THE SECRET LIVES OF WORDS: Bread, circuses and other April follies

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  • LaFleur
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Rick LaFleur
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Detail of the Circus Maximus, model of ancient Rome; Cinquantenaire Museum, Brussels, Belgium. (Pascal Radigue, Wikimedia Commons)

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Ancient Romans, like modern Americans, loved festivals and had plenty of them. 

The Roman calendar included upwards of 150 holidays and public games, with their curious mix of religious rites, chariot racing, and gladiatorial contests. Funded by the government or by wealthy individuals, these events provided citizens with countless, often frivolous distractions, and business slowed or came to a halt. 

The second–century A.D. satirist Juvenal sardonically observed that the only things needed to keep Romans happy were free “bread and circuses,” panem (source of PANtry, PANini, and PANera) et circenses – like Rome’s huge chariot racing track, the CIRCus Maximus, whose shape was more nearly OVal, from ovum/egg, rather than CIRCular. 

Bread was a staple of the ancient Mediterranean diet, and one of April’s major festivals was the week-long Cerealia, April 12-19, honoring Ceres (as in CEReal), the goddess of wheat; gluten-free was not an option. Two days later citizens celebrated the birthday of Rome, founded, according to tradition, on April 21, 753 B.C. 

The Urban Wine Fest, Vinalia Urbana (think VINe/WINe/URBAN), held on the 23rd of the month and honoring Jupiter and the love goddess Venus, featured samples of the previous fall’s vintage. Even in ancient times, it seems, man could not live by bread alone.

Some Romans thought “April” derived from aperire, “to open” (like a camera’s APERture), because, as the ancient encyclopedist Varro remarked, “spring opens up all things.” The love-poet Ovid preferred, perhaps correctly, connecting the month Aprilis to APHRodite, Greek goddess of desire, counterpart to the Roman Venus. A festival in her honor, the Veneralia (as in VENERable as well as VENEReal) commenced April 1. 

Romans were all about love on April 1 and didn’t exactly have an “April Fool’s Day,” whose modern origins date to the 17th century. But a March 25 holiday called the Hilaria, from hilarus/cheerful, was proclaimed a day of HILARity, with some pranksters HILARiously masquerading as politicians (like HILLARy – her name derives from that same Latin root).

There were as many fools in antiquity as nowadays, and Rome had lots of words for them. Stultus gives us the adjective STULTifying for an experience that makes us feel dull-witted (our word STOLid is related). One February holiday, the Festa Stultorum, “Feast of Fools,” officially assigned to different dates in each Roman voting ward, was so-called because folks who didn’t even know what precinct they belonged to could choose their own day to celebrate.

Ineptus (as in INEPTitude and its opposite APTitude) described a person whose talents were unsuited to the task at hand. Fatuus gives us FATUous, for someone empty-headed and silly, and inFATUated, for someone crazy in love. If you were demens/DEMENTed, you were literally “out of (de) your mind (mens/mentis, like MENTal).” And someone stupidus (as in STUPefied, STUPendous, and STUPor) was “dazed and confused.”

One of Rome’s more vicious fools and egomaniacs was the emperor Nero. Taking a cue from Julius Caesar and Augustus, whose supporters had replaced the month names Quintilis and Sextilis, “Fifth” and “Sixth,” with “July” and “August,” Nero, the quintessential narcissist, renamed April Neroneus and had plans to call Rome Neropolis (from Greek polis/city, like Superman’s imaginary “Metropolis.”)

The emperor’s more violent misdeeds included hiring an engineer to design a collapsible boat to drown his mother Agrippina. 

When that contraption failed, Nero had mother dearest less complicatedly executed. 

The emperor’s folly led ultimately to his suicide, “Neroneus” became “April” again, and Roma remained, well, Roma, which the ancient Romans lustily observed was amor/love spelled backward.

Rick LaFleur is retired from 40 years of teaching Latin language and literature at the University of Georgia. His book “Ubi Fera Sunt,” a translation into classical Latin of Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are,” ranked No. 1 on Time magazine’s 2015 list of the top 100 children’s books of all time. Rick and his wife, Alice, live part-time in Little Switzerland under the watch of their French bulldog, Ipsa.