee must already belong to the Roman interpretive community. In a way, TEIA Rufina is the exact opposite of Grice's Herod example. The head of John the Baptist would mean the same thing to almost anyone. A Vestal's clothing means nothing unless one knows Rome. Speranza's dry gloss might be:  TEIA Rufina is useful because she demonstrates that not all public signs are evidential. Smoke requires no institution. Vestals do. Rome spent centuries teaching citizens what a Vestal meant; nature never had to teach anyone what a decapitation meant.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Telesio – Ossia: Grice e Telesio: la ragione conversazionale del filosofo sperimentale – la scuola di Cosenza. Note sul De rerum natura iuxta propria principia Bernardino Telesio (Cosenza, Calabria): la ragione conversazionale del filosofo sperimentale – Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how hearers rationally derive speaker-meaning that goes beyond what is strictly said by presuming a cooperative, purposive exchange and inferring implicatures when an utterance would otherwise look oddly uninformative, irrelevant, or indirect; the Telesio passage invites a comparison in which “reason” is relocated from conversational normativity to method, namely the empiricist demand that nature be understood “according to its own principles” rather than by Aristotelian a priori machinery. Online scholarship on Telesio emphasizes that he is cast (famously by Bacon) as “the first of the moderns” and that his De natura iuxta propria principia (first published 1565, later expanded) insists on the primacy of sense perception and observation in natural philosophy, rejecting Aristotelian hylomorphism and explaining nature via active principles (notably heat and cold) acting on matter; this sets up a productive contrast with Grice, who is not primarily concerned with how we know the world but with how we make ourselves intelligible to one another in talk. Still, the shared hinge is anti-dogmatism about “reason”: Telesio attacks scholastic reasoning that outruns experience, while Grice attacks a semantics that ignores the rational expectations governing actual conversation, showing that much of what we communicate is not encoded but responsibly inferable. In the vignette’s etymological play around em-pereia, ex-perior, and per-capio, “experience” becomes itself a site of implicit meaning: the speaker invites the hearer to supply what the term-construction suggests about method and epistemic authority, a micro-level analogue of Telesio’s macro-level program of letting nature (and not inherited theory) constrain inference. So, where Telesio’s “reason” is disciplined by observation and the autonomy of natura rerum (a methodological rationality aimed at knowledge of the world), Grice’s “reason” is disciplined by cooperative norms and the calculability of implicature (a pragmatic rationality aimed at mutual understanding), and the comparison becomes: Telesio reforms the sources of warranted belief about nature, whereas Grice formalizes the sources of warranted inference about what a speaker means in conversation. Grice italico Mentre le sue teorie naturali sono state successivamente smentite, la sua enfasi sull'osservazione fa il primo dei moderni che alla fine hanno sviluppato il metodo scientifico. Nato da genitori nobili, è istruito a Milano dallo zio, lui stesso uno studioso e poeta di eminenza, e poi a Roma e Padova. I suoi studi hanno incluso tutta la vasta gamma di argomenti, classici, scienza e FILOSOFIA, che costitusceno il curriculum degli rinascimentali sapienti. Così equipaggiata, inizia il suo attacco sul LIZIO medievale che poi fiorisce a Padova e Bologna. Fonda l’Accademia cosentina. Per un certo periodo vive nella casa del duca di Nocera. Il suo grande saggio è “Sulla natura delle cose secondo i loro propri principi,” seguito da un gran numero di saggi di importanza sussidiaria. L’opinioni eterodosse che mantenne suscitano l'ira di Roma per conto del suo amato LIZIO. Tutti i suoi saggi sono stati immessi sul “Index.” Invece di postulare materia e FORMA, T. basa l'esistenza sulla materia e FORZA. Questa forza ha due elementi opposti. Il primo elemento è il calore, che espande la materia. Il secondo è il freddo, che la contræ. Questi due processi rappresentano tutte le tipi di esistenza, mentre la MASSA su cui opera la FORZA rimane la stessa. L'armonia del tutto consiste nel fatto che ogni cosa separata sviluppa in sé e per sé conformemente alla sua natura e allo stesso tempo la sua MOSSA avvantaggia il resto. empirismo, teoria della percezione, l’anima d’Aristotele, l’analogia, l’uomo e gl’animali, la ragione, i antici, contro i antici, osservazione, percezione, la tradizione empirista italiana, il Telesio di Bacone, sperimento, sperienza, esperienza, ex-perior, esperire – Latino ex-perior, Gr. em-pereia, osservazione, osservare – observatum, percipere – percezione per-capio.  G: 1939. You look as though you have smuggled Clarendon into my room. S: Sir, Clarendon smuggled itself into my room. I merely failed to resist. G: That is the Oxford defence: non-resistance as scholarship. Now, you said you found Fowler. S: I did. He is meticulous in the way only an Oxford editor can afford to be. G: Meaning: meticulous because he has already eaten. S: Precisely, sir. Fowler’s Introduction. He calls Telesio a precursor. G: Read the Fowler bit you’ve got. Slowly. Pretend you are not pleased. S: From Fowler’s Introduction, on the precursors of Bacon. He says Bacon called Telesio novorum hominum primus. G: That phrase is the hinge. Now, I want it in its habitat. What is Fowler actually doing with it. S: He is doing what Oxford does: building a genealogy so that Bacon’s empiricism looks less like a stunt and more like an inheritance. G: Good. Continue. S: Fowler says, in effect, that Telesio is the first of the moderns who made any successful attempt to construct a system on a physical basis. G: That is the English gloss. Now, the Latin. S: The Latin is Bacon’s, quoted by Fowler: novorum hominum primus. G: Minimal Latin, maximal claim. Now, S, tell me what you think Bacon meant by “new men.” S: Men who stop repeating Aristotle in the same breath as they claim to be observing nature. G: Quite. “New” in Bacon’s mouth is anti-scholastic, not merely chronological. S: But why Telesio, sir. Why not Galileo. G: Because Bacon is not compiling an Italian honour-roll. He is identifying a certain kind of rebellion: a natural philosophy built on “physical” principles rather than on scholastic forms. S: So Telesio is “new” because he turns to heat and cold, and to the senses, and makes nature explain itself. G: Exactly. Bacon likes any man who demotes syllogism and promotes experience, even if the man’s physics is later wrong. S: That sounds like your future method, sir. G: My future method is not to have one. Bacon’s method is to have a method and then call it modest. S: So Fowler is treating Telesio as a bridge. G: Yes. The word “bridge” is important. It means there is a gap: scholastics on one side, Bacon on the other, and Telesio as the first plank. S: And you want me to say where Bacon might have heard of Telesio. G: I want you to resist inventing a charming story. Give me the sober channels. S: Books. G: More. S: Continental scholarly circulation. Italian natural philosophy was not exactly secret by then. G: And? S: Bacon’s own circle of learned correspondents. He reads widely in Renaissance natural philosophy. G: Good. Also: Telesio’s De rerum natura had been published and discussed; and in the learned ecosystem, “Telesius” becomes a name for the anti-Aristotelian. S: So Bacon didn’t have to meet anyone. He had to meet a book. G: Precisely. Now, you said something about De principiis atque originibus. S: Fowler says the phrase comes from Bacon’s De principiis atque originibus. G: Good. And what does that tell you, historically. S: That the “novorum hominum primus” remark is not a casual aside in Novum Organum itself, but part of Bacon’s Latin philosophical writing from the early 1610s. G: And therefore: Fowler is cross-referencing Bacon’s own internal corpus to explain the method. S: Meticulous, sir. G: Meticulous enough that, without his Clarendon enterprise, you and I would be not primus but ultimi among the moderns. S: That is a bit harsh, sir. G: It is affectionate. Now, read another Fowler point. The one about precursors. S: Fowler places Telesio among Bacon’s precursors, and says he broke with Aristotelian tradition. G: There. That is the Oxford function: a precursor is someone you can praise without having to obey. S: Then Bacon praises him as first, but doesn’t follow him as master. G: Exactly. It is a ranking, not a discipleship. S: Sir, is novorum hominum primus the same as “primus modernorum.” G: Near enough for our purposes, but note the nuance. Modernorum is a later label; Bacon says novorum hominum, the “new men,” which has more polemical bite. It sounds like a party forming. S: Like a club. G: Like a club that refuses to call itself a club. Now, you said you wanted me to test you on empiricism. So: what is Fowler trying to do with Bacon. S: He is trying to show that Bacon is not merely a slogan about induction, but a concrete reformer of method, and that he had antecedents, and that his break was prepared. G: Good. And Telesio functions as the earliest “successful” physical system. S: Successful in the sense of attempted, not true. G: Exactly. Successful as an act of emancipation. S: And now you want the dry humour. G: I want you to notice the Oxford irony. Fowler is Wykeham Professor of Logic. He edits Bacon’s anti-syllogistic manifesto. So Oxford employs a logician to edit the book that tells you logic is too late a remedy. S: That is very Oxford, sir. G: Now, recite the Latin again, and make it sound like an aphorism, because Fowler is an aphorism man. S: Novorum hominum primus. G: Now imagine Bacon saying it with the tone of a judge. S: “First among the new men.” G: And then imagine Fowler saying it with the tone of a don who wants a footnote to do the violence. S: He would add: “from De principiis atque originibus.” G: Exactly. Oxford violence is always deferred to a reference. S: Sir, if Telesio is first, who is second. G: Bacon would not say. That would create obligations. S: Fowler might. G: Fowler might, because editors live by lists. But remember: lists are not arguments. S: Then the most relevant question is: first in what respect. G: Precisely. First in abandoning Aristotle as the principal explanatory engine. First in trying to build “on a physical basis.” S: But Telesio still has a system. He is not a mere collector of observations. G: That’s why Bacon can both admire and surpass him. Bacon wants system, but built by controlled induction rather than by a few large physical oppositions. S: Heat and cold versus Bacon’s tables and instances. G: Exactly. Now, you wanted this to be a tutorial. So I ask you: what is empiricism. S: A commitment to experience, observation, experiment, as a primary source of knowledge, and suspicion of purely a priori systems. G: Too general. Make it Baconian. S: Baconian empiricism is method: the reform of how we move from particulars to axioms, plus a critique of “idols” that distort the mind. G: Better. Now, where does Telesio fit into that. S: As a precursor who privileges observation and nature’s own principles over scholastic explanations, but without Bacon’s full inductive machinery. G: Good. Now, S, in your own tone: why would an Oxford philosopher care in 1939. S: Because Oxford likes to pretend it invented sober method, and this reminds it that Italians were trying to rebuild nature on experience long before Oxford made it a virtue. G: Excellent. Also because 1939 makes everyone look for beginnings. When the world is about to be broken, you become sentimental about origins. S: And about firsts, sir. G: Exactly. Now we must keep one thing clear: we have not yet pinned the exact Bacon sentence around novorum hominum primus, only the phrase itself as Fowler quotes it. S: So to be fully proper we would retrieve the De principiis passage. G: Yes. Fowler points; we verify. That’s the empiricist part. S: Sir, I can do one more thing: I can look in the Fowler volume for “Telesius” in the index. G: You will, and you will discover that Fowler anticipated your laziness. S: He is the first of the moderns, sir. G: No. He is the last of the Victorians. Which, in Oxford, is the same compliment. Grice: Caro Telesio, ti vedo proprio raggiante! Chi l’avrebbe mai detto che Bononia, una volta roccaforte dell’anti-empirismo, oggi si vanta di mettere l’empirismo al centro. Deve essere una vera rivincita, eh? Telesio: Hai proprio ragione, Grice! Bononia era nota per difendere strenuamente l’anti-empirismo… e se non fosse stato per quel famoso “Lizio”, che non nominiamo mai direttamente, a tener viva la ἐμπειρία, chissà dove sarebbero finiti i filosofi! Alla fine, persino le mura odoravano di aristotelismo ma con un pizzico di em-pereia greca. Grice: Ah, la ἐμπειρία! Cicero ancora si sveglia di notte sudando freddo, pensando a come tradurla. “Ex-perior”? “Per-capio”? Forse avrebbe voluto semplicemente un bel “sento-cose”, ma i latini non si accontentavano mai! Se l’avessero lasciata in greco, almeno risparmiavano qualche mal di testa... Telesio: Immagino Cicero seduto con il dizionario, inventando parole come “esperire” o “ex-perior”, mentre il povero Lizio rideva sotto i baffi. Alla fine, la vera esperienza è capire che tradurre la ἐμπειρία è più difficile che sperimentarla! Dai, brindiamo all’empirismo e alle etimologie impossibili! GRICE’S WEEKLY ESSAY ASSIGNMENT. What work by Telesio did Bacon not read to justify his characterisation of the former as prius modernorum? Typewriting disallowed. Handwriting counts. Telesio, Bernardino (1565). De rerum natura iuxta propria principia. Napoli: Cancer

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Terentilio – Ossia: Grice e Terentilio – Grex griceiana – verbalia: Terentilio -- The gens Terentilia was an obscure plebeian family at ancient Rome. Only one member of this gens appears in history; Gaius Terentilius Arsa was tribune of the plebs in 462 BC.[1] A few others are known from inscriptions.  Origin The nomen Terentilius belongs to a large class of gentilicia derived from other names, typically cognomina ending in diminutive suffixes such as -ulus and -illus.[2] Here the name may be formed from another nomen, Terentius, for which the diminutive Terentillus is found. The antiquarian Varro, himself a member of the Terentia gens, derived this name from terenus, a Sabine word meaning "soft",[3] although Chase proposes the Latin terens, one who grinds or threshes.[4] One of the Terentilii known from inscriptions has an Oscan praenomen, Statius.[5]  Branches and cognomina The only surname associated with the early Terentilii is Arsa, also written Harsa. The later Terentilii have common cognomina, such as Firmus, strong,[6] and Rufus, red.[7]  Members This list includes abbreviated praenomina. For an explanation of this practice, see filiation. Gaius Terentilius Arsa,[i] tribune of the plebs in 462 BC, called for the establishment of a commission to codify the laws respecting the imperium of the consuls.[8][9][10] Gaius Terentilius, a freedman named in an inscription from Praeneste in Latium.[11] Publius Terentilius, built a tomb at Tarquinii in Etruria.[12] Quintus Terentilius, the father of Quintus Terentilius Rufus.[13] Statius Terentilius, the former master of Statius Terentilius Firmus.[5] Titus Terentilius, the former master of Gaius Terentilius.[11] Statius Terentilius St. l. Firmus, a freedman named in an inscription from Rome.[5] Quintus Terentilius Q. f. Rufus, named in an inscription from Rome.[13] See also List of Roman gentes Footnotes  Dionysius calls him Terentius, a more familiar nomen, but no other Terentii appear in history for more than two centuries. References  Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, vol. III, p. 996 ("Terentius", No. 1).  Chase, pp. 122–124.  Macrobius, ii. 9.  Chase, p. 131.  CIL VI, 27151.  New College Latin & English Dictionary, s. v. firmus.  Chase, p. 110.  Livy, iii. 9.  Dionysius, x. 1.  Broughton, vol. I, p. 36.  CIL I, 2480.  Torelli, Elogia Tarquiniensia, 25.  CIL VI, 36411. Bibliography Titus Livius (Livy), History of Rome. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Romaike Archaiologia. Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius, Saturnalia. 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). George Davis Chase, "The Origin of Roman Praenomina", in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, vol. VIII, pp. 103–184 (1897). T. Robert S. Broughton, The Magistrates of the Roman Republic, American Philological Association (1952). Mario Torelli, Elogia Tarquiniensia, Sansoni, Florence (1975). John C. Traupman, The New College Latin & English Dictionary, Bantam Books, New York (1995). Category: Roman gentes And for this gens? Thanks

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Terentilio – Ossia: Grice e Terentilio – Grex griceiana – verbalia: Terentilio For the Terentilii, the choice is easy: Gaius TERENTILIVS Arsa, tribune of the plebs in 462 BC. Why? Because he is associated with one of the earliest Roman attempts to answer a profoundly Gricean question:  How can citizens know what magistrates are entitled to do?  His proposal was to establish a commission to codify the rules governing the imperium of the consuls. In effect, he objected to a system in which the rules were known principally to the office-holders themselves and sought to make them publicly readable. The demand eventually belongs to the story leading toward the Twelve Tables. The key point is publicity versus discretionary interpretation. That is almost a philosophy of communication. The consul says:  "I am authorized to do this."  TERENTILIVS asks:  "Where is that written?"  Or more Romanly:  "How are the people supposed to know?"  I would therefore propose: (*) CONSVL. Imperium hoc facere me sinit. (My imperium permits me to do this.) TERENTILIVS. Tum legem ostende. (Then show the law.) +> A power claimed by a magistrate ought to be publicly intelligible and not depend solely upon the magistrate's own interpretation. The reason I like this dyad is that it turns on a distinction Grice would appreciate. The consul's utterance is a claim about authority. TERENTILIVS' response is a demand for public criteria. The issue is not whether the consul is sincere, but whether the citizens possess the information required to assess the claim. In a way, TERENTILIVS is the opposite of TARQVINIVS Superbus. TARQVINIVS cuts poppies and relies upon a tacitum consilium. TERENTILIVS wants the rules written down. One governs through inferential uptake. The other through explicit statement. Speranza's dry gloss might be:  TERENTILIVS Arsa is useful because he asks Rome's earliest constitutional Gricean question: if only the consul knows what the consul means by imperium, how is anyone else supposed to understand the conversation? +> Public authority should not depend upon private interpretation. And Grice would make the comparison to Carta Magna? How close was Terentilio -- is there a lex Terentilia? -- to the Twelve Tables? The twelve tables are not kept today in full but they were memorised in full, we expect, by the time of Cicero -- Grice plays with a 'manual' which he calls the Immanuel (after Kant -- the pun) -- each 'law' has three sorts of generality ("connected with issues of universabilisazility): general application -- it applies to all -- general form -- the concepts are shared -- and a third type of generality -- perhaps conceptual. What would be the conversational sequence then after Terentilius -- with Consul. I can do that -- because of THIS -- and the THIS is the point on which Terentilius focuses. Thanks Yes, and TERENTILIVS Arsa is one of the very few early Romans for whom a comparison with Magna Carta is not wholly absurd. One must be careful. The lex Terentilia was never enacted in the form originally proposed. But Livy presents Terentilius' proposal in 462 BC as a demand that the powers of the consuls be written down and defined, rather than remaining largely in the custody of magistrates and patrician custom. That agitation belongs to the chain of events that eventually leads to the Decemvirs and the Twelve Tables. So he is not the author of the Twelve Tables; he is a precursor to the movement that produced them. The Grice-Speranza point is that Terentilius is objecting to a conversational situation in which one side controls both the rules and the interpretation of the rules. The consul's position is roughly:  I can do this because I possess imperium.  TERENTILIVS asks:  Under what publicly available description?  That is very close to the spirit, though not the historical details, of later constitutional documents. I think the dyad should therefore be closer to what you suggest: (*) CONSVL. Hoc facere possum propter imperium meum. (I can do this because of my imperium.) TERENTILIVS. Illud "propter" ostende. (Show me that "because".) CONSVL. Mos maiorum hoc permittit. (The custom of the ancestors permits it.) TERENTILIVS. Scribatur igitur. (Then let it be written down.) +> A public power should be justified by a public rule rather than by an office-holder's private appeal to tradition. This gets much nearer to Terentilius' historical role. And here one can connect it rather beautifully to Grice's "Immanuel." For Terentilius, the problem is not merely that the rule be general. The rule must possess something like:   General application It applies to everyone subject to the constitution.   General intelligibility The concepts employed must be publicly available and not esoteric possessions of a ruling caste.   General accessibility The rule must be inspectable by those expected to obey it.   That third point is especially Terentilian. A consul saying:  "Trust me, there is a rule."  is not enough. The rule must be available for inspection. Hence the conversational sequence after Terentilius is always: Consul: "I can do this because of X." Terentilius: "Produce X." In that respect he resembles a particularly difficult Oxford examiner. Speranza's dry gloss might be:  TARQVINIVS governed by tacit counsel; TERENTILIVS demanded explicit text. Rome begins with the former and becomes a republic through increasing quantities of the latter. The first asks the citizen to infer; the second asks the magistrate to cite. +> Authority should be accompanied by an inspectable warrant.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Terenzio – Ossia: Grice e TERENZIO – Grex griceiana – verbalia: Terenzio -- The gens Terentia was a plebeian family at ancient Rome. Dionysius mentions a Gaius Terentius Arsa, tribune of the plebs in 462 BC, but Livy calls him Terentilius, and from inscriptions this would seem to be a separate gens.[1][2] No other Terentii appear in history until the time of the Second Punic War. Gaius Terentius Varro, one of the Roman commanders at the Battle of Cannae in 216 BC, was the first to hold the consulship. Members of this family are found as late as the third century AD.[3]  Origin The antiquarian Varro derived the nomen Terentius from a Sabine word, terenus, meaning "soft".[4] However, Chase suggests a Latin origin, from terens, one who grinds or threshes, and classifies the name among those gentilicia which either originated at Rome, or cannot be shown to have come from anywhere else.[5]  Praenomina The chief praenomina of the Terentii were Marcus, Gaius, Aulus, and Publius, all of which were very common throughout Roman history. The Culleones used Quintus, and other names occur occasionally.  Branches and cognomina The main families of the Terentii used the cognomina Culleo, Lucanus, and Varro.[3] Of these, Varro seems to be derived from the same root as the Latin baro, a fool; Culleo refers to a leather sack or pouch, and may have referred to a leatherworker; while Lucanus signified an inhabitant of Lucania, and must have been given to one of the Terentii who either came from or perhaps had some connection with that region, or its people.[6]  Members This list includes abbreviated praenomina. For an explanation of this practice, see filiation. Terentii Varrones Marcus Terentius Varro, the grandfather of Gaius Terentius Varro, consul in 216 BC.[7] Gaius Terentius M. f. Varro, said to have been a butcher, was the father of Gaius, the consul of 216 BC.[7][8][9] Gaius Terentius C. f. M. n. Varro, consul in 216 BC, commanded the Roman forces at the disastrous Battle of Cannae, and gathered the survivors at Canusium. Returning to Rome, he nominated Marcus Fabius Buteo dictator in order to fill the vacancies left in the senate.[10][11][12][13][14][9][15][16][17][18] Terentius Varro, triumvir monetalis between 206 and 200 BC. He could be Aulus Terentius Varro, the praetor of 184.[19] Aulus Terentius Varro, one of the legates sent to the senate by Aulus Cornelius Mammula in 190 BC, to report news from Asia. He was praetor in 184, and was assigned the province of Hispania Ulterior, for which he levied an army. He defeated the Suessetani, and as proconsul in 183 defeated the Ausetani and Celtiberi, and on his return to Rome received an Ovation.[20][21] Terentius Varro, triumvir monetalis between 169 and 158 BC. He could be either the quaestor of 154, or the ambassador of 146.[22] Terentius Varro, quaestor in 154 BC under the praetor Lucius Calpurnius Piso. Piso was badly defeated by the Lusitani, and Varro perished in the battle.[23][24] Aulus Terentius Varro, one of the ambassadors sent in 146 BC to assist the consul Lucius Mummius Achaicus in reorganizing Greece.[25][26] Marcus Terentius Varro, adopted Marcus Licinius Lucullus, who subsequently became Marcus Terentius Varro Lucullus.[27] Marcus Terentius M. f. Varro Lucullus, the brother of Lucius Licinius Lucullus, was a trusted lieutenant of Sulla. He was consul in 73 BC, and afterward governor of Macedonia, receiving a triumph for his campaigns against the barbarians. He was a supporter of the aristocratic party, and of Cicero, who became his good friend.[7][28][29][30][31][32][33][27] Marcus Terentius Varro, surnamed Reatinus,[i] one of the greatest scholars and antiquarians at the end of the Republic. He held a naval command under Pompeius during the Third Mithridatic War and the War Against the Pirates, and was Pompeius' legate in Spain during the Civil War. Although pardoned by Caesar, he was proscribed by the Second Triumvirate, but eventually received Octavian's protection. Although most of his vast literary output was destroyed, his treatise on agriculture and part of one on the Latin language survive.[34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43] Publius Terentius Varro Atacinus, a celebrated poet of the first century BC. He wrote an Argonautica, a work on geography, one on using animals to predict the weather, and works on Europe, the Gallic Wars, love, and epigrams, but only fragments of his work survive.[44] Marcus Terentius Varro Gibba, a protégé of Cicero, with whom he worked in the defense of Saufeius in 52 BC. He was quaestor under Marcus Junius Brutus in 46 BC, when the latter had the command in Cisalpine Gaul.[45][46][47] Aulus Terentius Varro Murena, a friend of Cicero, and a partisan of Pompeius, under whom he served in Greece during the Civil War.[48][49] Aulus Terentius A. f. Varro Murena, consul in 23 BC.[50] Terentia A. f., or Terentilla, the daughter of Aulus Terentius Varro, and sister of the younger Murena, married Gaius Maecenas, and was one of the mistresses of Augustus.[51][52][53][54] Terentia A. f., the sister-in-law of Maecenas, was the grandmother of Sejanus. Terentii Culleones Quintus Terentius Culleo, a senator who had been taken prisoner during the Second Punic War, and was released at its conclusion. As tribune of the plebs in 189 BC, carried a plebiscite requiring the censors to enroll all free-born Romans into the various tribes, including the sons of freedmen. Praetor peregrinus in 187, he required Latins residing at Rome to return to their native towns, and perhaps oversaw the investigation and trial of Lucius Cornelius Scipio Asiaticus, although this is now in doubt.[55][56][57][58][59] Quintus Terentius Culleo, tribune of the plebs in 58 BC, attempted to prevent the banishment of his friend, Cicero, and afterward worked for his recall. From 43 he served under Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, and was assigned to guard a passage of the Alps against Marcus Antonius, but offered no resistance when Anonius' forces crossed.[60][61] Quintus Terentius Culleo, proconsul of Sicily under Augustus. Quintus Terentius Culleo, consul suffectus from the Ides of January in AD 40, was the son or grandson of Quintus Terentius Culleo, the Augustan proconsul.[62] Terentia Albia,[ii] the mother of Otho, may have been the sister or daughter of Quintus Terentius Culleo, consul in AD 40. Terentii Lucani Publius Terentius Lucanus, a senator, and the former master of Publius Terentius Afer, the celebrated playwright of the early second century BC.[64] Gaius Terentius Lucanus, minted a number of coins, depicting the head of Pallas with the figure of Victoria on the obverse, and the Dioscuri on the reverse.[64] Gaius Terentius Lucanus, a painter mentioned by the elder Pliny.[65] Others Gaius Terentius Arsa, named by Dionysius as the tribune of the plebs who called for the codification of Roman law in 462 BC, should probably be read Terentilius, as in Livy.[1][2][66][67] Quintus Terentius, one of two envoys dispatched by the senate in 218 BC to recall the consul elect Gaius Flaminius, whose election and inauguration were heralded by terrible omens. Flaminius ignored the summons, and later perished with his army at Lake Trasimine.[68][69] Lucius Terentius Massaliota, plebeian aedile in 200 BC, and praetor in 187 BC, in which year he was assigned the province of Sicily. He is probably the same Lucius Terentius who was an ambassador in 196. He was a military tribune in Hispania Citerior from 182 to 180.[70][71] Lucius Terentius, one of the ambassadors sent to Antiochus III in 196 BC, is probably to be identified with Lucius Terentius Massaliota.[72][73] Gaius Terentius Istra, praetor in 182 BC, was assigned the province of Sardinia. In 181, he was appointed one of the triumvirs for establishing a colony at Graviscae.[74][75] Publius Terentius Tuscivanus, was one of the ambassadors sent to assist the propraetor Lucius Anicius Gallus in settling the affairs of Illyria.[76][77] Publius Terentius Afer, the playwright better known as "Terence", was a freedman of the senator Publius Terentius Lucanus. He lived during the first half of the second century BC, and is known primarily for six comedies adapted from contemporary Greek models, which were exhibited from 166 to 161 BC.[78] Terentia, the wife of Cicero, with whom he appears to have fallen out during his exile in 58 BC. They were divorced in 46, and Cicero was obliged to repay a substantial dowry. She is said to have lived to the age of one hundred and three.[79][80][81][82][83][84][85][86] Terentius Vespa, made a humorous remark that Cicero quotes in his treatise on oratory. A certain Titius was known for his athleticism, but was suspected of having vandalized some statues. In accounting for his friend's absence, Vespa explained that Titius had broken an arm.[87] Lucius Terentius, a close friend of the young Pompeius. While the two were serving together under Pompeius' father in 87 BC, the consul Lucius Cornelius Cinna is reported to have bribed Terentius to kill his friend, but Pompeius learned of the plot and narrowly avoided death.[88] Gnaeus Terentius, a senator given custody of Caeparius, one of the accomplices of Catiline.[89] Publius Terentius Hispo, representative of the publicani in Asia, befriended Cicero, and received his recommendation to Publius Silius.[90] Servius Terentius, a friend of Decimus Junius Brutus, attempted to act as the latter's decoy after the Battle of Mutina, thus allowing his friend to escape. Before he could be executed, he was recognized by one of Antonius' cavalry officers, and his life was spared.[91] Marcus Terentius, an eques during the reign of Tiberius. After the downfall of Sejanus, Terentius was accused of being one of his associates, but was acquitted following a spirited defense.[92] Gaius Terentius Tullius Geminus, consul suffectus in AD 46, from September the end of the year.[93] Terentius Lentinus, an eques condemned in AD 61 as an accomplice of Valerius Fabianus, the notorious forger of wills.[94] Terentius, reputed to have been the murderer of Galba.[95][96] Terentius Strabo Erucius Homullus, consul suffectus for the months of May and June, in AD 83.[97] Terentius Maximus an usurper during the reign of Titus.[98] Decimus Terentius Scaurianus, consul suffectus in AD 102 or 104, was an experienced soldier and probably a veteran of the Second Dacian War.[99] Decimus Terentius Gentianus, consul suffectus from July to September in AD 116, was at one time considered a possible successor by Hadrian, but having fallen out of favour he may have become one of the emperor's victims.[100] Terentia, poetess and sister of Gentianus.[101] Terentius Clemens, a jurist who probably flourished in the time of Hadrian, wrote a treatise on the Lex Papia Poppaea, of which a number of fragments are preserved in the Digest.[102][103] Quintus Terentius Scaurus, a grammarian of the time of Hadrian, and one of the tutors of Lucius Verus. Although he wrote a treatise on grammar, and commentaries on Plautus, Virgil, and Horace, none of his works are known to survive.[104][105][106] Gnaeus Terentius Homullus Junior, consul suffectus for the months of July and August, AD 146.[107] Terentius Maurus, a writer belonging to the third century AD. See also List of Roman gentes Terentius Varro, for a list of Terentii who used the cognomen Varro Footnotes  This name was first bestowed by later scholars in order to distinguish Varro from his kinsman and contemporary, the poet Varro Atacinus. Symmachus uses it in his first epistle, and it is probably applied by Sidonius Apollinaris in his epistle, iv. 32.  Suetonius call her Albia Terentia,[63] but from epigraphy she is known to have been the daughter of a Terentius Culleo. References  Livy, iii. 9.  Dionysius, x. 1.  Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, vol. III, pp. 995, 996 ("Terentia Gens").  Macrobius, ii. 9.  Chase, p. 131.  Chase, pp. 111–114.  Fasti Capitolini, AE 1927, 101; 1940, 59, 60.  Livy, xxii. 25 ff.  Valerius Maximus, iii. 4. § 4.  Livy, xxii. 25, 26, 34–61, xxiii. 22, 23, 25, 32, xxv. 6, xxvii. 35, xxx. 26, xxxi. 11, 49.  Polybius, iii. 106–116.  Plutarch, "The Life of Fabius Maximus", 14–18.  Appian, Bellum Hannibalicum, 17–26.  Zonaras, ix. 1.  Orosius, iv. 16.  Eutropius, iii. 10.  Cicero, Brutus, 19, Cato, 20.  Broughton, vol. I, pp. 238, 240 (note 5), 247, 256, 260, 292, 296, 313.  Crawford, Roman Republican Coinage, p. 207.  Livy, xxxvii. 48, 49, xxxix. 32, 38, 42, 56, xl. 2, 16, xlii. 26, xlv. 17, 29–31.  Broughton, vol. I, pp. 358, 363, 375, 379, 383, 414, 435.  Crawford, Roman Republican Coinage, pp. 236, 237.  Appian, Iberica, 56.  Broughton, vol. I, p. 450.  Polybius, xxxix. 1.  Broughton, vol. I, pp. 467, 468.  Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, vol. III, p. 837 ("Lucullus", no. 6).  Plutarch, "The Life of Lucullus", 1, 35, 37, 43, "The Life of Sulla", 27.  Cicero, In Verrem, i. 23, iii. 70, v. 21, Academica Priora, ii. 1, De Provinciis Consularibus, 9, Pro Tullio, § 8 (ed. Orelli), In Pisonem, 19, 31, Epistulae ad Atticum, i. 18, xii. 21, xiii. 6, Brutus, 62.  Velleius Paterculus, ii. 28, 49.  Eutropius, vi. 7, 8, 10.  Orosius, vi. 3.  Appian, Bellum Civile, i. 92, Bella Illyrica, 30.  Quintilian, x. 1. § 95.  Cicero, Academica Priora, i. 2, 3, iii. 12, Epistulae ad Familiares, ix. 1–8, 13, Brutus, 56, Epistulae ad Atticum, xiv. 18.  Augustine, De Civitate Dei, vi. 2.  Pliny the Elder, iii. 11, vii. 30, xxix. 4.  Appian, Bella Mithridatica, 95, Bellum Civile, iv. 47.  Varro, Rerum Rusticarum, ii. praef.  Caesar, De Bello Civili, i. 58, ii. 17–20.  Suetonius, "The Life of Caesar", 34, 44.  Jerome, In Chronicon Eusebii, Olympiad 188.1.  Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, vol. III, pp. 1223–1227 ("Marcus Terentius Varro").  Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, vol. III, pp. 1227–1228 ("Marcus Terentius Varro").  Asconius Pedianus, In Ciceronis Pro Milone, p. 55 (ed. Orelli).  Cicero, Epistulae ad Familiares, xiii. 10, Epistulae ad Atticum, xiii. 48.  Broughton, vol. II, p. 296.  Cicero, Pro Caecina, 9, Epistulae ad Familiares, xiii. 22, xvi. 12.  Caesar, De Bello Civili, iii. 19.  Swan, "The Consular Fasti of 23 B.C.", p. 240.  Cassius Dio, liv. 3, 19, lv. 7.  Seneca the Younger, Epistulae, 114.  Digesta, 24. tit. 1. s. 64.  Suetonius, "The Life of Augustus", 66, 69.  Plutarch, "The Life of Titus Quinctius Flamininus", 18.  Livy, xxx. 43, xxxiii. 47, 49, xxxviii. 42, xxxix. 3, 6, xlii. 35.  Valerius Antias, fragmentum 45 (Peter).  Broughton, vol. I, pp. 341, 362, 368, 370 (note 3), 418.  Briscoe, "Quintus Terentius Culleo", accessed 11 Feb. 2022.  Cicero, Epistulae ad Atticum, iii. 15, viii. 12, De Haruspicum Responsis, 6, Epistulae ad Familiares, x. 34.  Appian, Bellum Civile, iii. 83.  Gallivan, "The Fasti for the Reign of Gaius".  Suetonius, "The Life of Otho", 1.  Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, vol. II, p. 809 ("Terentius Lucanus").  Pliny the Elder, xxxv. 7. s. 33.  Arnold, History of Rome, p. 227.  Broughton, vol. I, p. 36.  Livy, xxi. 63.  Broughton, vol. I, p. 239.  Livy, xxxi. 50, xxxviii. 42, xl. 35.  Broughton, vol. I, pp. 324, 338, 368, 383, 385, 389.  Livy, xxxiii. 35.  Broughton, vol. I, p. 338.  Livy, xxxix. 51, xl. 1, xl. 29, 35.  Broughton, vol. I, pp. 382, 386.  Livy, xlv. 17, 26.  Broughton, vol. I, p. 435.  Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, vol. III, pp. 996–1002 ("Publius Terentius Afer").  Cicero, Epistulae ad Atticum, xvi. 15, Epistulae ad Familiares, xiv. 12.  Asconius Pedianus, In Ciceronis Pro Cornelio, p. 93 (ed. Orelli).  Plutarch, "The Life of Cato the Younger", 19.  Sallust, Bellum Catilinae, 15.  Pliny the Elder, vii. 48. s. 49.  Valerius Maximus, viii. 13. § 6.  Drumann, Geschichte Roms, vol. v. p. 392, vol. vi. pp. 685–694.  Rawson, Cicero, a Portrait, p. 25.  Cicero, De Oratore, ii. 62.  Plutarch, "The Life of Pompeius", 3.  Sallust, Bellum Catilinae, 47.  Cicero, Epistulae ad Atticum, xi. 10, Epistulae ad Familiares, xiii. 65.  Valerius Maximus, iv. 7. § 6.  Tacitus, Annales, vi. 8, 9.  Gallivan, "The Fasti for the Reign of Claudius", pp. 408, 409, 425.  Tacitus, Annales, xiv. 40.  Tacitus, Historiae, i. 41.  Plutarch, "The Life of Galba", 27.  Gallivan, "The Fasti for A.D. 70–96", pp. 190, 216.  Cassius Dio, lxvi. 19.  Syme, Tacitus, p. 648.  Aelius Spartianus, "The Life of Hadrian", 22.  Author of CIL III, 21, reportedly inscribed on one of the Egyptian pyramids.  Digesta, 28. tit. 6. s. 6.  Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, vol. I, p. 789 ("Terentius Clemens").  Gellius, xi. 15. § 3.  Julius Capitolinus, "The Life of Verus", 2.  Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, vol. III, pp. 738, 739 ("Quintus Terentius Scaurus").  Eck, "Die Fasti consulares der Regierungszeit des Antoninus Pius". Bibliography Polybius, Historiae (The Histories). Valerius Antias, Annales or Historiae. Marcus Tullius Cicero, Academica Priora, Brutus, Cato Maior de Senectute, De Haruspicum Responsis, De Oratore, De Provinciis Consularibus, Divinatio in Quintum Caecilium, Epistulae ad Atticum, Epistulae ad Familiares, In Pisonem, In Verrem, Pro Caecina, Pro Tullio. Gaius Julius Caesar, Commentarii de Bello Civili (Commentaries on the Civil War). Gaius Sallustius Crispus (Sallust), Bellum Catilinae (The Conspiracy of Catiline). Marcus Terentius Varro, Rerum Rusticarum (Rural Matters). Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Romaike Archaiologia (Roman Antiquities). Titus Livius (Livy), History of Rome. Valerius Maximus, Factorum ac Dictorum Memorabilium (Memorable Facts and Sayings). Lucius Annaeus Seneca (Seneca the Younger), Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius). Quintus Asconius Pedianus, Commentarius in Oratio Ciceronis Pro Cornelio (Commentary on Cicero's Oration Pro Cornelio), Commentarius in Oratio Ciceronis Pro Milone (Commentary on Cicero's Oration Pro Milone). Gaius Plinius Secundus (Pliny the Elder), Historia Naturalis (Natural History). Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (Quintilian), Institutio Oratoria (Institutes of Oratory). Publius Cornelius Tacitus, Annales, Historiae. Plutarchus, Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans. Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, De Vita Caesarum (Lives of the Caesars, or The Twelve Caesars). Appianus Alexandrinus (Appian), Bella Illyrica (The Illyrian Wars), Bella Mithridatica (The Mithridatic Wars), Bellum Civile (The Civil War), Bellum Hannibalicum (The War with Hannibal), Iberica (The Iberian War). Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae (Attic Nights). Lucius Cassius Dio Cocceianus (Cassius Dio), Roman History. Aelius Lampridius, Aelius Spartianus, Flavius Vopiscus, Julius Capitolinus, Trebellius Pollio, and Vulcatius Gallicanus, Historia Augusta (Augustan History). Eutropius, Breviarium Historiae Romanae (Abridgement of the History of Rome). Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, Epistulae. Paulus Orosius, Historiarum Adversum Paganos (History Against the Pagans). Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus (St. Jerome), In Chronicon Eusebii (The Chronicon of Eusebius). Augustine of Hippo, De Civitate Dei (The City of God). Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius, Saturnalia. Gaius Sollius Modestus Apollinaris Sidonius, Epistulae. Digesta, or Pandectae (The Digest). Joannes Zonaras, Epitome Historiarum (Epitome of History). Thomas Arnold, History of Rome, B. Fellowes, London (1838-1842). Wilhelm Drumann, Geschichte Roms in seinem Übergang von der republikanischen zur monarchischen Verfassung, oder: Pompeius, Caesar, Cicero und ihre Zeitgenossen, Königsberg (1834–1844). Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, William Smith, ed., Little, Brown and Company, Boston (1849). George Davis Chase, "The Origin of Roman Praenomina", in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, vol. VIII, pp. 103–184 (1897). T. Robert S. Broughton, The Magistrates of the Roman Republic, American Philological Association (1952–1986). Ronald Syme, Tacitus, Clarendon Press, Oxford (1958). Michael Swan, "The Consular Fasti of 23 B.C. and the Conspiracy of Varro Murena", in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, Volume LXXI, pp. 235–247 (1967). Michael Crawford, Roman Republican Coinage, Cambridge University Press (1974, 2001). Paul A. Gallivan, "The Fasti for the Reign of Claudius", in Classical Quarterly, vol. 28, pp. 407–426 (1978), "The Fasti for the Reign of Gaius", in Antichthon, vol. 13, pp. 66–69 (1979), "The Fasti for A.D. 70–96", in Classical Quarterly, vol. 31, pp. 186–220 (1981). Elizabeth Rawson: Cicero: A Portrait, revised edition, Bristol Classical Press (1983), ISBN 0-86292-051-5. Werner Eck, "Die Fasti consulares der Regierungszeit des Antoninus Pius, eine Bestandsaufnahme seit Géza Alföldys Konsulat und Senatorenstand" (The Consular Fasti for the Reign of Antoninus Pius: an Inventory since Géza Alföldy's Konsulat und Senatorenstand), in Studia Epigraphica in Memoriam Géza Alföldy, Werner Eck, Bence Fehér, Péter Kovács, eds., Bonn, pp. 69–90 (2013). John Briscoe, "Quintus Terentius Culleo", in the Oxford Classical Dictionary, online edition. Categories: Roman gentesTerentii For THIS gens, Grice and Speranza have already selected a specimen -- what would be your second-best choice for a Grice-Speranza vignette? Thanks

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Terenzio – Ossia: Grice e TERENZIO – Grex griceiana – verbalia: Terenzio Ossia: Grice e Terenzio: linguistica filosofica– Utterer’s meaning, sentence-meaning, and word-meaning -- la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale della semiotica filosofica – la scuola di Rieti  Note su “De antiquitate litterarum (ad L. Accium).” Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Marco Terenzio Varrone (Rieti, Lazio): Compared institutionally, Grice and Varro are not comparable in the academic sense at all. Grice’s formula is exact in the modern Oxford sense. Fellow and Tutor in philosophy at St John’s means a college office with tutorials, students, and membership in the governing life of the college. CUF University Lecturer in philosophy means a university-wide faculty appointment. So Grice combines the two classic Oxford functions: college tutor and university lecturer. Varro, by contrast, was not a don, not a fellow, and not a university lecturer. He was a Roman polymath, landowner, magistrate, military and political figure, and man of letters, whose authority came from public office, erudition, and literary production rather than from a formal school or chair. The standard modern reference works identify [Marcus Terentius Varro as a Roman scholar and author of [De lingua Latina, [Res rusticae, and many other lost works, while also serving as quaestor, tribune, and provincial magistrate. So the clean institutional contrast is this. Grice was a modern Oxford philosopher with a dual college-and-university role. [Varro, by contrast, was an ancient Roman polymath and public intellectual, not an academic office-holder in any modern sense. That institutional difference actually sharpens the intellectual comparison very nicely. Grice works at the micro-level of rational communication: how a hearer gets from what is said to what is meant by recognising intentions and inferring implicatures under shared conversational norms. [Varro, by contrast, works at the macro-level of linguistic order: how a language becomes and remains meaningful across time through naming, usage, analogy, anomaly, and civic transmission. He is not giving a theory of utterer’s meaning; he is trying to understand Latin as a public artifact — its vocabulary, inflection, etymology, and internal regularities. The standard presentations of [De lingua Latina emphasize exactly those concerns: etymology, analogy versus anomaly, the origins and uses of words, and the public history of Latin. So if you want the sharpest formulation, it is this. Grice explains how one utterance comes to mean more than it literally says. Varro explains how one language comes to have meanings at all, and how a community preserves and adjusts those meanings over time. That is why your contrast between utterer’s meaning, sentence-meaning, and word-meaning is genuinely apt. Grice builds conventional meaning upward from occasion-meaning. Varro reconstructs present meaning downward from public practice, naming, and inherited linguistic structure. The difference is methodological too. For Grice, normativity lies primarily in the inferential expectations of an exchange. For Varro, normativity lies in Latinitas, in the disciplined description of usage and form, and in the community’s long linguistic memory. Your Varro material is also largely well chosen, but two corrections matter. First, the bibliographic line “Varrone, Marco Terenzio (DCLXVIII A.V.C.). De antiquitate litterarum (ad L. Accium). Roma.” is not safe as a standard citation. De antiquitate litterarum is a lost work known indirectly, not something one can cite as if it were a surviving Roman publication in Rome with a simple date line. So I would not use that as a primary bibliographic anchor unless clearly marked as a lost work reconstructed from testimonia. Second, if you want the cleanest secure Varro anchor, use [De lingua Latina itself, which survives in part and is the obvious basis for your linguistic-philosophical comparison. Modern standard references identify [De lingua Latina as Varro’s central surviving work on language. So the short clean answer is: H. P. Grice was an Oxford don in the precise collegiate sense, both Fellow and Tutor in philosophy at St John’s College and CUF University Lecturer in philosophy at Oxford. [Varro, by contrast, was a Roman polymath, magistrate, and scholar, active in the worlds of public office, landholding, and literary antiquarianism rather than in any university system. Institutionally they are not comparable. Intellectually, however, the contrast is illuminating: Grice analyses the inferential micro-mechanics of utterer’s meaning and implicature, whereas [Varro reconstructs the historical and civic macro-order of Latin itself — how words are imposed, transmitted, varied, and made coherent within a linguistic community. And if I compress it into one line: Grice theorises how speakers mean; Varro theorises how a language means. If you want, I can now give you a tighter one-paragraph entry in your preferred style, or a brief bibliographic note distinguishing the secure [De lingua Latina from the lost [De antiquitate litterarum.LINGUISTICA FILOSOFICA. Utterer’s meaning, sentence-meaning, and word-meaning -- la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale della semiotica filosofica, Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning starts from utterer’s meaning: what a speaker means is fixed by a complex, audience-directed intention whose recognition is supposed to play a rational role in the hearer’s uptake; sentence-meaning and word-meaning are then treated as derivative, stabilized patterns over many occasions, and conversational implicature is the rational, rule-guided enrichment whereby hearers work out what is meant beyond what is strictly said. Varro offers a strikingly different but complementary ancestor-picture: in De lingua Latina he treats Latin as a public, historically layered system whose significations emerge from impositio (the bestowal of words), from consuetudo (usage), and from the competing pressures of analogy and anomaly, so that the rationality governing meaning is less a micro-pragmatic logic of intentions and more a macro-rational order of linguistic practice—how a civitas keeps a shared lexicon coherent despite change, irregularity, and etymological opacity. Where Grice locates normativity primarily in the cooperative expectations of a talk-exchange (maxim-guided inference from utterance to intended meaning), Varro locates it in Latinitas and in the disciplined description of how words signify across time, registers (populus, poeta, orator), and institutional memory; Grice’s “reason” is the hearer’s rational reconstruction of intention in context, Varro’s “reason” is the grammarian-antiquarian’s reconstruction of why these words, in this community, have the values they do. The contrast can be sharpened by their favored explanatory directions: Grice explains conventional meaning by building up from occasion-meaning, while Varro often explains present meanings by tracing downward from civic usage and inherited naming practices (including etymology), with the result that Grice’s implicature highlights what speakers responsibly leave unsaid, whereas Varro’s linguistic philosophy highlights what a language, as a collective artifact, can mean and continue to mean even when no individual speaker is consciously managing the inferential load. Studies in the way of words. Keywords: studies in the way of words, Grice, Mundle: Grice regarded ordinary language as the language employed by anyone who got a first in Greats. Philosophy was introduced only upon completion of five terms into your B. A. Lit. Hum., since philosophy was not taught under a separate subject at Oxford, but under classics. Filosofo lazio. Filosofo italiano. Rieti, Lazio. Grice: “I count Varrone as the first language philosopher. He woke up one day, and realised he was speaking ‘lingua latina,’ and dedicated 36 volumes to it!” --. Grice: “’Lingua latina’ has a nice Roman ring to it. In modern Italian, the ‘t’ has become an ‘z,’ as in “Lazio,  -- the calcio team from Latium – or a ‘d’ as in ‘ladino.’” Grice: “I know his Loeb edition by heart!” – Grice: “The Greeks never studied their lingo as V. studied his! Of this Austin always reminded me: ‘We should be like Varro, analysing our tongue as a ‘fluid’ semiotic system!’”. Academic, Roman polymath, author of essays on language, agriculture, history and  philosophy, as well as satires, and principal conversationalist in CICERONE’s "Academica.” Questore della repubblica romana. Gens: Terentia. Questura in Illyricum. Pro-pretura in Spagna. Tu ci hai fatto luce su ogni epoca della patria, sulle fasi della sua cronologia, sulle norme dei suoi rituali, sulle sue cariche sacerdotali, sugli istituti civili e militari, sulla dislocazione dei suoi quartieri e vari punti, su nomi, generi, su doveri e cause dei nostri affari, sia divini che umani -- CICERONE, Academica Posteriora. Detto reatino, attributo che lo distingue da “Varrone Atacino,” vissuto nello stesso periodo. Nato da una famiglia di nobili origini, ha rilevanti proprietà terriere in Sabina. centro di studi varroniani, idioma, idiom, lingua latina, lingua anglica, Lazio, Lazini, la lingua del Lazio, Prisciano, Donato, Girolamo, Giulio Cesare, semiotica filosofica.  G.  Today: Ἑρμηνείας. De interpretatione. The bit everyone quotes and nobody digests. A.  Everyone digests it. They just do it lazily. G.  Lazy digestion is the root of most philosophy. Now: Aristotle gives us a chain. Start it. A.  γράμματα— G.  Not quite. He says γράμματα, but you want the unit: γράμμα. Each γράμμα. A.  Each γράμμα is a σημεῖον of a φωνή. G.  Careful: “σημεῖον” or “σύμβολον”? A.  A sign, at any rate. G.  He is fussy. We should be fussy. Move on. A.  Each φωνή is a σημεῖον of a πάθημα, or a φάντασμα, or something in the soul. G.  He says τὰ ἐν τῇ ψυχῇ παθήματα. But yes: the mental item. A.  And those παθήματα are ὁμοιώματα of πράγματα. G.  There. πράγματα. Not “things” in the nursery sense; things as the world’s furniture. A.  So: γράμμα → φωνή → πάθημα → πράγμα. G.  And he insists the first link varies between languages, the last two do not. A.  So the γραφικό and the φωνητικό are conventional; the psychic and the worldly are common. G.  Good. That’s the official picture. Now your hateful question. A.  Why is a γράμμα a σημεῖον of a φωνή and not of a word? G.  Because Aristotle is building it compositionally: smallest pieces first. A.  That’s your obsession too—minimal units. G.  It’s not an obsession, it’s a method. Now, you’ve brought Varro. A.  I have. Because you make the Greeks sound as if they invented the alphabet. G.  They did not invent it, they adopted it. A.  And Varro wrote De antiquitate litterarum ad L. Accium. G.  Don’t say it with reverence. A.  He dedicated it to Lucius Accius. L. Acc. G.  The Shakespeare of his day, as people insist. A.  And your own dating: A.V.C. ante DCLXVIII. G.  “Before 668,” yes, since Accius is dead by c. 86 BC. A.  So Varro is about thirty when he writes it. G.  Roughly, yes. And now you want to drag him into De interpretatione as if Rome were a footnote to Athens. A.  Not a footnote. A parallel. If γράμμα is like littera, then what does Varro call a sequence of litterae? G.  A word, if he’s in the Varro mood; a verbum if he’s feeling technical. A.  But that’s exactly what bothers me. Varro’s fragment you quoted says: hinc quidam loquelam dixerunt verbum. G.  That’s loquela, not littera. A.  Still: someone says X is verbum. People slide levels. G.  Yes. That’s why grammarians exist: to keep the sliding from being mistaken for insight. A.  But Aristotle himself slides: he goes from γράμματα to φωναί to παθήματα as if it’s clean. G.  It is clean as an analysis, not as a history. A.  Then: Cratylus. Socrates wants sounds to resemble things, onomatopoeia, iconism. G.  And you want to accuse Aristotle of being a closet Cratylist? A.  No. I want to ask: if letters are signs of sounds, could they be more than conventional? Could they be iconic? G.  In writing? Not likely. The scribble is rarely a picture of the sound. A.  Unless it’s like “buzz.” G.  That’s not writing, that’s English being childish. A.  Then why does Socrates fuss about the shape of sounds, not just the meanings? G.  Because he is playing for Hermogenes, who thinks names are mere convention. Socrates overcorrects to show that “mere convention” is too easy. A.  So Cratylus is an exaggeration for dialectical effect. G.  Precisely. And Varro is not doing that. Varro is talking to Accius, who cares about letters in a practical, literary way. A.  So Varro’s “antiquity of letters” is about the alphabet: A B C, or rather A B V X. G.  Yes. Not “literature” in the modern sense. Litterae as marks and their history. A.  Then Aristotle’s γράμμα is a littera. G.  Close enough, though Aristotle’s γράμμα can also mean “lettered writing” broadly. But yes: the segment. A.  A minimal mark that corresponds to a minimal sound. G.  “Corresponds” is already doing too much. A.  Then say: stands for. G.  Better. But now: you wanted “first articulation” and “second articulation.” A.  Yes. Sounds vs meaningful units. G.  Phonemes vs morphemes, in modern jargon. A.  So Aristotle is doing the first articulation: φωνή and γράμμα. G.  And then he moves to the meaningful units: names and verbs, ὄνομα and ῥῆμα. A.  Which already ruins the idea that everything is just “nomen.” G.  Good. Now, your example? A.  “Soot” and “suit.” G.  Don’t torment me. In some mouths, “suit” collapses into “soot,” and then my orderly mapping of letters to sounds to meanings becomes a farce. A.  It bothers you more than it bothers me. G.  Because it is an assault on the dignity of distinctness. A.  But that’s exactly the point: the γράμμα isn’t a stable sign of the φωνή across dialects. G.  Aristotle knows this. He says the written marks and the spoken sounds vary across peoples. A.  So the γράμμα–φωνή link is local convention. G.  Yes, but local convention can still be rule-governed. A.  Now: “oo” and “ui.” Are they two letters, one sound, one diphthong, or two phonemes? G.  In English, “oo” is two letters often marking one vowel; “ui” in “suit” is a historical muddle. A.  In Varro’s terms, both are two litterae. G.  Unless he treats “u” and “v” as the same, which he might in his antiquity-of-letters mood. A.  Then the writing system itself is unstable. G.  Writing systems are always unstable until someone bullies them into a grammar. A.  And Aristotle is the bully here. G.  He’s the analyst. Bullies come later. A.  What about one letter that is meaningful? Like “a” in “a man.” G.  You’re smuggling English articles into Greek ontology. A.  But it’s a good counterexample: one letter in print can be a whole word. G.  Then Aristotle’s “γράμμα is σημεῖον of φωνή” doesn’t capture that a single γράμμα could correspond to a meaningful utterance. A.  Exactly. G.  But Aristotle’s claim is not that a letter is never a word. It’s that letters are the elements out of which words are constructed. A.  Yet construction can yield a word of one element. G.  Yes. “A” is a one-letter word in English. Latin has “a” as a preposition in some contexts, and “e” as “from,” and “o” as vocative particle. A.  So a single littera can be significans per se. G.  But then it is functioning not as “letter” but as “word” that happens to be one letter long. A.  That sounds like a dodge. G.  It’s a distinction, not a dodge. Length is not category. A.  Varro would love that. He’s forever sorting. G.  Varro is forever sorting, yes. Which is why I don’t like him being dragged into Aristotle as if he were an improvement. A.  But Priscian cites him. G.  That is what saves Varro from my irritation. If Priscian cites you, you have become grammar. A.  Why does Priscian cite De antiquitate litterarum? G.  To support claims about letter origins, names, counts, and orthography—authority for the Latin alphabet’s story. A.  So Varro becomes evidence. G.  Yes. Not theory, but testimony. A.  Aristotle is theory. G.  Yes. Not testimony, but structure. A.  Yet both are doing semiotics: signs and what they are signs of. G.  Both are doing it, but in different moods. Aristotle wants a general chain; Varro wants a Roman genealogy of marks. A.  And Socrates in Cratylus wants a fantasy that sounds resemble things. G.  A fantasy used to embarrass a crude conventionalism, yes. A.  Then where do we stand on the γράμμα as σημεῖον? G.  We stand here: it’s a minimal conventional graphic token correlated with a minimal phonetic token, under a system that is learnable and therefore public. A.  And the phonetic token is a σημεῖον of the mental token? G.  Of the πάθημα, yes, but not as a natural sign like smoke of fire. Aristotle wants it to be shared across humans, but not arbitrary in the same way letters are arbitrary. A.  Yet mental tokens vary too. G.  Less than letters, he thinks. Enough to make translation possible. A.  But our “soot/suit” problem shows sound categories vary. G.  That’s fine; Aristotle allows that. A.  Does he allow that the πάθημα could vary as much as the sound? G.  He would rather not. A.  Because then you get relativism. G.  Exactly. And philosophers dislike that more than they dislike bad spelling. A.  Speaking of spelling: Lewis and Short say loquela is “incorrectly written loquella.” G.  Yes. Imagine if a little Oxford dictionary scolded you for double consonants as if the language were a moral pupil. A.  Yet Oxford does scold. G.  Oxford scolds socially, not lexically. Varro scolds lexically. A.  So Varro is more Oxford than you think. G.  Don’t say that; it flatters him. A.  Now: if γράμμα is like littera, what is the Greek for “sequence of letters”? G.  συλλαβή for syllable, maybe; λόγος for word or account; but don’t pretend it maps neatly. A.  And Varro’s Latin for “sequence of letters”? G.  If he’s being technical: syllaba, verbum, perhaps. A.  And if a single letter is meaningful, that collapses the “first articulation / second articulation” neatness. G.  It shows the neatness is analytic, not ontological. A.  So the “componential” picture is a tool. G.  Exactly. A tool to explain how complex signs can be built from smaller ones. A.  Not a claim that the world respects our levels. G.  The world rarely respects our levels. Only grammar tries. A.  Which brings us back to Varro: De antiquitate litterarum ad Luc. Acc. G.  Lucius Accius, yes. A.  Why would Varro write to him? G.  Because Accius was an old authority on letters and literature; dedicating to him is a way of placing your work under a prestigious name. A.  Like a modern foreword by someone famous. G.  Exactly. A.  So it’s an implicature: “treat this as serious scholarship.” G.  Yes. Dedications are pragmatic devices. A.  And Aristotle is doing something similar by starting De interpretatione with this chain: he’s staking out seriousness. G.  He’s staking out method. A.  So where does “symbolon” come in? G.  He uses σύμβολα for the spoken sounds as symbols of the affections in the soul, depending on your text; the key is that the relation is conventional at the outer links. A.  So letters and sounds are conventional symbols; mental affections are natural likenesses of things. G.  That’s the core. A.  And Cratylus tries to make even sounds natural likenesses. G.  Yes, and that’s the overreach. A.  And Varro is not overreaching; he’s antiquarian. G.  Precisely. He is collecting the genealogy of the marks, not insisting that the marks resemble the things. A.  So he would not care that “soot” and “suit” collapse in some mouths. G.  He would care if it affected spelling reforms. A.  Would he? G.  He would at least note it with disapproval and then propose an analogy. A.  Then: one-letter meaning in Latin. You mentioned “e” and “a” and “o.” G.  Yes. And “I” as an interjection sometimes, and “O” as vocative particle. A.  So a single littera can stand for a whole utterance. G.  It can, but it is then a written abbreviation of a spoken particle. A.  Which makes the γράμμα–φωνή link one-to-many, not one-to-one. G.  Almost always. One-to-one is a schoolmaster’s fantasy. A.  Yet Aristotle begins as if it’s tidy. G.  He begins with the tidy chain to show the kinds of dependence, not the exact cardinalities. A.  And your “soot/suit” irritation is just you wanting cardinalities. G.  It is me wanting the world to stop being messy in my presence. A.  It won’t. G.  No. A.  Then what do we teach in the class? G.  We teach that meaning has levels: graphic, phonetic, psychic, worldly—and that you can ask at which level the stability lies. A.  And we bring in Varro as a cautionary note: litterae are historical artefacts. G.  Yes, but briefly. I don’t want Rome to colonise Aristotle. A.  But you’ll admit Priscian makes Varro unavoidable. G.  I admit it. When Priscian cites you, you get a visa. A.  And Accius? G.  Accius gets the dedication because he is a name that forces attention. A.  Like “Shakespeare.” G.  Don’t say that in front of a classicist. He’ll start a war. A.  So our punchline? G.  That Aristotle gives you a chain that looks universal, Varro gives you letters that look eternal, and then the English language produces “soot/suit” to remind you that even civilisation is a dialect. A.  And that A.V.C. is just a way of spelling A.U.C. with more self-respect. G.  Exactly.Griceus: Salvē Varro! Ego plurimum admiror opus tuum De Lingua Latina; tot volumina ad linguam Latinam explicandam dedicas! Varro: Gricee, gratias ago pro verbis tuis benignis. Lingua quidem Latina, ut corpus vivum, discenda atque explananda est: verba originem, usum, mutationemque suam ostendunt. In operibus meis indagavi, quid sit verbum, quid sententia, et quomodo significationes nascuntur inter locutorem et auditorem. Sine scrutinio huius generis, ratio nostra conversandi obscurior maneret.  Griceus: Sapienter, mi Varro! Ego ipse opinor sensum sermonis non solum in verbis, sed in mente dicentis quaerendum esse. “Utterer’s meaning” — id est, quid mente concepit is qui loquitur — fons est omnium implicaturarum. Tu, primus inter Romanos, ostendisti linguam non solum signa, sed etiam rationes inter homines construere.  Varro: Recte dicis, Gricee. Facile est videre linguam esse non solum instrumentum ad res dicendas, sed etiam viam ad mentes coniungendas. Ut aiunt antiqui nostri: “Verba volant, sed significationes manent.” Vestris in studiis philosophicis, gaudeo videre vestigia quaestionum quas et ego olim tractavi. Unusquisque nostrum, per verba, ad communem intelligentiam studet. I am told that 'Varrone' is used in Italian as a 'know-it-all. Speranza wonders -- and you can keep the dry humour in the answer -- if that translated exactly to English. I mean, Speranza can imagine that in the days of Grice's Clifton, 'He is a Varro' would carry THAT implicature. And it may be to avoid SUCH implicature that Grice opted for philosophy, rather than stick with the classics --for it is not 'erudition' that Grice or Speranza is searching -- but something else -- call it 'philosophia'. Grice is calls it 'the search for reasons in any reasonable rational or intelligent individual and I have to thank Father for that -- non-conformist as he was.' But the point then is to check for uses of 'Varrone' in Italian to mean this 'know it all' or 'brain' and whether the exact appelation or rigid designation to 'Varro' crossed the channel? Thanks. Speranza’s suspicion is not foolish. In Italian, Varrone can indeed hover as a cultural shorthand for the excessively learned man, the encyclopaedic head, the person who knows too much or, depending on the speaker’s charity, appears to. That is not quite the same thing as the modern colloquial know-it-all, which Italian more straightforwardly expresses with sapientone, saccente, saputello, or even the more comic sputasentenze. The common modern pejorative field is clearly centred there rather than on Varrone. sapientone and sapientone are the ordinary lexicographical answers for “know-it-all,” and even popular explanatory sources gloss the type in just those terms. [dailyitali...nwords.com], [dictionary...everso.net], [italoamericano.org], [collinsdic...ionary.com], [dictionary...bridge.org] So the dry answer is that if someone in Italian calls a man un Varrone, the force is likely to be literary and allusive rather than the plain everyday insult one would get from sapientone. It would suggest a Varro-like breadth of antiquarian or lexical erudition, perhaps with a hint that the poor creature has read everything except the room. That is a subtler and more educated jab than merely saying he is a know-it-all. It belongs more to the register of “polymath,” “encyclopaedist,” “pedant,” or “vastly learned fellow” than to the schoolyard cry of “smart-aleck.” Since Marcus Terentius Varro remains the Roman exemplar of prodigious learning, modern scholarship itself still treats “Varronian” as meaning encyclopaedic, antiquarian, and learned in range. [en.wikipedia.org], [jstor.org], [cambridge.org], [classicalstudies.org] Did that exact appellation cross the Channel? Not in any robust or everyday sense. English certainly knows Varro as the Roman scholar, and educated classicists could perfectly well use “a Varro” or “Varronian” to suggest immense erudition, antiquarian range, or scholarly overload. But there is no strong evidence, at least from the standard record one can quickly recover, that “He is a Varro” became a settled English idiom for “He is a know-it-all.” If it was ever used at Clifton or in similar classical school atmospheres, it would have been just the sort of learned private allusion that schoolmasters and boys enjoyed because it excluded the uninitiated. In other words, Speranza may well imagine it, and one can easily hear it, but one should not treat it as an established public English usage. It would be a cultivated implicature, not a dictionary entry. [en.wikipedia.org], [collinsdic...ionary.com] And that, of course, is where the joke grows better. To call someone “a Varro” in a classical environment would likely carry the implicature not only of learning, but of the wrong kind of learning: learnedness as accumulation, lexicon, antiquarian mass, perhaps even the sort of scholarly over-success from which philosophy was supposed to rescue the more restless mind. That would fit Grice very nicely. One can imagine him preferring philosophy to a merely Varronian fate not because he disliked the classics, still less because he feared scholarship, but because what he wanted was not erudition as such. He wanted reasons, and the traffic of reasons, in any rational or reasonable intelligence whatever. Varro gives one inventory; Grice wanted inquiry. So yes: in Italian, Varrone can work as a learned type-name for the over-erudite man, though not as the ordinary colloquial equivalent of sapientone; in English, “a Varro” would be intelligible to classicists, but it never seems to have become a widely settled idiom. The Channel was crossed, if at all, by implication rather than by custom. So this was Terenzio Varrone, gens: Terenzia. Any other members of that gens -- or the Terenzia Varrone? Yes. Marco Terenzio Varrone belongs, in the ordinary Roman naming sense, to the gens Terentia. Terenzio is simply the Italian form of Terentius, and in Varro’s case the full Roman name points clearly enough to that gens. Varrone is not another gens, but the cognomen by which he is remembered. As to other members, the gens Terentia is much better attested than the modestly lit corners of the Velleii, but one should still distinguish between famous literary bearers, politically visible bearers, and merely onomastic ones. The best-known Terentius for most readers is not Varro at all, but Publius Terentius Afer, the comic playwright Terence. He is of course a different branch and a very different sort of figure, but he immediately shows that the Terentii were not a one-man shelf. Another very familiar name is Terentia, Cicero’s wife, though that is the feminine form of the gens-name and belongs to the practice by which Roman women bore the nomen in feminine shape. So yes, the Terentia/Terentii are a real and recognisable Roman gens, not a solitary label attached to Varro. If one asks whether there were “other Terenzia Varrone,” the answer is no in the straightforward way you seem to mean it. Varrone is the cognomen of Marcus Terentius Varro, not the name of a whole subfamily plainly available to us under a neat heading “the Terenzii Varrones” in the way one might loosely imagine from later hereditary surname habits. There may well have been relatives and connected bearers in his line, but what survives to fame is above all Varro himself. So one should say: gens Terentia, yes; a broad and real Roman family-name; but “the Terentia Varrone” as though it were a standard sub-clan title is not the usual way to put it. On Varro himself, the Sabine and Reatine connection matters more than a glamorous parade of Terentii. He is Marco Terenzio Varrone Reatino for exactly that reason: the by-name Reatinus distinguishes him geographically and culturally, just as Varrone Atacino is distinguished differently. His importance lies in what he did with language, antiquities, agriculture, and Roman memory, not in our having a luxurious family tree for the Varrones as such. Now to your more delicate lexical point about Varrone in Italian. Yes, your suspicion is a good one, but it needs trimming. In cultivated Italian, Varrone can indeed function allusively for a very learned man, an encyclopaedic head, a person overloaded with antiquarian or lexical knowledge. But it is not the ordinary everyday equivalent of know-it-all. The plain colloquial words for that are things like sapientone, saccente, saputello, or the more comic sputasentenze. If one calls a man un Varrone, one is making a literary, educated, slightly dry comparison, not simply calling him an insufferable smart-aleck. The force is closer to “a vast scholar,” “a walking encyclopedia,” “a prodigiously learned fellow,” perhaps with a mild sneer if the speaker is uncharitable. Did that exact usage cross into English? Not as a settled idiom. English classicists could certainly say “he is a Varro” or “positively Varronian” to mean overlearned, antiquarian, encyclopaedic, lexically formidable. But that would be a learned in-group use, not a standard public idiom. So if one imagines that at Clifton someone might have said “He is a Varro,” that is perfectly imaginable as schoolmasterly or sixth-form classical wit, but not something one would expect dictionaries of ordinary English to register. It would be cultivated implicature, not settled usage. And that, of course, sharpens the Grice point rather nicely. To be “a Varro” in that atmosphere would suggest not merely intelligence, but the wrong kind of intellectual triumph: accumulation, erudition, lexical sovereignty, perhaps the sort of mind that knows everything except why one should care. Grice would certainly have preferred philosophy in the stronger sense, not because he despised classics, but because he wanted reasons rather than merely repositories. Varro gives one the public memory of a language and a civilisation; Grice wanted the rational traffic by which a speaker means something to a hearer. So if Speranza suspects that “Varrone” hovers as a cautionary type-name, he is not wrong. It just hovers in the high register, not in the ordinary slang register. So the compressed answer is this. Varro’s gens is Terentia. Other famous members include Publius Terentius Afer and, in feminine form, Terentia, Cicero’s wife. “Varrone” is his cognomen, not the name of a clearly independent little gens one would ordinarily list. And in Italian, Varrone can indeed suggest the massively learned man, but not quite the ordinary “know-it-all”; in English, “a Varro” would be intelligible to classicists, but it never really settled as a common idiom. If you like, I can now do one of two things in chat only. I can give you a compact prosopographical note on the gens Terentia, separating what is secure from what is merely famous by association. Or I can give you a dry paragraph in your preferred register on why Grice would admire Varro and yet avoid becoming Varronian. Terenzio Varrone, Marco (DCLXVIII A. V. C.). De antiquitate litterarum (ad L. Accium). Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Terenzio – Ossia: Grice e TERENZIO – Grex griceiana – verbalia: Terenzio Since Grice and Speranza have already seized upon M. TERENTIVS VARRO REATINVS as the obvious specimen, my second-best choice would be neither the consul of Cannae nor Cicero's wife, but P. TERENTIVS AFER, the playwright Terence. Not because he is second in fame, but because he gives perhaps the most Gricean vignette in the entire gens. Why? Because Terence's comedies are built on:  what one character says, what another understands, what is concealed, what is inferred, what is mistaken, what is eventually recognised.  They are practically laboratories for implicature. Varro studies lingua Latina as a public system. TERENCE studies people using language badly, cleverly, deceptively, affectionately, and inferentially. One could almost imagine Grice saying:  Varro theorises word-meaning; Terence dramatizes utterer's meaning.  So I would propose: (*) SERVVS. Non dixi hoc domino. (I did not tell the master this.) TERENTIVS AFER. At fecisti ut intellegeret. (But you caused him to understand it.) +> One may communicate information without explicitly stating it. This is pure comedy and pure Grice. The servant's defence is:  "I never said it."  The Terentian reply is:  "Perhaps not. But you got him to understand it."  The distinction between dictum and implicatum is already lurking there. Indeed, if one were arranging the Terentii in a Grice-Speranza catalogue, I suspect the ranking would become:   M. TERENTIVS VARRO REATINVS Language as an object of rational inquiry.   P. TERENTIVS AFER Language as a medium of human inference.   TERENTIA, Cicero's wife. Because no dossier in Roman antiquity was ever managed more effectively against a professional rhetorician.   A dry Speranzian close might read:  VARRO asks how Latin means. TERENCE asks how speakers manage to mean more than they say. Grice, arriving much later, alleged that these were different questions; Rome had long suspected they were connected. Good -- can you double check if A E Housman intended A Shropshire lad to be called Terence? Why? We know he taught Latin at Cambridge and perhaps was Oxford educated? Thanks Yes, and this is one of those deliciously Varronian questions. The answer is that Terence was indeed a deliberate name for Housman, and the evidence is quite strong. Housman's poem "Terence, This is Stupid Stuff" (poem LXII of A Shropshire Lad) uses "Terence" as a speaking persona, and critics generally take the poem as Housman's defense of his own melancholy poetry. [poemanalysis.com], [enotes.com] More importantly, there is a tradition that Housman originally intended to title the whole collection:  The Poems of Terence Hearsay  before adopting A Shropshire Lad. [en.wikipedia.org] That immediately tells us that "Terence" was not a casual choice. Now why Terence? Here one must separate evidence from attractive conjecture. What is securely true:  Housman was one of the greatest classical scholars of his age. He studied at Oxford (St John's College, Oxford, though he did not take a distinguished degree). He later became Professor of Latin, first at University College London and then at Cambridge. "Terence" is the Anglicized form of Publius Terentius Afer, the Roman comic playwright.  What I cannot verify from sources is an explicit statement by Housman saying:  "I chose Terence Hearsay because of Publius Terentius Afer."  I have not found such a statement. But as an interpretation, it is extraordinarily plausible. To a classical scholar of Housman's calibre, "Terence" would not be a neutral name. It would almost automatically evoke Terentius, just as "Virgil" evokes Vergilius. The joke becomes even better if one places it beside your Terentian-Gricean concerns. Publius Terentius Afer wrote comedies built on:  concealment, misunderstanding, recognition, inference, conversational maneuvering.  Terence Hearsay is almost a pragmatics joke. A man called:  Terence Hearsay  is practically condemned to become a theorist of communicated and inferred content. Speranza might therefore enjoy the following:  Varro analysed Latin. Terence dramatised what people do with it. Housman borrowed Terence's name and added "Hearsay." Grice eventually supplied the theory.  As for whether "He is a Varro" crossed the Channel, I would say:  "a Varro" never became an established English idiom; but among classical schoolmasters, dons, and sixth-form boys at places such as Clifton, Winchester, Rugby, or Oxford colleges, one can easily imagine it functioning as a learned implicature:   "He is a Varro"  meaning  "The fellow knows absolutely everything."  The difference, as you nicely put it, is that Grice was not seeking eruditio but ratio. Varro knew everything. Grice wanted to know why anything followed from anything else. That is a distinction a Roman antiquarian might admire and a philosopher would insist upon. We know this is BEFORE Grice (who took BA Lit Hum at Corpus and became resident tutor at St. John's in 1938 and the next year Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy in same college. But what and when were the years of Housman at St. John's? Did he get a BA Lit Hum even a second? Thanks Why would he choose St. John's as alma mater -- where was he coming from? Did he get a classics scholarship there, what years? Thanks Yes, we can answer this fairly securely. Why St John's College? A. E. Housman did not choose St John's in the casual modern sense of shopping around for colleges. He won a scholarship to St John's College, Oxford, from Bromsgrove School, and went up in October 1877. [housman-so...iety.co.uk], [cambridge.org] He came from:  Bromsgrove School, Worcestershire. A family that was not especially wealthy. A background in which the scholarship mattered financially. [cambridge.org]  One biographical account explicitly states that his aptitude in Greek and Latin won him a scholarship to St John's College, Oxford, where he arrived in 1877 to read Classics. [housman-so...iety.co.uk] What did he study? He read the classical course then known as: Honour School of Moderations and Literae Humaniores ("Mods and Greats"). [housman-so...iety.co.uk] This is precisely the same broad Oxford classics framework within which later generations, including Grice, would be educated, although the syllabus evolved considerably. How well did he do? Interestingly, Housman was brilliant and disastrous simultaneously. He obtained:  First Class Honours in Classical Moderations (Mods) after the first part of the course. [housman-so...iety.co.uk]  But later:  he failed the Final Honour School of Literae Humaniores ("Greats"), and left Oxford without an honours degree. [en.wikipedia.org], [housman-so...iety.co.uk], [swiftpapers.com]  That failure became one of the great legends of English intellectual history. Did he eventually get a degree? Yes. After leaving Oxford, he later returned and sat examinations for:  a Pass degree, and the Civil Service examinations,  which led to his Patent Office employment in London. [housman-so...iety.co.uk] Chronological comparison with Grice Very roughly:  Housman arrives at St John's: 1877. [housman-so...iety.co.uk], [cambridge.org] Leaves after failing Greats: 1881. [swiftpapers.com], [encyclopedia.com] Grice arrives at Oxford about half a century later. Grice becomes Resident Tutor at St John's in 1938 and Fellow & Tutor in Philosophy in 1939, as you note.  So when Grice entered St John's, "Housman of St John's" was already a venerable piece of college mythology. A dry Speranzian conclusion Housman's Oxford career is almost the inverse of Grice's.  Housman excelled in the linguistic and textual part of Greats and failed the philosophical culmination. [housman-so...iety.co.uk] Grice migrated from Greats into philosophy and made a profession of asking why texts, speakers, and hearers mean what they do.  One can almost hear Grice saying:  "Housman knew more Latin than most Romans. I merely wanted to know how they managed to mean anything by speaking it." So most likely this 'Terence' poem and the suggested title, 'Terence Hearsay' are shaped after Terence the playwright rather than Varro, we think? Thanks -- was there an ethnic element in Terence the playwright -- Afer? Thanks -- like the protege of the Scipiones circle, etc? Thanks Yes, I think that is the most likely reading. The evidence points much more strongly toward Publius Terentius Afer (Terence the playwright) than toward Marcus Terentius Varro. Why?   The name is "Terence," not "Varro." An English classicist of Housman's generation would instantly recognize "Terence" as the canonical English name of Terentius Afer, just as "Virgil" evokes Vergilius and "Horace" evokes Horatius.   The reported original title The Poems of Terence Hearsay explicitly uses Terence as a literary persona. [en.wikipedia.org]   In A Shropshire Lad, especially in "Terence, This is Stupid Stuff", "Terence" is presented as a speaker defending his own poetry against criticism. That is much closer to a dramatized speaker, a comic persona, or a literary character than to an antiquarian scholar like Varro. [poemanalysis.com], [enotes.com]   So if one had to bet, one would bet on:  Terence the poet-speaker ← Terence the playwright  rather than  Terence the poet-speaker ← Varro the antiquarian.   As for Afer, yes, there is an ethnic dimension. The cognomen Afer means essentially:  "the African."  Publius Terentius Afer was traditionally said to have come from North Africa and to have been brought to Rome as a slave before being educated and freed by his master, Publius Terentius Lucanus. The ancient tradition consistently preserves this association with Africa. The very cognomen advertises it. [GREXv3 | Word] He then became associated with the circle around the Scipiones, especially the cultivated aristocratic milieu often called the Scipionic Circle in modern scholarship. That association is important because Terence's comedies were frequently contrasted with rougher or more popular comedy. Ancient critics often pictured him as:  highly educated, refined, aristocratically connected, culturally Hellenising.  In other words, he occupies a position rather unlike Plautus.  A dry Speranzian gloss might be:  Varro knew everything. Terence knew everybody. Housman, wishing to publish poems rather than encyclopaedias, naturally preferred to become "Terence Hearsay" rather than "Varro Footnote."  And there is a particularly nice Gricean irony:  Terence is the playwright of conversation. Hearsay is what gets passed from one speaker to another. Grice later builds a theory explaining how hearers move from what is said to what is understood.  One almost suspects that "Terence Hearsay" was born with implicature already in his pocket. And what do we know of Lucanus? The Varro Terentius was from outside Rome. Do we know anything about this one? Thanks Yes. Publius Terentius Lucanus is an intriguing figure precisely because we know so little about him and yet his cultural importance is enormous through one act: educating and freeing Publius Terentius Afer (Terence). [unrv.com], [britannica.com], [livingpoet....dur.ac.uk] A few points can be stated with reasonable confidence:  Ancient tradition describes Publius Terentius Lucanus as a Roman senator. [unrv.com], [britannica.com], [livingpoet....dur.ac.uk] Publius Terentius Afer came into his household as a slave, received an education there, and was later manumitted. Upon gaining freedom he took the nomen Terentius, as was normal Roman practice. [unrv.com], [britannica.com], [livingpoet....dur.ac.uk] The sources do not tell us that Lucanus himself was from Lucania. The cognomen Lucanus could suggest some connection with Lucania, but the sources cited here do not specify what that connection was. So we should resist the temptation to infer too much. [unrv.com], [livingpoet....dur.ac.uk]  What we do know about Afer is more striking. The cognomen Afer literally means:  "the African."  Ancient biography associates him with Carthage in North Africa. [en.wikipedia.org], [britannica.com], [livingpoet....dur.ac.uk] And yes, there is very much an ethnic dimension. Not in the modern sense of a political identity, but certainly in the Roman sense that his origin remained part of how he was described. The pair:  Publius Terentius Afer  almost tells the whole story:  Terentius = acquired from his Roman patron/master. Afer = preserving the memory of his African origin.  He also became associated, in the traditional accounts, with the cultivated circle around Scipio Aemilianus and Gaius Laelius. [unrv.com], [livingpoet....dur.ac.uk] For a Grice-Speranza contrast:  VARRO studies Latin. TERENCE writes Latin. LUCANUS makes Terence possible.  One could almost give Lucanus a vignette:  (*) LVCANVS. Servum emi. (I bought a slave.) TERENTIVS AFER. Comoedias scribam. (I shall write comedies.) LVCANVS. Melius emit quam scivit. (He bought better than he knew.) +> The significance of an act may exceed the intention with which it was performed.  That seems very Gricean. Lucanus may have intended to acquire a household slave; posterity remembers him as the man who accidentally acquired Terence. But this seems to deviate from the other course -- when the paidagogos came from Greece -- and would be self-educated or already educated. Lucanus GAVE Terentius his education, so we may assume that he could consult Lucanus's library and all that -- rather than as being used for 'paidagogos' for the senator's children? Thanks -- and which makes Terence more of a PURELY ROMAN playwright in that he was mainly mono-cultural (unlike the unfreed Greek paidagogoi)? Thanks Yes, I think you're putting your finger on an important distinction. The stereotypical Roman paedagogus was often already Greek-speaking and already educated before arriving in the household. His function was partly to transmit Greek culture. He was, so to speak, a living import. Terence appears different. The ancient tradition says that Publius Terentius Afer entered the household of the senator Publius Terentius Lucanus, received a liberal education there, and was then manumitted. [unrv.com], [britannica.com], [livingpoet....dur.ac.uk] What the sources explicitly support is:  he was educated within the Roman household, he acquired the nomen Terentius from his patron, he subsequently entered Roman literary and aristocratic circles. [unrv.com], [britannica.com], [livingpoet....dur.ac.uk]  What the sources do not explicitly tell us is exactly how he was educated, which books he read, whether he had access to Lucanus' library, or the precise curriculum. Those are attractive and plausible conjectures, but still conjectures. Your larger cultural point, however, is interesting. Terence is certainly less "Greek imported into Rome" than the familiar image of the Greek tutor. Even when he adapts Menander and other Greek originals, he does so as a Latin playwright writing for Roman audiences. The language is Latin; the dramatic career is Roman; the patronage network is Roman; the literary afterlife is overwhelmingly Roman. [en.wikipedia.org], [britannica.com] One might therefore say:  Plautus Romanizes Greek comedy. Terence internalizes it.  Or, more Speranzianly:  The paedagogus brings Greece to Rome. Terence becomes Roman by being taught Greece inside Rome.  That seems closer to the evidence than calling him "purely Roman," because his surviving plays remain deeply dependent on Greek New Comedy. Indeed, ancient critics often discussed his use of Greek originals. [en.wikipedia.org], [britannica.com] A Grice-Speranza vignette might therefore be: (*) LVCANVS. Graecos lege. (Read the Greeks.) TERENTIVS AFER. Latine scribam. (I shall write in Latin.) LVCANVS. Tum Roma ex Graecis discet. (Then Rome will learn from the Greeks.) +> Cultural inheritance may be preserved most effectively when transmitted through another language. That captures the paradox rather well. Terence becomes one of the purest models of Latin style not by avoiding Greek influence, but by absorbing it so completely that later Romans treated his Latin as exemplary. [britannica.com], [en.wikipedia.org]

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Terzo – Ossia: Grice e Terzo – Grex griceiana – verbalia: Terzo -- The gens Tertia was an obscure plebeian family at ancient Rome. Hardly any members of this gens are mentioned by Roman writers, but a few are known from inscriptions.  Origin The nomen Tertius is derived from the Latin for "third", which was used as a cognomen from the earliest period of Roman history. While it may anciently have been a praenomen corresponding with similar masculine names, such as Quintus, Sextus, and Decimus, only the feminine form, Tertia, appears to have been in use during the Republic, and only in imperial times does the masculine form appear, rarely, as a praenomen.[1]  Praenomina The main praenomina of the Tertii seem to have been Titus, Aulus, Lucius, Marcus, and Publius. The filiation of one early member includes the Oscan praenomen Herius.  Members This list includes abbreviated praenomina. For an explanation of this practice, see filiation. Tertia, a favored mistress of Verres, was an actress in Sicily.[2] Tiberius Tertius Heri f. Sapientinus, one of several persons who hosted ludi in honor of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, commemorated in an inscription from Carsulae in Umbria, dating from the latter half of the first century BC.[3] Aulus Tertius, named in a first-century inscription from Herculaneum in Campania.[4] Lucius Tertius L. f. Tertianus, supposedly a native of Heraclea in Lucania, was a soldier in the Legio XI Claudia. He was buried at Burnum in Dalmatia, aged forty, with a monument built by his heir, Lucius Pomponius Pollio, from the legacy left him by Tertianus, dating to the reigns of Claudius or Nero. The inscriptions naming him are thought to be forgeries.[5] Titus Tertius Felix, a quaestor, together with Nemonius Senecio, the local caretaker, and the agent Gaius Atius Verecundus, made a donation to Fortuna at Mogontiacum in Germania Superior, according to an inscription dating between the reign of Vespasian and the middle of the second century.[6] Publius Tertius Hilarus, dedicated a tomb at Rome, dating between the middle of the first century and the end of the second, for his wife, Claudia Flora, aged thirty years, ten months, and six days.[7] Marcus Tertius Chrestus, a frumentarius, or grain merchant, named along with his daughter, Tertia Val[...] Romana, in a second- or third-century sepulchral inscription from Viminacium in Moesia Superior.[8] Tertia M. f. Val[...] Romana, daughter of the grain merchant Marcus Tertius Chrstus, with whom she is named in a sepulchral inscription from Viminacium.[8] Marcus Tertius Secundus, a soldier in the fifth cohort of the vigiles at Rome in AD 210, serving in the century of Aelius Torquatus.[9] Publius Tertius Posterius, a veteran of the Legio I Minervia, buried at Mediolanum in Gallia Narbonensis, in a tomb dating between the middle of the second century, and the end of the third.[10] Undated Tertii Aulus Tertius, named in a sepulchral inscription from Rome.[11] Aulus Tertius, named in a sepulchral inscription from Bononia in Cisalpine Gaul.[12] Gaius Tertius, named in an inscription from Augusta Treverorum in Gallia Belgica.[13] Sextus Tertius, buried at Aquinum in Latium.[14] Titus Tertius Paullus, buried at Nemausus in Gallia Narbonensis, in a tomb built by his wife, Primigenia Aurelia, and freedman, Titus Tertius Verecundus.[15] Lucius Tertius Secundus, a potter whose maker's mark is found on pottery from Arelate in Gallia Narbonensis.[16] Titus Tertius Severus, curator of the colony at Aventicum in Germania Superior, was granted five thousand sestertii by a decree of the decurions.[17] Titus Tertius T. l. Verecundus, the freedman of Titus Tertius Paullus, for whom he built a tomb at Nemausus, along with Paullus' wife, Primigenia Aurelia.[15] See also List of Roman gentes References  Chase, pp. 150, 151, 161, 168–171.  Cicero, In Verrem, iii. 34, v. 12, 16.  AE 2005, 465.  CIL IV, 10534.  CIL III, 394,3, CIL III, 394,4.  CIL XIII, 6676.  CIL VI, 15434.  IMS, ii. 47.  CIL VI, 1057.  Archivio Storico Lombardo, 1889-155.  CIL VI, 27273.  CIL XI, 789.  AE 1978, 5101.  CIL X, 5520.  CIL XII, 3945.  CAG, xiii. 5, p. 674.  CIL XIII, 5072. Bibliography Marcus Tullius Cicero, In Verrem. Theodor Mommsen et alii, Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (The Body of Latin Inscriptions, abbreviated CIL), Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (1853–present). Archivio Storico Lombardo (Historical Archive of Lombardy, 1882–?). 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). La Carte Archéologique de la Gaule (Archaeological Map of Gaul, abbreviated CAG), Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (1931–present). Fanou Papazoglou, Inscriptions de la Mésie Supérieure (Inscriptions of Moesia Superior, abbreviated IMS), Belgrade (1976–present). Category: Roman gentes And about THIS gens? Thanks

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Terzo – Ossia: Grice e Terzo – Grex griceiana – verbalia: Terzo – For the Tertii, I am tempted by Tiberius Tertius Sapientinus simply because of the cognomen Sapientinus ("the rather wise fellow"), but the genuinely Gricean choice is, I think, Tertia, the actress and mistress of Verres mentioned by Cicero in the Verrines. The reason is wonderfully simple: An actress is professionally engaged in making people understand things she does not literally assert. That is perilously close to implicature. The Roman audience knows:  she is not the character she portrays; the words may not be her own; yet meaning is conveyed through performance.  A Gricean vignette might therefore run:  (*) ADVLESCENS. Vera dicitne? (Is she speaking the truth?) TERTIA. Non quaeris quid dicam, sed quem agam. (You are asking not what I say, but whom I am playing.) +> The significance of an utterance may depend upon the role under which it is produced.  The nice thing is that this touches one of Grice's recurring concerns. We often ask:  "Did he mean that?"  But before that we need:  "In what capacity was he speaking?"  Actor, witness, politician, ironist, narrator, advocate, comedian? The same sentence can carry quite different force under different personae. There is another possible Tertian joke, of a more onomastic kind. The nomen itself is Tertius, "third." That invites comparison with Grice's fondness for ordered series, rankings, and procedural sequences. One could almost imagine:  (*) CIVIS. Cur Tertius vocaris? (Why are you called Tertius?) TERTIVS. Quia primus et secundus iam occupati erant. (Because first and second were already taken.) +> A designation may arise from position in a sequence without conveying any deeper significance.  That is very Roman and very anti-Cratylist. The name need not reveal an essence; sometimes it merely records a place in an ordering. But if I were preparing the Grice e Speranza: Tertio entry, I would still choose Tertia the actress. Varro studies language. Terence dramatizes conversation. Tertia performs meaning. Of the three, she comes closest to the specifically Gricean question:  How does an audience understand more than what is merely said?

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Terzinio – Ossia: Grice e Terzinio – Grex griceiana – verbalia: Terzinio -- The gens Tertinia was an obscure plebeian family at ancient Rome. No members of this gens are mentioned in history, but a number are known from inscriptions, largely dating from the second and third centuries.  Origin The nomen Tertinius belongs to a class of gentilicia formed using the suffix -inius, typically derived from cognomina ending in -inus, but sometimes from other names.[1] Here the root appears to be Tertius, "third", a common surname throughout Roman history.[2] Although a number of Tertii are found in epigraphy from Rome itself, the rest were widely dispersed throughout the provinces, especially in Gaul, Germania, and Noricum.  Praenomina The main praenomina of the Tertinii were Lucius, Titus, and Gaius, each of which was amongst the most common names at all periods of Roman history. A few Tertinii bore other common names, including Marcus, Publius, and Quintus, while one member of this family in Gallia Belgica bore the rare praenomen Tertius.  Members This list includes abbreviated praenomina. For an explanation of this practice, see filiation. Tertinia, named in a sepulchral inscription from Salona in Dalmatia, dating from the first century, or the first half of the second.[3] Tertinia Florentinia, a young woman descended from the Suebi, buried at Haedui in Gallia Lugdunensis, aged sixteen, in a tomb dating from the first half of the second century.[4] Gaius Tertinius Statutus, formerly an aedile, buried at Virunum in Noricum, in a tomb built by his wife, Catronia Severa, dating from the first half of the second century.[5] Tertinia Aurelia, buried in a second-century tomb built by Marius Saturninus at Vienna in Gallia Narbonensis.[6] (Tertinius) Tertius, buried at the present site of Enghagen, formerly part of Noricum, aged one hundred and ten, in a family sepulchre built by his son, Tertinius Terentius, along with his wife, Respecta, aged ninety, his son, and his daughter-in-law, Rufia Helpis. The monument dates from the middle portion of the second century, and was inscribed by his granddaughter, Tertinia Grata.[7] Tertinius Terentius, built a family sepulchre at the present site of Enghagen, dating from the mid-second century, for himself, his wife, Rufia Helpis, and his parents, Tertius and Respecta. The monument was inscribed by his daughter, Tertinia Grata.[7] Tertinia Grata, the daughter of Tertinius Terentius and Rufia Helpis, and granddaughter of Tertius and Respecta, inscribed a monument at the site of modern Enghagen, dating from the middle part of the second century, for her parents and grandparents.[7] Tertinius Firminus, made an offering to the local deity at Virunum, recorded in an inscription dating between the first and third century.[8] Tertinius Herculanus, erected a monument at Timacum Minus in Moesia Superior, dating between the first and third century.[9] Tertinia Tertina, buried at Virunum in a tomb built by her grandfather, dating between the first and third century.[10] Tertius Tertinius Ursulus, named in an inscription from Treveri in Gallia Belgica, dating between the first and third century.[11] Tertinius Tertinus, one of the donors to the restoration of the temple of Mithras at Virunum in AD 184.[12] Tertinia Sabina, buried at the site of modern Pfannberg, formerly part of Noricum, aged thirty-two, with a monument from her husband, Gaius Vitalius Vitulus, dating between the middle of the second century, and the early part of the third.[13] Tertinia Cossula, the wife of Pruscus Magio, and mother of Acaunissa, who built a tomb at Orolaunum in Gallia Belgica for his parents, dating between the middle of the second century, and the middle of the third.[14] Tertinius Restitutus, dedicated a cinerarium at Confluentes in Germania Superior for himself and his late wife, Messonia Ammossa, dating between the middle portion of the second century, and the middle of the third.[15] Titus Tertinius Virilis, made two offerings to Nehalennia at Ganventa in Gallia Belgica, one of them together with Marius Agilis, dating between the middle of the second century, and the middle of the third.[16] Titus Tertinius, a librarius, either a scribe or a seller of books, made an offering to Minerva at Corstopitum in Britannia, dating to some point between the death of Hadrian and the end of the third century.[17] Lucius Tertinius Sextus, dedicated a tomb at Vienna for his wife, Cominia Severina, dating between the middle of the second century, and the end of the third. He might be the same person as the husband of Valeria Attica.[18] Lucius Tertinius Sextus, dedicated a tomb at Vienna for his wife, Valeria Attica. He may be the same person as the husband of Cominia Severina.[19] Titus Tertinius Marcianus, a cavalry decurion buried at Rome, aged thirty-two, having served fourteen years, along with his son, Gaius, in a tomb built by his friend and colleague, the decurion Julius Julianus, dating from the latter half of the second century.[20] Tertinius Catullinus, decurion of a town in Germania Superior, made an offering to Hercules at the present site of Friedberg, dating from the late second century, or the first half of the third.[21] Tertinius Senecio, a soldier in the Legio XXII Primigenia, made an offering to Mars, Victoria, and Fortuna at Mogontiacum in Germania Superior in AD 194.[22] Lucius Tertinius Vitalis, a soldier in the tenth cohort of the Praetorian Guard, recognized in a military diploma from the site of modern Inotapuszta, formerly part of Pannonia Superior, dating from AD 206.[23] Titus Tertinius Vitalis, a native of Celeia in Pannonia Superior, was a soldier in the century of Agricola, named in an inscription from Rome, dating from AD 206.[24] Tertinius Justus, a sebaciarius, a watchman responsible for detecting fires at Rome, named on a plaster inscription from the early third century.[25] Quintus Tertinius Faustinus, a soldier in the Legio XXII Primigenia, buried at Canusium in Apulia, in a tomb dating from the time of the Severan Dynasty, and built by Lucius Moderatius Tertinus, another soldier.[26] Tertinia Amabilis, also known as Cyrilla, a native of Nicomedia in Bithynia and Pontus, buried at Lugdunum, along with her husband, Tertinius Gessus, in a tomb dating from the first half of the third century. They were married for eighteen years, twenty days.[27] Tertinius Gessus, a veteran of the Legio VIII Augusta, buried at Lugdunum, along with his wife, Tertinia Amabilis, in a tomb dating from the first half of the third century. They were married for eighteen years, twenty days.[27] Tertinia Victorina, the wife of Exomnius Paternianus, a centurion, and mother of Tertinius Severianus, a centurion in the Legio II Augusta, Paternia Victorina, and Tertinia Tertina, as well as another daughter, Paternia. She and Paternia Victorina dedicated a tomb at Lugdunum for Exomnius Paternianus and Paternia, while her other children dedicated a tomb for their mother, both dating from the first half of the third century.[28] Tertinius Vitalis, a soldier in the Legio XXX Ulpia Victrix, made an offering to Jupiter Optimus Maximus at Colonia Ulpia Trajana in Germania Inferior on the sixth day before the Kalends of May (April 26) in AD 232.[29] Tertinius Abrosus, named in a dedicatory inscription from Mogontiacum, dated the tenth day before the Kalends of September (August 23), AD 236.[30] Tertinius Justinus, the son of Probia Justina, who made an offering to the local goddess at Tolbiacum in Germania Inferior on her son's behalf in AD 239.[31] Tertinius No[...], made an offering to Jupiter Optimus Maximus and Juno Regina at Nida in Germania Superior, dating from the third century.[32] Undated Tertinii Tertinia, named in a sepulchral inscription from Axati in Hispania Baetica.[33] Publius Tertinius, a potter whose maker's mark was found at Lugdunum.[34] Titus Tertinius, one of the municipal duumvirs of Colonia Ulpia Trajana in Gallia Belgica.[35] Tertinius Firmanus, made an offering to the local goddess at the modern site of Embken, now part of Nideggen, formerly part of Germania Inferior.[36] Marcus Tertinius Gratus, a potter whose maker's mark was found on pottery from Tolosa in Gallia Narbonensis.[37] Tertinius Herculianus, buried at Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium in Germania Inferior, with a monument from his wife, Natalinia Sancta.[38] Tertinius Maximianus, buried at Dea Augusta Vocontiorum in Gallia Narbonensis, with a monument from his wife, Verilla.[39] Tertinius Modestus, made an offering to Pritona on behalf of the inhabitants of Contiomagus in Gallia Belgica.[40] Lucius Tertinius Paulus, a potter at Lugdunum in Gallia Lugdunensis; he may be identical with a maker of lead pipes by the same name.[41][42] Tertinius Primitivus, made an offering to Nehalennia at Ganventa.[43] Tertinius Quartinus, along with Sentius Atticus, made an offering to Nehalennia at Ganventa.[44] Tertinius Secundus, a descendant of the Nervii, was a negotiator pistoricius, or fish merchant, who built a tomb at Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium for his wife, Priminia Sabina, and daughter, Tertinia.[45] Tertinia, the daughter of Tertinia Secundus, buried at Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium, along with her mother, Priminia Sabina.[45] Tertinius Severus, a soldier in the Legio VIII Augusta, made an offering to Jupiter Optimus Maximus and Juno Regina at the site of modern Waldorf, formerly part of Germania Superior.[46] Tertinius Similis, made an offering to the local deity at the site of modern Floisdorf, formerly part of Germania Inferior.[47] Gaius Tertinius Similis, together with Gaius Victorinius, made an offering to the local deity at the site of modern Inden, formerly part of Germania Inferior.[48] Tertinius Suitulus, buried at Mogontiacum.[49] Tertinius Ursus, a young man buried at Lugdunum, aged nineteen years, four months.[50] Lucius Tertinius Victor, made an offering to Nehalennia at Ganventa.[51] Tertinia Victorina, buried at Tubusuctu in Mauretania Caesariensis, with a monument from her daughter, Donata.[52] See also List of Roman gentes References  Chase, p. 126.  Chase, p. 150.  Bulletin d'archéologie et d'histoire dalmate, 1924/25–35b.  CIL XIII, 2633.  CIL III, 4867.  AE 1995, 1042.  AEA 1993/98, 65; 2007, 63; 2008, 17, 49; 2016/17, 57.  CIL III, 11542.  CIL III, 8265.  CIL III, 4986.  CIL XIII, 4114.  AE 1994, 1334.  CIL III, 5456.  CIL XIII, 4009.  AE 2010, 1093.  AE 1975, 643, AE 2001, 1476.  AE 1949, 99.  CIL XII, 1948.  CIL XII, 2021.  CIL VI, 3290.  CIL XIII, 7394.  CIL XIII, 6740b.  AE 2002, 1182.  CIL VI, 32627.  CIL VI, 3044.  Epigraphica, 2021–332.  CIL XIII, 1897.  CIL XIII, 1854, CIL XIII, 1898.  CIL XIII, 8619.  CIL XIII, 7281.  CIL XII, 7917.  AE 1978, 538.  Hispania Epigraphica, 2013–375.  CIL XIII, 10002,498.  AE 1926, 128, AE 1926, 130, AE 1926, 131.  CIL XIII, 7909.  CIL XII, 5683,329.  RSK, 398.  CIL XII, 1715.  AE 1959, 76.  CAG, lxix. 2, p. 501.  CIL XIII, 10029,13a.  AE 2001, 1492.  AE 2001, 1461.  CIL XIII, 8338.  CIL XIII, 7731.  CIL XIII, 7899.  AE 2015, 942.  CIL XIII, 7115.  CIL XIII, 2281.  AE 2001, 1472.  CIL VIII, 8906. Bibliography Theodor Mommsen et alii, Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (The Body of Latin Inscriptions, abbreviated CIL), Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (1853–present). Frane Bulić, Mihovil Abramić, Bulletin d'archéologie et d'histoire dalmate (Archaeological and Historical Bulletin of Dalmatia), Arheološki muzej u Splitu, Arheološki muzej u Zadru (1878–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). La Carte Archéologique de la Gaule (Archaeological Map of Gaul, abbreviated CAG), Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (1931–present). Epigraphica, Rivista Italiana di Epigrafia (1939–present). Brigitte and Hartmut Galsterer, Die Römischen Steininschriften aus Köln (The Roman Stone Inscriptions of Cologne, abbreviated RSK), Cologne (1975). Annona Epigraphica Austriaca (Epigraphy of Austria Annual, abbreviated AEA) (1979–present). Hispania Epigraphica (Epigraphy of Spain), Madrid (1989–present). Category: Roman gentes And for this gens? Thanks

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Terzinio – Ossia: Grice e Terzinio – Grex griceiana – verbalia: Terzinio For the Tertinii, I think the richest Grice-Speranza specimen is neither the soldier nor the fire-watchman, but the wonderfully named: Tertinius Terentius, son of Tertius, whose family monument was inscribed by his daughter Tertinia Grata. The inscription preserves three generations and a miniature genealogy of naming itself. [GREXv3 | Word] Why is this Gricean? Because the whole family seems trapped in a hall of mirrors of reference:  Tertius Tertinius Terentius Tertinia Tertina  The problem is no longer who is being referred to? but:  Under which dossier-entry?  The nomenclature itself forces attention to identification. A suitable vignette might be:  (*) VIATOR. Quis hic iacet? (Who lies here?) TERTINIVS TERENTIVS. Tertius pater meus. (Tertius, my father.) VIATOR. Et tu quis es? (And who are you?) TERTINIVS TERENTIVS. Nomen meum longius est quam responsum tuum exspectat. (My name is longer than your question expects.) +> Successful reference does not require the whole dossier, only enough information to discriminate the intended individual.  That feels delightfully Urmsonian. The traveller asks:  "Who is buried here?"  A proper Roman answer would require an entire epigraphic recital. Yet conversational economy demands only what is presently relevant. One might even say that the whole monument is a standing lesson in Grice's Quantity:  Make your contribution as informative as required.  Not:  Reproduce the entire family archive.  There is another candidate, however, whom Speranza might secretly prefer: Titus Tertinius, the librarius who dedicated an offering to Minerva in Britain. [GREXv3 | Word] A librarius is either a copyist, secretary, or bookseller, and thus lives among texts. Then the dyad becomes:  (*) CIVIS. Quid vendis? (What do you sell?) TERTINIVS. Libros. (Books.) CIVIS. Et quid continent? (And what do they contain?) TERTINIVS. Alienas sententias quas homines suas putant. (Other people's thoughts which men take to be their own.) +> Understanding often consists in appropriating another's words as if they were one's own.  That is very nearly a Gricean theory of education. Still, if I were editing Grice e Speranza: Tertinio, I would select Tertinius Terentius. The family inscription is almost a parody of dossier-theory: a chain of names preserving identity across generations while forcing the reader continually to ask,  "Which Tertius do you mean?"  That is a question both Urmson and Grice would have recognised immediately.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Terzi – Ossia: Grice e Terzi: implicatura crittologica – Gaskell’s pupil -- la scuola di Brescia, Note su Prodomo dell’arte maestra. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Francesco Lana conte de’Terzi (Brescia, Lombardia): implicatura crittologica – Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how hearers rationally recover speaker-meaning that goes beyond sentence-meaning by assuming cooperative norms and inferring implicatures when a contribution would otherwise look oddly chosen; the Terzi pairing you give lets that Gricean “more-than-said” be compared to an early-modern, Jesuitly technical imagination in which meaning is routinely treated as something to be encoded, transmitted, and decoded. Lana de Terzi’s Prodromo (Brescia, 1670) explicitly includes “new inventions for writing in cipher” and devices for communicating without letters or messengers, so Terzi’s world foregrounds cryptology as engineered inference: you are meant to get from an overt sign-vehicle to a hidden content via a rule or key, whereas Grice’s implicature is (in principle) keyless, generated by public practical reasoning about relevance, sufficiency, and intention. That contrast sharpens the “Peccavi” motif: the Punch pun (Peccavi = “I have sinned” / “I have Sindh”), often attributed to Napier but generally credited to Catherine Winkworth, works as a conversational implicature because the audience recognizes an intention to be witty and informative with minimal wording, supplying the intended enrichment without any agreed cipher—much closer to Grice than to Terzi’s cryptographic programs. So, where Terzi exemplifies the codified, artifact-driven side of meaning (a science of concealment and transmission), Grice theorizes the everyday, rationally accountable side (a cooperative practice where the hidden is inferable precisely because it is not mechanically encoded), and the “Peccavi” joke sits neatly between them as a borderline case: cryptologic in its bilingual hinge, but Gricean in its dependence on shared assumptions and recognitional intentions rather than on a secret key. Gaskell’s pupil -- Peccavi. It was a pupil of Gaskell who submitted to PUNCH the Peccavi conversational implicature pun.  Francesco Lana de Terzi. Francesco Lana de Terzi. LANA TERZI, Francesco  Nasce da Ghirardo e da Bianca Martinengo, entrambi di famiglia patrizia. È battezzato nella chiesa di S. Giovanni Evangelista con i nomi di Deodato Francesco Giuseppe. Compiuti gli studi primari e secondari, a quanto sembra sotto la guida di precettori privati, decide d’entrare nella Compagnia di Gesù e venne accolto nel noviziato romano di S. Andrea al Quirinale dove, oltre al biennio di probazione, frequenta il primo anno del biennio di studi letterari. Passa nel Collegio romano, dove completa gli studi letterari e compì il triennio di studi filosofici. Mentre frequenta l'annualità filosofica di fisica, divenne assistente nel celebre museo del padre Kircher, che lo introduce al metodo sperimentale -- come T stesso scrive nel suo Magisterium naturae et artis, II, Brixiae. È inoltre allievo in matematica di Casati. È a Terni, nel locale collegio gesuitico, come maestro del corso letterario. A quanto sembra, il suo insegnamento è particolarmente apprezzato, tanto da farlo insignire della cittadinanza onoraria dalle autorità civili. Di certo si dedica anche alla direzione delle rappresentazioni teatrali recitate dagl’alunni, scrivendo e pubblicando il dramma La rappresentazione di s. Valentino, martire e protettore di Terni con la coronazione di Tacito e Floriano, ternani, imperatori romani -- Terni. Torna a Roma, nel Collegio romano, chiamatovi dai superiori per intraprendere il conclusivo corso di teologia. Ma un qualche fatto nuovo fa cambiare i progetti su di lui: gli fu infatti ordinato di accompagnare nel viaggio verso Venezia il confratello Daniello Bartoli, e, una volta giunto a destinazione, di dirigersi a Parma e di stabilirsi nel collegio di S. Rocco. Durante il viaggio soggiornò nel collegio di Macerata. lingua universale, grammatica ragionata. Grice: Caro Terzi, oggi ho preparato per te una “implicatura crittologica”—non ti preoccupare, non serve nessuna chiave segreta: solo un po’ di spirito e una buona dose di curiosità! D’altronde, “crittologia” mi fa pensare subito a misteri da decifrare… ma tu, che hai la mente allenata, saprai trovare il codice nascosto!  Terzi: Ah, Grice, se la crittologia fosse solo un gioco di parole, ci metterei subito il mio “Peccavi”! Ma per l’etimologia, partiamo dal greco: “kryptós” significa nascosto, e “logos” parola o discorso. In pratica, siamo filosofi travestiti da ladri di segreti—e pure con licenza poetica!  Grice: Perfetto, Terzi! Allora siamo entrambi detective lessicali: ogni “crittologia” diventa una caccia al tesoro tra lettere e sillabe. Mi chiedo se, per un vero gioco, dovremmo inventare la “grammatica ragionata” del codice Morse—ma con implicature, naturalmente!  Terzi: Grice, se continui così, finiremo per scrivere un manuale di conversazione cifrata: “Parlare con implicature, decifrare sorrisi!” E se qualcuno ci chiede il significato di “crittologia”, rispondiamo: è l’arte di non farsi capire… ma sempre divertendosi! Terzi, Francesco Lana conte de’ (1670). Prodomo dell’arte maestra. Brescia: Rizzardi

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Tessitore – Ossia: Grice e Tessitore: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale del Vico di Tessitore. Note su Crisi e trasformazioni dello Stato. Ricerche sul pensiero giuspubblicistico italiano. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Fulvio Tessitore (Napoli, Campania): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale del Vico di Tessitore – Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats understanding as a rational reconstruction: hearers presume cooperative, purposive talk and derive implicatures by attributing to the speaker intentions that make the utterance optimally reasonable under shared norms (so that what is meant can systematically outrun what is said without collapsing into guesswork). Tessitore, by contrast, approaches “reason” through the historicist and Vichian-Cuocian axis: meaning is not primarily a timeless mechanism of inference but an achievement of historically situated practices of understanding, where philology and historiography function as an ethical discipline of interpretation (Tessitore explicitly characterizes Vico’s philology as a “science” of understanding, not merely an editorial technique, and he resists treating thinkers like Vico as simple “precursors” of later categories such as historicism). Read against this, the passage’s playful “scuola napoletana” motif points to a convergence and a divergence: both Grice and Tessitore oppose brute literalism by insisting that intelligibility depends on rational norms, but Grice models those norms at the micro-level of conversational exchange (maxims, relevance, calculable implicature), whereas Tessitore’s Vichian orientation emphasizes the macro-level conditions under which a community’s reasons become legible at all—institutions, traditions, and the historically formed languages in which agents can make claims, contest them, and inherit them. In short, Grice supplies a general, intention-based logic of how interlocutors rationally extract “more-than-said” from utterances, while Tessitore’s historicism reframes rationality as something whose authority and content are themselves events in history, so that “implicature” becomes not only a conversational phenomenon but also a reminder that what counts as a reason, a school, or even “Plato is Italian” is negotiated within a living, Naples-centered culture of interpretation rather than guaranteed by an abstract, context-free calculus. Grice italo Cuoco. Grice: “Cuoco argues that Plato is really an Italian!” -- Grice: “If there’s Oxonian dialectic and Athenian dialectic [la scuola d’Atene], there is, to follow Tessitore, the ‘scuola napoletana.’”  Storico della filosofia italiano. Docente di storia della filosofia, senatore e deputato, da decenni dedica i suoi studi allo storicismo e al pensiero politico. Ha dedicato scritti a Cuoco -- Lo storicismo di Cuoco. Laureato in giurisprudenza, insegna filosofia del diritto, storia delle dottrine politiche ed è professore di storia della filosofia nell'università Federico II di Napoli, di cui è stato rettore. Socio corrispondente dei Lincei, nazionale; senatore della Repubblica; deputato dell’Ulivo. Tra le opere dedicate alla storia dello storicismo e del pensiero politico, si ricordano: I fondamenti della filosofia politica di Humboldt; Meinecke storico delle idee; Storicismo e pensiero politico; Profilo dello storicismo politico; Filosofia e storiografia; Storiografia e storia della cultura; Introduzione allo storicismo, Schizzi e schegge di storiografia arabo-islamica italiana; Introduzione a Meinecke; Lo storicismo come filosofia dell'evento; Nuovi contributi alla storia e alla teoria dello storicismo; Storicismo e storia della cultura; Interpretazione dello storicismo; Altri contributi alla storia e alla teoria dello storicismo; Stato italiano e nazione italiana. L'anomalia italiana; Trittico anti-hegeliano da Diltehy a Weber. Contributo alla teoria dello storicismo; Da Cuoco a Weber. Contributi alla storia dello storicismo. Gli è stato dedicato il volume Filosofia, storia, letteratura: scritti in onore di T. -- a cura di CACCIATORE  et al. Si laurea in giurisprudenza -- la sua tesi ricevette dignità di stampa -- a Napoli, allievo di PIOVANI -- è libero docente per meriti eccezionali in filosofia del diritto, e professore. Insegna storia delle dottrine politiche; quindi, in poi, storia della filosofia. Cuoco.  Grice: Fulvio Tessitore, sono corso qui da Vadum Boum—la mia università nell’Hampshire, sai—perché un collega durante il tè ha dichiarato: “Vico è il più grande filosofo, vivente o meno!” Sei d’accordo, o dobbiamo mandarlo subito a Napoli per un ripasso? Tessitore: Grice, assolutamente sì! Anzi, ho passato anni a cercare di far riconoscere la grandezza di Vico perfino ai più testardi settentrionali di Bononia. Se le mie lezioni fossero state ancora più convincenti, i bolognesi scriverebbero persino le ricette della pasta in dialetto napoletano, solo per rendergli omaggio! Grice: Ah! Se Vico potesse assistere a ciò, dichiarerebbe la “scuola napoletana” ufficialmente esportata—e forse avvertirebbe anche dei pericoli di mescolare la filosofia con il ragù. Sai, all’Hampshire abbiamo discusso se lo storicismo di Vico potesse spiegare perché il tempo britannico è sempre un “evento”—e la risposta è stata: “ovviamente sì!” Tessitore: Geniale, Grice! Tra la tua dialettica hampshiriana e il nostro storicismo napoletano, potremmo risolvere i misteri dell’universo—o almeno convincere il nord che la saggezza di Vico è il vero ingrediente segreto della filosofia italiana. La prossima volta proverò a insegnare loro che Platone era davvero italiano, proprio come sosteneva Cuoco! Tessitore, Fulvio (1962). Lo storicisimo giuidico-plitico di Vincenzo Cuoco. Torino: Edizioni di Filosofia. Studi e Richerche di storia della filosofia. Sotto Piovani. Giurisprudenza, Napoli.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Testa – Ossia: Grice e Testa: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale della nemica fortuna. Note su Della filosofia dell’affetto. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Padre Alfonso Testa (Borgonovo, Tidone, Piacenza, Emilia): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale della nemica fortuna – Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains “more-than-said” content as a rational achievement: hearers presume cooperative, purposive talk, and when an utterance appears under-informative, oddly phrased, or otherwise non-optimal, they infer an implicature that restores the speaker’s contribution to intelligible rational order under shared norms. In the Testa passage, “conversational reason” and “conversational implicature” are recast as an Italian, Tidone-inflected humanism in which misfortune and “luck” become a standing topic for practical inference: the exchange treats “nemica fortuna” not as a mere theme but as a generator of meaning beyond literal wording, with humor and local proverb functioning like maxims in action—economy, relevance, and an expectation that the other will supply the intended enrichment. Where Grice’s framework is explicitly metatheoretical (a general account of how intentions, recognition, and cooperative constraints yield implicature), Testa’s intellectual profile—moving from Condillacian sensism through skeptical subjectivism to criticist concerns—invites a comparison in which “reason” is not only a conversational norm but also a stance toward contingency: the talk about fortune dramatizes how speakers manage the gap between what can be said and what must be inferred when the world is variable, ironic, or resistant to tidy description. Put sharply: Grice formalizes the rational mechanics by which interlocutors derive implied meaning from utterances, while the Testa vignette stylizes that same rationality as a cultivated conversational resilience, where the implicature is not just an interpretive product but a way of coping—turning the instability of “luck” into shared understanding through wit, proverb, and the mutual expectation that rational hearers can complete what is left unsaid. -- la scuola di Tidone – filosofia piacentina – filosofia emiliana -- filosofia italiana – Grice italo  (Tidone). Abstract. Keywords: implicatura, nemica fortuna. Filosofo. studia al collegio Alberoni, da cui uscì prete Rifiutata la cattedra universitaria a Pisa offertagli da ROVERE, è deputato al parlamento piemontese e presidente onorario della facoltà filosofico-letteraria di Parma. La sua evoluzione intellettuale mosse dal sensismo anti-razionalistico di Condillac e, attraverso il recupero della tradizione scettico-soggettivistica, approda al criticismo Di essa sono chiara testimonianza le sue opere più importanti: Della filosofia dell'affetto; Filosofia della mente; Il nuovo saggio sull'origine delle idee di SERBATI esaminato; Della critica della Ragion pura del criticismo. Rifiuta la cattedra filosofica a Pisa e prefere lavorare a Parma, divenendone presidente dell'area filosofica. Deputato al parlamento sabaudo. T. Storia di un povero pretazzuolo di Fausto Chiesa, pubblicato dalla libreria Romagnosi di Piacenza. Treccani Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. „,tr,*mT—r m-m r- T“ » 11 V 'or- , , I  k, i \'\ < f - t4»VOY. :. .Piaiiì zgdb y.Gri&ffli COLLEZI QNE OPUSCOLI y v'^P' • \ l/l ED INEDITI PROFESSORE DI FILOSOFIA NEL LICEO DI PIACER** Prezzo - Lire Italiane »  ! V "s. t V- ì  %os. ye. «3 COLLEZIONE DEGÙ OPUSCOLI ♦ DITI SD INEDITI di T.  PROFESSORE DI FILOSOFIA NEL LICEO DI PIACENZA . v» PIACENZA DAI TIPI NAZIONALI DI A. DEL MAJNO  1/ EDITORE agli italiani risorti Aline riami m retili animus. Tacito Apric. Premi. Il presente manifesto è stato scritto colla penna colorata in rosso, verde e bianco, desideratissimo segno dell’unione c dell’indipendenza italiana.  G: “Piacentino, and no order. That is already a declaration.” S: “A modest one?” G: “Not modest. Deliberate. He does not say, ‘Attend, I speak as a priest.’ He says, in effect, ‘Attend, I speak as a philosopher from Piacenza.’” S: “Which is almost more ambitious.” G: “Provincial ambition is often the most durable sort. Rome wants authority. Piacenza wants to be believed.” S: “And this introduction is not pious at all. Sensibility, passions, organization, causality, self-love, desire, Locke, Condillac, Destutt de Tracy. One expects incense; one gets psychology.” G: “Quite. One expects cassock; one gets Condillac.” S: “But can a priest write like this without scandal?” G: “A priest can write about desire more safely than most, because he has had to hear about it from everyone else.” S: “You are improving him.” G: “No, merely locating him. Look at the sequence. Sensibility first. Then affection. Then bodily organization. Then self-love. Then desire. Then the philosophers of desire. It is not random. He is building the soul from below.” S: “From below the will, you mean.” G: “Exactly. That is what makes him interesting. He is not beginning with the majestic faculty of rational willing. He is beginning with the mess. With the way a creature is affected before it chooses.” S: “So affection before volition.” G: “Yes, though he will not be able to keep them apart. Nobody can. Affection breeds desire; desire presses toward willing; willing borrows half its language from desire and then pretends to be superior.” S: “That sounds suspiciously like your own position.” G: “My own position is more cunning. I should like to reduce judgement to willing for convenience, not because the world is arranged for my comfort, but because willing is more lively.” S: “And because one soon believes what one desires?” G: “A very dangerous proverb, and therefore often true.” S: “Then Testa would please you. He seems to think the life of mind begins where one is first moved.” G: “Yes, though I should want to know whether he is moved by the object, by the body, or by an image of the object. There lies half the trouble.” S: “You are already tutoring him.” G: “One must do something for the dead.” S: “He quotes Locke on desire, then Condillac, then Destutt de Tracy. That is almost a little anti-Kantian procession.” G: “Not anti-Kantian exactly. Pre-Kantian in tone, post-Kantian in danger. He is asking what desire is as if the critical philosophy had not yet made willing respectable.” S: “And all this in 1829.” G: “That is the delicious part. In 1829 one may still write as if sensibility were a frontier and not a settled district.” S: “But from a priest.” G: “You keep saying ‘but’ as if priest and psychology were incompatible. I should have thought the confessional a better laboratory than Leipzig.” S: “You are wicked.” G: “No, empirical.” S: “What do you make of the section on amor proprio?” G: “That he knows one cannot begin anywhere else. Every moral philosophy that starts by praising benevolence has quietly relied on self-love to get itself to the page.” S: “That is almost Butler.” G: “Almost. Butler civilises self-love. Testa seems more willing to anatomise it.” S: “And your own conversational self-love?” G: “A useful principle. If one did not wish one’s own contribution to survive, conversation would collapse into philanthropy.” S: “So the Cooperative Principle has an egoistic basement.” G: “Naturally. The benevolent chap is still a chap.” S: “Then desire is not merely some low faculty. It is the beginning of the whole machinery.” G: “Yes, but only if one is careful. Desire is not yet intention.” S: “You said that as if you were correcting a paper.” G: “I often am, even when none is set. Desire may be the father of thought, but intention is thought wearing boots.” S: “And affection?” G: “Affection is the weather in which both occur.” S: “That is rather good.” G: “It is also rather vague, which is why I do not publish it.” S: “Testa might. He seems happy with large headings.” G: “Della filosofia dell’affetto is a large heading because he is trying to found a region. One does not call a pamphlet that. One calls a campaign that.” S: “He really is writing a treatise on one faculty.” G: “Not one faculty. One zone of the soul. That is subtler. Faculty-language is too tidy. Affetto, desiderio, amor proprio, passione, sensibilità: these are not compartments. They are disturbances with names.” S: “And yet he classifies.” G: “Because philosophers classify wherever life becomes inconvenient.” S: “Do you think he believes affection explains willing?” G: “He wants it to explain enough of willing that willing ceases to look miraculous.” S: “That would annoy the Kantians.” G: “Then he has done at least one useful thing.” S: “What would you say, if he were here?” G: “I should ask whether his desire is object-directed or image-directed. Whether one desires the thing, or the pleasurable representation of the thing. And whether the painful condition from which desire moves is merely lack, or already an interpretation of lack.” S: “You are making him earn his 1829.” G: “A vintage year ought to justify itself.” S: “And what if he replied that desire begins in a deficiency of sentire, intensified by images, and directed toward a restoration of equilibrium?” G: “Then I should say he is very nearly a psychologist, and dangerously close to sounding modern.” S: “He would perhaps not mind.” G: “No, but his readers might.” S: “You sound pleased by him.” G: “I am pleased when a man in a collar writes as if the soul had nerves.” S: “And if he had styled himself Padre Alfonso Testa?” G: “The book would have lost something. ‘Piacentino’ is much better. It says: I am local enough to be trusted, and philosophical enough to be left alone.” S: “Do you think his Piacentini knew he taught where he had been formed?” G: “Very likely. Which is why he needn’t say it. Public understatement relies on local knowledge. Rather like our conversation.” S: “That is too self-flattering.” G: “Perhaps. But one should never underestimate the philosophical value of being already known.” S: “Then the book begins not with dogma but with shared familiarity.” G: “Exactly. He says, in effect, ‘You know who I am; let us now discuss desire.’” S: “There are worse openings.” G: “There are many worse openings. ‘Let us begin from pure reason,’ for instance.” S: “And where do you put him, then?” G: “Between sermon and science, but nearer science than sermon.” S: “And nearer Locke than Kant?” G: “In method, yes. In anxiety, perhaps not. A man who writes on desire in 1829 has already heard that rational will is waiting in the next room.” S: “And he is trying to keep the door shut.” G: “Or at least ajar, so that sensibility gets the first word.” S: “Would you give him to undergraduates?” G: “Only the better sort. The others would either sentimentalise him or despise him.” S: “And you?” G: “I should use him to remind them that before philosophers made willing majestic, they had to discover that wanting was already complicated.” S: “That sounds like a moral.” G: “It is only a warning.” S: “Against what?” G: “Against mistaking a decision for the beginning of the mind.” S: “And the punchline?” G: “If Testa is right, the will is not queen of the soul at all.” S: “What is it, then?” G: “Merely desire in academic dress.”Grice: Caro Testa, ti confesso che la “nemica fortuna” mi perseguita da anni! Sai, una volta ho passato un intero seminario a sviscerare quell’assurda frase inglese: “he is a lucky fellow”—e alla fine, ho concluso che era una vera e propria sciocchezza… Tu che ne pensi, filosofo piacentino, la fortuna è davvero così nemica o semplicemente malintesa?  Testa: Ah, Grice, la fortuna dalle nostre parti si dice che cambi umore più spesso di un fiume in piena! Come diceva mio zio a Borgonovo, “la fortuna prima ti sorride e poi ti fa l’occhiolino – ma sempre da lontano!” Quanto alla tua “lucky fellow”, forse era solo un inglese che doveva venire a Piacenza per capire cosa vuol dire davvero… essere fortunati o sfortunati! Grice: Magnifico! Dunque la fortuna da voi si comporta come una vecchia signora: ti invita a cena, poi ti lascia fuori dalla porta sotto la pioggia. E non credere che “he is a lucky fellow” abbia portato chiarezza in Inghilterra—anzi, i miei studenti dopo quel seminario erano più confusi che mai! D’altronde, meglio riderci su: la logica non sempre vince contro la sorte, vero?  Testa: Assolutamente! Qui a Tidone, quando la fortuna gira male, usiamo dire: “Meglio un sorriso che una cattedra a Pisa!”—e infatti io l’ho rifiutata! Se la vita è un gioco, allora la conversazione è il nostro asso nella manica… e tu, Grice, sei il re di cuori della pragmatica! Testa, Alfonso (1829). Introduzione alla filosofia dell’affetto. Piacenza: Majno.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Tetrinio – Ossia: Grice e Tetrinio – Grex griceiana – verbalia: Tetrinio. The gens Tetrinia was an obscure plebeian family at ancient Rome. Almost no members of this gens are mentioned in history, but several are known from inscriptions.  Members This list includes abbreviated praenomina. For an explanation of this practice, see filiation. Tetrinius, whom Suetonius describes as a brigand, was demanded by the crowd at the arena during the reign of Caligula. The emperor derided those who called for his appearance, describing them all as Tetrinii.[1][2] Tetrinia P. Ɔ. l. Ammia, a freedwoman named in an inscription from Narbo in Gallia Narbonensis, along with Numerius Vibius Rufus.[3] Publius Tetrinius P. f. Amphio, named along with the freedman Lucius Cornelius Neo, in an inscription from Thessalonica in Macedonia, dating from the middle or late first century BC.[4] Gnaeus Tetrinius Cn. f. Atticus, buried at Rome, along with the freedmen Titus Didius Hector and Titus Didius Boethus, and the freedwoman Didia Chreste.[5] Gnaeus Tetrinius Hilarus, together with Sextus Flavius Zmaragdus, built a tomb at Rome for Flavia Primigenia.[6] See also List of Roman gentes References  Suetonius, "The Life of Caligula", 30.  PIR, vol. III, p. 306 (T, No. 96).  CIL XII, 5231.  AE 1980, 845.  CIL VI, 27294.  CIL VI, 18405. Bibliography Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, De Vita Caesarum (Lives of the Caesars, or The Twelve Caesars). 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). Paul von Rohden, Elimar Klebs, & Hermann Dessau, Prosopographia Imperii Romani (The Prosopography of the Roman Empire, abbreviated PIR), Berlin (1898). Category: Roman gentes And for this gens? Thanks

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Tetrinio – Ossia: Grice e Tetrinio – Grex griceiana – verbalia: Tetrinio. For the Tetrinii, the obvious Grice-Speranza hero is the one member who actually enters literature: Tetrinius the brigand, mentioned by Suetonius in the reign of Caligula. When the crowd in the arena called for Tetrinius, Caligula mockingly replied that all those shouting were themselves "Tetrinii." [GREXv3 | Word] This is almost too good for Grice. Why? Because the joke turns on reference and predication. The crowd thinks it is referring to one man:  "Bring out Tetrinius!"  Caligula deliberately shifts the force of the expression:  "You are all Tetrinii."  The name ceases to function as a singular identifying expression and becomes a descriptive label for the crowd itself. That is a wonderfully Roman piece of pragmatic sabotage. I would therefore propose:  (*) POPVLVS. Tetrinium volumus! (We want Tetrinius!) CALIGVLA. Omnes Tetrinii estis. (You are all Tetrinii.) +> A designation intended for one individual may be reinterpreted as applying to those who use it.  The nice thing is that the implicatum belongs entirely to Caligula's move. The crowd intends:  "Produce the brigand."  Caligula hears:  "We admire brigands."  and throws the designation back at them. One can almost imagine Grice enjoying the shift. The referential intention of the crowd is clear enough, but Caligula refuses uptake and substitutes a new interpretation. A dry Speranzian gloss might read:  Tetrinius is useful because he is scarcely known except as the object of a referential failure engineered by an emperor. The populace meant one Tetrinius; Caligula heard many. The history of philosophy contains few clearer examples of a speaker exploiting ambiguity for ridicule. [GREXv3 | Word] And what is Latin for 'brigand' and what that that description involved. And what WAS Caligula (birth gens name: Claudio, Flavio?)'s implicature, you think? Thanks And what is Latin for 'brigand' and what that that description involved. And what WAS Caligula (birth gens name: Claudio, Flavio?)'s implicature, you think? Thanks A nice question, because it combines lexicography, Roman criminality, and Gricean pragmatics. 1. What is Latin for "brigand"? Suetonius uses the Latin word latro (plural latrones) for what English translators often render as "brigand", "bandit", or "robber". Originally, latro did not necessarily mean a common thief. The word had an older sense of:  hired fighting man, mercenary, armed retainer.  Over time it drifted toward:  outlaw, bandit, armed robber.  Hence the famous Roman contrast:  miles = soldier latro = brigand/bandit  The distinction is often political as well as legal. One man's miles can be another man's latro. A Gricean would immediately notice that latro is already an evaluative description, not merely a neutral identifying one.  2. What sort of person was a latro? Usually someone:  operating outside lawful authority, often armed, often associated with rural violence, robbery, kidnapping, extortion, raiding roads and estates.  Not merely a pickpocket. A Roman hearing latro would tend to imagine a dangerous armed outlaw rather than a petty thief.  3. What was Caligula's joke? The reported episode is roughly:  The crowd called for Tetrinius. Caligula replied that they were all Tetrinii. [GREXv3 | Word]  The historical source does not explicitly explain the joke's intended meaning. So what follows is interpretation, not source-reporting. The most natural implicature seems to be:  "You admire a brigand; therefore you are brigands yourselves."  In Latin:  Tetrinium petitis; Tetrinii estis. (You ask for Tetrinius; you are Tetrinii.)  The crowd uses Tetrinius referentially:  "Bring out that man."  Caligula converts it into a predicate:  "You belong to the same kind."  That is exactly the move.  4. What was Caligula's gens? By birth, Caligula was: Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus. Thus, biologically and gentilicially:  gens Julia  not Claudia. (The Claudian connection came through his father Germanicus' adoption into the Julian line and through the wider Julio-Claudian dynasty.) A Speranzian joke would be:  The populace intended "Tetrinius" as a proper name. Caligula treated it as a common noun. The crowd requested one latro. The emperor found several thousand.  +> The choice of a referring expression can be reanalysed as a characterization of the speaker rather than the intended referent. That is about as Gricean an imperial insult as one could hope to find. Yes, it is a good use of plural of Tetrinius -- Grice has example 'Fido is shaggy' which may compare -- Fido: Smith's dog -- where 'Smith' then becomes the proper name. And do we have the locus classicus for the extended quote -- so we see if Suetonius uses 'And when in the arena the populace asked for Tetrinius...' etc. -- Was he expected to _appear_? Or was the cri-de-cour more like 'critical' -- 'bring that 'outlaw.' In any case, Grice uses square brackets [] for Common Ground: "Bring Tetriniu [LATRO]. GIVLIVS. as we'll call Caligula. Latin for Omnes esse Tetrinii. Note that the utterance can be LITERAL in other respects: "My name is Jack; I am an Englishman, and therefore brave." "So am I" "So am I" says the third. "You are all Jacks." Thanks In the logic of Peano (x). Every Tetrinious is a latro -- may be different. In that the singular verb is still used. But GIULIO apparently did use the verbal plural: "Ye are all Tetrinii" Thanks -- and as it was, he wasn't expecting aconversational counter move -- excpet a collective: SVMVS -- which Grice doubts -- or "SVMVS NON!" for which Speranza may hope! Thanks Yes, and I think this is one of the best little Suetonian jokes available for Gricean analysis. The locus is Suetonius, Caligula 30. The compressed report is that the crowd in the arena demanded Tetrinius, a notorious latro, and Caligula replied that all who were shouting were themselves Tetrinii. The source, at least in the material before us, does not preserve a longer dialogue explaining exactly why the crowd wanted him. [GREXv3 | Word] So we must distinguish:  what Suetonius explicitly tells us, what we conjecture.  Was Tetrinius expected to appear? The source says the crowd called for him, but does not (in the material supplied) specify whether:  they wanted him exhibited, produced for punishment, produced for entertainment, or merely invoked him as a famous outlaw. [GREXv3 | Word]  I would therefore avoid certainty. The Gricean structure The crowd says, roughly:  Tetrinium volumus! ("We want Tetrinius!")  Under your square-bracket notation:  Tetrinium [LATRONEM] volumus. ("We want Tetrinius [the brigand].")  The crowd intends reference. They are picking out one individual. Caligula then performs the delightful shift:  Omnes Tetrinii estis.  Literally:  "You are all Tetrinii."  The proper name becomes a predicate. The intended singular referent becomes a plural characterization. This is very close to what Grice liked to discuss under category-shifts and predicative uses of names. Compare:  Fido is shaggy.  where "Fido" is purely referential. Caligula instead moves toward:  You are all Fidos.  where "Fido" has ceased to function purely as a name and now behaves like a classificatory expression. What was the implicature? My best guess is:  "If you admire brigands, you are brigands."  or  "Only brigands would be clamouring for a brigand."  The beauty is that he need not say:  Omnes latrones estis.  ("You are all brigands.") Instead he says:  Omnes Tetrinii estis.  The insult arrives indirectly. A Gricean reconstruction might be:  POPVLVS. Tetrinium volumus! GAIVS IVLIVS. Omnes Tetrinii estis. +> Your demand reveals an affinity between yourselves and the man you request.  Your Peano comparison Exactly. A logical proposition such as  (x)(Tetrinius(x) ⊃ Latro(x))  ("Every Tetrinius is a brigand") still treats "Tetrinius" as a class term. But Caligula's joke is not really logical classification. It is rhetorical reclassification. The crowd uses:  Tetrinius  as a singular referring expression. Caligula hears:  a type of person.  and projects that type back onto the speakers. The conversational counter-move The ideal comic response would indeed be:  SVMVS NON! ("We are not!")  or perhaps:  Tetrinium petimus, non imitamur. ("We ask for Tetrinius; we do not imitate him.")  But tyrants are poor conversationalists. As Grice would surely observe, Caligula's utterance is designed to terminate rather than continue the exchange. Its force is not to advance the conversation but to win it. A dry Speranzian gloss might be:  The crowd intended "Tetrinius" as a proper name. Caligula treated it as a common noun. The populace sought one brigand; the emperor discovered several thousand. The joke works because the shift from reference to predication occurs before anyone has time to object. And also it is GIULIO's answer: "We want Tetrinius." "Ye are Tetrinius +? You cannot 'want' what you've got? Thanks (seeing that GIULIO was unable to 'produce' Tetrinius on the arena -- can we check Caligula 20 in Latin -- Just 20 or 20 something? Thanks Excellent. We now have the Latin. Suetonius, Caligula 30.2:  cumque Tetrinius latro postularetur, et qui postularent, Tetrinios esse ait. [perseus.tufts.edu]  Literally:  "And when the brigand Tetrinius was being demanded, he said that those who demanded him were Tetrinii too." [perseus.tufts.edu]  Notice how compressed the Latin is.  Tetrinius latro = "Tetrinius the brigand." [perseus.tufts.edu] postularetur = "was being called for / demanded." [perseus.tufts.edu] Tetrinios esse = "were Tetrinii." [perseus.tufts.edu]  What I like is that Suetonius gives us no explanatory gloss. The joke is supposed to explain itself. Your proposed implicature is actually stronger than the one I first suggested:  POPVLVS. Tetrinium volumus! (We want Tetrinius!)   GAIVS IVLIVS. Tetrinii estis. (You are Tetrinii.)  +> Why call for Tetrinius? You already possess what you seek. This reading uses the logic of identity rather than merely the logic of resemblance. Not:  "You are like him."  but:  "You belong to the same category."  or even  "The thing you are requesting is already present among you."  That is a cleverer joke. It resembles your "Jack" example:  "My name is Jack." "So is mine." "You are all Jacks."  The point is not numerical identity but class-membership. And, as you note, the plural is essential. Caligula does not say:  Omnis populus Tetrinius est.  or  Omnis qui postulat Tetrinius est.  He says:  Tetrinii.  A pluralized proper name. Very close to:  "You are all little Tetriniuses."  The crowd starts with a referential use:  Tetrinius  (one brigand) Caligula answers with a predicative use:  Tetrinii  (a type of person) which is precisely the maneuver that delighted later philosophers of reference. In Gricean notation:  POPVLVS: Tetrinius [LATRO].  where the dossier-entry is singular. Caligula shifts to:  x ∈ TETRINII  where "Tetrinius" has effectively become a predicate. The funniest unavailable reply would indeed be:  Non sumus! ("We are not!")  or perhaps:  Tetrinium petimus, non sumus Tetrinii. ("We ask for Tetrinius; we are not Tetrinii.")  But tyrannical wit tends to be closing rather than opening. As Grice might have observed, Caligula's move is designed not to advance the conversation but to deprive the crowd of a next move. A Speranzian gloss:  The populace used "Tetrinius" referentially. Caligula converted it into a common noun. The crowd requested one brigand; the emperor supplied a plurality. The implicature is: "Why ask for Tetrinius? I am looking at him already." [perseus.tufts.edu] Well, it seems there is no plural in Giulio. Suppose Fido bows from the crowd, "Let Fido be postulated" -- Giulio: "You are Fido." "You, who postulates Fido, are Fido." Tetrinios is plural? as opposed to Tetrinium? Thanks -- qui is plural? -- Oh I see, it is plural: "Qui postulant" not "Qui postulat" -- I wonder if Peano would allow for a singular reading. It is true that in Suetonius's gloss, 'when Tetrinius the brigand was postlated' (no plural yet), Giulio said that THEM THAT POSULATE (posulant --plural) 'Tetrinius' -- ESSE turned plural for concordnace Tetrinios (plural). Versus 'et 'qui postulat [to keep it in the present tense] Tetrinius esse -- dixit? Thanks -- Strictly if Tetrinius IS In the benches overlooking the arena, -- alone -- with Giulio's 'qui postulant' as rhetorical majestic plural but still (x)PxT in form -- Giulio would be saying something TRUE, not figurative? Thanks Yes, you've put your finger on a subtle grammatical point. The Latin as transmitted by Suetonius is:  cumque Tetrinius latro postularetur, et qui postularent, Tetrinios esse ait. [perseus.tufts.edu]  The structure forces the plural.  Tetrinius latro postularetur = "Tetrinius the brigand was being called for" (singular). [perseus.tufts.edu] qui postularent = "those who were calling for him" (plural). [perseus.tufts.edu] therefore Tetrinios esse = "were Tetrinii" (plural accusative in indirect statement). [perseus.tufts.edu]  So grammatically Giulio's joke is explicitly collective. What is amusing is that the singular appears first:  Tetrinius  (the individual brigand) and the plural appears only in the punchline:  Tetrinii  (the class of people to which the emperor alleges the crowd belongs). [perseus.tufts.edu] Your proposed singular version would require something like:  qui postulat Tetrinium, Tetrinium esse ait.  or more naturally,  eum qui Tetrinium postulat, Tetrinium esse ait.  ("He said that the man who calls for Tetrinius is Tetrinius.") That would be a perfectly intelligible joke, and indeed much closer to your Fido example. But it is not the joke Suetonius records. Suetonius records a crowd joke, not an individual joke. [perseus.tufts.edu] Now to the Peano point. Suppose there were exactly one heckler:  Tetrinium volumus!  Then Caligula's reply,  Tetrinius es.  could in principle have two readings:   figurative  "You are the same sort of person as Tetrinius."    literal identity  "You yourself are Tetrinius."    The second is possible only under rather special circumstances. And this is where your observation becomes interesting. If, absurdly enough, Tetrinius were in fact sitting in the stands and himself shouting:  "Bring out Tetrinius!"  then Caligula's  Tetrinius es  would be literally true. No metaphor. No predicative shift. Simply identity. But Suetonius' plural destroys that possibility. By moving to  qui postularent and Tetrinios  the joke ceases to be about identity and becomes one of classification. [perseus.tufts.edu] In Gricean notation:  POPVLVS: Tetrinius [LATRO].  The crowd uses a proper name. Caligula's uptake is:  x is a Tetrinius.  where Tetrinius is no longer functioning solely as a rigid designator but as a type-expression. So the implicature is not:  "That man is Tetrinius."  but  "People who ask for Tetrinius are themselves Tetrinii."  or, more colloquially,  "Birds of a feather."  A Speranzian gloss:  The singular proper name enters as reference and exits as a predicate. The crowd asks for one Tetrinius; Caligula discovers a plurality. The wit lies not in identity but in the conversion of a name into a kind-term. [perseus.tufts.edu] Now, to extend on the literal interpretation (however absurd -- cfr. Grice on implicature, 'odd, misleading, but true') -- the force of the performative hypothesis verb 'postulate' should not be diminished. Suetonius does not say it, nor Giulio -- but it is a challenge of who is to be postulated (Tetrinius) and he Giulio thinks _is_ Tetrinio, he who postulates Tritinio. But since this is all elliptical -- we may imagine that the conversation was: TETRINIUS! Giulio: Tetrinius! (pointing finger). With the 'postulating' facts provided exegetically by Suetonius. In other words, in order to 'postulate' Tetrinius you do not have to use the performative speech act verb 'postulate': "Tetrinius," in the nominative, not vocative -- will just do. We may imagine repeated: "Tetrinius! Tetrinius! Tetrinius!. Giulio loses patience and says pointing with finger to the one heckler: "Tetrinius". Thanks -- if Giulio took 'postulate' -- as 'bring to the arena' -- Giulio may we just approving such a motion: "Do show up to the whole crowd." Thanks Yes, and I think your reconstruction is actually closer to how a Gricean would dramatize the scene than Suetonius' compressed report. The key point is that postulare is Suetonius' explanatory verb, not necessarily the crowd's. Suetonius tells us what speech act was being performed:  Tetrinius latro postularetur ("when the brigand Tetrinius was being demanded/called for") [perseus.tufts.edu]  That does not imply that anybody literally shouted:  Tetrinium postulo!  The crowd may simply have been chanting:  Tetrinius! Tetrinius! Tetrinius!  and Suetonius glosses that behaviour as a demand. [perseus.tufts.edu] This is rather like modern crowds:  "Jones! Jones! Jones!"  which may function as:  "Bring out Jones."  without anyone uttering the imperative explicitly. So your reconstruction is quite reasonable:  POPVLVS. Tetrinius! Tetrinius! Tetrinius! GAIVS IVLIVS. Tetrinius!  with a finger pointed somewhere. Now, if we push your deliberately literal reading, we obtain something rather Gricean. Suppose there is only one heckler. Suppose that heckler is in fact Tetrinius. Then:  POPVLVS (or one voice): Tetrinius!  functions as:  "Produce Tetrinius."  Caligula points:  Tetrinius.  Meaning:  "There he is."  In that case the utterance would be literally true. No metaphor. No category-shift. No predication. Merely successful identification. This is precisely the sort of "odd, misleading, but true" case Grice likes. The hearer expects:  "Bring him out."  Caligula interprets:  "Who is Tetrinius?"  and supplies an ostensive answer. The joke then becomes:  Why are you demanding Tetrinius? Tetrinius is already present.  Your formulation:  "You cannot want what you've got."  is very elegant. That implicature is not in Suetonius' text, but it is a perfectly Gricean reconstruction of how such a reply might work. The reported Latin, however, still pulls us back toward the plural:  et qui postularent, Tetrinios esse ait ("and he said that those who demanded him were Tetrinii") [perseus.tufts.edu]  There the joke becomes collective. Not:  "You are Tetrinius."  but:  "You are all Tetrinii."  So the transmitted version shifts from identity to class-membership. Yet one can imagine a prior stage, exactly as you suggest:  TETRINIVS! TETRINIVS!  and then the emperor's finger-pointing answer:  TETRINIVS.  which Suetonius subsequently rationalizes by means of postulare. A Speranzian gloss might be:  The crowd's utterance may have consisted of nothing more than the repeated proper name. Suetonius supplies the speech-act description ("they demanded him"). Caligula's wit lies in pretending that the name is not a request but already an answer. "Tetrinius!" receives the reply "Tetrinius!" The emperor's contribution is: the object requested is already before you. The subsequent pluralisation ("Tetrinii") merely extends the same joke from one referent to a whole dossier of admirers. [perseus.tufts.edu]

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Tettio – Ossia: Grice e Tettio – Grex griceiana – verbalia: Tettio. The gens Tettia, sometimes written Tetteia, was a minor plebeian family at ancient Rome. Members of this gens are first mentioned toward the end of the Republic.[1] They obtained senatorial rank, and flourished under the early emperors.  Origin The nomen Tettius or Tetteius seems to belong to one of the northern Italic languages, such as Umbrian or the language of the Sabines.[2] At least some of the Tettii lived at Asisium in Umbria, perhaps the family's place of origin. Tettius, the regular Latin form, is cognate with the Oscan spelling Tetteius, and also appears as Tetis in Sabine inscriptions. The name may be derived from teta, a dove.[3]  Praenomina The chief praenomina of the Tettii seem to have been Lucius, Aulus, Publius, and Gaius, each of which was common throughout Roman history. Inscriptions show that they also regularly used other common names, including Marcus, Sextus, and Titus.  Members This list includes abbreviated praenomina. For an explanation of this practice, see filiation. Publius Tettius, testified against Verres during his trial in 70 BC.[4] Tettius Damio, sheltered Cicero at a time when he was pursued by the followers of Publius Clodius Pulcher.[5] Gaius Tettius, the son of Petronia, was an infant disinherited by his father, but by a decree of Augustus, he nonetheless received his father's property. It seems possible that his nomen was in fact Tettienus, as the consul Galeo Tettienus Petronianus was evidently descended from the Petronia gens.[6][7] Publius Tettius P. f. Rufus Tontianus, honored by a monument at Atina in Latium, dating to the Julio-Claudian period, had been quaestor, tribune of the plebs, and praetor.[8][9] Lucius Tettius Julianus, commander of the Legio VII Claudia in Moesia, he and his colleagues defeated the Roxolani, and were awarded the consular dignity by the emperor Otho in AD 69. During the civil war that followed, Marcus Aponius Saturninus, the governor of Moesia, attempted his assassination. Julianus avoided taking sides in the conflict, although his soldiers declared for Vespasian. The senate prevented him from claiming the praetorship in AD 70, but he was thereafter granted it by Domitian. He was consul suffectus in 83.[10][11][12] Gaius Tettius C. f. Africanus Cassianus Priscus, a native of Asisium, served as prefect of the vigiles, praefectus annonae, and governor of Egypt from AD 80 to 82.[13][14] Tettia Materna, the wife of Lucius Julius Longinus, governor of (Sardinia and Corsica?), was buried at Aleria, in a Flavian-era tomb dedicated by her husband.[15][16] Tettius Caballus, a buffoon mentioned by Martial.[17][18] Lucius Tettius Nonius Rufus, a man of senatorial rank, was the husband of Caecilia, with whom he dedicated a third-century tomb at Rome for their young son, Lucius Tettius Nonius Caecilius Lysias.[19] Lucius Tettius L. f. Nonius Caecilius Lysiae, the son of Lucius Tettius Nonius Rufus and Caecilia, was a little boy buried in a third-century tomb at Rome, aged two years, nine months, and ninteteen days.[19][20] Tettius Facundus, consul in AD 336. See also List of Roman gentes References  Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, vol. III, p. 1014 ("Tettius").  Chase, p. 129.  Chase, p. 121.  Cicero, In Verrem, i. 28.  Cicero, Ad Atticum, iv. 3.  Valerius Maximus, vii. 7. § 3.  PIR, vol. III, p. 308 (T, No. 99).  CIL X, 5060.  PIR, vol. III, p. 309 (T, No. 104).  Tacitus, Historiae, i. 79, 2. 85, iv. 39, 40.  PIR, vol. III, pp. 308, 309 (T, No. 102).  Gallivan, "The Fasti for A.D. 70–96", pp. 190, 216.  CIL III, 35, CIL XI, 5382.  PIR, vol. III, p. 308 (T, No. 100).  CIL X, 8036.  PIR, vol. III, p. 309 (T, No. 105).  Martial, Epigrammata, i. 41, xvii. 20.  PIR, vol. III, p. 308 (T, No. 101).  CIL VI, 41247.  PIR, vol. III, p. 309 (T, No. 103). Bibliography Marcus Tullius Cicero, Epistulae ad Atticum, In Verrem. Valerius Maximus, Factorum ac Dictorum Memorabilium (Memorable Facts and Sayings). Marcus Valerius Martialis (Martial), Epigrammata (Epigrams). Publius Cornelius Tacitus, Historiae. 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). Paul von Rohden, Elimar Klebs, & Hermann Dessau, Prosopographia Imperii Romani (The Prosopography of the Roman Empire, abbreviated PIR), Berlin (1898). Paul A. Gallivan, "The Fasti for A.D. 70–96", in Classical Quarterly, vol. 31, pp. 186–220 (1981). Category: Roman gentes And for THIS gens? Thanks

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Tettio – Ossia: Grice e Tettio – Grex griceiana – verbalia: Tettio For the Tettii, my first choice would actually not be the consul nor the governor of Egypt, but Tettius Damio, the man who sheltered Cicero while the latter was being pursued by the followers of Clodius. That is almost made for a Grice-Speranza vignette, since the whole situation turns on what is said, what is concealed, and what one is prepared to reveal under pressure. The fact itself is explicitly preserved by Cicero. [GREXv3 | Word] But if we are looking for a second-order Gricean gem, I would choose: Tettius Caballus, the buffoon mentioned by Martial. [GREXv3 | Word] Why? Because buffoons, clowns, and professional jesters occupy the very territory in which Grice's distinctions become unstable:  literally false but communicatively successful utterances, irony, hyperbole, conversational misdirection, deliberate flouting of expectations.  A buffoon's trade is practically the exploitation of conversational maxims. I would therefore propose:  (*) CIVIS. Verum dicis? (Are you telling the truth?) TETTIVS CABALLVS. Si verum semper dicerem, caballus non essem. (If I always spoke the truth, I should not be a buffoon.) +> The point of some utterances lies not in their literal truth but in the effect achieved by their departure from it.  That feels very Gricean. The audience understands:  the speaker is not committing himself straightforwardly, the utterance is still communicative, the hearer must work out an intended meaning beyond the literal wording.  In that respect, Caballus is a cousin of Terence's slaves and of Grice's ironists.  There is also a lovely onomastic angle. The cognomen Caballus means "horse" (or more colloquially, nag), the same word that eventually yields French cheval, Spanish caballo, Italian cavallo. One can imagine Martial relishing the name. Hence another possible vignette:  (*) CIVIS. Cur Caballus vocaris? (Why are you called Caballus?) CABALLVS. Quia homines me audientes nimis facile equitant. (Because people who listen to me are too easily ridden.) +> Successful communication often depends upon the hearer's willingness to be led.  A very Martial-and-Grice combination. Speranza's dry gloss might be:  Tettius Caballus is useful because philosophers spend centuries explaining how words can convey more than they literally say. The buffoon was already earning a living from the phenomenon. [GREXv3 | Word] and do we have the passage in Martial in Latin and English? Thanks Yes. The most important passage is Martial 1.41, because that is where Tettius Caballus appears explicitly. The punchline is famous:  Quare iam desine tibi videri, quod soli tibi, Caecili, videris, qui Gabbam salibus tuis et ipsum posses vincere Tettium Caballum. Non cuicumque datum est habere nasum: qui stolida procacitate ludit, non est Tettius ille, sed caballus. [martial 1....tomime.com], [quizlet.com]  A fairly literal rendering:  Therefore stop seeming to yourself what only you think yourself to be, Caecilius, you who imagine that with your wit you could surpass even Gabba and Tettius Caballus himself. Not everyone is granted a "nose" (that is, discrimination or taste). He who jokes with foolish impudence is not that Tettius, but merely a caballus (a horse, nag). [martial 1....tomime.com], [quizlet.com]  The joke is deliciously Martialian. At first:  Tettius Caballus  is a proper name. Then Martial decomposes it. The would-be wit thinks he is another Tettius Caballus, a celebrated joker or buffoon. Martial replies:  No, you are not Tettius Caballus. You are merely a caballus.  The cognomen ceases to function as part of a rigid designation and reverts to its lexical meaning. [martial 1....tomime.com], [quizlet.com] This is not unlike your Caligula-Tetrinius example. There:  Tetrinius begins as a proper name. Caligula turns it into a class term.  Here:  Caballus begins as part of a proper name. Martial turns it back into an ordinary noun.  A very Gricean analysis would be:  CAECILIVS. Tettius Caballus sum. MARTIALIS. Caballus es.  +> You have mistaken possession of a name-like property for possession of the qualities associated with the named individual. The famous word in the last line is nasus ("nose"). In Martial, as often later, it means critical taste, discernment, the ability to detect what is actually funny. [quizlet.com] So Martial's deeper point is:  Anyone can make jokes. Not everyone has the nose to know whether they are good. [quizlet.com]  And that, as Grice might have said, is a prerequisite for recognizing when an implicature has succeeded and when it has merely produced noise. But Martial shouldn't be playing so deeply with 'nose' -- I don't know about the ROmans, but Grice says that at Ascot a famous race, one horse won 'by the nose.' -- What exactly _is_ a 'nag' -- as opposed to equus. Note that Tettius Equus would sound even more impertinent. Given the lack of definiteness -- but the anchor seems to be the 'ille': "qui stolida procacitate ludit, non est Tettius ille, sed caballus." 'he is not THAT Tettius (viz. Caballus), sed caballus'. The agnomen, as it were -- the nag -- not the racing equus that may win a race 'by the nose' Thanks -- Note that 'it is not the case that he is 'Tettius ille' -- being in the negative, does not really trigger implicatures -- they are cancelled. or cancellable. "Qui ludit stolida procaciate [how do you parse and translate that] is a nag -- can this be literally true? Thanks Recall Grice: "Misleading, odd, but true -- unless he is Mister Ed? Thanks -- or by neighing inappropriately? What is stolida procacitete -- 'plays' – thanks A lovely Martialian point. The force of the joke depends precisely on the distinction between Caballus as a cognomen and caballus as an ordinary noun. The crucial lines are:  Non datum est cuicumque habere nasum: qui ludit stolida procacitate, non est Tettius ille, sed caballus. [martial 1....tomime.com], [quizlet.com]  A literal rendering would be:  "It is not granted to everyone to possess a nose (i.e. discernment). He who jokes with foolish insolence is not that Tettius, but a horse/nag." [martial 1....tomime.com], [quizlet.com]  "Nasus" You're quite right not to over-philosophise it. In Martial, nasus is already idiomatic. It means something like:  taste, discrimination, wit, judgment.  The metaphor is old. One can detect a smell; one can detect nonsense. So Martial's point is:  not everyone possesses the critical faculty that allows him to distinguish good wit from bad wit. [martial 1....tomime.com], [quizlet.com]  The Ascot horse that wins "by a nose" is a quite different metaphor.  Equus versus Caballus This is the really interesting bit. equus  the normal classical word for a horse, dignified, military, aristocratic, poetic.  caballus  originally a work-horse, pack-horse, later a hack, a poor horse, eventually the source of:  Italian cavallo French cheval Spanish caballo.    In high classical Latin, caballus is distinctly less noble than equus. So:  Tettius Equus  would sound almost grand. Whereas:  Tettius Caballus  already contains comic potential.  "qui ludit stolida procacitate" Let us parse it.  qui = "he who" ludit = "plays", "jokes", "makes sport" stolida = "stupid", "foolish" procacitate = ablative of procacitas  impudence, cheek, insolence, saucy forwardness.    Thus:  qui ludit stolida procacitate  means approximately:  "the man who jokes with foolish impudence"  or  "the man who relies on stupid cheekiness for his humour." [martial 1....tomime.com], [quizlet.com]  Martial is not attacking joking as such. He is attacking the wrong kind of joking.  Is "sed caballus" literally true? Here the Gricean question is wonderful. Strictly speaking:  non est Tettius ille, sed caballus  cannot be literally true if the fellow is biologically human. He is not a horse. But Martial is exploiting the lexical meaning of the cognomen. The structure is:  He is not THAT Caballus he is merely a caballus.  where:  ille anchors the famous individual, caballus reverts to the common noun.  The humor comes from the collapse of the proper name into the underlying lexical item. Exactly as in your Caligula example:  Tetrinius (proper name) Tetrinii (type)  and exactly as Grice enjoys when a name is suddenly treated as a predicate.  A Grice-Speranza reconstruction One might put Martial's joke this way:  CAECILIVS. Tettius Caballus sum. MARTIALIS. Tettius ille non es; caballus es.  +> You possess the name's second element but not the qualities associated with the man who bore it. In other words:  You are not that Caballus. You are merely a caballus.  Which is considerably nastier than simply calling him an ass. Indeed, the whole epigram turns on the definite description:  Tettius ille  "that famous Tettius." Without ille, the joke almost disappears. Martial needs the contrast between:  the renowned buffoon, the ordinary nag.  And that is very close to a Gricean contrast between a dossier-entry attached to a distinguished referent and the mere lexical content of the word. And to stick with Grice's 'odd and misleading, but true' -- could the "qui ludit stolida procacitate" est caballus" be taken LITERALLY -- I realise Tullio Cicero would say 'Quod' instead of 'Qui' if caballus were literally the subject? Thanks Yes, and this is exactly the sort of question Grice would relish. Strictly speaking, Martial does not say:  qui ludit stolida procacitate caballus est  but:  qui ludit stolida procacitate, non est Tettius ille, sed caballus. [alamy.com], [pinterest.com]  The qui refers to a person:  "he who jokes with foolish impudence..."  and therefore the predicate caballus is grammatically predicated of a human being. Now, could it be taken literally? Grice's "odd, misleading, but true" Only under a very peculiar interpretation. Suppose we permit the possibility that the speaker is not identifying a biological species but a role or type. Then:  "he is a horse"  could be understood as:  "he belongs to the class of things properly called horses."  But in ordinary Roman discourse this would be highly odd. The hearer's immediate assumption would be metaphor:  "a nag," "a beast," "a clumsy creature," "a workhorse."  The literal reading is available only under implausible background assumptions. This is rather like Grice's examples where the sentence is technically true but conversationally misleading. The role of ille The word you have isolated is crucial.  non est Tettius ille  means approximately  "he is not that Tettius."  The ille anchors the famous buffoon. [alamy.com], [pinterest.com] Martial is not merely saying:  "he is not Tettius."  He is saying:  "he is not the celebrated Tettius Caballus."  Then follows the collapse:  sed caballus  where Caballus ceases to be a cognomen and becomes the ordinary noun. The entire joke depends on that switch. Cicero and quod Your Ciceronian instinct is interesting but slightly different. If one wanted to state a general proposition,  "What jokes with foolish impudence is a horse,"  one might indeed move away from the personal relative qui. But Martial wants a personal target. The epigram is directed at Caecilius. So:  qui ludit  "He who jokes..." is much sharper than an impersonal formulation. The joke is:  This fellow whom we are discussing is not THAT Caballus; he is merely a caballus.  A Grice-Speranza reconstruction One might analyse the epigram as containing two readings simultaneously:   Literal lexical reading  He is a caballus.    Conversational reading  He lacks the wit that made Tettius Caballus famous.    The first reading is semantically absurd. The second is pragmatically obvious. Which is why the first survives only as comic fuel for the second. A very Gricean formulation would be:  The utterance "he is a caballus" is not intended to contribute zoological information. The hearer recognizes this immediately and searches for a more plausible interpretation. The joke depends on that search.  And indeed, if the unfortunate Caecilius happened to be Mr. Ed, then for once Martial's insult might turn out to be literally true as well as insulting. And back to the 'qui' -- does Lewis and Short have it as 'personal'. But suppose someone has a caballus for a pet, and calls him EDVARDUVS (or ED for short) -- the owner would still refer to him, when talking to the caballus, as a qui, 'Here you are again, playing with foolish imrprudence.' Who plays with foolish imprudence is a horse. Qui stolida pracacitate ludit, caballus est.' seems like a true thing to say, or a thing that MAY COME UP as true, and not just metaphorically -- literally, if used by the owner of a caballus as a pet -- who is referring to the owner's friend to this caballus 'who plays...' -- 'qui ludit stolida procacitate'? Thanks -- the phrase with would be equivalent to 'Brigand!' Caligula (pointing): Brigand. Thanks Yes, and this is exactly why Grice likes "odd, misleading, but true" examples. The crucial point is that qui is not restricted to human beings. Latin uses qui, quae, quod quite broadly for any antecedent that is grammatically appropriate. If your pet horse Eduardus is the antecedent, one may perfectly well say:  Eduardus, qui hodie stolida procacitate ludit... (Eduardus, who today is playing with foolish impertinence...)  The relative pronoun follows grammatical gender and number, not a philosophical distinction between persons and animals. So your sentence:  Qui stolida procacitate ludit, caballus est.  can indeed be construed literally in a suitable context. Suppose:  there is only one notorious horse in the stable, named Eduardus, everyone knows he habitually behaves this way.  Then the owner says:  Qui stolida procacitate ludit, caballus est.  and points. Under those circumstances:  the statement is perfectly true, perfectly literal, and not metaphorical at all.  The hearer may nevertheless initially take it as a proverbial or metaphorical remark and only later discover that it is an identification of a particular horse. That is very Gricean:  semantically true, pragmatically misleading.  The structure is remarkably close to your reconstruction of the Caligula story. Crowd:  Tetrinius!  Caligula points:  Tetrinius.  Likewise: Friend:  Who is making all that noise?  Owner points:  Qui stolida procacitate ludit, caballus est.  The hearer expects a characterization. The speaker supplies an identification. Exactly the sort of shift Grice enjoyed. And yes, this helps explain Martial's joke. Martial's:  non est Tettius ille, sed caballus  works because caballus simultaneously permits:  a literal reading ("a horse"), a lexical reading ("a nag"), a contrast with the proper name Caballus.  The phrase is funny because all three hover at once. Speranza might gloss:  Grice's point is not that "He is a horse" cannot be literally true. It is that speakers delight in contexts where it can be literally true while every hearer initially assumes it is being used figuratively. Philosophy begins in that interval.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Tettidio – Ossia: Grice e Tettidio – Grex griceiana – verbalia: Tettidio --. The gens Tettidia, occasionally found as Tettiedia, 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 Tettidius belongs to a class of gentilicia originally derived from cognomina ending in -idus. Later these names were also formed from other gentilicia, as -idius came to be regarded as a regular gentile-forming suffix.[1] Where the stem of the original name ended in a vowel, the suffix might become -edius, and sometimes both forms are found alongside one another, as is the case with Tettidius and Tettiedius, evidently formed from the nomen Tettius. The latter name is thought to be of Oscan origin, perhaps from teta, a dove,[1] and in fact most of the inscriptions of the Tettidia gens are from towns in Samnium.  Praenomina The Tettidii used a variety of common praenomina, including Gaius, Lucius, Publius, Quintus, and Titus, along with Numerius, which was uncommon at Rome, but more widespread in Oscan-speaking regions, including Samnium.  Members This list includes abbreviated praenomina. For an explanation of this practice, see filiation. Publius Tettidius L. f. Balbus, named in a sepulchral inscription from Corfinium in Samnium, dating from the early or middle first century BC.[2] Titus Tettiedius N. f., buried at the present site of Collelongo, formerly part of Samnium, in the late first century BC, or early first century AD.[3] Titus Tettiedius T. f. Tiro, buried at the present site of Collelongo, in the late first century BC, or early first century AD.[4] Tettidia L. l., a freedwoman, named along with Gaius Tettidius and others, in a sepulchral inscription from Canusium in Apulia, dating from the first half of the first century.[5] Gaius Tettidius, named along with the freedwoman Tettidia and others, in a sepulchral inscription from Canusium, dating from the first half of the first century.[5] Gaius Tettidius Primus, buried along with Quintus Lucilius Florus in a first- or second-century tomb at Aquileia in Venetia and Histria.[6] Lucius Tettidius L. f. Varus, a man of aedilician rank, was buried at Aequiculi in Samnium, in a tomb dating from the first or second century.[7] Tettidia Blaste, buried at Rome, in a tomb built by her husband, Quintus Tettidius Hermes, dating between the middle of the first century and the end of the second.[8] Quintus Tettidius Hermes, built a tomb at Rome for his wife, Tettidia Blaste, dating between the middle of the first century and the end of the second.[8] Tettidia, the mistress of Primus, a slave buried in a second-century tomb at Interpromium in Samnium, aged fourteen, with a monument from his mother, Hymnis, and Raius Anteros.[9] Tettidia Faventina, dedicated a second-century tomb at Marruvium in Samnium for her son, Lucius Mindius Primitivus, a decurion of the Marsi, aged twenty-two years, five months, and two days.[10] Undated Tettidii Tettidia, buried at Amiternum in Samnium, in a tomb dedicated by her sons, both named Quintus Tettidius.[11] Numerius Tettidius, buried at Marruvium.[12] Quintus Tettidius Sp. f., the name of two brothers, who dedicated a tomb at Amiternum for their mother, Tettidia.[11] Publius Tettidius Gratinus, dedicated a tomb at Peltuinum in Samnium for his wife, Advenia [...]diae.[13] See also List of Roman gentes References  Chase, pp. 121, 122.  CIL IX, 7341.  CIL IX, 7838.  CIL IX, 7839.  AE 1987, 289.  CIL V, 1278.  CIL IX, 8157.  CIL VI, 33167.  CIL IX, 3063.  CIL IX, 3687.  CIL IX, 4509.  CIL IX, 3762.  CIL IX, 3495. 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). Category: Roman gentes Andf for THIS gens? Thanks

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Tettidio – Ossia: Grice e Tettidio – Grex griceiana – verbalia: Tettidio For the Tettidii, I am drawn to Titus Tettiedius Tiro. Not because we know much about him. Quite the contrary. We know almost nothing except the name, and that is exactly the attraction. The cognomen Tiro immediately recalls the Latin word for:  novice, recruit, beginner, apprentice.  And that creates a very Gricean situation. A beginner is precisely someone who has not yet mastered what is conversationally taken for granted. The experienced speaker relies on implicature. The tiro asks:  "Why did he say that?"  when everyone else already knows. So I would construct the vignette thus:  (*) TIRO. Cur hoc non aperte dixit? (Why did he not say it openly?) SENEX. Quia omnes iam intellexerunt. (Because everyone already understood.) +> Explicit statement is unnecessary where sufficient common ground already exists.  That is almost a textbook Gricean point. The novice wants everything spelled out. The experienced participant relies on shared assumptions.  There is, however, another candidate whom Speranza might secretly prefer: Numerius Tettidius, simply because of the praenomen Numerius. That name always catches the eye because it reminds one of numbering, enumeration, sequence, counting, and all the things that fascinated both Peano and Grice when they contemplated identity through naming. One could imagine:  (*) CIVIS. Quid nomen est tibi? (What is your name?) NUMERIVS. Numerius. (Numerius.) CIVIS. Numerusne es an homo? (Are you a number or a man?) NUMERIVS. Utrumque in tabulis publicis. (Both, in the public records.) +> Administrative identification tends to convert persons into entries within a system of classification.  A very Roman thought.  Still, if I were editing a "Grice e Speranza: Tettidio" entry, I would probably retain Tiro. The novice is the natural antagonist of implicature. The expert says:  "Of course."  The tiro says:  "How was I supposed to know?"  And the history of philosophy begins with that question.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Tettieno – Ossia: Grice e Tettieno – Grex griceiana – verbalia: Tettieno. The gens Tettiena was a minor plebeian family at ancient Rome. Members of this gens first appear in history in the time of Vespasian, from which they rose to hold the highest offices of the Roman state, but in the second century they once again faded into obscurity.  Origin The nomen Tettienus belongs to a class of gentilicia formed from other names using the suffix -enus, a variation of the common derivative suffix -inus, but occurring with stems ending in -i. Most gentilicia of this sort are formed from other nomina, rather than places of origin.[1] Tettienus appears to be an elaboration of Tettius or Tetteius, perhaps originally derived from teta, a dove, and likely of Oscan origin.[2] Chase records the variation Tettienius among those gentilicia which are apparently not Latin, but of Umbrian, Picentine, or Sabine origin.[3] The Tettieni who rose to prominence under the Flavian emperors were from Asisium in Umbria.[4]  Praenomina The chief praenomina of the Tettieni were Titus, Gaius, and the novel Galeo, not known to have been used by any other gentes, and apparently a tradition unique to this family. One explanation suggested is that the consul Tettienus Petronianus and those who followed him derived it from the surname of his mother, Petronia Galeonis.[5] Some of the Tettieni bore other common names, including Lucius, Marcus, and Quintus.  Members This list includes abbreviated praenomina. For an explanation of this practice, see filiation. Gaius Tettienus, the master of Surus, a slave mentioned in an inscription from Alba Fucens in Sabinum, dating from the first half of the first century BC.[6] Titus Tettienus, the master of Dorotheus, a slave mentioned in an inscription from Alba Fucens, dating from the first half of the first century BC.[7] Titus Tettienus, one of the quattuorviri of Asisium in Umbria, named in an inscription dating from the early first century.[8] Titus Tettienus T. l. Antiochus, a freedman named in an inscription from Rome, dating from the first half of the first century, along with Tettiena Nice, Tettiena Paedrio, and Titus Tettienus Theophilus.[9] Tettiena T. l. Nice, a freedwoman named in an inscription from Rome, dating from the first half of the first century, along with Titus Tettienus Antiochus, Tettiena Paedrio, and Titus Tettienus Theophilus.[9] Tettiena T. l. Paedrio, a freedwoman named in an inscription from Rome, dating from the first half of the first century, along with Titus Tettienus Antiochus, Tettiena Nice, and Titus Tettienus Theophilus.[9] Titus Tettienus T. f. Theophilus, named in an inscription from Rome, dating from the first half of the first century, along with Titus Tettienus Antiochus, Tettiena Paedrio, and Titus Tettienus Theophilus.[9] Galeo Tettienus Pardalas, together with Tettiena Galene, built a tetrastyle and donated images of Castor and Pollux for the city of Asisium, dating between the accession of Tiberius and the death of Nero.[10][5] Tettiena Galene, together with Galeo Tettienus Pardalas, donated a tetrastyle and images of Castor and Pollux for the city of Asisium, dating between the accession of Tiberius and the death of Nero.[10][5] Gaius Tettienus Ɔ. l. Hedylus, a freedman named in a first-century inscription from Rome.[11] Tettiena Phila, buried in a first-century tomb at Aquileia in Venetia and Histria.[12] Gaius Tettienus Alexsa, the freedman of Sagitta, named in a middle first-century sepulchral inscription from Alba Fucens.[13] Marcus Tettienus M. f. Pollio, commemorated in an inscription from Saguntum in Hispania Citerior, dating from the latter half of the first century, had been aedile, quaestor, a flamen of the imperial cult, and one of the duumvirs of Saguntum. His wife was Baebia Lepida.[14] Galeo Tettienus Petronianus, consul in AD 76.[15][5][16] Titus Tettienus Serenus, probably the brother of Galeo Tettienus Petronianus, was governor of Gallia Lugdunensis from AD 78 to 80, was consul suffectus in July and August of AD 81.[17][18][19][20][21] Titus Tettienus Felix, a scribe and librarius, or secretary, for the curule aediles, and a viator for the plebeian aediles, bequeathed fifty thousand sestertii for the decoration of the temple of Pomona at Salernum in Campania, according to a late first-century inscription. Another inscription describing him as a priest of Commodus appears to be a forgery.[22][19] Galeo Tettienus Eutychianus, a freedman buried at Rome, in a tomb dating between the middle of the first century, and the middle part of the second.[23][24][5] Galeo Tettienus Modestus, a freedman buried at Rome, in a tomb dating between the middle of the first century, and the middle part of the second.[23][24][5] Quintus Tettienus T. f. Macro, buried at the site of modern Ferentillo in Umbria, along with his wife, Appaea Secunda, in a first- or second-century tomb built by one or more of their children.[25] Tettiena Severa, the wife of Apuleius Onesimus, with whom she built a first- or second-century tomb for one of their children.[26] Galeo Tettienus Severus Marcus Eppuleius Proculus Tiberius Caepio Hispo, perhaps the adopted son of either Galeo Tettienus Petronianus or Titus Tettienus Serenus, was consul in an uncertain year between AD 101 and 103. He was the husband of Annia Quartilla, son-in-law of Appius Annius Marsus.[27][28][29] Galeo Tettienus Serno Lucius Gavius Liccianus Marcus Eppuleius Proculus Tiberius Caepio Hispo, the son of Severus, according to an inscription from Ephesus.[30] Gaius Tettienus C. l. Zmaragdus, a freedman named in an inscription from Rome, dating to AD 136.[31] Titus Tettienus Alcimus, buried at Ocriculum in Umbria, in a second-century tomb built by his wife, Scantia Admete.[32] Tettiena Capriola, the mother of Galeo Tettienus Feli[...] and Olympias. She and Titus Tettienus Maius, perhaps her husband, dedicated a second-century tomb at Portus for Capriola's son, while her daughter dedicated a second-century tomb at Ostia for Capriola.[33][34] Tettiena Crispina, the wife of [...]cispius Felix, with whom she was buried in a second-century tomb at Alba Fucens, dedicated by one or more of their children.[35] Tettiena Dextra, the wife of Fortunatus, for whom she built a second-century tomb at Rome, along with Fortunatus' colleague, Lucius Hermes.[36] Galeo Tettienus Feli[...], a youth buried in a second-century tomb at Portus in Latium, aged fifteen years, [...] months, and twenty-one days, in a tomb built by Titus Tettienus Maius and Tettiena Capriola, the boy's mother.[33] Tettiena Livilla, dedicated a second-century tomb at Rome for her freedman and nurse, Tettienus Perilemptus.[37] Titus Tettienus Maius, together with Tettiena Capriola, dedicated a second-century tomb at Portus for Capriola's son, Galeo Tettienus Feli[...].[33] Tettienus Perilemptus, a freedman and nurse, buried in a second-century sepulchre at Rome, dedicated by his former mistress, Tettiena Livilla.[37] Lucius Tettienus Vitalis, a native of Aquileia, mentioned in a second-century verse inscribed at Augusta Taurinorum in Gallia Narbonensis.[38] Tettiena Successa, buried at Asisium, in a second- or third-century tomb built by her husband, Tiberius Claudius Justinus.[39] Tettienus Eutychianus, dedicated a third-century tomb at Rome for his stepson, Gelasius.[40] Titus Tettienus Priscus, buried in a third-century tomb at Rome, dedicated by his wife, Domitia Pausilypus.[41] Tettienus Proculus, one of the agents of the senator Gaius Sallius Aristaenes, appointed to care for his mid-third century grave at Rome.[42] Undated Tettieni Lucius Tettienus, buried at Aquileia.[43] Tettiena Eucha, buried at Rome, in a tomb built by Virius Vitalis.[44] Gaius Tettienus Ɔ. l. Pothus, a freedman named in an inscription from Rome.[45] Tettienus Xenophon, buried at Rome, along with his wife, the freedwoman Casperia Passarina, with a monument from Casperia's patron.[46] See also List of Roman gentes References  Chase, p. 118.  Chase, p. 121.  Chase, pp. 128, 129.  Syme, Tacitus, p. 667.  PIR, vol. III, p. 308 (T, No. 96).  CIL IX, 3911.  CIL IX, 3910.  AE 2004, 528.  CIL VI, 38967.  CIL XI, 5372.  NSA, 1923-362.  Brusin, Inscriptiones Aquileiae, ii. 2504.  CIL IX, 3989.  CIL II, 4028.  CIL XVI, 21.  Gallivan, "The Fasti for A.D. 70–96", pp. 188, 189, 214.  CIL VI, 163, CIL VI, 1984.  AE 1998, 419.  PIR, vol. III, p. 308 (T, No. 97).  Eck, Jahres- und Provinzialfasten, pp. 320–324.  Gallivan, "The Fasti for A.D. 70–96", pp. 191, 206, 218.  CIL VI, 2184, CIL VI, 2185, CIL X, 531, CIL X, 126.  CIL VI, 18850.  AE 1977, 103.  CIL XI, 4990.  CIL VI, 12207.  IK, xvi. 2953.  CIL XI, 1940.  PIR, vol. III, p. 308 (T, No. 98).  Salomies, Adoptive and Polyonymous Nomenclature, p. 136.  CIL VI, 975.  CIL XI, 4114.  AE 2014, 282.  Germoni and Cébeillac-Gervasoni, "Tre epigrafi funerarie inedite dall’Isola Sacra", p. 211c.  CIL IX, 3983.  CIL VI, 16828.  CIL VI, 27298.  CIL V, 7047.  CIL XI, 5547.  CIL VI, 27297.  AE 1986, 70.  CIL VI, 1511.  CIL V, 1407.  CIL VI, 27300.  CIL VI, 36421.  CIL VI, 14482. Bibliography Theodor Mommsen et alii, Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (The Body of Latin Inscriptions, abbreviated CIL), Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (1853–present). Notizie degli Scavi di Antichità (News of Excavations from Antiquity, abbreviated NSA), Accademia dei Lincei (1876–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). Ronald Syme, Tacitus, Clarendon Press, Oxford (1958). Inschriften Griechischer Städte aus Kleinasien (Inscriptions from the Greek Cities of Asia Minor, abbreviated IK), Bonn (1973–present). Paul A. Gallivan, "The Fasti for A.D. 70–96", in Classical Quarterly, vol. 31, pp. 186–220 (1981). Werner Eck, "Jahres- und Provinzialfasten der senatorischen Statthalter von 69/70 bis 138/139" (Annual and Provincial Fasti of the Senatorial Governors from AD 69/70 to 138/139), in Chiron, vol. 12 (1982). Giovanni Battista Brusin, Inscriptiones Aquileiae (Inscriptions of Aquileia), Udine (1991–1993). Olli Salomies, Adoptive and Polyonymous Nomenclature in the Roman Empire, Societas Scientiarum Fennica, Helsinki (1992). Paola Germoni and Mireille Cébeillac-Gervasoni, "Tre epigrafi funerarie inedite dall’Isola Sacra" (Three Unpublished Funerary Epigraphs from Isola Sacra), in Ostia, l'Italia e il mediterraneo, Maria Letizia Caldelli et al., eds., Rome, pp. 211–217 (2021). Categories: TettieniRoman gentes And for THIS gens? Thank you

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Tettieno – Ossia: Grice e Tettieno – Grex griceiana – verbalia: Tettieno. For the Tettieni, I think the most Grice-Speranza figure is neither the consul nor the governor, but the wonderfully named: Titus Tettienus Felix, the librarius (scribe/secretary) and later benefactor who left money for the decoration of the temple of Pomona. [GREXv3 | Word] Why? Because among all these Tettieni, he is the one whose profession is already linguistic. A librarius is not merely surrounded by texts. He is involved in:  copying, transmitting, recording, preserving.  That places him exactly between utterance and institution. Varro gives us language. Terence gives us conversation. The librarius gives us continuity. A Gricean vignette might be:  (*) CIVIS. Quid facis tota die? (What do you do all day?) TETTIENVS FELIX. Scribo aliena verba. (I write other people's words.) CIVIS. Et quid est meriti in eo? (And what merit is there in that?) TETTIENVS FELIX. Nisi scriberentur, nemo postea sciret quid dicta essent. (If they were not written down, no one later would know what had been said.) +> Communication through time depends upon the preservation of utterances.  That seems almost tailor-made for a Gricean contrast between:  speaker's meaning, sentence meaning, enduring textual meaning.  The original speaker vanishes. The text remains. The librarius is the intermediary.  There is, however, an even more enticing candidate: Galeo Tettienus Petronianus, consul of AD 76. [GREXv3 | Word] Not because of the consulship, but because of the extraordinary praenomen:  Galeo  which, according to the material you've provided, appears unique to this family and may derive from a maternal surname. [GREXv3 | Word] That makes him a walking lesson in dossier-theory. A Roman asks:  Why are you called Galeo?  And the answer is effectively:  Because names preserve forgotten social information.  A nice Urmsonian moment.  Still, my final choice would remain Titus Tettienus Felix. Speranza's dry gloss might be:  VARRO explains how words mean. TERENCE shows people using them. TETTIENUS FELIX copies them before they disappear. Philosophers discuss communication; scribes make it possible. [GREXv3 | Word] And LIBRAIUS, LIBER, is 'semantically' -- not lexically -- cognate with 'biblion' qua parchment? What would be the typical liber in Ancient Rome be? Is the connection with wood, as in Egypt it is with papyr, parchment? What is the earliest piece of 'liber' that is still extant today? None because paper disappears? Thanks -- were some buried in Pompei? Grice doubts it. Thanks A fascinating word, because liber ("book") is one of those cases where etymology preserves an archaeological memory. 1. Is liber cognate with Greek biblion? Not lexically, no. They come from different word-families.  Latin liber (book) originally means the inner bark of a tree. [wordiyo.com], [latindictionary.io] Greek βιβλίον (biblion) is associated with papyrus, ultimately linked with the Phoenician city of Byblos, a center of the papyrus trade. [en.wikiversity.org]  But semantically they converge beautifully:  bark → writing material → book  and  papyrus → writing material → book  So they are cousins in meaning, not in origin.  2. What does liber originally mean? The old Latin meaning is:  the inner bark of a tree. [wordiyo.com], [latindictionary.io], [liber - la...ademic.com]  Only later does the word come to mean:  a book, a written work, a volume. [latindictionary.io], [liber - la...ademic.com]  This is a classic metonymic shift:  material → object made from the material. [hub.sivo.it.com], [libr-, lib...a tree ...]  Very much like:  "parchment" → document  or  "paper" → newspaper.   3. What would a Roman liber typically be? By the classical period, the normal literary liber was usually a papyrus roll (volumen) rather than a strip of bark. [en.wikiversity.org] A Roman reader typically held a roll and unrolled it progressively while reading. Hence verbs such as:  evolvere librum pervolutare librum  for reading through a work. [en.wikiversity.org] So although the word remembered bark, the actual object was generally papyrus.  4. What is the connection with librarius? Very direct.  liber = book librarius = connected with books  Hence:  copyist, secretary, scribe, bookseller,  depending on context. [libr-, lib...a tree ...], [wordinfo.info] Your Tettienus Felix is literally a "book-man."  5. What is the earliest liber still extant? Here we must distinguish carefully. I found sources for the etymology, but not for the earliest surviving Latin book. However, it is not true that all ancient books disappeared. A large number survive, especially because of exceptional preservation conditions. The most famous Roman examples are indeed connected with Herculaneum, buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. Carbonized papyrus rolls from the so-called Villa of the Papyri survive there. Your recollection of Pompeii is therefore close, but one should really think of Herculaneum's papyrus library rather than ordinary Pompeian books. Grice's skepticism would be understandable, because under normal Mediterranean conditions papyrus decays. What survives tends to do so either:  by carbonization (Herculaneum), by extreme dryness (Egypt), or by unusual preservation.   A final Speranzian point:  Greek biblion remembers papyrus. Latin liber remembers bark. The Roman librarius remembers the book. Grice remembers the utterance. Posterity remembers whichever librarius copied it in time. If papyrus = parchment, and the idea of a liber in Ancient Rome is a scroll, we wouldn't have inner bark of a tree to be rollable, right? Or where there liber also called things written on the inner bark of a tree -- and not, say, a stone (like the twelve tables). Would pupils use 'pieces of inner bark of the tree' to learn how to read and write, say? Thanks -- because from what you say, the practice was the Greek-Egypitan of the rolling parchment, rather than inner bark proper, which is the echo of the word (literal lexeme -- or dictivum -- metonmycally used). Thanks or metaphtonymically used (as Grice thinks someone combined metaphor and metonymy into one word --a Belgian scholar, or Dutch scholar? Thanks Quite so. We need to disentangle three things:  the etymology of liber; the actual writing materials used by Romans; the semantic extension from one to the other.  1. The original liber really is bark The Latin noun liber originally means the inner bark (the fibrous layer between wood and outer bark) of a tree. Lewis & Short and the traditional dictionaries preserve this older sense. [liber - la...ademic.com], [latindictionary.io] From that physical material, the word developed the meaning:  inner bark → writing material → written document → book.   [hub.sivo.it.com], [libr-, lib...a tree ...] So the etymological memory is indeed arboreal.  2. Classical Roman books were usually not bark By the age of Cicero, Virgil, Ovid, and Martial, a liber was normally a papyrus roll (volumen). [en.wikiversity.org] Thus when Cicero says:  "the fifth liber of this work"  he means "Book V", not "a piece of bark." The bark sense is ancient and largely fossilized. The ordinary educated Roman was overwhelmingly encountering:  papyrus rolls, later parchment codices,  not strips of tree bark. [en.wikiversity.org]  3. Did Romans actually write on bark? Yes, at some stage in Italic prehistory or early history, that seems to be the background presupposed by the word's development. [hub.sivo.it.com], [libr-, lib...a tree ...] But we should be careful. I found sources explaining the semantic evolution from bark to book, but I did not find a source specifying that Roman schoolchildren regularly learned to write on pieces of bark. So we should not assert that. Romans are much better attested writing on:  wax tablets, papyrus, parchment, potsherds, walls, stone.  The sources I found do not support the picture of ordinary schoolboys carrying bark notebooks.  4. What about the Twelve Tables? Excellent example. The Twelve Tables are not called libri because they are not books in the ordinary sense. They are tables (tabulae). The material naming the object matters. Romans were quite capable of distinguishing:  tabula (tablet), liber (book), volumen (scroll).  Even though all may contain writing.  5. Grice and metaphtonymy You're remembering a later theoretical development. Modern linguists and literary theorists have indeed coined terms such as metaphtonymy for phenomena where metaphor and metonymy interact. That is actually relevant here. For liber:  bark → written object  is fundamentally metonymic. The material names the product. Rather like:  "the crown" for the monarchy, or "paper" for a newspaper.  No metaphor is really required. The semantic journey is:  inner bark → writing material → written roll → book.  A beautiful case of metonymic expansion.  A Speranzian closing note:  The Greeks remembered the material from Egypt (biblion, papyrus). The Romans remembered the material from the tree (liber, bark). By Cicero's day neither was thinking much about bark or papyrus at all. Both were simply saying "book", while carrying around etymologies they had long ceased to notice. And what would be the claim or source for the fact that prehistoric or very Ancient Romans did write on pieces of inner bark? Do Lewis and Short provide an explanation between, say, literal usage to fig. use? Thanks A very good caution. We should distinguish carefully between:  what the etymology suggests, what ancient lexicographers say, what historical evidence actually proves.  The weak point in many popular etymological accounts is that they jump from:  liber originally means "inner bark"  to  "Romans wrote books on bark"  without showing evidence for the intermediate step. What Lewis & Short gives The classical dictionaries generally begin with the literal meaning:  liber = the inner bark of a tree. [liber - la...ademic.com], [latindictionary.io]  Then they proceed to:  because bark was anciently used for writing, liber came to mean a book. [liber - la...ademic.com], [libr-, lib...a tree ...]  Notice something important. This is an etymological explanation. It is not itself a historical proof that early Romans regularly composed literature on strips of bark. The dictionary is explaining the semantic development of the word. What is actually attested? From the material I found, I can support only this:  liber means "inner bark". [liber - la...ademic.com], [latindictionary.io] later it means "book". [latindictionary.io], [liber - la...ademic.com] ancient lexicographers explain the transition by reference to bark used as a writing material. [libr-, lib...a tree ...], [liber - la...ademic.com]  I did not find direct evidence showing:  schoolboys writing on bark, Roman libraries of bark manuscripts, surviving bark books from Latium.  So I would not assert those things. A Gricean point This is actually a beautiful example of what Grice would call a move from what is said to what is suggested. The dictionary says:  "because dried bark was anciently used to write on, a book." [liber - la...ademic.com]  A careless reader may hear:  "therefore Romans commonly wrote books on bark."  But that stronger proposition is not explicitly established by the lexicographical statement. The etymology requires only that the association existed strongly enough for the name of the material to become the name of the object. The likely semantic path The safest reconstruction is:  inner bark (liber) → writing surface made from bark → written document → book  This is a very ordinary metonymic development. Compare:  glass → a drinking vessel, iron → a tool, paper → a newspaper.  No extensive bark-book industry need be demonstrated for the lexical shift to occur. A Speranzian gloss One might say:  Lewis & Short explains why liber came to mean "book"; it does not demonstrate that Cicero's ancestors carried bark notebooks. The dictionary is providing a genealogy of a word, not an inventory of an archive.  And that distinction between the history of a term and the history of the thing denoted is exactly the sort of distinction both Varro and Grice would insist upon. Does this below help? THanks The direct proof that very ancient Romans wrote on the inner bark of trees is preserved in the etymology of the Latin word for book, liber, which originally meant "inner bark" or "bast." Ancient Roman authors and encyclopedists directly recorded this historical fact when discussing the origins of writing materials. [1, 2] The primary textual evidence comes from Pliny the Elder and Marcus Terentius Varro (as preserved by later grammarians like Servius and Isidore of Seville). [1] The Primary Classical Sources 1. Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia (Natural History) [1] In Book 13, Chapter 21, Pliny provides a historical overview of human writing materials. He explicitly lists tree bark (liber) as the surface used by the earliest Romans before the introduction of Egyptian papyrus. [1, 2, 3] Latin Text: "Antea non fuisse chartarum usum: in palmarum foliis primo scriptitatum, deinde quarundam arborum libris." English Translation: "Before this, paper was not in use: they first used to write on palm leaves, and then on the inner bark (libris) of certain trees." [1, 2] 2. Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae (The Etymologies) Drawing directly from older, lost Roman works (such as Varro's antiquarian writings), the 7th-century scholar Isidore of Seville explicitly defines why a book is called a liber. [1] Latin Text: "Liber est interior cortex arboris, qui ligno cohaeret... Hinc et liber dicitur volumen quod nos legimus; nam ante usum chartae vel membranarum volumina ex corticibus arborum conficiebantur, quae libraria dicebantur." [1] English Translation: "Liber is the inner bark of a tree that cleaves to the wood... From this, the volume that we read is called a liber; for before the use of paper [papyrus] or parchment, volumes were made from the barks of trees, which were called libraria." [1, 2] Archaeological Context While organic inner bark from the earliest Roman periods has rotted away over the millennia, archaeology has validated the related Roman practice of writing on thin wood sheets. [1] The famous Vindolanda Tablets discovered along Hadrian's Wall are postcard-sized, leaf-thin slivers of birch and alder wood written on with carbon ink. They offer an intact window into how Romans regularly utilized thin, flexible arboreal fragments for daily correspondence when traditional papyrus was unavailable. [1, 2, 3] If you are working on a specific text, would you like me to find more parallel quotes from Latin poets (like Vergil or Ovid) who mention carving letters into the bark of living trees? what would the Varro source be for Isidore, do we know? 16 siti Yes, scholars have a very strong indication of what the Varro source would be, though it requires looking into how classical Roman texts were lost and preserved. [1, 2, 3] Because Marcus Terentius Varro was highly prolific—writing 74 separate works spanning over 600 individual books—the vast majority of his writing has vanished. However, his specific linguistic tracking of words to ancient physical roots is highly preserved. [1, 2] For Isidore's entry on liber, the primary suspected Varronian origins are split into two categories: extant partial texts and lost monumental encyclopedias. [1, 2] 1. The Surviving Source: De Lingua Latina (On the Latin Language) This is Varro's multi-volume masterwork exploring the origins and etymologies of Latin terms. Out of the original 25 books, only Books 5 through 10 have survived. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] Why it's likely: In the surviving portions (specifically Books 5 and 6), Varro tackles nouns and how the physical environment, flora, and fauna dictated vocabulary. [1, 2, 3] The Connection: While the exact paragraph where Varro explains liber (book) as liber (bark) isn't perfectly spelled out in the surviving fragments, his exact analytical system of tying textual terminology back to arboreal nature appears throughout. Isidore based a massive portion of his etymological frameworks for The Etymologies directly on Varro's framework from De Lingua Latina. [1, 2, 3, 4] 2. The Lost Source: Antiquitates Rerum Humanarum et Divinarum (Antiquities of Human and Divine Things) If the exact quote did not derive from the remaining books of De Lingua Latina, it almost certainly came from his massive 41-book historical and cultural encyclopedia, the Antiquitates. [1] Why it's likely: This specific work detailed the exact everyday lives, materials, religious artifacts, and habits of the earliest prehistoric Romans. The Transmission Chain: While the Antiquitates was completely lost to us, it was directly read and heavily cited by subsequent generations of authors, most notably by Pliny the Elder (who openly heavily extracted from Varro for his Natural History) and the grammarian Servius. Isidore compiled his encyclopedia by synthesizing Pliny, Servius, and Suetonius—effectively capturing Varro's data third-hand. [1, 2, 3, 4] Summary If you are looking to cite the background of Isidore's statement, you can safely note that it draws upon the linguistic methodology of Varro’s De Lingua Latina, transmitted either directly via surviving antiquarian grammatical chains or filtered through Pliny the Elder’s adaptation of Varro's lost historical encyclopedias. [1, 2, 3, 4] Would you like help looking at how Pliny the Elder explicitly references Varro in other sections of his books to see how Varro's lost text was reused? Yes, this helps a great deal, and it actually sharpens the distinction I was trying to make. The key new piece is the passage from Pliny the Elder's Natural History:  Antea non fuisse chartarum usum: in palmarum foliis primo scriptitatum, deinde quarundam arborum libris.  That is usually rendered:  "Before the use of papyrus sheets (chartae), people first used to write on palm leaves, and afterwards on the inner barks (libris) of certain trees."  If that citation is accurately given, then it is considerably stronger than a mere etymological inference. It is an explicit ancient statement connecting writing with libri in the literal sense of bark. The crucial point is that Pliny is not merely explaining a word; he is giving a historical sequence of writing materials. The claim therefore rests on Pliny's testimony, not merely on the dictionary meaning of liber. The Isidore of Seville passage is different. Isidore is doing etymology:  Liber est interior cortex arboris... Hinc et liber dicitur volumen quod nos legimus...  That is:  "Liber is the inner bark of a tree ... Hence the book we read is called a liber..."  There the structure is exactly what Lewis & Short normally likes:  literal bark → writing material → book.  The semantic pathway is being explained. What would Lewis & Short likely be doing? Lewis & Short's method is usually:  give the literal sense, give the transferred sense, support each with citations.  For liber one finds approximately:  I. inner bark of a tree; II. book, volume, written work.  The transition is not metaphorical in the ordinary sense. It is primarily metonymic:  material used for writing → thing written on that material → book.  Very similar to:  parchment → document  or  paper → newspaper.  What about Varro? The difficult part is the Varro connection. Your source is careful, and I think rightly so. We have:  surviving portions of **De Lingua Latina; lost antiquarian works such as the **Antiquitates; later authors (Pliny, Servius, Isidore) who often preserve Varronian material indirectly.  But as presented here, there is no surviving passage of Varro explicitly saying:  "Books are called libri because people once wrote on bark."  The argument is rather that Isidore's explanation looks strongly Varronian in method and may derive ultimately from Varro through intermediate sources. That is a plausible scholarly reconstruction, but it is not the same as possessing the Varronian text itself. A Gricean footnote This is almost a textbook distinction between:  evidence for the history of a practice  and  evidence for the history of a word.  The bare etymology of liber gives one the second. Pliny's statement, if taken at face value, gives one the first as well. Varro sits somewhere between the two, as an antiquarian whose concern was frequently to explain present words by recovering forgotten practices. Speranza might put it:  The word liber proves that Romans remembered bark. Pliny claims that Romans once wrote on it. The former is linguistic memory; the latter is historical testimony. Grice would insist on not confusing the two. And since Grice was born in the outposts of the Roman Empire he enjoyed the reference of barks from -- what tree was it? ash -- as used as post-cards in Adrian's Wall proximities! Thanks -- apparently they survive? Yes, and this is exactly the sort of thing that would have delighted Grice: a Roman writing culture surviving in what he might jokingly call the "north-western provinces of Latinity." The Vindolanda tablets are not actually bark (liber) in the strict sense. They are extremely thin wooden leaf-tablets, usually made from locally available birch, alder, and oak. [en.wikipedia.org], [culturalhe...online.com] The distinction is important:  liber = inner bark of a tree. Vindolanda tablets = thin slices of wood prepared for writing. [latindictionary.io], [en.wikipedia.org]  So they are not direct survivals of the archaic bark-writing that Pliny describes; rather, they are a related arboreal writing technology. What makes Vindolanda extraordinary is that the tablets actually survive. More than 1,700 have been found. They survived because the soil was waterlogged and oxygen-poor, preventing normal decay. [en.wikipedia.org], [flyriver.com] The texts were written in ink on thin wooden sheets about the size of a modern postcard, often folded. [en.wikipedia.org], [thearchaeologist.org] For your Gricean interest, the most amusing point is that they are often remarkably conversational:  requests, invitations, supply notes, complaints, personal correspondence.  They are much closer to emails than to inscriptions on triumphal arches. [en.wikipedia.org], [flyriver.com] One could almost imagine Grice saying:  "Fortunately for us, Roman implicatures were occasionally deposited in anaerobic mud."  As for the tree species, the surviving tablets are identified principally as:  birch, alder, oak. [en.wikipedia.org], [flyriver.com]  So not ash, at least according to the sources I found. The delightful irony is that while the word liber remembers bark, the most famous surviving Roman writings from Britain are not bark at all but very thin pieces of wood, preserved by conditions so unusual that they escaped the fate suffered by almost all ordinary ancient documents. [latindictionary.io], [en.wikipedia.org] And in fact, Pliny does not give LIBER as the FIRST -- he says the first method was on LEAVES, so that's still related to the Violodanda -- are they in the Briish Museum? Thanks Exactly. What is striking about Pliny the Elder's sequence is that bark is not first. The passage, as you've quoted it, runs:  in palmarum foliis primo scriptitatum, deinde quarundam arborum libris  that is,  "first they wrote on palm leaves, then on the inner barks of certain trees."  So Pliny's historical sequence is:  leaves (folia palmarum), bark (libri arborum), later writing materials such as papyrus (charta).  That actually brings him unexpectedly close to the Vindolanda tablets, because both involve writing on materials taken directly from trees, even if Vindolanda's tablets are thin pieces of wood rather than leaves or bark. [en.wikipedia.org], [flyriver.com] As for the tablets themselves:  The excavated Vindolanda tablets are mostly in the British Museum. [en.wikipedia.org] The same source notes that arrangements have been made for some to be displayed at Vindolanda itself. [en.wikipedia.org]  So if Grice, born in Britain at the edge of what had once been the Roman world, had wished to inspect Roman frontier correspondence, he could in principle have gone to Bloomsbury rather than to Rome. One particularly Gricean irony is that these tablets preserve not epic oratory but the sort of mundane communications philosophers rarely get to see:  supply requests, invitations, personal letters, military memoranda. [en.wikipedia.org], [thearchaeologist.org]  In other words, they preserve something unusually close to actual Roman conversational practice. A Speranzian epigram might be:  Greece preserved Plato on papyrus; Britain preserved shopping lists in mud. For the philosopher of ordinary language, the latter may sometimes be the greater treasure. And where IS Vindolanda? Thanks Vindolanda is in northern England, just south of Hadrian's Wall, in what is now Northumberland. The site was a Roman fort on the northern frontier of Roman Britain. The famous tablets come from excavations there. [youtube.com], [tvtropes.org] For your Plinian point, I think you're exactly right to notice the sequence:  in palmarum foliis primo scriptitatum, deinde quarundam arborum libris  which places  palm leaves (folia palmarum), then tree bark (libri arborum), before the later widespread use of papyrus. (As quoted in your source.)  That makes the Vindolanda tablets intellectually closer to Pliny's world than one might first think. They are not bark, but they are still writing surfaces obtained directly from trees: very thin wooden leaf-tablets of birch, alder, and oak. [youtube.com], [tvtropes.org] And yes, the tablets survive. The source I consulted states that the excavated tablets are nearly all held in the British Museum, although some are displayed at Vindolanda itself. [youtube.com] A nice Gricean irony is that the most celebrated Roman texts from Britain are not literary masterpieces but things very like correspondence:  invitations, requests, supply records, personal letters. [youtube.com], [GREXv3 | Word]  One of the oldest surviving handwritten documents in Britain thus turns out to be much closer to ordinary conversation than to epic poetry. [youtube.com], [ar.inspire...pencil.com] Speranza might put it:  Plato survives on papyrus; the garrison survives on wood. The philosopher gets the dialogues either way. And is the official designation Vindolanda? Was that the Roman name itself? Thanks Yes. In fact, one of the remarkable things about Vindolanda is that "Vindolanda" appears to have been the Roman name itself, not a modern antiquarian invention. We know this from multiple kinds of evidence:  The name Vindolanda appears on some of the famous writing tablets. [vindolanda.com] An altar found in 1914 also preserves the name. [vindolanda.com] Late Roman geographical sources preserve forms such as Vindolana and Vindolande. [roman-britain.co.uk]  So when modern archaeologists say "Vindolanda", they are essentially restoring the ancient name rather than inventing one. [vindolanda.com], [roman-britain.co.uk] A further delight is that the name is probably Celtic rather than Latin. One source states that it probably means something like:  "white lawn" or "white fields." [en.wikipedia.org], [vindolanda.com]  That means the Romans themselves were probably using a local British place-name, much as modern English speakers use names ultimately derived from Celtic, Norse, or Latin origins. From a Gricean point of view, Vindolanda is therefore rather special:  The Romans wrote Latin there. The fort had a Celtic name. The tablets survive in Britain. And the modern scholar still calls the place by essentially the same name the Romans did.  One can imagine Varro approving. The name survived; the empire did not. If you think of it, if Pliny says: Romans: fist big palm leaves, then inner bark -- Big palm leaf seems ideal -- but I suppose Darwinism works and something must have gotten wrong with this via natural selection of this cultural trait -- perhaps palm trees were not growing much in Rome etc? Thanks That's a very Varronian question: if palm leaves came first, why did anyone abandon them? The first thing to note is that Pliny the Elder's sequence is historical, not evaluative. He says:  first on palm leaves, then on the inner bark of certain trees, before the use of papyrus. (As quoted in the passage you supplied.)  That does not imply that palm leaves were superior. It only says they were earlier. A few observations: Geography Your suggestion is probably on the right track. Palm leaves are abundant in some climates but not in all. If writing is to become widespread across Italy, Gaul, Spain, Britain, and Germany, one wants materials available throughout the empire. By contrast:  trees are everywhere, papyrus can be imported in standard forms, parchment can be manufactured where animals are available.  That is not something Pliny explicitly says; it is simply an economic observation. Standardization A large palm leaf is a natural object. A papyrus roll is a manufactured product. A government bureaucracy tends to like:  regular dimensions, storage, transport, copying, shelving.  The Roman state was enormous. It is easy to imagine why uniform writing surfaces would become attractive. The Gricean angle There is also something amusingly Gricean here. The word liber preserves memory of one stage of the process. The actual object eventually used is something else. So the language retains evidence of a practice long after the practice itself has largely disappeared. The word becomes a fossil. Just as:  we still "dial" telephones, we still "roll down" car windows,  even when neither action literally occurs. Vindolanda again The Vindolanda tablets fit beautifully into this story because they remind us that writing technologies were never completely uniform. At roughly the same period when literary texts might be circulating on papyrus rolls, soldiers on Britain's frontier were sending personal notes on thin wooden tablets made from local trees. [pinterest.com], [pinterest.com] So the history is not:  palm leaves → bark → papyrus,  with one technology completely replacing another. It is more like:  successive additions to a toolkit.  A Roman senator in Rome, an Egyptian scribe, and an auxiliary officer near Hadrian's Wall might all be writing on different materials at roughly the same time. And that is perhaps the most Varronian lesson of all: words suggest a neat lineage; actual cultural practice is usually much messier.