PART IV.
CHAPTER I.
LATIN NOMENCLATURE.
Hitherto we have had to deal with names at once explained by the language of those who originally bore them. With a very few exceptions, chiefly in the case of traditional deities, the word has only to be divided into its component parts, and its meaning is evident, and there was a constant fabrication of fresh appellations in analogy with the elder ones, and suited to the spirit of the times in which they were bestowed.
But on passing the Gulf of Adria we come upon a nation of mingled blood, and even more mingled language, constantly in a condition of change; their elder history disguised by legends, their ancient songs unintelligible to the very persons who sang them, their very deities and rites confused with those of Greece, till they were not fully understood even by their most cultivated men; and their names, which were not individual but hereditary, belonging to forgotten languages, and often conveying no signification to their owner.
The oldest inhabitants of Italy are thought to have been Pelasgi, which is argued, among other causes, from the structure of the language resembling the Greek, and from the simple homely terms common to both; but while the Pelasgi of the Eastern Peninsula became refined and brought to perfection by the Hellenes, the purest tribe of their own race, those of the Western Peninsula were subjected to the influence of various other nations. In the centre of Italy the Pelasgians appear to have been overrun by a race called Oscans, Priscans, or Cascans, who became fused with them, and called themselves Prisci Latini, and their country Latium or Lavinium. Their tongue was the elder Latin, and the Oscan is believed to have supplied the element which is not Greek, but has something in common both with Kelt and Teuton. These Latins were, there can be no doubt, the direct ancestors of the Romans, whose political constitution, manners, and language, were the same, only in an advanced condition.
Roman legend and poetry brought the fugitive Æneas from Troy to conquer Latium, and found Alba Longa; and after the long line of Alban kings, the twins, Romulus and Remus, founded the City of the Seven Hills, and filled it with Latins, i. e. the mixed Pelasgic and Oscan race of Latium. The first tribe of pure Oscans who came in contact with the Romans were the Sabines, who, after the war begun by the seizure of the Sabine women, made common cause with Rome, and thus contributed a fresh Oscan element to both blood and language. The Oscan race extended to the South, divided into many tribes, and their language was spoken in a pure state by the southern peasantry far on into Roman history. The numerous Greek colonies which caused the South to be termed Magna Græcia, became in time mingled with the Oscans, and gave the whole of Apulia, Bruttium, and Calabria, a very different character from that of central Italy.
Northward of Latium was the powerful and mysterious race calling themselves the Raseni, and known to the Romans as Tusci. They are usually called Etruscans, and their name still survives in that of Tuscany. They are thought by some to have been Keltic, but their tongue is not sufficiently construed to afford proof, and their whole history is lost. Their religion and habits were unlike those of their Roman neighbours, and they were in a far more advanced state of civilization. In the time of Tarquinius Priscus they obtained considerable influence over Rome, many of whose noblest works were Etruscan; and though this power was lost in the time of Tarquinius Superbus, and long wars were waged between Rome and Etruria, the effects of their intercourse lasted, and many institutions were traceable to the Etruscan element. Of the Roman families, some considered themselves descended from different Latin tribes, others from Sabines, others from Etruscans; and their genealogy was carefully observed, as their political position depended upon it.
Their nomenclature was, in fact, the immediate parent of our own.
Every Roman citizen had necessarily two names. The second of these was the important one which marked his hereditary position in the state, and answered to our surname. It was called the nomen, or name, par excellence, and was inherited from his father, belonging also to the entire gens, or tribe, who considered themselves to have a common ancestor, and who, all alike, whether wealthy or otherwise, took the rank of their gens, whether patrician, equitial, or plebeian. The daughters of the gens were called by the feminine of its name, and sometimes took that of the gens of their husband, but this was not always the custom.
Besides these large tribes, there were lesser ones of families. If an ancestor had acquired an additional appellation, whether honourable or ludicrous, it passed to all his male descendants, thus distinguishing them from the rest of their gens, and was called the cognomen. For instance, after Marcus Manlius had saved the capitol, Capitolinus would be the cognomen not merely of himself but of his posterity.
Clients and freedmen took the gentile name of their patron, and when the freedom of Rome was granted to a stranger, he took the gentile name of him from whom it was received, thus infinitely spreading the more distinguished nomina of the later republic and early empire, and in the Romanized countries gradually becoming the modern hereditary surname, the convenience of the family distinction causing it to be gradually adopted by the rest of the world. When the last of a gens adopted the son of another clan to continue his line, the youth received the nomen and one or more cognomina of his new gens, but brought in that of his old one with the augmentative anus. As for instance, Publius Æmilius Paullus being adopted by Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus, became Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Æmilianus, and his daughter was simply Cornelia. Again, Caius Octavius, as adopted into the Julian gens, became Caius Julius Cæsar Octavius; and the emperors being all adopted, arrived at such a multitude of names that the accumulation was entirely useless, and they were called by a single one.
Added to all these family names, each man had his own individual name, which was bestowed in later times, or more properly registered when, at the age of fourteen, he laid aside the childish tunic and bulla, or golden ball, which he had worn from infancy, put off the toga prætextala, and assumed the toga virilis, or manly gown, white edged with purple, which was the regular official Roman dress. In the latter days, the prænomen was given on the eighth day, with a lustratio or washing of the infant. There was a very small choice of Roman prænomina, not above seventeen; an initial was sufficient to indicate which might be intended, nor did ladies receive their feminines in the earlier times. By which name a man might be called was arbitrary; the gentile name was the distinction of rank, and perhaps the most commonly used by his acquaintance, unless the tribe were very large, when the cognomen would be used; and among brothers the prænomen was brought in first as the Christian name is with us. The great Marcus Tullius Cicero was called Cicero by those who only knew him politically, while to his correspondents he was Tullius; his son, of the same name, was termed Marcus Cicero; his brother, Quintus Cicero; and Caius Julius Cæsar figures in contemporary correspondence as C. Cæsar.
In Christian times, the lustratio at the giving of the prænomen became Holy Baptism, thus making our distinction between baptismal and hereditary names. The strict adherence to the old prænomina had been already broken into, especially in favour of women, who had found the universal gentile name rather confusing, and had added to it feminine prænomina or agnomina, had changed it by diminution or augmentation, or had taken varieties from the other gentes to which they were related. Christianity had given individuality to woman, and she was no longer No. 1, or No. 2, the property of the gens. Significant names, Greek names, or saintly ones were chosen as prænomina, and the true Christian name grew up from the old Roman seventeen. Besides these, the numerous slaves, who formed a large part of the Roman population, had each a single name. Some of these were in their own language, disguised by Latin pronunciation; others were called by Greek or Latin words; others bore their masters' names. Many of these slaves were among the martyrs of the Church, and their names were bestowed on many an infant Christian. Others were afterwards formed from significant Latin words, but far fewer than from Greek words, the rigid hereditary customs of Latin nomencloture long interfering with the vagaries of invention, and most of these later not being far removed from classical Latinity.
It should be observed that the original Latin word, especially if descriptive or adjectival, usually ends in us, representing the Greek ος, and in the oblique cases becoming i and o—in the vocative e. When it was meant to signify one of or belonging to this first, the termination was ius—thus from Tullus comes one belonging to Tullus—Tullius, in the vocative i; and again, one of the gens adopted into another, would become Tullianus,—Tullus, Tullius, Tullianus. The diminutive would be illus, or iolus, and in time became a separate name: Marcus, Marcius, Marcianus, Marcellus. In the adoption of Latin by the barbarous nations, the language was spoken without the least attention to declension; the Italians and Spanish used only the dative termination, making all their words end in o; but the former preserving the nominative plural i, and the latter the accusative plural os, while the French stopped short at the simple elementary word, and while finishing it in writing with an e, discarded all pronunciation of its termination. The vocative was their favourite case in pronunciation, and has passed to us in our usual terminal y. The a of feminine names was retained by Italy and Spain; cut off by France, Germany, and England.[[51]]
[51]. Niebuhr, Rome; Arnold, Rome; Smith, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities; Max Müller.
CHAPTER II.
LATIN PRÆNOMINA.
Section I.—Aulus, Caius, Cnæus, Cæso.
For the sake of convenient classification, it may be best to begin the Latin names with the original prænomina and their derivatives, few in number as they are, and their origin involved in the dark antiquity of the Roman pre-historic times. The chief light thrown upon them is in a work entitled De Factis Dictisque Memorabilibus, compiled by one Marcus Valerius Maximus, in the Augustan age, to which is appended a dissertation on Roman prænomina of doubtful authorship; but whether this be by Valerius himself, or by his abridger and imitator, it is the earliest information we possess as to these home appellations of the stern conquerors of the world.
Caius, or Caiius as the elders spelt it, was one of the most common of all Roman prænomina, and was pronounced Gaius, as it is written in St. Paul’s mention of “Gaius mine host.” Men indicated it by the initial C; women who bore it, used the same C reversed (ↄ) on coins or inscriptions. Valerius, or his imitator, deduces it from gaudium parentum, the parents' joy, but it is more probably from the root-word gai. When a Roman marriage took place with the full ceremonies such as rendered divorce impossible, the names Caius and Caia always stood for those of the married pair in the formulary of prayer uttered over them while they sat on two chairs with the skin of the sheep newly sacrificed spread over their heads; and when the bride was conducted to her husband’s house, spindle and distaff in hand, she was demanded who she was, and replied, “Where thou art Caius, I am Caia;” and having owned herself his feminine, she was carried over his threshold, to prevent the ill omen of touching it with her foot, and set down on a sheepskin within. From this rite all brides were called Caiæ. It is said that it was in honour of Tanaquil, whose Roman name was Caia Cæcilia, and who was supposed to be the model Roman woman, fulfilling the epitome of duties expressed in the pithy saying, Domum mansit, lanam fecit (she staid at home and spun wool), and was therefore worshipped by Roman maids and matrons. The Romans introduced Caius into Britain, and the Sir Kay, seneschal of Arthur’s court, who appears in the romances of the Round Table, was probably taken from a British Caius; but the Highland clan, Mackay, are not sons of Caius, but of Ey.
It was probably from a word of the same source, that the Italian town and promontory of Caieta were so called, though the Romans believed the name to be taken from Caieta, the nurse of Æneas, a dame who only appears among Latin authors. The city has become Gaeta in modern pronunciation, and from it has arisen the present Italian Gaetano. Who first was thus christened does not appear, but the popularity of the name began on the canonization of Gaetano di Thienna, a Vicentine noble and monk, who, in 1524, instituted the Theatine order of monks. He himself had been called after an uncle, a canon of Padua, learned in the law; but I cannot trace Gaetano back any further. It is in right of this saint, however, that it has become a great favourite in Italy. The Portuguese call it Caetano, the Spaniards, Cajetano; the Slavonians (who must have it through Venice), Kajetan or Gajo. It was a family name in Dante’s time, and his contemporary, Pope Boniface VIII., of whom he speaks with some scorn, had been Benedetto Gaëtano.[[52]]
| English. | Welsh. | French. | Italian. |
| Lucy | Lleulu | Lucie | Lucia |
| Luce | Luce | Luzia | |
| Lucinda | |||
| Russian. | Polish. | Hungarian. | Spanish. |
| Luzija | Lucya | Lucza | Lucia |
[52]. Smith; Diefenbach, Celtica; Butler; Michaelis.
Section II.—Lucius.
Lux (light) gave the very favourite prænomen Lucius, one born at daylight, or, as some say, with a fair complexion. Many an L at the opening of a Roman inscription attests the frequency of this name, which seems first to have come into Rome with the semi-mythical Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, and was derived from his family by the first Brutus. The feminine Lucia belonged to a virgin martyr of Syracuse, whose name of light being indicated by early painters by a lamp or by an eye, led to the legend that her beautiful eyes had been put out.
The Sicilian saints were, as has been already said, particularly popular, and Santa Lucia is not only the patroness of the Italian fishermen, and the namesake of their daughters, but she was early adopted by the Normans; and even in the time of Edward the Confessor, the daughter of the Earl of Mercia had been thus baptized, unless indeed her husband, Ivo Taillebois, translated something English into Lucia. The house of Blois were importers of saintly names, and Lucie, a sister of Stephen, was among those lost in the White Ship. The name has ever since flourished, both in England and France, but was most popular in the former during the seventeenth century, when many noble ladies were called Lucy, but poetry chose to celebrate them as Lucinda, or by some other fashionable variety of this sweet and simple word.
The lady has here had the precedence, because of her far greater popularity, but the masculine is also interesting to us. The root luc (light) is common to all the Indo-European languages; and ancient Britain is said to have had a king called Lleurwg ap Coel ap Cyllin, or Llewfer Mawr (the Great Light), who was the first to invite teachers of the Gospel to his country. He is Latinized into Lucius, and this word has again furnished the Welsh Lles. Nothing can be more apocryphal than the whole story, but it probably accounts for the use of Lucius amongst Englishmen just after the Reformation, when there was a strong desire among them to prove the conversion of their country to be anterior to the mission of Augustine. Named at this time, Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, rendered the sound honourable, though it has not become common. Lucio, or Luzio, is hereditary in Italy. The Irish Lucius is the equivalent of the native Lachtna and Loiseach.
The Lucillian gens of the plebeian order was formed from Lucius, and thence arose Lucilla, borne by several Roman empresses, and by a local saint at Florence; and in later times considered as another diminutive of Lucy.
Lucianus, on the other hand, was a derivative, and having belonged to several saints, continued in use in Italy as Luciano or Luziano, whence Lucien the Buonaparte derived the appellation, so plainly marking him, like his brother, as an Italian Frenchified.
Luciana has continued likewise in Italy, and was anciently Lucienne in France. Perhaps the English Lucy Anne may be an imitation of it.
Lucianus contracted into Lucanus as a cognomen, and thus was named the Spanish poet, Marcus Annæus Lucanus, usually called in English Lucan; but it has a far nearer interest to us. Cognomina in anus, contracted into the Greek ας, were frequently bestowed on slaves or freed-men, especially of Greek extraction. These were often highly educated, and were the librarians, secretaries, artists, and physicians of their masters, persons of Jewish birth being especially employed in the last-mentioned capacity. Thus does the third Evangelist, the beloved physician and reputed painter, bear in his name evidence of being a Greek-speaking protégé of a Roman house, Λουκας (Lukas) being the Greek contraction of Lucanus or Lucianus. “His sound hath gone out into all lands,” and each pronounces his name in its own fashion; but he is less popular as a patron than his brethren, though more so in Italy than elsewhere.
| English. | French. | Italian. | Spanish and Portuguese. |
| Luke | Luc | Luca | Lucas |
| German. | Russian. | Wallachian. | Bohemian. |
| Lukas | Luka | Luka | Lukas |
| Slavonic. | Lusatian. | Hungarian. | |
| Lukash | Lukash | Lukacz | |
| Lukaschk |
Lucretius, the name of a noted old gens, is probably from the same source, though some take it from lucrum (gain). “Lucrece, combing the fleece under the midnight lamp,” that fine characteristic Roman tale, furnished Shakespeare with an early poem; and Lucrezia was one of the first classic names revived by the Italians; and though borne by the notorious daughter of the Borgia, has continued fashionable with them and with the French, who make it Lucrèce; while we have now and then a Lucretia, learnt probably from the fanciful designations of the taste of the eighteenth century.[[53]]
[53]. Smith; Butler; Kitto; Jameson.
Section III.—Marcus.
The origin of Marcus, represented by the M, so often a Roman initial, is involved in great doubt. It has been deduced from the Greek μαλακὸς (soft or tender), a very uncongenial epithet for one of the race of iron. Others derive it from mas (a male), as implying manly qualities; and others, from Mars, or more correctly, Mavers or Mamers, one of the chief of the old Latin deities. Diefenbach thinks also that it may be connected with the Keltic Marc (a horse), and with the verb to march.
It extended into all the provinces, and was that by which John, sister’s son to Barnabas, was known to the Romans. Tradition identifies him with the Evangelist, who, under St. Peter’s direction, wrote the Gospel especially intended for “strangers of Rome,” and who afterwards founded the Church of Alexandria, and gave it a liturgy. In consequence, Markos has ever since been a favourite Greek name, especially among those connected with the Alexandrian patriarchate. In the days, however, when relic-hunting had become a passion, some adventurous Venetians stole the remains of the Evangelist from the pillar in the Alexandrian church, in which they had been built up, and transferred them to Venice.
Popular imagination does not seem to have supposed the saints to have been one whit displeased at any sacrilegious robberies, for San Marco immediately was constituted the prime patron of the city; and, having been supposed to give his almost visible protection in perils by fire and flood, the Republic itself and its territory were known as his property, and the special emblem of the state was that shape among the Cherubim which had been appropriated as the token suited to his Gospel, namely, the lion with eagle’s wings, the Marzocco, as the populace termed it, and another such Marzocco figures at Florence.
Marco was the name of every fifth man at Venice, and the winged lion being the stamp on the coinage of the great merchant city, which was banker to half the world, a marc became the universal title of the piece of money which, though long disused in England, has left traces of its value in the legal fee of six-and-eightpence.
The chief popularity of the Evangelist’s name is in Italy, especially Lombardy; though the Greek Church, as in duty bound, has many a Markos, and no country has ceased to make use of it. Some, such as Niebuhr for his Roman-born son, and a few classically inclined English, have revived the ancient Marcus; but, in general, the word follows the national pronunciation.
| English. | French. | Italian. | Spanish and Portuguese. |
| Mark | Marc | Marco | Marcos |
| Marcus | |||
| Esthonian and Russian | Polish and Bohemian | Lusatian. | Hungarian. |
| Mark | Marek | Markusch | Markus |
From Marcus sprang the nomen Martius, or, as it was later written, Marcius, belonging to a very noble gens of Sabine origin, which gave a king to Rome, and afterwards was famous in the high-spirited and gentle-hearted Cnæus Marcius Coriolanus.
The daughters of this gens were called Marcia, and this as Marzia, Marcie, Marcia, has since been used as the feminine of Mark. From Martius again came Martinus, the name of the Roman soldier who divided his cloak with the beggar, and afterwards became Bishop of Tours, and completed the conversion of the Gauls. He might well be one of the favourite saints of France, and St. Martin of Tours rivalled St. Denys in the allegiance of the French, when kings and counts esteemed it an honour to belong to his chapter; and yet Martin occurs less frequently in French history than might have been expected, though it is to be found a good deal among the peasants, and is a surname. Dante speaks of Ser Martino as typical of the male gossips of Florence; and from the great prevalence of the surname of Martin in England, it would seem to have been more often given as a baptismal name. Martin was a notable king of Aragon; but zealous Romanist countries have perhaps disused Martin for the very reason that Germans love it, namely, that it belonged to “Dr. Martinus Luther,” as the learned would call the Augustinian monk, whose preachings opened the eyes of his countrymen.
| English. | French. | Italian and Spanish. | Portuguese. |
| Martyn | Martin | Martino | Martin |
| Mertin | Martinho | ||
| German. | Swiss. | Dutch. | Lett. |
| Martin | Märti | Martijn | Martschis |
| Mertil | Martili | Marten | Hungarian. |
| Swedish. | Martoni | ||
| Marten |
Martina was one of the young Roman girls who endured the fiery trial of martyrdom under the Emperor Decius. Her plant is the maidenhair fern, so great an ornament to the Roman fountains; and her name, whether in her honour, or as the feminine of Martin, is occasionally found in Italy, France, and England.
Marcianus was an augmentative of Marcus, whence Marciano or Marcian were formed. Marcellus is the diminutive, and became the cognomen of the great Claudian gens. Marcus Claudius Marcellus was the conqueror of Syracuse, and the last of his direct descendants is that son of Octavia and nephew of Augustus, the prediction of whose untimely death is placed by Virgil in the mouth of his forefather, Anchises, in the Elysian Fields. St. Marcellus was a young Roman soldier who figures among the warrior saints of Venice, and now and then has a French namesake called Marcel.
Marcella was a pious widow, whose name becoming known through her friendship with St. Jerome, took the fancy of the French; and Marcelle has never been uncommon among them, nor Marcella in Ireland.
Marcellianus, another derivative from Marcellus, was the name of an early pope, whence Marcellin is common in France.
From Mars again came Marius, the fierce old warrior of terrible memory; but who, in the form of Mario, is supposed by the Italians to be the masculine of Maria, and used accordingly.[[54]]
[54]. Smith; Diefenbach; Roscoe, History of Venice; Grimm; Transactions of Philological Society.
Section IV.—Posthumus, &c.
Posthumus is generally explained as meaning a posthumous son, from post (after) and humus (ground); born after his father was underground; but there is reason to think that it is, in fact, Postumus, a superlative adjective, formed from post, and merely signifying latest; so that it originally belonged to the son of old age, the last born of the family. It became a frequent prænomen by imitation, and in several Roman families was taken as a cognomen.
The pseudo Valerius Maximus derives Titus from the Sabine Titurius; others make it come from the Greek τίω (to honour), others from tutus (safe), the participle of tueor (to defend). It was one of the most common prænomina from the earliest times, and belonged to both father and son of the two emperors connected with the fall of Jerusalem. Both were Titus Flavius Sabinus Vespasianus, but the elder is known to us by his cognomen, the younger by his prænomen. Titus should have been a more usual Christian name in honour of the first Bishop of Crete, but it has hardly survived, except in an occasional Italian Tito; and here Dr. Titus Oates gave it an unenviable celebrity. Tita is also sometimes used in Italy. The historian, Titus Livius, has been famous enough to have his name much maltreated, we calling him Livy, the French Tite Live.
Section V.—Numeral Names.
Thus far and no farther went Latin invention for at least seven hundred years in the way of individual domestic names. Beyond these ten, the Romans had, with a very few exceptions, peculiar to certain families, nothing but numerals for their sons; some of which became names of note from various circumstances. The words, though not often the names, have descended into almost all our modern tongues.
Primus, the superlative of præ (before), præ, prior, primus, was only used as a slave’s name, or to distinguish some person of an elder race.
Sequor (to follow) gave Secundus; the feminine of which fell sometimes to the share of daughter No. 2, to distinguish her from the elder sister, who was called by the family name. Men only had it as a cognomen, and that only in the later times. It has passed into our own tongue as well as into the more direct progeny of Latin, but Germany holds out against it. Rome likewise used Secundus in the sense of favourable, much as we speak of seconding in parliamentary language. St. Secundinus was a companion of St. Patrick, called by the Irish St. Seachnall. His disciples were christened Maol Seachlain, pupils of St. Secundinus, a name since turned into Malachi. King Malachi with the collar of gold, is truly the shaveling of the lesser follower.
Tertius barely occurs as a Roman name; but Tertia was rather more common than Secunda, and by way of endearment was called Tertulla. From this diminutive arose Tertullus and Tertullianus.
The next number is identical in all the tongues, though a most curious instance of varied pronunciation. The quadra, or four equal-sided Quartus, only occurs once in St. Paul’s writings, and so far as we know, nowhere else. Quadratus and Quartinus were late nomina.
Why Quintus should have been so much more prevalent with the Romans than the earlier numerals does not appear, but it was one of the commonest prænomina, and was always indicated by the initial Q; while the Greeks called it Κοίντος. Thence came the Quintian, or Quinctian, gens, an Alban family removed by Tullus Hostilius to Rome, so plain and stern in manners that even their women wore no gold, and principally illustrious in the person of Cæso Quinctius Cincinnatus. An obscure family named Quintianus sprung again from this gens, and in time gave its name to one of the missionary martyrs of Gaul, who, in 287, was put to death at Augusta Veromanduorum on the Somme. His corpse being discovered in 641, the great goldsmith bishop of Noyon, St. Eloi, made for it a magnificent shrine, and built over it a church, whence the town took the name of St. Quentin, and Quentin became prevalent in the neighbourhood. It was also popular in Scotland and Ireland, but it is there intended to represent Cu-mhaighe (hound of the plain), pronounced Cooey. From the diminutive of the Quinctian gens came Quintilius, and thence again Quintilianus, the most noted Roman rhetorician. Pontius is thought to be the Samnite or Oscan word for fifth, related to the Greek pente, and Keltic pump, five. It was an old nomen among those fierce Italians, and belonged to the sage who gave the wise advice against either sparing or injuring by halves, the Romans at the Caudine Forks. Pontius Pilatus should, it would seem, have brought it into universal hatred, but it probably had previously become hereditary in Spain as Ponce, whence sprang the noble family of Ponce de Leon; the French had Pons; and the Italians, Ponzio, and our Punch is by some said to be another form. It may, perhaps, come from pons (a bridge).
Sextus was the prænomen of the hateful son of Tarquinius Superbus, but after him it was disused, although thence arose the Sextian, Sestian, and Sextilian gentes. In later times it came again into use, and a bishop of Rome, martyred under Valerian, was named Sixtus, whence this has grown to be one of the papal adopted names, and is called by the Italians Sisto, whence the Sistine chapel takes its name, and the Dresden Madonna of Raffaelle is called di San Sisto, from the introduction of one of the three sainted popes so termed. The French used to call these saints Xiste.
The Latin septem gave Septimus, a name exceptionally used among them, as it is among us, for a seventh son.
Some unknown Octavus (the eighth) probably founded the Octavian gens, which had only been of note in Rome for 200 years before Caius Octavius Rufus married Julia, the sister of Cæsar, and their son Caius, being adopted as heir of the Julian line, became C. Julius Cæsar Octavianus, though he afterwards merged this unwieldy[unwieldy] title in that of Augustus. Octavius gained a certain renown through him, and Ottavio has passed on in Italy, while eighth sons are perhaps most usually named Octavius. The gentle Octavia, his sister, the most loveable of matrons, has made Ottavia an Italian name, and Octavie is one adopted by modern French taste. October is the eighth month in all modern tongues.
Nonnus, from nonus, the ninth, is not known as a name till very late, when Latin and Greek names were intermixed. Then it belonged to a poet, at first heathen, afterwards Christian. Nonna was the name to that female slave who wrought the conversion of Georgia to Christianity, and (we believe) has there been continued; and in Rome Nonnius and Nonianus occur in later times as gentile appellations. Nona has been bestowed in England upon that rare personage a ninth daughter. November again bears traces of its having been the ninth month of the Romans, as does December of the tenth.
Decimus was a prænomen in the family of Junius Brutus, inherited mayhap from a tenth son, and it was at Decimus Brutus that Cæsar’s dying reproach, Et tu Brute, is thought to have been levelled. Decimus and Decima are now and then to be found among us in unusually large families of one sex. Decius was the name of a great plebeian gens, one of the oldest in Rome, and illustrated by the self-devotion of Decius Mus.[[55]]
[55]. Clark, Handbook of Comparative Grammar; Liddell and Scott; Facciolati; Junius; Smith; Publications of the Irish Society; Butler.
CHAPTER III.
NOMINA.
Section I.—Attius.
The Latin nomina were those that came by inheritance, and denoted the position of the gens in the state, its antiquity, and sometimes its origin. Their derivation is often, however, more difficult to trace than that of any other names, being lost in the darkness of the Oscan and Latin dialects; and in the latter times they were very wide-spread, being adopted by wholesale by persons who received the franchise, as Roman citizens, from the individual who conferred it; and after the time of Caracalla, A.D. 212, when all the free inhabitants of the empire became alike Roman citizens, any person might adopt whatever name he chose, or even change his own if he disliked it. The feminine of this gentile name, as it was called, was the inheritance of the daughters; and on marriage, the feminine of the husband’s nomen was sometimes, though not uniformly, assumed.
These names are here placed in alphabetical order, as there seems to be nothing else to determine their position, and it is in accordance with the rigid Roman fashion of regularity.
Thus we begin with the Accian, Attian, or Actian gens; one of no great rank, but interesting as having been fixed on by tradition as the ancestry of the great mountain lords of Este, who were the parents of the house of Ferarra in Italy, and of the house of Brunswick, which has given six sovereigns to Britain. Accius is probably derived from Acca, the mother of the Lares, an old Italian goddess, afterwards turned into the nurse of Romulus. Valerius, however, deduces both it and Appius from a forgotten Sabine prænomen Attus. The Appian gens was not a creditable one; but Appia was sometimes the name of mediæval Roman dames.
The genealogists of the house of Este say that Marcus Actius married Julia, sister of the great Cæsar, and trace their line downwards till modernized pronunciation had made the sound Azzo.
Him whom they count as Azo I. of Este was born in 450, and from him and his descendants Azzo and Azzolino were long common in Italy, though now discarded.
Section II.—Æmilius.
Almost inextricable confusion attends the development of the title of one of the oldest and most respectable of the plebeian gentes, namely the Æmilian, anciently written Aimilian. The family was Sabine, and the word is, therefore, probably Oscan; but the bearers were by no means agreed upon its origin, some declaring that it was αἵμυλος (flattering or witty), and called it a surname of their founder, Mamercus, whom some called the son of Pythagoras, others of Numa. The later Æmilii, again, claimed to descend from Aemylos, a son of Ascanius; and others of them, less aspiring, contented themselves with Amulius, the granduncle of Romulus. Can this most intangible Amulius be, after all, a remnant of the Teutonic element in the Roman race, and be the same with the mythical Amal, whence the Gothic Amaler traced their descent? It is curious that maal or âmal means work in Hebrew, while aml is work, likewise, in old Norse, as our moil is in English, though in Sanscrit amala is spotless. Altogether, it seems most probable that the word mal (a spot or stroke) may underlie all these forms, just as it does the German mal (time); that Amal was, in truth, the dimly remembered forefather; and that thus the proud Æmilii of Rome, and the wild Amaler of the forests, bore in their designations the tokens of a common stock.
Several obscure saints bore the name of Æmilius or Æmilianus; and Emilij has always been a prevailing masculine name in Russia. In Spain, a hermit, Saint Æmilianus, is always known as St. Milhan. Emilio was of old-standing in Italy; but the great prevalence in France of Émile, of late, was owing to Rousseau’s educational work, the hero of which had numerous namesakes among the children born in the years preceding the Revolution.
The feminine had been forgotten until Boccaccio wrote his Teseide, and called the heroine Emilia. It was at once translated or imitated in all languages, and became mixed up with the Amalie already existing in Germany. Amalie of Mansfeld lived in 1493; Amalie of Wurtemburg, in 1550; and thence the name spread throughout Germany, whence the daughter of George II. brought it to England, and though she wrote herself Amelia, was called Princess Emily. Both forms are recognized in most European countries, though often confounded together, and still worse, with Amy and Emma.
| English. | French. | Italian. | Slovak. | Lusatian. |
| Emily | Émilie | Emilia | Emilija | Mila |
| Emilia | Milica | Milka |
Section III.—Antonius.
Two gentes were called Antonius, a word that is not easy to trace. Some explain it as inestimable, but the Triumvir himself chose to deduce it from Antius, a son of Hercules. One of these clans was patrician, with the cognomen Merenda; the other plebeian, without any third name, and it was to the latter that the avenger of Cæsar and lover of Cleopatra belonged—Mark Anthony, Marc Antoine, or Marcantonio, as modern tongues have clipped his Marcus Antonius. The clipping had, however, been already performed before the resuscitation of his evil fame in the fifteenth century, for both his names had become separately saintly, and therefore mutilated; Mark in the person of the Evangelist, Antonius in that of the great hermit of the fourth century—the first to practise the asceticism which resulted in the monastic system. Of Egyptian birth, his devotions, his privations, and his conflicts with Satan, were equally admired in the Eastern and Western Churches, and Antonios has been as common among the Greeks as Antonius among the Latin Christians.
St. Antony was already very popular when St. Antonio of Padua further increased the Italian devotion to the name, and Antonio has ever since been exceedingly common in Italy and Spain. Classical pedantry made Antonio Paleario turn it into Aonio in honour of the Aonian choir; but whatever he chose to call himself he made glorious by his life and death.
The Dutch seem to have needlessly added the silent h, and we probably learnt it from them. The popularity of Antony has much diminished since the Reformation in England, where perhaps it is less used than in any other country.
| English. | French. | Provençal. | Italian. |
| Antony | Antoine | Antoni | Antonio |
| Anthony | Tonio | ||
| Tony | Tonetto | ||
| Antholin | |||
| German. | Frisian. | Dutch. | Swiss. |
| Antonius | Tönnes | Anthonius | Antoni |
| Tenton | Tonjes | Theunis | Toni |
| Tony | Toontje | ||
| Tool | |||
| Antoonije | |||
| Russian. | Polish. | Slovak. | Servian. |
| Antonij | Antoni | Anton | Antun |
| Anton | Antek | Tone | Antonija |
| Antos | Tonek | ||
| Lusatian. | Lett. | Esthonian. | Hungarian. |
| Anto | Antons | Tönnis | Antal |
| Hanto | Tennis | Tonnio | |
| Tonisch | Tanne | ||
| Tonk |
The feminine form, Antonia, is very common in Italy and Spain. The Germans have it as Antonie, and this was the original name of Maria Antonia, whom we have learnt to regard with pitying reverence as Marie Antoinette, whence Toinette is a common French contraction.
| French. | Italian. | Swedish. | Swiss. | Lithuanian. |
| Antoinette | Antonia | Antonia | Tonneli | Ande |
| Toinette | Antonietta | Antonetta | ||
| Toinon | Antonica |
The Aurelian gens was an old Sabine one, and probably derived its name from aurum (gold), the oro of Italy and or of France, though others tried to take it from Helios (the sun).
The old name, Aurelia, for a chrysalis was, like it, taken from the glistening golden spots on the cases of some of the butterfly pupæ. The Aurelian gens was old and noble, and an Aurelia was the mother of Julius Cæsar.
Section IV.—Cæcilius.
The most obvious origin of the nomen of the great Cæcilian gens would be cæcus (blind); in fact Cæcilia means a slow-worm, as that reptile was supposed to be blind; but the Cæcilii would by no means condescend to the blind or small-eyed ancestor; and while some of them declared that they were the sons of Cæcas, a companion of Æneas, others traced their source to the founder of Præneste, the son of Vulcan, Cæculus, who was found beside a hearth, and called from caleo (to heat), the same with καίω (to burn). There was a large gens of this name, famous and honourable, though plebeian; but rather remarkably, the feminine form has always been of more note than the masculine. As has been before said, Caia Cæcilia is said to have been the real name of Tanaquil, the model Roman matron, patroness of all other married dames; and who has not heard of the tomb of Cæcilia Metella? But the love and honour of the Roman ladies has passed on to another Cæcilia, a Christian of the days of Alexander Severus, a wife, though vowed to virginity, and a martyr singing hymns to the last. Her corpse was disinterred in a perfect state two hundred years after, when it was enshrined in a church built over her own house, which gives a title to a cardinal. A thousand years subsequently, in 1599, her sarcophagus was again opened, and a statue made exactly imitating the lovely, easy, and graceful position in which the limbs remained.
This second visit to her remains was not, however, needed to establish her popularity. She is as favourite a saint with the Roman matrons as is St. Agnes with their daughters; and the fact of her having sung till her last breath, established her connection with music. An instrument became her distinguishing mark; and as this was generally a small organ, she got the credit of having invented it, and became the patroness of music and poetry, as St. Katharine of eloquence and literature, and St. Barbara of architecture and art. Her day was celebrated by especial musical performances; even in the eighteenth century an ode on St. Cecilia’s day was a special occasion for the laudation of music; and Dryden and Pope have fixed it in our minds, by their praises, not so much of Cecilia, as of Timotheus and Orpheus. Already, in the eleventh century, the musical saint had been given as a patroness; and the contemporaries, Philip I. of France, and William I. of England, had each a daughter Cécile.
From that time, Cécile in France was only less popular than the English Cicely was with all ranks before the Reformation. Cicely Neville, the Rose of Raby, afterwards Duchess of York, called “Proud Cis,” gave it the chief note in England; but her princess grandchild, Cicely Plantagenet, was a nun, and thus did not transmit it to any noble family. After the Reformation, Cicely sank to the level of “stammel waistcoat,” and was the milkmaid’s generic name. And so the gentlewomen who had inherited Cicely from their grandmothers, were ashamed of it; and it became Cecilia, until the present reaction against fine names setting in, brought them back to Cecil and Cecily. In Ireland, the Norman settlers introduced it, and it became Sighile.
| English. | French. | Italian. | German. |
| Cecilia | Cécile | Cecilia | Cacilia |
| Cecily | |||
| Cicely | |||
| Cecil | |||
| Sisley | |||
| Sis | |||
| Sissot | |||
| Cis | |||
| Hamburg. | Russian. | Polish. | Illyrian. |
| Cile | Zezilija | Cecylia | Cecilia |
| Cecilija | |||
| Cila | |||
| Cilika |
Sessylt, the British form of the masculine, lasted on long in Wales; and the Italians kept up Cecilio. The English masculine Cecil is, however, the surname of the families of Salisbury and Exeter, adopted as a Christian name.
Moreover, Cæcilianus is supposed to be the origin of Kilian, one of the many Keltic missionaries who spread the light of the Gospel on the Continent, in the seventh century. St. Kilian is said to have been of Irish birth. He preached in Germany, and was martyred at Wurtzburg; and his name has never quite ceased to be used in the adjacent lands.[[56]]
[56]. Facciolati; Smith; Valerius Maximus; Butler; Jameson; Michaelis; Pott.
Section V.—Cœlius.
Cœles Vivenna, an Etruscan general, named the Cœlian hill, and the Cœlian gens, whence the Italians have continued Celio and Celia. In Venice the latter becomes Zilia and Ziliola, and is often to be found belonging to noble ladies and the wives of doges. At Naples it was Liliola, and it seems to be the true origin of Lilian and Lilias. The Irish, too, have adopted it as Sile, or Sheelah, and Célie and Celia have been occasionally adopted by both French and English, under some misty notion of a connection with cœlum (heaven). The prevalence of Celia among the lower classes in English towns is partly owing to the Irish Sheelah, partly to some confusion with Cecilia.
Cœlina was a virgin of Meaux, converted to a holy life by St. Geneviève. She is the origin of the French Céline, who probably suggested the English Selina, though, as we spell this last, we refer it to the Greek Selene (the moon).
Section VI.—Claudius.
Another personal defect, namely lameness, probably was the source of the appellation of the Claudian gens, although by some the adjective claudus is rejected in favour of the old verb clueo, from the same root as the Greek kleo, I hear, and kluo, I am called, or I am famous, meaning to be called, i. e., famed. The Claudii were a family of evil fame, with all the darker characteristics of the Roman, and they figure in most of the tragedies of the city. They were especially proud and stern, and never adopted any one into their family till the Emperor Claudius adopted Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, who did not improve the fame of the Claudian surname of Nero. But the reign of the Emperor Claudius and the number of his freedmen, and new citizens, gave his gentile name an extensive vogue, and from his conquests in Britain was there much adopted. Besides, the Claudia who sends her greeting to St. Timothy in St. Paul’s Epistle, is believed to have been the daughter of a British prince and wife of Pudens, whose name is preserved in inscriptions at Colchester.
The epigrams of Martial speak of a British lady of the same name, and thus Claudia is marked by the concurrence of two very dissimilar authorities as one of the first British Christians, while the hereditary Welsh name of Gladys, the Cornish Gladuse, corroborate the Christian reverence for Claudia. The masculine form, Gladus, is likewise used, and in Scotland Glaud, recently softened into Claud, is not uncommon. Claudie is very common in Provence. Louis XII., who gave both his daughters male names, called the eldest Claude, and when she was the wife of François I., la Reine Claude plums were so termed in her honour. Her daughter carried Claude into the House of Lorraine, where it again became masculine, and was frequent in the family of Guise. The painter Gelée assumed the name of Claude de Lorraine in honour of his patrons, and thus arose all the picturesque associations conveyed by the word Claude.
Claudine is a favourite female Swiss form.[[57]]
| English. | Scotch. | French. | Italian. | Russian. | Slovak. |
| Claud | Glaud | Claude | Claudio | Klavdij | Klavdi |
| Godon | Illyrian. | ||||
| Klavdij | |||||
| FEMININE. | |||||
| French. | Welsh. | Italian. | |||
| Claude | Gladys | Claudia | |||
| Claudine | |||||
| Claudie | |||||
[57]. Facciolati; Smith; Rees, Welsh Saints.
Section VII.—Cornelius, &c.
The far more honourably distinguished clan of Cornelius has no traceable origin, unless from cornu belli (a war horn), but this is a suggestion of the least well-informed etymologists, and deserves no attention. Scipio and Sylla were the most noted families of this gens, both memorable for very dissimilar qualities; and Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, inherited her name from her father, Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus I. The centurion of the Italian band was probably a hereditary Roman Cornelius; but earliest gentile Christian though he were, he was not canonized, and the saint of the Western Church is a martyred Pope Cornelius of the third century, whose relics were brought to Compiègne by Charles the Bald, and placed in the Abbey of St. Corneille, whence again a portion was carried to the Chapter of Rosnay, in Flanders. This translation accounts for the popularity of both the masculine and feminine forms in the Low Countries, in both kingdoms of which they constantly are found, and where Cornelius gets shortened into Kees, Knelis, Nöll, or Nelle, and Cornelia into Keetje, or Kee. As an attempt to translate the native Keltic names beginning with cu, or con, Cornelius, or Corney, is one of the most frequent Irish designations. Nelleson is the Dutch surname, and Nelson is as likely to be thus derived as from the northern Nielson. The Dantzic contraction is Knelz, and the Illyrians call the feminine Drenka!
The great Fabian gens was old Latin, and was said by Pliny to be so called from their having been the first to cultivate the bean, faba, while others say the true form was fodius, or fovius, from their having invented the digging of pits, foveæ, for wolves, a proceeding rather in character with the wary patient disposition displayed by the greatest man of the race, Quintus Fabius Maximus, whose agnomen of Cunctator so well describes the policy that wasted away the forces of the Carthaginian invader. Fabio has been occasionally a modern Italian name; Fabiola is the diminutive of Fabia; Fabianus the adoptive augmentation, whence the occasional French Fabien, and, more strange to record, the Lithuanian Pobjus.
Fabricius is probably from Faber (a workman), but there was no person of note of the family except Caius Fabricius Luscinus, whose interview with Pyrrhus and his elephant has caused him to be for ever remembered. Fabrizio Colonna, however, seems to be his only namesake.
Flavus and Fulvus both mean shades of yellow, and there were both a Flavian and a Fulvian gens, no doubt from the complexion of an early ancestor, Flavius being probably a yellow-haired mountaineer with northern blood; Fulvius a tawny Italian. It is in favour of this supposition that Constantius, who brought the Flavian gens to the imperial throne, had the agnomen Chlorus, also expressing a light complexion. Out of compliment to his family the derivatives of Flavius became common, as Flavianus, Flavia, and Flavilla. Flavio is now and then found in modern Italy, and Flavia figured in the poetry and essays of the last century. Fulvia, “the married woman,” as her rival Cleopatra calls her, was the wife of Antony, and gave her name an evil fame by her usage of the head of the murdered Cicero.[[58]]
The Herminian gens is believed to be of Sabine origin, and its first syllable, that lordly herr, which we traced in the Greek Hera and Hercules, and shall find again in the German Herman. There is little doubt that the Roman Herminius and the brave Cheruscan chief, whom he called Arminius, were in the same relationship as were the Emilii and Amaler.
Herminius is the word that left to Italy the graceful legacy of Erminia, which was in vogue, by inheritance, among Italian ladies when Tasso bestowed it upon the Saracen damsel who was captured by Tancred, and fascinated by the graces of her captor. Thence the French adopted it as Hermine, and it has since been incorrectly supposed to be the Italian for Hermione; indeed, Scott indiscriminately calls the mysterious lady in George Heriot’s house Erminia or Hermione. The Welsh have obtained it likewise, by inheritance, in the form of Ermin, which, however, they now murder by translating it into Emma.
Hortensius (a gardener), from hortus, a garden, belonged to an honourable old plebeian gens, and has been continued in Italy, both in the masculine Ortensio, and feminine Ortensia, whence the French obtained their Hortense, probably from Ortensia Mancini, the niece of Mazarin.
The Horatian gens was a very old and noble one, memorable for the battle of the Horatii, in the mythic times of early Rome. Some explain their nomen by hora (an hour), and make it mean the punctual, but this is a triviality suggested by the sound, and the family themselves derived it from the hero ancestor, Horatus, to whom an oak wood was dedicated. The poet Horace bore it as an adoptive name, being of a freedman’s family. Except for Orazio, in Italy, the name of Titian’s son, it slept till Corneille’s tragedy of Les Horaces brought it forward, and the influence of Orazio made it Horatio in England. Thus the brother and son of Sir Robert Walpole bore it, and the literary note of the younger Horace Walpole made it fashionable. Then came our naval hero to give it full glory, and that last mention of his daughter Horatia seems to have brought the feminine forward of late years. The name is not popular elsewhere, but is called by the Russians, Goratij, by the Slovaks, Orac.[[59]]
[58]. Smith; Butler; Facciolati; Irish Society.
Section VIII.—Julius.
“At puer Ascanius, cui nunc cognomen Iulo,
Additur Ilus erat dum res stetit Ilia regno.”
“The boy Ascanius, now Iulus named—
Ilus he was while Ilium’s realm still stood,”
quoth Jupiter, in the first book of the Æneid, whence Virgil’s commentators aver that Ascanius was at first called after Ilus, the river that gave Troy the additional title of Ilium; but that during the conquest of Italy he was termed Iulus, from ιουλος (the first down on the chin), because he was still beardless when he killed Mezentius. The father of gods and men continues:
“Nascetur pulchrâ Trojanus origine Cæsar,
(Imperium Oceano, famam qui terminet astris,)
Julius, a magno nomen Iulo.”
“A Trojan, by high lineage shall arise—
Cæsar (whose conquering fame the sea and stars shall bound),
Called Julius, from Iulus, mighty name.”
The Julian gens certainly exceeded Rome in antiquity, and one of their distinguished families bore the cognomen of Iulus; but in spite of Jupiter and Virgil, Livy makes Iulus, or Ascanius, not the Trojan son of Æneas and the deserted Creusa, but the Latin son of Æneas and Lavinia, and modern etymologists hazard the conjecture that Julus may be only a diminutive of dius (divine), since the derivation of Jupiter from Deus pater (father of gods) proves that such is the tendency of the language.
The family resided at Alba Longa till the destruction of the city by Tullus Hostilius, and then came to Rome, where, though of very high rank, they did not become distinguished till, once for all, their star culminated in the great Caius Julius Cæsar, after whom the Julii were only adoptive, though Julia was the favourite name of the emperors' daughters, and their freedmen and newly-made citizens multiplied Julius and Julianus throughout the empire.
Julius was hereditary throughout the empire, and lingered on long in Wales, Wallachia, and Italy. It is the most obvious source for the French Gilles; though, as has been already said, that word claims to be the Greek Aigidios, and is like both the Keltic Giolla and Teutonic Gil. The modern French Jules and English Julius were the produce of the revived classical taste. The latter belonged to a knight whose family name was Cæsar; and Clarendon tells a story of a serious alarm being excited in a statesman by finding a note in his pocket with the ominous words “Remember Julius Cæsar,” which left him in dread of the ides of March, until he recollected that it was a friendly reminder of the humble petition of Sir Julius Cæsar.
| English. | Welsh. | Breton. | French. |
| Julius | Iolo | Sulio | Jules |
| Iola | Julot | ||
| Italian. | Spanish and Portuguese. | German. | Wallachian. |
| Giulio | Julio | Julius | Julie |
| Slavonic. | |||
| Julij |
The feminine shared the same fate, being hereditary in Italy, and adopted as ornamental when classical names came into fashion in other countries. The heroine of Rousseau’s Nouvelle Heloïse made Julie very common in France.
| English, Spanish and Portuguese. | French and German. | Italian. | Russian. |
| Julia | Julie | Giulia | Julija |
| Polish. | Lett. | Hungarian. | Slovak. |
| Julia | Jule | Juli | Iliska |
| Julka | Julis | Breton. | |
| Juliska | Sulia |
As every family that in turn mounted the imperial throne was supposed to be adopted into the Julian gens, all bore its appellation; and thus it was that out of the huge stock of nomina that had accumulated in the family of Constantius, the apostate bore by way of distinction the adoptive form of Julianus.
As the adoptive form this was more widely diffused than Julius itself in the Latinized provinces, and thus came to the Conde Julian, execrated by Spain as the betrayer of his country into the hands of the Moors.
To redeem the name of Julian from the unpopularity to which two apostates would seem to have condemned it, it belonged to no less than ten saints, one of whom was the nucleus of a legend afloat in the world. He was said to have been told by a hunted stag that he would be the murderer of his own parents; and though he fled into another country to avoid the possibility, he unconsciously fulfilled his destiny, by slaying them in a fit of jealousy before he had recognized them when they travelled after him. In penance, he spent the rest of his life in ferrying distressed wayfarers over a river, and lodging them in his dwelling; and he thus became the patron of travellers and a saint of extreme popularity.
| English. | Scotch. | Welsh. | Breton. |
| Julian | Jellon | Julion | Sulien |
| French. | Spanish. | Portuguese. | Italian. |
| Julien | Julian | Juliao | Giuliano |
| Russian. | |||
| Julian |
The feminine was already abroad in the Roman empire in the days of martyrdom, when St. Juliana was beheaded at Nicomedia under Galerius; and in the days of Gregory the Great, her relics were supposed to be at Rome, but were afterwards divided between Brussels and Sablon. She is said to have been especially honoured in the Low Countries, and must likewise have been in high favour in Normandy, perhaps through the Flemish Duchess Matilda. Julienne was in vogue among the Norman families, and belonged to that illegitimate daughter of Henry I. whose children he so terribly maltreated in revenge for their father’s rebellion; and it long prevailed in England as Julyan: witness the heraldic and hunting prioress, Dame Julyan Berners; and, indeed, it became so common as Gillian, that Jill was the regular companion of Jack, as still appears in nursery rhyme; though now this good old form has almost entirely disappeared, except in the occasional un-English form of Juliana. In Brittany, it has lasted on as Suliana, the proper name of the nun-sister of Du Guesclin, who assisted his brave wife to disconcert the night assault of their late prisoner.
| English. | French. | Breton. | Italian. |
| Julyan | Julienne | Suliana | Giuliana |
| Juliana | |||
| Gillian | |||
| Gill | |||
| Spanish, Portuguese, and Wallachian. | German. | Slavonic. | Hungarian. |
| Juliana | Juliana | Julijana | Julianja |
Another feminine diminutive, Julitta, was current in the empire in the time of persecution, and belongs in the calendar to a martyr at Cæsarea in Cappadocia, as well as to her who has been already mentioned as the mother of the infant St. Kyriakos, or Cyr, a babe of three years old. She was undergoing torture herself when she beheld his brains dashed out on the steps of the tribunal, and till her own death, she gave thanks for his safety and constancy. Together the mother and child were commemorated throughout the Church; and the church of St. Gillet records her in Cornwall, as does that of Llanulid in Wales. Her name, however, when there borne by her namesakes was corrupted into Elidan. Jolitte was used among the French peasantry, and Giulietta in Italy, whence Giulietta Capellet appears to have been a veritable lady, whose mournful story told in Da Porta’s novel, was adopted by Shakespeare, and rendered her name so much the property of poetry and romance, that subsequently Juliet, Juliette, and Giulietta, have been far more often christened in memory of the impassioned girl, than of the resolute Christian mother.[[60]]
[59]. Butler; Michaelis.
[60]. Smith; Facciolati; Michaelis; Pott; Butler; Arrowsmith, Geography; Rees; Jameson; Gesta Romanorum.
Section IX.—Lælius, &c.
Lælius, an unexplained gentile name, left to the Italians, Lelio, which was borne by one of the heresiarchs Socini; also Lelia, in French Lélie, and sometimes confused with the names from Cœlius.
It was said that the city of Pompeii was so called from pompa, the splendour or pomp with which Hercules founded it. However this might be, it is likely that from it came the nomen of the Pompeian gens, which did not appear in Rome till a late period, and which its enemies declared was founded by Aulus Pompeius, a flute-player. The gallant Cnæus Pompeius won for himself the surname of Magnus, and made sufficient impression on the world to have his name adapted to modern pronunciation by the Pompée of the French, and the English Pompey. When a little negro boy was the favourite appendage of fine ladies of the early seventeenth century, the habit of calling slaves by classical titles, made Pompey the usual designation of these poor little fellows; from whom it descended to little dogs, and though now out of fashion, even for them, it has obtained a set of associations that is likely to prevent that fine old Roman Pompey, surnamed the big, from obtaining any future namesakes, except in Italy, where Pompeio has always flourished, probably from hereditary associations.
On Roman authority, the Porcii were the breeders of porcus (a pig), according to the homely, rural, and agricultural designations of old Latinity, which to modern ears have so dignified a sound. It was the clan of the two Catones, but the masculine has not prevailed; though that “woman well reputed, Cato’s daughter” Porcia, or, as the Italians spelt it, Porzia, caused her name to be handed on in her native land, where Shakespeare took it, not only for her, but for his other heroine—
“Nothing undervalued
To Cato’s daughter, Brutus' Portia;”
from whom Portia, as after his example we make it, has become an exceptional fancy name. The Romans thought no scorn of the title of the unclean beast, and three families in other clans likewise bore its name, Verres, Scrofa, and Aper; the last, it is just possible, being the origin of the Sir Bors of the Round Table; in Welsh, Baez.
The origin of Sulpicius is not known. It may possibly be connected with the obsolete word that named Sulla, from a red spotted visage; but this is uncertain. There were three saints of the name: Severus Sulpicius, a friend of St. Martin; Sulpicius (called the severe), Bishop of Bourges, in the sixth century; and Sulpicius (called the gentle), also Bishop of Bourges, in the seventh. It is an arm of this last of the three that has led to the consecration of the celebrated church at Paris, in the name of St. Sulpice. In Germany, it is Sulpiz.
Terenus (soft or tender) was the origin given by the Romans to the Terentian gens, which produced Terentia, wife of Cicero, called in affection Terentilla, and likewise gave birth to the comic poet, Publius Terentius Afer, known to us as Terence, and to the Germans as Terenz. As a supposed rendering of Turlough, Terence is a very favourite name in Ireland, and is there called Terry, but it prevails nowhere else.
The meaning of the name of Sergius is not known, but the Sergian gens was very ancient, and believed itself to spring from the Trojans. From them Cataline descended, and from another branch the deputy Sergius Paullus, from whom some suppose St. Paul to have taken his name.
One saint called Sergius was martyred at the city of Rasapha, in Syria; and was honoured by the change of the name of the place to Sergiopolis, in Justinian’s time. His relics are at Rome and at Prague; but a far greater favourite as a namesake is the Russian Ssergie, who founded a monastery near Moscow, and died there in 1292, in the highest esteem for sanctity, so that his monastery is a place of devotional pilgrimage, and Ssergij or Sserezka are favourite names in Russia.[[61]]
[61]. Butler; Michaelis; Smith; Facciolati; Courson, Peuples Bretons; Pott; Valerius Maximus.
Section X.—Valerius.
Deep among the roots of Indo-European tongues lies the source of our adverb well, the German wohl, Saxon wel, Gothic waila, an evidently close connection of the Latin verb valeo (to be well); and which the Keltic gwall links again with the Greek καλός (well, or beautiful), related to the Sanscrit kalya (healthy, able, or well).
Valeo was both to be sound and to be worth, and to the old Roman a sound man was necessarily valiant, worth something in the battle; and valor, which to them and the Italians is still value, is to the chivalrous French and English valour.
This word of well-being named the old Sabine Valerian gens, one of the most noble and oldest in Rome, who had a little throne to themselves in the Circus, and were allowed to bury their dead within the walls of the city. The simple masculine form of the name had but two saints, and they were too obscure to be much followed, though Valère and Valerot as surnames have risen from it in France. The feminine of it was in honour at Rome for the sake of Valeria, the public-spirited lady who took the lead in persuading the mother of Coriolanus to intercede with her son to lay his vengeance aside and spare his mother-city; Valérie is a favourite French name, but the compounds of this word have had far greater note. Valerianus, the adoptive name, was borne by Publius Sicinius Valerianus, that unhappy persecuting emperor who ended his career as a stepping-stone to Shahpoor. Saint Valerianus was Bishop of Auxerre, and though properly Valérien in French, Valerian in English, was probably the patron of the Waleran, or Galeran, occurring in the middle ages, chiefly among the Luxembourgs, Counts of St. Pol.
Valentinianus has been continued by the Welsh in the form of Balawn.
Valentinus was a Roman priest, who is said to have endeavoured to give a Christian signification to the old custom of drawing lots in honour of Juno Februata, and thus fixed his own name and festival to the curious fashion prevailing all over England and France, of either the choice of a “true Valentine,” or of receiving as such the first person of the opposite sex encountered on that morning.
These customs increased the popularity of Valentine and Valentina, the latter being more probably used as the feminine of the former, than as the name of an obscure martyr who died under Diocletian.
Valentina Visconti was the wife of the Duke of Orleans, brother of Charles VI. of France, and as one of the bright lights in a corrupt court, merited that her name should have become more permanent than it has been.
The Slavonic contractions of the masculine are curious. Lower Lusatia makes it Batyn, Tyno, Bal, and Balk; Lithuanian, Wallinsch; and Hungary, Balint.[[62]]
It is not easy to separate the idea of Virginia from virgo (a virgin), especially since Sir Walter Raleigh gave that name to his American colony in honour of the Virgin Queen, and it was probably under this impression that Virginie was made by Bernardin de St. Pierre, the heroine of his tropical Arcadian romance, which reigned supreme over French, English, and German imaginations of a certain calibre, and rendered Virginie triumphant in France, and a name of sentiment in England. Nay, had the true Virginia lived and died a couple of centuries earlier, her story would have passed for a myth expressed in her appellation; but the fact is, that she derived it from a good old plebeian gens, who formerly spelt themselves Verginius, thus connecting themselves with ver (the spring), Persian behar, Eolic Βεαρ, the old Greek Γέαρ, and with all its kindred of virga (a rod, or green bough), vireo (to flourish), viridis (green); and again with the more remote descendants of these words in modern Europe—vert, verdure, il vero, &c. Virginio was a name in the Orsini family, but otherwise it has not been kept up.
[62]. Liddell and Scott; Pott; Facciolati; Smith; Arnold; Jones, Welsh Sketches; Brand, Popular Antiquities; Michaelis.
CHAPTER IV.
COGNOMINA.
Section I.
Roman cognomina were originally neither more nor less than nick-names, sometimes far from complimentary, but for the sake of convenience, or of honourable association, continued in the family.
Sometimes they were adjectives, such as Asper (the rough), Cæcus (the blind), Brutus (the stupid). Sometimes they were suggested by the appearance, such as Naso (the nose), or Scævola (the left-handed), the soubriquet earned by that Mutius who seared his right hand in the fire to prove to Porsenna what Roman constancy was. Sura (the calf of the leg), Sulla (the red-pimpled), Barbatus (the bearded), Dentatus (the toothed), Balbus (the stammerer), and even Bibulus and Bibacula (the drunkard).
Sometimes, like some of the gentle nomina previously mentioned, they came from animal or vegetable, connected in some way with the ancestor, either by augury, chase, or culture, such as Corvinus, from corvus (a raven), Buteo (a buzzard), Lentulus (a bean), Piso, from pisum (a pea), Cicero (a vetch), Cæpio, from cæpe (an onion). Others were from the birthplace of the forefather, such as Hadrianus, Albinus; others were the ablative case of the name of the tribe to which the gens belonged, as Romilia, or Palatina. Sometimes a cognomen secundus, or agnomen, was superadded in the case of distinguished personages, in memory of their services, such as Coriolanus, Capitolinus, Africanus, Asiaticus. The latest example of an agnomen of victory was Peloponnesiacus, which was conferred in 1688 by the Venetian Republic upon Francesco Morosini, the conqueror of the Morea.
Whatever the cognomen,—fortuitous, derisive, or honourable,—it remained attached for ever to the family, and served to designate that section of the gens, but did not naturally descend to females; though in the latter and more irregular periods, when the gentes were so extensive that the feminine was no distinction, they were usually assumed by the daughters of the house, and altered to suit their construction.
Ater, black, was the source of the name of Adria in Picenum, whence was called Adriatic Sea. A family of Ælii, migrating through Spain, were known by the cognomen of Adrianus, or Hadrianus, both place and name being usually spelt with the aspirate. The Emperor Publius Ælius Hadrianus built our famous northern wall, still called after him, as is the city of Adrianople; but he failed in imposing his gentile name of Ælia upon Jerusalem. The Italian surname of Adriani is probably derived from the original city. An Adrianus was the first abbot of St. Augustin’s, Canterbury, and another was first bishop of Aberdeen; but the most popular St. Adrianus was an officer in the imperial army who was converted by the sight of the martyrdoms under Galerius, and was martyred himself at Nicomedia, whence his relics were taken to Constantinople and to Rome, and thence again to Flanders, where they were transported from one abbey to another, and supposed to work such miracles that Adrianus has ever since been a universal name in the Low Countries, where it gets contracted into Arje, or Janus, while the more northerly nations call it, in common use, Arrian, or Arne. The French make it Adrien, and have given it the feminine Adrienne; and the Italians have not unfrequently Adriano and Adriana. In Russia it is Andreïän.
Aquila (an eagle) was a cognomen in several Roman families, either from augury or from the national feature. It reminds us of the Greek Aias, and of many of the Teuton names beginning with ar.
Aquila was a companion of St. Paul; and another Aquila, under Hadrian, wavered long between Judaism and Christianity, and translated the Old Testament into Greek; but Aquila has not been followed save here and there in England and America as a Scripture name.
Agrippa was not well understood by the Romans themselves, though they settled that it meant one born with his feet foremost. The explanation we quote from Professor Aufrecht: “He (Gellius) ascribes to that preposterous birth all the calamities which befell the world through Agrippa’s ill-starred descendants. ‘To fall on one’s feet’ was therefore no auspicious event in Italy. But how can we possibly reconcile that signification with the etymology? I think the legs peep out of the pp, and that ppa is probably a contraction of peda. In Greek Ἀκρόπους means only ‘the beginning or tip of the foot;’ but it might as well have signified an individual, who, on entering this shaky world of ours, philosophically chose to take a firm ‘stand-point,’ rather than begin by a foolish act, and plunge into it headlong.” It was at first a prænomen, but became a cognomen in the clan of Menenius and of many others. Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa was the friend and son-in-law of Augustus. From him the Herods called themselves Agrippa; and his daughter was the first of those ladies named Agrippina, whose tragic stories mark the early years of the Roman empire. Cornelius Agrippa was probably assumed by the learned man of Cologne, who has connected it in the popular mind with alchemy and necromancy. St. Agrippina was martyred at Rome under Valerian, and her remains being transferred to Girgenti in Sicily, she became known to the Greeks. Her name is used in Russia in the softened form of Agrafina, and the rude contraction Gruscha or Grunja. Some suggest that Agrippa may be the Greek ἀργίπους (swift-footed).
The city of Alba Longa doubtless took its first name from that universal word that named the Alps, the Elbe, Elves, Albion, and Albin from their whiteness, and left albus still the adjective in Rome. Legend declared that the city was called from the white sow with fifty piglings, who directed Æneas to its site; but, however this might be, it was the source of the family of Albinus in the Postumian gens, whence, slightly altered, came the name of the soldier Albanus, the British martyr, whose death led to the change from Verulamium to St. Albans, and from whom we take the English Christian name of Alban. Another St. Albanus, or Abban, was an Irish bishop, consecrated by St. Patrick, and probably the source of the Scottish Christian name Albany, which was often used as a rendering of the Keltic Finn, also meaning white. Another Albanus, or Albinus, of a British family, established in Armorica, was a monastic saint and bishop of Angers, naming the family of St. Aubin; and perhaps William de Albini, the ancestor of the Howards. The modern English feminine Albina, or Albinia, must have been formed as a name of romance from some of these.
Section II.—Augustus.
Augustus is the agnomen conferred by the senate upon the second Cæsar, meaning reverend or set apart, and was selected as hedging him with majesty, though not offending the citizens with the word king. It is closely related to avigur or augur, which the Romans said was “ob avium garritus” because the augur divined by the chatter of birds; while others make it come from augeo (to increase); but it is not impossible that it may be related to the Teuton æge (awe). At Rome, after Diocletian, the Augustus was always the reigning emperor, the Augusta was his wife; and no one presumed to take the name till the unfortunate Romulus Augustus, called Augustulus in contempt, who ended both the independence of Rome and the empire with the names of their founders.
| English. | French. | German. | Lett. |
| Augustus | Auguste | August | Aujusts |
| Gussy | Justs | ||
| Russian. | Hungarian. | ||
| Avgust | Agoston | ||
| FEMININE. | |||
| English. | German | Italian. | Lusatian. |
| Augusta | Auguste | Augusta | Avgusta |
| Gussie | Asta | Gusta | |
| Guste | Gustylka | ||
| Gustel | |||
The Welsh formed the name of Awst from Augustus; but it does not seem to have been elsewhere used, except as an epithet which the flattering chroniclers bestowed upon Philippe III. of France, until about the middle of the sixteenth century, a fancy seized the small German princes of christening their children by this imperial title. August of Anhalt Plotzgau appears in 1575—seven years earlier, August of Braunsweig Luneburg. Then August of Wolfenbüttel names his daughter Anne Augusta; and we all recollect the Elector Johann August of Saxony, memorable as the prisoner of Charles V. Thenceforth these names flourished in Germany, and took up their abode in England with the Hanoverian race.
The diminutive had, however, been adopted under the Roman empire in later times, and was borne by the great Father Augustinus of Hippo, and his namesake, the missionary of the Saxons. This was chosen by a Danish bishop as a Latinization of his proper name of Eystein (island stone); and it has always been somewhat popular, probably owing to the order of Augustin or Austin Friars, instituted in honour of the first St. Augustin, and once the greatest sheep owners in England. S
| English. | French. | German. | Spanish. |
| Augustin | Augustin | Augustin | Augustino |
| Austin | |||
| Portuguese. | Italian. | Polish. | |
| Agostinho | Aogostino | Agostin | |
| FEMININE. | |||
| Irish. | French. | German. | Italian. |
| Augusteen | Augustine | Augustine | Agostina |
| Stine | Portuguese. | ||
| Agostinha | |||
Section III.—Blasius.
Some consider Blasius to be a mere contraction of the Greek basilios (royal); but long before that name prevailed, at least among historical personages, we hear of Blatius, Blattius, or Blasius, as a man of Salapia, in Apulia, whose name seems to have signified a babbler. Nevertheless, Blasio was a surname in the Cornelian gens, and Blasius was Bishop of Sebaste, in Nicomedia, where he was martyred in 316. In the time of the Crusades, his relics were imported from the East, he became patron of the republic of Ragusa; and from a tradition that he had been combed to death with iron combs, such an implement was his mark, and he was the favourite saint of the English wool-staplers. The only vestige of this as a name in England is, however, in Goldsmith’s Madam Blase; but in Spanish Blas is used, as no reader of Gil Blas can forget. Blasius is found in Bavaria; and Plase, Blase, Bleisig, and Bläsing, are surnames thence derived.
| English. | French. | Spanish. | Portuguese. |
| Blaze | Blaise | Blas | Braz |
| Blase | Blaisot | ||
| Italian. | German. | Dutch. | Russian. |
| Biagio | Blasius | Blaas | Vlassij |
| Biasio | Blasi | Vlass | |
| Baccio | Blasol | ||
| Servian. | Illyrian. | Hungarian. | |
| Blazej | Blasko | Balás | |
| Vlaho | |||
| Bearck |
The Germans have even the feminine Blasia.[[63]]
[63]. Smith; Brand; Michaelis.
Section IV.—Cæsar, &c.
No cognomen has ever been so much used as that of Cæsar, which first began in the Julian gens, nearly two centuries before the time of the great Dictator. Some derived it, like Cæso, from cædo (to cut); others said that the eyes of the first owner of it were unusually blue (cæsius), or that his hair (cæsaries) was wonderfully profuse; and a fourth explanation declared that it was the Moorish word for an elephant, which one of the Julii had slain with his own hand in Africa. However this might be, adoption into the family of Cæsar was the means of obtaining that accumulation of magisterial offices that placed the successor of Julius at the head of affairs, civil and military; and whilst habits of republican equality were still retained by the emperors, Cæsar was merely used as their designation. After the first twelve, adoption could no longer be strained into any fiction of the continuance of the Julian clan, and Cæsar became more properly a title. After the new arrangement of the empire under Diocletian, Augustus was the title of the emperor who had become an actual monarch, and Cæsar of the heir to the empire with considerable delegated power. In consequence, when Charlemagne relieved Rome from the attacks of the Lombards, the pope, as the representative of the S.P.Q.R., created him Cæsar, and the title has been carried on among his German representatives as Kaiser, though no elected “King of the Romans” might assume this sacred title until he had been crowned by the pope’s own hand. As a Christian name it has seldom occurred. Cesare Borgia was named, like many Italians of his date, in the classical style, but no one wished to inherit it from him, and it is seldom found except in France as Cesar; though in some counties of England the peasantry give it in baptism, having taken it, perhaps, from the surname Cæsar. The only feminine I can find is Cesarina Grimaldi, in 1585. Kaiser occurs in the same manner in Germany.
Camilla was a warlike Volscian nymph, dedicated to the service of Diana, and celebrated in the Æneid. Her name is said to have been Casmilla, and to have been given as meaning that she was a votaress of Diana. It is believed to be an Etruscan word, and the youth of both sexes were termed Camilli and Camillæ when employed in any solemn office; and thus Camillus became a name in the gens of Furius, and was noted in him who saved the capitol. Nymphs always had an attraction for the French, and a Camille figures in Florian’s romance of Numa Pompilius, while Camilla was adopted in the rage for classical names which actuated the English after the Reformation, and in some few families it has been handed on to the present day. Camillo was revived with classical names in Italy; and at the time of the Revolution, Camille was very fashionable in France. Camilla is still very common in the Abruzzi, its old classic ground.
Clemens came in so late that it hardly deserves to be called a cognomen, but we find it as the third name of Titus Flavius Clemens, Vespasian’s nephew, who was put to death by Domitian, on a charge of atheism, like others who went over to the Jewish superstition, i. e. to Christianity. A very early church at Rome is dedicated to him, and he is thought by some to be the same as the Clemens mentioned by St. Paul (Phil. iv. 3), author of two epistles, and first of nine bishops of Rome so called. Another great Father, St. Clemens of Alexandria, was likewise of the same name; besides a martyr of Ancyra, all called from the adjective clemens, which has much the same meaning as its derivative clement in all modern tongues. Its origin is uncertain: some saying it meant of clear mind, others of inclining mind; but the substantive Clementia was a personified idea, worshipped at Rome as a goddess, bearing a cup in one hand and a lance in the other. “Your Clemency” became a title of the emperors, and we find the orator Tertullus even addressing it to Felix. It is possible that it was thus that Clemens first passed to the emperor’s kinsman. There is a pretty legend that St. Clement was martyred by being beheaded, and thrown into the sea, where a shrine (I think of coral) was formed round his head, and he thus became the patron of sailors, above all, of Danes and Dutchmen. In Germany Clemens has preserved its Latin form, but cuts down into Klenim, Mente, Menz, Mentzel; as in Denmark into Klemet and Mens. The English surname, Mence, may perhaps be from this source; and Clement and Clementi are French and Italian surnames, as Clement and Clemente are the Christian ones. Italy probably first modernized the abstract goddess into Clemenza, whence France took up Clémence, while Germany invented Clementine for the feminine, whence our Clementina, rendered popular for a time in honour of the Italian lady in Sir C. Grandison. The Russians have Kliment, the Hungarians Kelemen, and the Esthonians contract the name into Lemet. It must have been from the Dutch connections of eastern England, that Clement and Clemency were both at one time frequent.[[64]]
[64]. Smith; Cave; Marryat, Jutland; Michaelis.
Section V.—Constantius.
Constantius arose likewise as late as any cognomen deserving to be reckoned. It comes from constans (constant), a word meaning holding together firmly, and compounded of con (together), and stans, the participle of the verb sto (I am, or I stand).
So late, indeed, did Constantius become prominent in history in the person of Flavius Valerius Constantius, that he does not even seem to have had a prænomen, and his sons and grandsons varied the cognomen by way of distinction into Constans and Constantinus. Of these the first Christian emperor rendered the diminutive glorious, and though it has not been much copied in the West, Κονστάντινος is one of the very few Latin names that have been Latinized among the Greeks, as well it might be, in memory of the emperor who transported the seat of empire to a Greek city, and changed its appellation from Byzantium to Constantinopolis.
Constantius Chlorus was very popular in Britain, and—as has been said before—the belief that his wife Helena was of British birth, held the island firm in its allegiance till the death of the last emperor who claimed kindred with him. And then Constantius and Constantinus were names assumed by the rebels who first began to break the bonds of union with the empire, as if the sound were sure to win British hearts. Indeed, Cystenian has never entirely disappeared from the Welsh nomenclature, nor Kusteninn from Brittany.
Perhaps one charm of the name to a Kelt was its first syllable, which resembles the con or cu (wisdom or hound), which was one of their favourite beginnings. The Constantines of Hector Boece’s line of Scottish kings are ornamental Congals and Conchobars; and, in like manner, Ireland has turned many a Connal and Connor into Constantine in more modern times, accounting for the prevalence of the trisyllabled Roman as a surname.
In Russia Konstantin has been carried on, especially since the days of Catharine II., as a witness to the continuation of the Byzantine empire in that of Muscovy; and here and in the other Slavonian countries alone does it really prevail as a popular name, frequent enough for vernacular contractions, such as Kostja, Kosto, Kostadin.
The feminine of both names was used by the daughters of the imperial family, and Constantia continued among the Provençal ladies, so as to be brought to the throne of France by the termagant Constance of Provence, wife to that meek sovereign, Robert the Pious. She is said to have insisted on his composing a Latin hymn in her honour, when he, not being in a mood for flattery, began to sing “O constantia martyrum” which she took as a personal compliment. Constance has ever since been a royal and noble name in France, but the unfortunate Breton duchess, mother of Arthur, probably received it as a supposed feminine to Conan, the name of her father. Italy made it Gostanza, and the Sicilian mother of Frederick II. transmitted it to Germany as Constanz, or Stanze. Her great granddaughter, the heiress of Manfred’s wrongs, took it to Spain as Constanza, the traces of which we see in the Custance, by which Chaucer calls that excellent daughter of Pedro the Cruel, who was the wife of John of Gaunt. After her time it was common in England, and it is startling to find a real Constance de Beverley in disgrace in the reign of Henry VIII., not, however, for forging Marmion’s letters, but for the much more excusable misdemeanour of attending the Marchioness of Exeter in a stolen visit to the Nun of Kent. In the times immediately after the Reformation, Constance died away, then came forth as Constantia in the Minerva press, and at present reigns among the favourite fancy names.
Kostancia, Kotka, Stanca are used in the Slavonian countries, but far less commonly than the masculine Constantine, which is almost entirely disregarded by the Teuton side of Europe.
Section VI.—Crispus, &c.
Crispus (curled, or wrinkled), the same word which has produced our crisp; and the French crépé (applied to hair), became a cognomen, and in late times produced Crispinus and Crispinianus, two brothers who accompanied St. Quentin when he preached the Gospel in France. They settled at Soissons, and there, while pursuing their mission, supported themselves by making shoes until their martyrdom, A.D. 287. Shoemakers, of course, adopted them as their patrons, and theirs was a universal holiday.
“Oh! that we now had here
But one ten thousand of those men in England
Who do no work to-day.”
That day being the 25th of October, that of the battle of Agincourt, of which King Henry augurs—
“And Crispin, Crispian, shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered.”
Crispin has never been a frequent Christian name, but it has become a surname with us, and the French have Crêpin, Crêpet, and the Italians Crispino. Crispin is still the French for a shoemaker’s last. Crêpin means a little stool which the Irish call a creepeen.
Drusus, a cognomen in the Livian gens, was only accounted for among the Romans by a story that its first owner took it from having killed a chieftain in Gaul named Drausus. This word is explained by comparative philologists as firm or rigid in Keltic, Drud, strong, in Welsh, droth in Erse. Either the Gaul was the real cause of the surname, or it is an instance of the Keltic element in old Italian. It is hardly worthy of notice, except that, in imitation of the sister and daughter of his patron Caligula, Herod Agrippa called his daughter by the feminine diminutive Drusilla, by which she appears by the side of Felix, hearing but little regarding the discourse of St. Paul.
The name of Felix himself was an agnomen frequently assumed by peculiarly fortunate individuals. It meant happy, and has given rise to all manner of words of good augury in the modern languages. No less than eleven saints so called are numbered in the Roman calendar, and yet it has never been a popular name, though sometimes occurring in Spain and France in the original form, and as Felice in Italy. The feminines, Felicia and Félise, in England and France, have been constructed from it, and Felicia was Queen of Navarre in 1067; but the abstract idea, Felicitas (happiness), once worshipped as a goddess at Rome, named the slave-martyr of Carthage, who suffered with St. Perpetua. There was another Felicitas who, with her seven sons, under Antoninus Pius, presented a Christian parallel to the mother in the Maccabees. Felicità in Italy, and Félicité in France, are the votaries of one or others of these. Felix is adopted in Ireland as a substitute for Feidlim or Phelim (ever good).
Faustus and Faustina are formed exactly in the same spirit of good augury, and Fausto is sometimes an Italian name.[[65]]
[65]. Facciolati; Diefenbach; Smith; Butler; Anderson: Irish Society; Grimm.
Section VII.—Galerius, &c.
The Teutonic helm (protection), turned in the Latin pronunciation into galea (helmet), named the persecuting Emperor Galerius, and continued in Lombardy till it formed that of Galeazzo, which became notable among the Visconti of Milan, and was called by the French Galeas. Old Camden augured that the first Galearono was so called from all the cocks in Milan crowing at the time of his birth, and certainly, unless the frequent Roman cognomen Gallus indicates a partly Gallic extraction, it would either be one of the farming names, and show that the owner was notable for his poultry, or be a differently spelt variety from Galea or helmet. Galileo, Galilei, and Galeotti are all Italian continuations of this old Latin name—that is, if the great astronomer’s name be not in honour of Galilee. It is also possible that it may be connected with the Keltic Gal (courage, or a stranger), which occurs again as the Irish saint who founded an abbey in Switzerland; but more of this in Keltic regions of names.
Niebuhr considers the Prisci to have been the original Latin tribe, whose name acquired its sense of age from their antiquity, just as Gothic was at one time a French and English synonym for antiquated. Priscus was the Porcian cognomen, probably denoting the descent of the gens from the Prisci; and he whom we are accustomed to call Cato the elder, as a translation of Marcus Porcius Priscus Cato, was the first to add the second cognomen, the meaning of which is wary, from Catus, probably a contraction from Cautus (cautious). Priscus and Prisca are both found in the Roman martyrology; but to us the most interesting person thus named is Priscilla, the fellow-worker of St. Paul, in honour of whom this diminutive has had some prevalence in England, though somewhat of a puritan kind.
Sabinus, of course indicating a Sabine family, occurs among the Flavii, and many other gentes. Sabina was the second name of that Poppæa, Nero’s wife, whose extravagances have become a proverb, who bathed in asses' milk, and shod her mules with gold. As a frequent cognomen, this was the name of many other women, and specially of a widow who was converted by her maid, Seraphia, to the Christian faith, and was martyred in Hadrian’s persecution. There is a church at Rome dedicated to her, which was formerly the first “Lent station,” a fact which commended her to the notice of the Germans, and has made Sabine frequent among them. Sabina is often found among the peasantry about Gloucester, but it is possible that this may be a corruption of Sabrina (the Severn).
Serenus (serene, or good-tempered) was an old cognomen, and two saints were so called. Serena was the niece of Theodosius, and wife of Stilicho. Her appellation was chosen by Hayley for the heroine of his Triumphs of Temper; but it is more often imaginary than real. In Norway, however, it has been revived as an ornamental form of Siri, the contraction of Sigrid.
Scipio means nothing but a staff; but it is a highly honourable title, since it was given to one of the Cornelii, who served as the staff of his old blind father; and the same filial piety distinguished the great Africanus when, at seventeen, he saved the life of his father in the battle of the Ticinus. Distinguished as is the cognomen it has not often been followed, though Scipione has occasionally occurred in Italy, and if Gil Blas may be trusted, in Spain.
Traherne, an old Welsh name, is formed from Trajanus, which belonged to others besides the emperor, whose noble qualities had made such an impression on the Italian mind as to have led to the remarkable tradition that St. Gregory the Great had obtained permission to recall him from the grave, and convert him to the true faith.
Torques (a neck-chain) gave the cognomen Torquatus to the fierce Lucius Manlius, who, having slain a gigantic Gaul in single combat, took the gold chain from about his neck, and hung it on his own; and who afterwards put his son, Titus Manlius Torquatus, to death for the breach of discipline in accepting a like challenge from a Tusculan noble. Torquato Tasso is the sole modern instance of the recurrence of the surname of this “Roman Father,” the northern Torquil being from an entirely different source, i.e. Thorgils (Thor’s pledge).[[66]]
[66]. Pott; Michaelis; Camden; Diefenbach; Philological Society; Niebuhr; Butler; Dante; Arnold.
Section VIII.—Paullus and Magnus [small and large].
The precedence must be given to the less on account of its far greater dignity.
There can be no doubt that the cognomen Paullus, or Paulus, the contraction of Pauxillus, originated with one of the Æmilian gens, who was small in stature. It was common in other gentes, though chiefly distinguished among the Æmilii, and was most probably the name by which “Saul of Tarsus” would have been enrolled as a citizen, either from its resemblance to his Jewish name, or from the person who had conferred liberty upon his parents.
| English. | French. | Italian. | Portuguese. |
| Pawl | Pol | Paolo | Paulo |
| Paul | Paul | ||
| Paulot | |||
| Spanish. | Wallachian. | German. | Russian. |
| Pablo | Pawel | Paul | Pavel |
| Dutch. | Pavlenka | ||
| Paultje | Pavluscha | ||
| Illyrian. | Lett. | Hungarian. | Lapp. |
| Pavl | Pavils | Pal | Pava |
| Pavle | Palko | Pavek | |
| Pavo | |||
| FEMININE. | |||
| Italian. | Spanish. | Russian. | Illyrian. |
| Paola | Pala | Paola | Pava |
| DIMINUTIVE. | |||
| Welsh. | Italian. | Spanish. | Slavonic. |
| Peulan | Paolino | Paulino | Pavlin |
| FEMININE. | |||
| English. | French. | Italian. | German. |
| Paulina | Pauline | Paolina | Pauline |
| Paulette | Paoletta | Slavonic. | |
| Pavlina | |||
Some, however, imagine that he assumed it out of compliment to the deputy, Sergius Paulus; others, that it was an allusion to his “weakness” of “bodily presence,” or that he took it in his humility, meaning that he was “less than the least of the Apostles.” Be that as it may, he has given it an honour entirely outshining that which is won from the Æmilii, and has spread Paul throughout Europe. The strong presumption that St. Paul preached the Gospel in Spain has rendered Pablo very common there; but, in fact, the name is everywhere more usual than in England, in spite of the tradition that the great Apostle likewise landed here, and the dedication of our great cathedral. Perhaps this may be owing to the fact that twelve other SS. Paul divide the allegiance of the Continent with the Apostle. Paula is not only honoured as his feminine, but as the name of the friend and correspondent of St. Jerome, the mother of Eustochium; and Paola is in consequence found in Italy. Paulinus (the lengthened form) became in Welsh, Pewlin, and also named three saints—among them our first Northumbria, bishop of York; but it has not been followed, except in Italy, by Paolina, and there is, perhaps, a mere diminutive of Paulus. Yet the feminine is far more fashionable; and Paulina, Pauline, Paolina, are the favourite forms everywhere occurring. Perhaps Pauline became the more popular in France for the sake of that favourite grandchild whose Christian name is almost the only one mentioned in Madame de Sévigné’s letters. It was the only form commonly recognized in France; but it seems that the sister of Napoleon was commonly called Paulette in her own family. The direct Italian diminutive always seems to be a greater favourite with the southern blood than its relative from the northern chen.
The adjective of size is another word of universal kindred, though not always with the same meaning. The Sanscrit mahat, and Persian mi or meah, are close connections of the Gothic mikils (which survives in mickle and muckle, and has furnished our much), and of the Greek μεγαλος or μεγας, and Roman magnus and Slavonic magi. All these possibly may be remotely connected with the verb magan (may), which is the source of macht (might) in all Teutonic tongues.
Magnus was an agnomen added as a personal distinction, as in the case of Pompey. It was never a name till long after the Roman empire was over, when Karl der Grösse, as his Franks called him, had been Latinized into Carolus Magnus, and honoured by the French as Charlemagne. St. Olaf of Norway was known to be a great admirer of Charlemagne, whose example he would fain have imitated, and his followers, by way of a pleasant surprise and compliment to him, before they woke him to announce to him the birth of his first son, christened the child, as they thought, after the latter half of the great Emperor Carolus Magnus. That child became a much-beloved monarch, under the denomination of King Magnus Barefoot, from his having established his identity on his return from Ireland, by the ordeal of walking unshod over red-hot ploughshares. In honour of his many excellencies, as King of Norway, the entire North uses his name of Magnus, and transplanted it to Ireland, where it flourished under the form of Manus, until it became the fashion to ‘Anglicize’ it into Manasses. The Scottish islands, where the population is Norse, likewise use Magnus as a baptismal name; and the Lapps have turned it into Manna, or Mannas.
Maximus was likewise properly an individual agnomen of size, or of victory, as with Fabius Maximus; but it came to be a proper name, and was borne by Maximus the Monk, a great Greek ecclesiastic of the sixth century, as well as by many other obscure saints, from whom the Italians derive their Massimo, and the French Maxime, and the Welsh their old Macsen.
Maxentius and Maximinus, both named not only persecuting emperors, but Christian martyrs, whence Maxime and Maximien. Maximilianus was one of the Seven Sleepers, but he is not the origin of the German imperial name. According to Camden, this was a compound invented by the Emperor Frederick VII., and bestowed on his son in his great admiration of Fabius Maximus and Scipio Æmilianus. “The Last of the Knights,” with his wild effrontery and spirited chamois-hunting might be despised by the Italians, as Massimiliano Pochi Danari; but he was beloved by the Austrians as “Our Max.” His great grandson, Maximilian II., contributed to the popularity of his unwieldy name, and Max continues to be one of the favourite German appellations, from the archduke to the peasant, to the present day; and has even thrown out the feminine Maximiliane. The Poles and Illyrians use ks instead of x in spelling it.
Section IX.—Rufus, &c.
Rufus, the red or ruddy, was a cognomen of various families, and was, in fact, one of the adjectives occurring in the nomenclature of almost every nation; and chiefly of those where a touch of Keltic blood has made the hair vary between red and black. Flavius, Fulvius, Rufus, and an occasional Niger, were the Roman names of complexion; and it is curious to find the single instances of Chlorus (the yellow), occurring in the Flavian family. The Biondi of Italy claim to be the Flavii, and thence the Blound, Count de Guisnes, companion of William the Conqueror, took the name now Blount!
Rufus is, indeed, the Latin member of the large family of which we spoke in mentioning the Greek Rhoda; and the Kelts had, in plenty, their own Ruadh or Roy; nevertheless, such as fell under Roman dominion adopted the Roman Rufus or Rufinus; and it passed on by tradition in Wales, as Gruffin, Gruffydd, or as the English caught it and spelt it, correctly representing the sound of dd, Griffith. It was the name of many Welsh princes, and has passed into a frequent surname.
In its Gruffin stage, it passed into the commonwealth of romance. Among the British names that had worked through the lost world of minstrelsy, to reappear in the cycle with which Italian poets graced the camp and court of Charlemagne, is Grifone, a descendant of Bevis of Hampton. By this time, no doubt, his name was supposed to be connected with the Griffin, that creature with griffes, or claws; that[that] after having served in earlier times, as with Dante, to represent the Italian idea of the vision of the cherubim, had been gradually degraded to a brilliant portion of the machinery of romance.
No doubt the Italians who bore the name of Grifone, thought more of the “right Griffin” and the true knight, than of the ruddy Roman whose Ruffino or Ruffo was still left lingering among them; together with Rufina, the name of a virgin martyr.
Rufus is, for some reason or other, rather a favourite at present with our American neighbours.
Niger (the black) was a cognomen of various Romans of no great note, and distinguished a teacher from Antioch, mentioned in the Acts. The diminutive Nigellus seems to have been adopted in France, by the Normans, as a translation of the Nial which they had brought from Norway, after having learned it of the Gael, in whose tongue it means the noble. In Domesday Book, twelve proprietors are recorded as Nigel, both before and after the Conquest, being probably Danish Nials thus reduced to the Neustrian French Latin. Of these was Nigel de Albini (temp. William I.), and Nigel de Mowbray (temp. Henry II.). The influx of Anglo-Normans into Scotland introduced this new-fashioned Nigel, and it was adopted as the English form of Niel, and has since become almost exclusively confined to Scotland, where it is a national name, partly perhaps in memory of the untimely fate of Niel or Nigel Bruce; and among the covenanters, for the sake of the fierce Nigel Leslie, Master of Rothes. It has shared the fate of Colin and of the true Nial, and has been taken for Nicolas. The French used a like name, which Froissart spells Nesle; but this is probably from the inference that a lengthened sound of e infers a silent s.
CHAPTER V.
NAMES FROM ROMAN DEITIES.
Section I.
A short chapter must be given to the modern names that, in spite of the canon prohibiting the giving of names of heathen gods in baptism, are either those of Latin divinities, or are derived from them. These, though few in number, are more than are to be found in the Greek class, from the fact that where a Roman deity had become identified with a Greek one, the Latin name was used throughout Western Europe in all translations, and only modern criticism has attempted to distinguish between the distinct myths of the two races. Most of these are, or have been, in use either in France or England, the modern countries most under the dominion of fancy with regard to names.
Aurora (the dawn), so called, it is said, from aurum (gold), because of the golden light she sheds before her, assumed all the legends attached by the Greeks to their Eos, whose rosy fingers unbarred the gates of day. When the Cinque-cento made classic lore the fashion, Aurore came into favour with the fair dames of France, and has ever since there continued in vogue, occasionally passing into Germany. In Illyria, the dawn and the lady are both called Zora, and she in endearment Zorana.[[67]]
Bellona was not a goddess whose name one would have expected to find renewed in Christian times, yet instances have been found of it in England among those who probably had some idea that it was connected with beauty instead of with bellum (war). In effect, hers is not quite a proper name, being really an adjective, with the noun understood, Bellona Dea (the war goddess). An infant born in the streets of Weimar during the sack that followed the battle of Jena was named Angelina Bellona, as having been an angel of comfort to her parents in the miseries of war. She became a great musician, and won renown for her name in her own land.[[68]]
The old Latin deities were often in pairs, masculine and feminine. Divus, that part of their title that is still recognized as belonging to the supernatural, is from the same source as the Sanscrit deva, Persian dev, Greek δῖος, 0εός, Zeus, and was applied to all. Divus Janus and Diva Jana were one of these pairs, who presided over day and night, as the sun and moon. Divajana became Diana; and as groves were sacred to her, and she was as pure a goddess as Vesta, there was every reason for identifying her with the Greek Artemis, and giving her possession of the temple of Ephesus, and the black stone image that “fell down from Jupiter,” or the sky; she had Apollo given as her fellow instead of Janus, and thenceforth was the goddess of the silver bow, daughter of Jupiter and Latona, as Artemis had been of Zeus and Leto. Her name slept as a mere pagan device till the sixteenth century, when romances of chivalry gave place to the semi-classical pastoral, of which Greece was usually the scene. Jorge de Montemayor, the Spanish gentleman who led the way in this flowery path, named his heroine, Diana, and she was quickly copied by the sponsors of Diane de Poitiers, the fair widow whose colours of black and white were worn by Henry II. of France even to his last fatal tournament. Diane thus became so fashionable in France, that when the Cavalier court was there residing, the English caught the fashion, and thenceforth Lady Dye at times appeared among the Ladies Betty and Fanny of the court. In the lower classes, Diana seems to be at times confused with the Scriptural Dinah, though it may sometimes be adopted as a Bible name, since a peasant has been known to pronounce that he well knew who was “greatest ‘Diana of the Ephesians,’—a great lady of those parts, and very charitable to the poor.” At Rome Jewesses now alone bear it, and Italian Christians consequently despise it, and only give it to dogs. However, in the eighteenth century, a Monna Diana existed at Florence, who is recorded as an example of the benefits of a heavy head wrapper, for a large stone fell upon her head from a building, and she took it for a small pebble!
Diana’s fellow, Divus Janus, had a very different career. He was sometimes called Dianus, but much more commonly Janus, and from being merely the sun, he became allegorical of the entire year, and had a statue with four faces for the seasons, and hands pointing the one to 300, the other to 55, thus making up the amount of days then given to the year; and before him were twelve altars, one for each month. He thus presided over the beginning of everything, and the first month of the year was from him called Januarius, as were all gates jani, and doors januæ; and above all, that gate between the Sabines and the Romans, which was open when they were friends, shut when they were foes. When the two nations had become thoroughly fused together, the gate grew to a temple; but the ceremony of shutting the doors was still followed on the rare occasions when Rome was at peace, and of opening them when at war to let the god go out, as it was now said, to help the Romans. This idea of peace, however, turned Janus into a legendary peaceful monarch, who only wore two heads that he might look both ways to see either side of a question, and keys were put into his hand as the guardian of each man’s gate. His own special gate continued to be called Janicula, and his name passed from the door, janua, to the porter, janitor; and thence in modern times to St. Peter, who, bearing the keys, was called by the Italians, il Janitore di Cielo, and thence the fish, which was thought to bear the mark of St. Peter’s thumb, was il janitore, or, as we call it, the John Dory, if not from its gilded scales, dorée or dorado. Its Spanish name of San Pedro would favour the janitor theory. The month of Janus, Janvier, January, Gennaro, Januar, has kept its name, like all the other months of the Roman calendar, in spite of the French attempt to displace them with Glacial, Pluvial, &c. Birth in the month of January occasioned the name of Januarius to be given to various persons in the time of the Roman empire, to one of the seven sons of St. Felicitas, to a martyr whose day is the 13th of October, and especially to St. Januarius, of Beneventum, who in the persecution of Diocletian was thrown to wild beasts at Pozzuoli, and on their refusal to hurt him, was beheaded. His blood was already a religious curiosity before the eighth century, when it was thought to have delivered Naples from an eruption of Mount Vesuvius, and it furnishes one of the most questionable and most hotly-defended miracles of the Church of Rome. After this Gennaro cannot fail to be a very frequent Neapolitan Christian name.[[69]]
Section II.—Florentius.
The goddess of flowers was called from their Latin name flos, the same that has passed into all European languages except the German. In late times the name of Florus was formed from that of the goddess, and is memorable as that of the procurator, whose harshness drove the Jews to their last rebellion. Flora was probably first used merely as the feminine of Florus. There is a church at Florence to SS. Fiore and Lucilla, otherwise the first occurrence of any variety of Flora is in Roman-Gothic Spain, where the unhappy daughter of Count Julian was called by the Spanish diminutive Florinda, and thus caused the name to be so much detested, that while Spanish ballads called her la Cava, the wicked, her Christian name was only bestowed upon dogs, and curiously enough it was the little spaniel (a Spanish breed), for which Flora was considered in England as an appropriate name. A Spanish maiden, however, who was martyred by the Moors in 851, brought Flora into better repute; and Flore became known to the French, though probably first adopted as a romantic epithet; and through the close connection between France and Scotland, it passed to the latter country, the especial land of floral names, and there became frequent as the English equivalent to the Gaelic Finghin. It was spelt as Florie by the island heroine of the '45. Florentius was the natural product of the goddess Flora, and named a female saint, Florentia, martyred with two others, both men, in Diocletian’s persecution in Gaul, and commemorated by a monastery built over the spot. St. Florentius was likewise a Gaul, and was sent by St. Martin to preach in Poitou. His relics were at first at Saumur, but in the eleventh century were taken to Roye, and in the time of Louis XI., were divided between the two cities. As an Angevin saint, he quite accounts for the prevalence of Florence in the masculine gender among the Anglo-Norman nobles of the middle ages; but it soon died away. The recent revival is chiefly owing to the name having been given to English girls born at the Italian city so called, and it has since acquired a deeper and dearer honour in the person of Florence Nightingale. From the city, or else as a diminutive of Florentius, arose Florentinus, a name borne by various distinguished persons in the latter days of the empire, and saintly in the person of a martyr of Burgundy. Florentina was one of the daughters of St. Leander, of Spain, and the relics of these saints scattered the names of Florentin and Florentine over a wide extent in France. Besides these, should be mentioned the romantic name, Blanchefleur. It is given to Sir Trystan’s mother, and probably translates some Keltic name analogous to the Erse Blathnaid, Finbil, and Finscoth, all of which mean white flower.
The Irish Florence, or Flory, so common among the peasantry, is intended for Finghin, or Fineen (fair offspring); also for Flann, Fithil, and Flaithri.[[70]]
[67]. Keightley; Michaelis.
[68]. Keightley; Smith; Key, Latin Grammar; Madame Scopenhauer, Memoirs.
[69]. Keightley; Smith; Bouterwek; Istoria de Firenze; Brand; Butler; Spanish Literature.
[70]. Smith; Butler; Irish Society; Pott.
Section III.—Laurentius.
It appears natural to refer Laurentius direct to laurus (the bay or laurel); but there is reason to think that it, as well as the tree, must go farther back to the dim vestiges of early Roman mythology. From the Etruscans the Romans learnt the beautiful idea of guardian spirits around their hearths, whom they called by the Etruscan word lar or lars; meaning lord or master. The spirits of great statesmen or heroes became public lares, and watched over the welfare of the city; those of good men, or of innocent infants under forty days old, were the lares of their home and family. Their images, covered with dogskins, and with the figure of a dog beside them, were placed beside every hearth; and, curiously enough, are the origin of the name dogs, still applied to the supports on either side of a wood fire-place. They were made to partake in every household festival; cups were set apart, in which a portion of every meal was poured out to them; the young bride, on being carried across her husband’s threshold, made her first obeisance to these household spirits of his family; and on the nones, ides, and calends of each month, when the master returned from the war, or on any other occasion of joy, the lares were crowned with wreaths and garlands. Pairs of lares stood in niches at the entrance of the streets; other lares guarded districts in the country; and the lares of all Rome had a temple to themselves, where stood twin human figures with a dog between them. All these wore green crowns on festival days, especially on those of triumph; and thus there can be little doubt that the evergreen whose leaves were specially appropriated to the purpose was thence called laurus, as the poplar was from forming people’s crowns. The special feast of the lares was on the 22nd of December, and it was immediately followed by that of a female deity called Lara, Larunda, Larentia, Laurentia, or Acca Laurentia, who was termed in old Latin genita mana (good mother), received the sacrifice of a dog, and was entreated that no good domestic slave might depart. Thus much custom had preserved to the Romans; but when Greek mythology came in, flooding and corrupting all their own, poor Laurentia was turned into a nymph, so given to chattering (λαλιά) that Jupiter punished her by cutting out her tongue and sending her, in charge of Mercury, to the lower world; and the lares, now allowed to be only two, were made into her children and those of Mercury. Another story, wishing to account for all traditions in one, made her into the woman who nursed Romulus and Remus, and thus disposed of her and of the she-wolf at once, and made the twelve rural Lares her sons; whilst a third version degraded her, like Flora, and made her leave all her property to the state, in the time of Ancus Martius.
Laurentius does not occur in early history; but it belonged to the gentle Roman deacon who, on the 10th of August, 258, showed the “poor and the maimed, the halt and the blind,” as the treasures of the Church, and was martyred, by being roasted over a fire on bars of iron. Constantine built a church on his tomb, and seven other Churches at Rome are likewise dedicated to him. Pope Adrian gave some of his relics to Charlemagne, who took them to Strasburg, and thus rendered him one of the regnant saints in Germany, where the prevalence of shooting stars on the night of his feast has occasioned those meteors to be called St. Lorenz’s sparks. In fact, his gentle nature, his peculiar martyrdom, and his church at Rome, caused him to be a saint of universal popularity; and a fresh interest was conferred on him, in Spanish eyes, by Philip II.’s belief that the battle of St. Quentin, fought on his day, was won by his intercession, and the consequent dedication of the gridiron-palace convent of the Escurial to him.
Besides the original saint, England owns St. Laurentius among the band of Roman missionaries who accompanied St. Augustine, and, in succession, became archbishops of Canterbury. When England, in her turn, sent forth missionaries, another Laurence preached the Word in the North, with such effect as to compel the Trollds themselves to become church builders, much against their will, and to leave his name, cut down into Lars, its primitive form, as a favourite in all Scandinavia. In Ireland, Laurence, whose name I strongly suspect to have been Laghair, a son of Maurice O'Tuathail, of Leinster, was archbishop of Dublin at the time of the conquest by the Norman adventurers, and was thus brought into close connection with Canterbury and with Rome, knitting the first of the links that have made the Irish so abject in their devotion to the Papal See. It was probably on this account that he was canonized, but he was also memorable as one of the builders of St. Patrick’s cathedral at Dublin, and for his charities during a terrible famine, when he supported as many as 300 destitute children. It is he who has rendered Lanty and Larry so common among the Irish peasantry. Besides all these, the modern Venetian saint, Lorenzo Justiniani, worthily maintained the honour of the Christian name already so illustrious in excellence, and it has continued in high esteem everywhere, though, perhaps, less common in England than on the Continent. Germany is the place of its special reign; and in the Harz mountains, to bow awkwardly is called krummer Lorenz machen.
| English. | Scotch. | Irish. | French. |
| Lawrence | Lawrence | Laurenc | Laurent |
| Laurence | Laurie | Lanty | |
| Larkin | Larry | ||
| Italian. | Spanish. | Portuguese. | Swiss. |
| Lorenzo | Lorenzo | Laurençho | Lori |
| Renzo | Lenz | ||
| Enz | |||
| Enzali | |||
| German. | Wallachian. | Swedish. | Danish. |
| Lorenz | Lavrentia | Laurentius | Lorenz |
| Lars | Lars | ||
| Lauritz | |||
| Norse. | Russian. | Polish. | Bohemian. |
| Laurans | Lavrentij | Vavrzynec | Vavrinec |
| Jörens | |||
| Larse | |||
| Slovak. | Lithuanian. | Lapp. | Hungarian. |
| Lovre | Labrenzis | Laur | Lörencz |
| Brenzis | Laures | ||
| Lauris | Laura | ||
| Raulus |
Some languages have the feminine, but it is not frequent anywhere. The Italian Lorenza is, perhaps, the most frequent.
The name of Laura is a great perplexity. It may be taken from Laurus, and ladies so called consider St. Laurence as their patron; but it may also be from the word Laura, the Greek Λαβρα, or Λαυρα, meaning an avenue, the same as labyrinth, and applied to the clusters of hermitages which were the germ of monasteries. Or again, a plausible derivation is that Lauretta might have commemorated the laurel-grove, or Loreto, whither Italian superstition declared that the angels transported the holy house of Nazareth away from the Turkish power on the conquest of Palestine. Those who call the milky-way the Santa Strada di Loretto, might well have used this as one of their varied forms of seeking the patronage of the Blessed Virgin. The chief objection that I can find to this theory is, that the first Lauretta that I have met with was a Flemish lady, in 1162; the next was a daughter of William de Braose, Lord of Bramber, in the time of King John, a period antecedent to the supposed migration of the holy house, which did not set out on its travels till 1294. Others think it the same with Eleonora, which I cannot believe; but, at any rate, it was the Provençal Lora de Sades, so long beloved of Petrarch, who made this one of the favourite romantic and poetical names, above all, in France, where it is Laure, Lauretta, Loulou.[[71]]
[71]. Smith; Keightley; Loudon, Arboretum; Butler; Jameson; Grimm; Pott; Michaelis; Dugdale; Hanmer, Chronicle of Ireland.
Section IV.—Sancus.
Sancus, or Sanco-Sancus, was the divinity who presided over oaths, and guarded the marriage vow and treaties between nations. He was afterwards mixed up with Hercules, and so entirely forgotten that his altar was long supposed to have been an early Christian erection bearing the word sanctus.
This word is the past participle of the verb sancire (to decree). It was equivalent to instituted, and was gradually applied to mark the institutions of religion. That “all the congregation are holy,” all under sanctification, all once at least saints, was a faith strong in the Church, and prompted the name of Sanctus among the first Christians.
One Sanctus was a deacon of the band of martyrs at Lyons, and another Sanctus was a Christian physician of Otriculum, a city of central Italy, and was put to death under the Antonines. There is some doubt whether he is the same physician of Otriculum who is also called St. Medicus.
Sanctus was the favourite patron in Provence, Biscay, and Navarre; and Sancho and Sancha were constantly in royal use in the early kingdoms of the struggling Christians of Spain; though as royalty and nobility became weary of what was national and peculiar, they were left to the peasantry, and would have been entirely forgotten, but for that wonderful personification of the shrewd, prosaic, selfish, yet faithful element in human nature, Sancho Panza, whom Cervantes has made one of the most typical yet individual characters of literature.
The Provençals had both the masculine and feminine forms in frequent use; and the co-heiress of Provence, who married our Richard, Earl of Cornwall, king of the Romans, was Sancia, or Sancie; but the name did not take root in England, and sorely puzzled some of our old genealogists, who record the lady as Cynthia, Scientia, or Science. This last name actually occurs several times in the seventeenth century, both in Latin and English, in the register of a small Hampshire parish; but whether meant for Sancha, or chosen in love for abstract knowledge, those who named ‘Science Dear’ alone could tell.
Italy, as in duty bound, remembered her saintly physician as Sancto at Rome, and Sanzio with the ‘lingua Toscana,’ where it came as a family name to the greatest of painters.[[72]]
Section V.—Old Italian Deities.
Februus was the old Italian god both of the dead and of fertility, to whom February was sacred. The word is thought to mean purification, but after the Etruscan deities were forgotten, Juno, who had also a share in the month, absorbed it all, and was called Juno Februata. Thence, probably, arose the name of Febronia, a nun of Sibapolis on the borders of Assyria, who suffered horrid torments under her persecutors, and was at last beheaded. She is venerated by the Greek Church on the 25th of June, and suggested to Russia the names Fevronia, or Khevronia.
Though not divine, the name of Lavinia should be mentioned here as that of a mythical personage imitated by the moderns, though not by the Romans themselves. In Livy and in Virgil, she is the daughter of King Latinus, and the last wife of Æneas, in whose right he obtained a footing in Italy. Niebuhr and his followers deny her existence, and make her a mere personification of the Latin territory, and whether this be the case or not, hers is certainly a feminine form of Latinus, the t changed to v, as happened in other instances. The classical Italians of the Cinque-cento revived Lavinia for their daughters; and by way of recommending the story of the Book of Ruth to the taste of the eighteenth century, Thomson had the audacity to translate the Moabitess into “the lovely young Lavinia,” whence it has happened that this has become rather a favourite with those classes in England who have a taste for many syllables ending in ia.
Picus was another old Italian deity who used to be represented with a woodpecker on his head. Whether he or the woodpecker first had the name of Picus does not appear; but in English that term passed to the pyot or magpie, and some recurrence to old tradition caused Pico to be revived in Italy in the person of the famous Pico de Mirandola and his namesakes.
From fors (chance) came Fortuna, the goddess of prosperity and success. She was said on entering Rome to have thrown away her globe, and shed her wings like a queen-ant, to denote that here she took up her permanent abode. She was adored at Rome as early as the reign of Ancus Martius, and to her was ascribed the success of the women’s entreaty in turning away the wrath of Coriolanus.
Her name does not appear to have been used in the heathen times, but in 212 SS. Felix and Fortunatus were martyred at Valence in Dauphiné, and it was probably from the latter that Fortunio became a name among the early Asturian and Navarrese sovereigns.
What shall we think of the augury of names when we find in the parish register of St. John’s, Newcastle, on the 20th of June, 1599, the marriage of Umphraye Hairope, husbandman, to Fortune Shafto, gentlewoman?
A pair of twins, girls, of the Wycliffe family, born in 1710, were christened Favour and Fortune; and Fortune is a surname in Scotland.[[73]]
[72]. Butler; Keightley; Smith.
[73]. Niebuhr; Arnold; Surius; Keightley; Sir O. Sharpe, Extracts from Parish Registers.
Section VI.—Quirinus.
Quirinus, one of the oldest of the war-gods, was called from the Oscan quiris (a spear), which likewise was the source of the old Roman name of Quirites, and of that of the Quirinal Hill. Spearmen alike were the Quirites and their unconquerable foes; the Gjermanner, the Germans, nay, probably gher and quiris are the very same word, equally related to the Keltic coir.
Others, however, call Quirinus the mere personified god of the town of Cures. When all had become confusion in the Roman mind as to their old objects of worship, and they had mingled them with “gods whom their fathers knew not,” they took it into their heads that Quirinus was the deified Romulus who had been transported to the skies by his father, Mars, in the middle of a muster of his warriors in the Campus Martius; and when a still later age distrusted this apotheosis, some rationalist Roman suggested that, weary of Romulus' tyranny, the senators had secretly assassinated him during the review, and to prevent detection had cut his body to pieces, each carried a portion home under his toga, and professed to have beheld the translation to the skies. Quirinus had become a cognomen at the Christian era, but first occurs as a Christian name in 304, when St. Quirinus was Bishop of Siscia on the Save, and after a good confession before the tyrant Maximus, was dragged in chains through the cities on the banks of the Danube, and then drowned at Sabaria, now Sarwar. His relics were afterwards taken to Rome, but are now said to be in Bavaria; and in his honour Cyran has become a French name. As a saint connected with Germany, various chapters arose in commemoration of him; and Mrs. Elizabeth Carter describes her meeting with a pretty little chanoinesse at Spa, who wore her medal of St. Quirinus, but was able to give so little account of him that Mrs. Carter, better read in Roman history than in hagiology, concluded him to be the “Saint who built Rome and killed his brother.”
Quirinius was the name of the Roman governor whom St. Luke called in Greek Κυρήνιος, and our translators render Cyrenius.
The name of Romulus is thought by many to have been a mere myth made out of that of his city Roma, a word that probably signified strength, and was no inappropriate title for that empire of iron. Ῥώμη is the Greek word for strength; the same root is found in the Latin robur, and it may be in the Teutonic ruhm (fame). Others say that groma (a cross-road) was the origin of this most famous of all local titles.
However this may be, after Romulus Augustulus had seen the twelve centuries of Rome fulfilled, Romolo still lingered on as a name in Italy; the first bishop of Fiesole was thus named, and was so popular at Florence, that Catherine dei Medici was actually christened Romola.
When to be a Roman citizen was the highest benefit a man of a subject nation could enjoy, Romanus was treated as a cognomen. Pliny had two friends so called. There are seven saints thus named, and three Byzantine emperors. But when Teuton sway had made a Roman the meanest and most abject epithet, Romain or Romano died away in popularity, and only occurs now and then in French genealogy, though it is still used in Italy.
They must not be confounded with Romeo and Romuald, which are genuine Teutonic.[[74]]
[74]. Diefenbach; Arnold; Livy; Butler.
Section VII.—Sibylla.
The Sibyls were beings peculiar to Roman mythology, prophetesses half human, half divine, living to a great age, but not immortal. Etymologists used to interpret their name as coming from the Greek Ζεύς and βουλή (Zeus' councils), but it is far more satisfactorily explained as coming from sabius, or sabus, an old Italian, but not a Latin word, which lives still in the vernacular Sabio, thus making Sibulla signify a wise old woman.
Old, indeed! for the Cumean Sibyl, who guided Æneas to the infernal regions, was likewise said to be the same who brought the prophetic books for sale to Tarquinius Priscus, and on each refusal of the sum that she demanded for them, carried them off, destroyed one, and brought the rest back rated at a higher price. The single remaining roll bought by the king was said to contain all the mysterious prophecies that were afterwards verified by the course of events, and above all, that prediction of the coming rule of peace, which Virgil, following Theocritus, embodied in his eclogue as fulfilled in Augustus. That eclogue, flattery though it were, won for Virgil his semi-Christian fame, and caused the learned men of Italy to erect the Sibyls into the personifications of heathen presages of Gospel truth—
“Teste David cum Sibylla,”
as says the glorious hymn uniting the voices of Hebrew and Gentile prophecy; and in this character do Michel Angelo’s magnificent Sibyls adorn the Sistine Chapel; though later painters, such as Guido and Domenichino, made them mere models of female intellectual beauty.
Sibilla, probably through the influence of Campania upon nomenclature, early spread as a Christian name. Possibly the word was the more acceptable to Northern ears from its resemblance to the Gothic sibja (peace, or friendship), the word familiar to us as the Scottish sib (related), forming with us the last syllable of gossip, in its old sense of god-parent. Thence came Sippia, Sib, or Sif, the lovely wife of Thor, whose hair was cut off by Lok, and its place supplied by golden tresses, which some consider to mean the golden harvest.
Perhaps it was this connection that recommended the Italian Sibila to the Norman chivalry. At any rate, Sibila of Conversana was the wife of Robert of Normandy, and Sibille soon travelled into France, and belonged to that Angevin Queen of Jerusalem, whose many marriages gave so much trouble to the Crusaders. It was very frequent among English ladies of Norman blood; and in Spain, Sevilla, or Sebilla, is frequent in the earlier ballads. Sibella, Sibyl, or Sibbie, is most frequent of all in Ireland and Scotland; but I believe that this is really as the equivalent for the ancient Gaelic Selbhflaith (lady of possessions).
Russia has the name as Ssivilla; the Lithuanians call it Bille; and the Esthonians, Pil. Sibilley is the form in which it appears in a Cornish register in 1692; in 1651 it is Sibella.[[75]]
Section VIII.—Saturn, &c.
Saturnus was a mythical king of ancient Italy, peaceful, and given to agriculture, indeed, his name is thought to come from satus (sown). It is very odd that he should have become the owner of all the fame of the Greek Kronos, infanticide, planet rings, and all; but so completely has he seized upon them that we never think of him as the god of seed-time, but only as the discarded king of heaven and father of Jupiter.
We should have little to do with him were it not that the later Romans formed from him the name of Saturninus, which belonged to sundry early saints, and furnished the old Welsh Sadwrn.
Sylvanus was a deity called from sylva (a wood), the protector of husbandmen and their crops, in the shape of an old man with a cypress-tree in his hand. His had become a Roman name just before the Christian era, and belonged to the companion of St. Paul, who is called Sylvanus in the Epistles, and, by the contraction, Silas in the Acts. This contracted form, Silas, has been revived in England as a Scripture name.
St. Sylvanus, or Silverius, was a pope whom his Church esteems a martyr, as he died in the hands of Belisarius; but sylvan, or salvage, was chiefly used in the middle ages to express a dweller in a forest, rude and hardly human. Silvano, Selvaggio, or Silvestro, was generally the name of monsters with shaggy locks, clubs, and girdles of ivy leaves, who appeared in romance; and Guidon Selvaggio was the rustic knight of Boiardo and Ariosto. Occasionally these words became names, and about the year 1200, Sylvestro Gozzolini, of Osimo, founded an order of monks, who, probably, are the cause that Sylvester became known in Ireland as a Christian name, and has come to us as a surname, while the French have it as Sylvestre.
The son of Æneas and Lavinia was said to have been born in a wood, and therefore called Æneas Silvius, and his name was given to one of the Piccolomini family, Enea Silvio, afterwards pope; and also belonged to an historian. Sylvain, Sylvan, Sylvius, Sylvia became favourite names for shepherds and shepherdesses in the time of the pastoral romance; Sylvia turned into a poetical name for a country maid, and has since been used as a village Christian name, having been perhaps first chosen by some fanciful Lady Bountiful.
CHAPTER VI.
MODERN NAMES FROM THE LATIN.
There still remain a class of names derived from the Latin, being chiefly Latin words formed into names. Some of them answer to the class that we have called Christian Greek, being compound words assumed as befitting names by early Roman Christians, such as Deusvult.
There are fewer of these than of the like Greek designations, both from the hereditary system of nomenclature, and from the language being less suitable for such formations than the Greek, which was so well known to all educated Romans that a Greek appellation would convey as much meaning as a Latin one, and in that partially veiled form that always seems to have been preferred in nomenclature in the later ages of nations. Some, however, either from sound, sense, or association, have become permanent Christian names in one or more nations; and with these, for the sake of convenience, have been classed those formed from Latin roots, and which, though coined when their ancestral language was not only dead but corrupt, are too universal to be classed as belonging to any single country of modern Europe, though sometimes the product of a Romance tongue rather than of genuine Latin, or appearing in cognate languages in different forms; cousins, in fact, not brethren, and sometimes related to uncles sprung from the elder tongue.
Section I.—From Amo.
Of these are all the large class of names sprung from amo, which has descended into all the Southern languages of Western Europe nearly unaltered. The Gallic Christians seem to have had a particular delight in calling their children by derivatives of this word; for in their early times there occur in the calendar, Amabilis (loveable), Amator (a lover), Amandus (about to be loved), and Amatus and Amata (loved); Amadeus (loving God) seems to have been still older. Out of this collection, St. Amand has survived as a territorial surname; whilst Amanda, from its meaning, was one of the complimentary noms de plume of the eighteenth century; and Amandine is sometimes found in France. Amabilis was a male saint of Riom, known to France as St. Amable; nevertheless, his name passed to Aimable, the Norman heiress of Gloucester, who so strongly protested against accepting even a king’s son without a surname. Her name became on English lips Amabel, which has been handed down unchanged in a few old English families, though country lips have altered it into Mabel, in which form it is still used among the northern peasantry. Ignorant etymologists have tried to make it come from ma belle (my fair one), and lovers of false ornament turn it into Mabella.
Nothing is known of the female saint, Amata, or Aimée, but that the people of Northern France used to honour her, and she had namesakes in old French pedigrees, so that there can be little doubt that Norman families brought in the pretty simple Amy that has never been entirely disused, and has been a frequent peasant name in the West of England. St. Amatus, or Amé, was about the end of the seventh century a hermit in the Valais, and afterwards became Bishop of Sion, and was persecuted by one of the Merovingian kings. He thus became the patron saint of Savoy, and for a long succession the Counts were called Amé; but after a time, they altered the name to Amadeus, Amadée, or Amadeo, as it was differently called on the two sides of the mountain principality, and as it has continued to the present time. Amyot and Amyas in England, and in Romance the champion Amadis de Gaul, drew their names from this Savoyard source. This notable knight is believed to have been invented in Spain, and the Italians call him Amadigi. It is possible, however, that he may come from the Kymry, for Amaethon, son of Don, appears in the Mabinogion, and was a mystic personage in Welsh mythology. His name meant the husbandman, another offshoot from the universal Amal. He must have been the Sir Amadas of the Round Table.
The old English Amicia, so often found in old pedigrees, is probably a Latinizing of Aimée. The most notable instance of it is Amicia, the daughter of the Earl of Leicester, who brought her county to the fierce old persecutor, Simon de Montfort, and left it to the warlike earl, who imprisoned Henry III. His sister carried Amicie into the Flemish family of De Roye, where it continued in use, and it descended again into Amice in England. Amadore was in use in Florence, cut into Dore.[[76]]
[75]. Max Müller, Science of Language; Keightley; Ruskin; Grimm; Michaelis.
[76]. Butler; Pott; Dugdale; Mabinogion; Lady C. Guest; Dunlop, Fiction.
Section II.—Names from Beo.
The old verb beo (to make happy or bless) formed the participle beatus (happy or blessed), which was applied by the Church to her departed members, and in time was bestowed on the living. Indeed, in France, béate was so often applied to persons who lived in the profession of great sanctity, that une vieille béate has now come to be used in the sense of a hypocritical pretender.
St. Beatus, or Béat, was an anchorite near Vendôme, in the fifth century; but we do not find instances of his patronage having been sought for men, though in England Beata is a prevailing female name in old registers and on tombstones up to the seventeenth century, when it dies away, having, I strongly suspect, been basely confounded with Betty. Beata and Bettrys are however still used in Wales. This last stands for Beatrice (a blesser), which seems to have been first brought into this island as a substitute for the Gaelic Bethoc (life), of which more in its place.
The original Beatrix, the feminine of Beator (a blesser), is said to have been first borne by a Christian maiden, who, in Diocletian’s persecution, drew the bodies of her martyred brothers from the Tiber, and buried them: afterwards she shared their fate, and her relics were enshrined in a church at Rome, whence her fame spread to all adjacent countries; and her name was already frequent when Dante made the love of his youth, Beatrice Portinari, the theme of his Vita Nuova, and his guide through Paradise. Thus it was a truly national name at Florence; and Shakespeare used the Italian spelling for his high-spirited heroine, thus leading us to discard the old Latin x. It has been a queenly name in Spain, but less common here than it deserves.
| English. | Welsh. | French. | Italian. | Spanish. |
| Beatrix | Bettrys | Béatrix | Beatrice | Beatriz |
| Trix | Bice | |||
| Beatrice | ||||
| Portuguese. | German. | Russian. | Slavonic. | |
| Beatrix | Beatrix | Beatriks | Beatrica |
This same beo is said to be the source of benus, the old form of bonus, which survives in the adverb benè. Both adjective and adverb are familiar in their many derivatives in the southern tongues, as well as in the bonnie and bien that testify to the close connection of France and Scotland when both alike were the foes of England.
The feminine Bona, or Bonne, was probably first invented as a translation of the old German Gutha; for we find a lady, in 1315, designated as Bona, or Gutha, of Göttingen. Bona was used by the daughters of the Counts of Savoy, and in the House of Luxemburg, and came to the crown of France with the daughter of the chivalrous Johann of Luxemburg, the blind King of Bohemia.
St. Benignus, whose name is from the same source, was a disciple of St. Polycarp, and is reckoned as the apostle of Burgundy, where he was martyred, and has been since commemorated by the splendid abbey of St. Benigne, at Dijon, whence it happens that Benin has been common among the peasantry in that part of France, and Benigne is to be found among the string of Christian names borne by the French gentry of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Servia has the feminine form, Benyma, shortening it into Bine.
Benedico (to speak well) came to have the technical sense of to bless; and the patriarch of the Western monks rendered Benedictus (blessed) so universally known that different forms of it prevail in all countries, lesser luminaries adding to its saintly lustre.
| English. | French. | Breton. | Italian. |
| Benedict | Benoît | Bennéad | Benedetto |
| Bennet | Bennéged | Betto | |
| Bettino | |||
| Spanish. | Portuguese. | German. | Swedish. |
| Benedicto | Benedicto | Benedikt | Bengt |
| Benito | Bento | Dix | |
| Norse. | Swiss. | Russian. | Polish. |
| Benedik | Benzel | Venedict | Benedykt |
| Benike | Benzli | ||
| Bent | |||
| Slavonic and Illyrian. | Lusatian. | Lithuanian. | Lapp. |
| Benedikt | Beniesch | Bendzus | Pent |
| Benedit | Bendikkas | Penta | |
| Benko | Lett. | Hungarian. | Pint |
| Bindus | Benedik | Pinna |
There was a Visigothic nun in Spain canonized as Benedicta, but most of the feminines were meant in devotion to the original founder of the Benedictine rule. Indeed, in France, Benedicte must have been far more often assigned on the profession of a nun than have been given in baptism, except when the child was destined from her birth to a conventual life.
| French. | Italian. | Spanish. | German. |
| Benoîte | Benedetta | Benita. | Benedikta |
| Betta | Benedictine | ||
| Bettina |
How the localities of these feminines mark the extent of monasticism in modern times!
The sister of St. Benedict bore the strange name of Scholastica, a scholar, from schola (school). Monasticism spread the name, but it was never much in vogue, though England shows a Scholastica Conyers, in 1299.
Bonifacius (good-worker) was the name of a martyr; then of a pope; and next was assumed by our Saxon Wilfred, when in the sixth century he set out to convert his continental brethren. Perhaps, if he had kept his native name, it would have been more followed, both at home and in Germany; but in both, Boniface has withered away out of use, though Bonchurch, in the Isle of Wight, is a contraction of the Church of St. Boniface, that having probably been the last English ground beheld by the saint when he sailed on his mission. In Italy, however, Bonifacius was a papal name. Bonifazio prevailed among the Alpine lords of Monferrat, and thus is still found in Italy. It has become one of the stock names for the host of an inn, and has named the straits between Sardinia and Corsica.
| English. | Italian. | Russian. | Polish. | Bohemian. |
| Boniface | Bonifacio | Bonifacij | Bonifacij | Bonifac |
| Facio | ||||
| Bonifazio | ||||
| Fazio |
Of modern Italian date and construction is Bonaventura. Its origin was the exclamation of St. Francis on meeting Giovanni de Fidenza, the son of a dear friend: O buona ventura (happy meeting). These words became the usual appellation of young Fidenza, and as he afterwards was distinguished for holiness and learning, and was called the seraphic doctor, he was canonized as San Bonaventura, and has had sundry namesakes in Italy and France; in the latter country being called Bonaventure. Benvenuto Cellini may perhaps be reckoned as one, unless his name be intended to mean welcome without reference to the saint.
Section III.—From Clarus.
Clarus (bright or clear) was used by the Romans in the sense of famous, and St. Clarus is revered as the first bishop of Nantes in Brittany, in A.D. 280. Another Clarus, said to have been a native of Rochester, was a hermit, near Rouen, where he was murdered at the instigation of a wicked woman who had vainly paid her addresses to him. Two villages of St. Clair, one on the Epte, the other near Coutance, are interesting as having (one or the other of them) named two of the most noted families in the history of Great Britain, besides the various De St. Clairs of France, who came either from thence or from a third St. Clair in Aquitaine.
A Norman family, called from one of these villages, became the De Clares. ‘Red De Clare,’ stout Glo’ster’s earl, the foe of Henry III., was one of them; and his son marrying into the house of Geraldin, in Ireland, received from Edward I. a grant of lands in Thomond, now known from his lordship as County Clare. His heiress carried the county to the De Burghs, and their heiress again marrying Lionel, son of Edward III., the county becoming a dukedom and royal appanage, was amplified into Clarence, and gave title to Clarencieux—king-at-arms, when Thomas, brother of Henry V., was Duke of Clarence—unless this be from Clare, in Suffolk. Clarence as a male Christian name did not solely arise when William IV. was Duke of Clarence, but began as early as 1595, when Clarence Babbington was christened at Hartlepool.
Spanish ballad lore gives a daughter, Clara, to Charlemagne, and a son, Don Claros de Montablan, to Rinaldo, and of course marries them; but it is to Italy that the feminine name, so much more universal, is owing. The first Chiara on record was the devoted disciple of St. Francis, who, under his direction, established the order of women following his rule, and called, poor Clares, or sisters of St. Clara. From them the name of Clara spread into the adjoining countries, little varied except that the French used to call it Claire, until recently, when they have added the terminal a, just as the English on the other hand are dropping it, and making the word Clare. The Bretons use both masculine and feminine as Sklear, Skleara; and the Finns have the feminine as Lara.
The old Latin feminine of words ending in or, meaning the doer, was ix—nutor, nutrix—and this became ice in modern Italian. Thus Clarice was probably intended to mean making famous. A lady thus named was the wife of Lorenzo de Medici, and France learnt it probably from her, but made the c silent; and England, picking it up by ear, obtained Clarissa, which, when Richardson had so named the heroine of his novel, was re-imported into France as Clarisse. Clarinda was another invention of the same date.
Esclairmonde, a magnificent name of romance, the heroine of Huon de Bourdeaux, walked into real life with a noble damsel of the house of Foix, in the year 1229, and was borne by various maidens of that family; but who would have thought of two ladies called Clarimond, in Devonshire, in 1613 and 1630?
Section IV.—Columba.
Columba is one of the sweetest and most gentle of all words in sound and sense, yet it has not been in such universal use as might have been expected from its reference to the dove of peace.
A virgin martyr in Gaul, and another in Spain, were both called Columba; and Columbina must at one time have prevailed in Italy, as a peasant name, since from the waiting damsel in the impromptu comedies that the poetical Italians loved to act, it passed to the light-footed maiden of modern farce, and now is seldom used save for her and the columbine, the dove-flower, so called from the resemblance of the curled spurs of its four purple petals to doves drinking.
It was from his gentle character that Crimthan, the great and admirable son of the House of Neill, was called Columba, a fitting name for him who was truly a dove of peace to the wild Hebrides. In Ireland this good man is generally called St. Columkill, St. Columb of the cell, or monastery, because of the numbers of these centres of Christian instruction founded by him, and he is thus distinguished from a second Columb, called after him. He has, indeed, left strong traces on the nomenclature of the country that he evangelized. Colin, so frequent among the Scots of all ranks, is the direct descendant of Columba, though it is often confounded with the French Colin, from Nicolas, who is the chief Colin of modern Arcadia, and perhaps has the best right to the feminine invention of Colinette. Besides this, it was the frequent custom to be called Gillie-colum and Maol-colm, the disciple, or shaveling, of Columb, from whence arose Malcolm, one of the most national of Scottish names. Colan, probably called after the patron saint of the place, was married at St. Columb Magna, in Cornwall, in 1752; but earlier it was Columb for men, Columba for women, both now disused.
Columbanus, another great Irish missionary saint, was probably called, after old Latin custom, by the adoptive formed from Columba. His influence on the Continent, newly broken and almost heathenized by the Teutonic invasions, was so extensive, reaching as it did from Brittany to Switzerland, and still marked by the relics of Irish art in the books of the monasteries of his foundation, that we wonder not to find more traces of his name. His day, November 1st, is called by the Germans St. Colman’s, and it is thought that the surnames Kohl and Kohlmann are remains of his name, as well as the French Coulon. So, too, the Genoese Colon was by historians identified with Columbus, when they Latinized the mariner who “gave a new world to Spain.” Two spots in that new world bear his name, that in Terra Firma, where he landed on his third voyage, and the bishopric newly founded in Vancouver’s Isle.
The Slavonian dove is Golubica, a cognate word to this and sometimes used as a name.[[77]]
Section V.—Durans.
Durans (enduring, or lasting) formed the name which no reader of Don Quixote can forget as that of the enduring hero, lying on his back on the marble tomb, in the cave of Montesinos, who uttered that admirable sentiment, “Patience, cousin, and shuffle the cards!”
The name of Durandus prevailed in other countries; and Durand, to our surprise, figures constantly in Domesday Book, probably having belonged to French immigrants. A Durand and Marta, who jointly owned a house at Winchester in the reign of Stephen, were almost certainly Provençal, since St. Martha was hardly known except in the scene of her exploit with the dragon. Durand Grimbald is a specimen of a French Christian and English surname then prevailing. Durandus is the Latinized surname of the great French lawyer of the middle ages; and Durandus again is familiar to the lover of mediæval symbolism; but none of these can approach in honour the great Florentine Durante Alighieri, whose glory, lasting like that of Homer and Shakespeare, has made his contracted appellation of Dante stand alone and singly.
[77]. Butler; Hanmer, Ireland; Chalmer, Caledonia; Montalembert; Ossianic Society; Pott; Michaelis.[Michaelis.]
Section VI.—Names of Thankfulness.
A great race of Christian names were fabricated, in Latin, after the pattern of the Greek Theophilus, Theophorus, &c., though hardly with equal felicity, and chiefly in the remoter provinces of the West, where Latin was, probably, a matter of scholarship. Thus, in the province of Africa, we find, just before the Vandal invasion, Quodvultdeus (what God wills) and Deogratias (thank God), neither of which had much chance of surviving. Deusvult (God wills), Deusdedit (God gave), and Adeodatus, lived nearer to Italy; indeed, Deusdedit was a pope. Adeodatus or Deodatus (God given) was a Gallic saint, called, commonly, St. Die, and with the other form, Donum Dei, continued in use for children whose birth was hailed with special joy. When Louis VII. of France at length had a son, after being “afflicted with a multitude of daughters,” he called him Philippe Dieudonné; but this grateful name was discarded in favour of the imperial Auguste, by which he is distinguished. Deodati di Gozo, the Knight of Rhodes who slew the dragon, better kept his baptismal name, and it often occurs in Italian history, and is an Italian surname. Deodatus is an occasional name only found in England. The old French knightly name, Dudon, called in Italian romantic poetry Dudone, is, probably, a contraction of Dieudonné, as the surnames Donnedieu, Dondey, Dieudé, can hardly fail to be. Deicola (a worshipper of God) was invented for a pupil of St. Columbanus, who followed his master to France, lived as a hermit, and became the patron-saint of Franche Comté, where boys are still called, after him, Diel or Diez, and girls, Dielle. There is likewise an Italian name Diotisalvi, or God save thee, only to be paralleled by some of our Puritan devices.
To these may be added Donatus (given), which evidently was bestowed in the same spirit, though not mentioning the giver. It occurs, like most of this class, in the African province, and belonged to the bishop of Numidia, whose rigour against the penitent lapsed made him the founder of the exclusive schismatical church named after him. Another Donatus was St. Jerome’s tutor; and, before his time, several martyrs had been canonized by his name, and it seems to have prevailed in Gaul and Britain. In Wales it was pronounced Dynawd; and, by the time St. Augustine came to England and disputed with the Cymric clergy, the history of the word had been so far forgotten that Dynawd, abbot of Bangor-Iscoed, was Latinized into Dionothius. Donat, or Donath, is found in Ireland, but it was probably there adopted for the sake of its resemblance to the native Gaelic Don, meaning brown-haired. Donato, likewise, at one time prevailed in Italy, and produced the frequent surname, Donati. Donnet was a feminine in Cornwall in 1755.
Desiderius, or Desideratus, was of the same date, and given, in like manner, to express the longing desire or love of the parents towards the child. In fact the word desiderium, in Latin, more properly means affection than wish, as we explain its derivatives in modern languages. The Desiderius of history was a brother of Magnentius, the opponent of Constantine, and the Desiderius of the calendar was a bishop of Bourges, in the seventh century; but, in the mean time, the last Lombard king of Italy either had become so Italianized as to adopt it, or else used it as a translation of one of the many Teuton forms of Leofric, Leofwin, &c., for he was known to Italy as Desiderio, to France as Didier; and his daughter, whom Charlemagne treated so shamefully, was Desiderata, Desirata, or Desirée. The latter has continued in use in France, as well as Didier and Didiere; and the masculine likewise appears in the Slavonic countries as Zljeko, and among the Lithuanians as Didders or Sidders.
The most learned men were not perfect philologists in the sixteenth century, when they played the most curious tricks with their names. Erasmus began life as Gerhard Gerhardson, signifying, in fact, firm spear, a meaning little suited to his gentle, timid nature. He was better pleased to imagine ger to be the German all, and ard to be erd (earth or nature); of this all-nature he made out that affection embraced all, therefore he called himself Desiderius, and then, wanting another equally sounding epithet, he borrowed Erasmus from the Greek, where it had named an ancient bishop. It came from ἐράω (to love); and thus Desiderius Erasmus, the appellation by which he has come down to posterity, was an ingenious manufacture out of the simple Gerard.[[78]]
[78]. Pott; Butler; Sismondi; Life of Erasmus.
Section VII.—Crescens, &c.
The verb cresco (to increase or grow) has descended into all our modern languages. It has formed the French croître (to grow), our increase and decrease, and our crescent. Its participle was already adopted as a name in St. Paul’s time, at least it is thus that his companion, Κρήσκης, is rendered, who had departed to Dalmatia; and a later Crescens is said to have brought about the death of Justin Martyr, in the second century. The occasion, however, of the modern name was one of the many holy women of Sicily—Crescentia, a Christian nurse, who bred-up her charge, the infant Vitus, in her own faith, fled with him to Italy, and was there seized and martyred, under Diocletian. Crescenzia, and the masculine, Crescenzio, prevail in both Naples and Sicily; and the election of the Angevin-Sicilian Carobert, to the throne of Hungary, carried the former thither as Czenzi; whence Bavaria took it as Cresenz, Zenz, Zenzl.
Section VIII.—Military Names.
In the slender thread of connection with which we try to unite names given in the same spirit, we put together those that seem to have accorded with the tastes of the Roman army.
Thus eligo (to choose), which originally caused the title of Legion, was in the participle electus, and thus led to words most familiar to us in the state as political terms, to the theological term elect or chosen for salvation.
There is some doubt whether St. John’s third epistle be indeed to a lady called Electa, or to an elect lady, as it is in our version; but when a name from this source next appears, it is among the cultivated Gallo-Romans, when they had gradually worked their way to consideration among the rude Franks, who had nearly trodden out civilization in the conquered country. Eligius was the great goldsmith bishop who designed King Dagobert’s throne, made shrines for almost all the distinguished relics in France, and doubtless enjoyed the fame of having made many more than could have come from his hand. He is popularly called St. Eloy, and some derive from him the Provençal Aloys; but this is far more probably a southern form of Hlodweh, or Louis.
The Roman veterans were termed emeriti (having deserved) from mereor (to deserve). From these old soldiers must have come the name Emerentius, which is to be found as Emerenz in Germany, and Emérence in France.
St. Emerentiana was said to have been a catechumen, who was killed by soldiers who found her praying on the tomb of St. Agnes. Her name (probably her relics) passed to Denmark, and to Lithuania, where it is called Marenze, and Embrance is the old English feminine.
The very contrary, Pacifico (peaceful), is a modern Italian and Spanish name—as Peace is Puritan.
Here, too, we place that which the soldier most esteems—honos, or honor. Honor was a deity in later Rome, but no old classical names were made from him, and Honorius first appears as one of the appellations of the Spanish father of the great Theodosius; then again inherited by that imbecile being, his grandson, the last genuine Roman emperor; also by a niece, called Justa Grata Honoria, who dishonoured all her three honourable names. Yet some lingering sense of allegiance to the last great family that gave rulers to the empire perpetuated their names in the countries where they had reigned; and the Welsh Ynyr long remained as a relic of Honorius, in Wales. Honorine was a Neustrian maiden, slain in a Danish invasion, and regarded as a martyr; so that Honorine prevails in France and Germany, and one of the favourite modern Irish names, is Onora, Honor, or in common usage, Norah.
Russia has the masculine as Gonorij; Lithuania, the feminine cut down into Arri. There were two Gallic bishops named Honoratus, whence the French Honoré, which has named a suburb of Paris, and we had one early archbishop of Canterbury so called, from whom we have derived no names, though Honor was revived in England in the days of names of abstract qualities, and Honoria was rather in fashion in the last century, probably as an ornamental form of the Irish Norah.[[79]]
[79]. Butler; Smith, Antiquities; Le Beau.
Section IX.—Names of Gladness.
A large class of names of joy belonging to the later growth of the Latin tongue may be thrown together; and first those connected with the word jocus, which seems to have arisen from the inarticulate shout of ecstasy that all know, but none can spell, ἰουας (in Greek), and with us joy, the French joie, and Italian gioia.
The original cry is preserved in the Swiss jodel, or shout of the mountaineers, and this indeed seems to be the sound naturally rising from the cries that peal from one hill to another, for here the Eastern meets the Western tongue. The sound at which the walls of Jericho fell, was called the Yobêl; and the fifty years' festival of release, inaugurated with trumpet sounds, was the Yobêl (the jubilee). Jubilo (to call aloud), already a Latin word, also from the sound of the shout and exultation, had been connected with it even before the annum jubileum had come in from the Hebrews.
Giubilare and Giubileo made themselves at home in Italian, while German, either from the Latin or its own resources, took its own word jubel. Giubileo was probably born in the year of a jubilee.
From jocus came Jodocus, an Armorican prince, belonging to a family which migrated from Wales. He refused the sovereignty of Brittany, to live as a hermit in Ponthieu, where he is still remembered as St. Josse, and named at least three villages, perhaps also forming Josselin; but in his native Brittany, Judicael, an old princely name, seems to have been the form of his commemoration. In Domesday Book we find Judicael Venator already a settler in England before the conquest, probably brought by the Confessor. Germany accepted this as a common peasant name, as Jost, or Jobs; Bavaria, as Jobst, or Jodel; Italy, as Giodoco; and the feminine, Jodoca, is not yet extinct in Wales.
Neither is the very similar Jocosa, once not uncommon among English ladies, by whom it was called Joyce. The contractions of this name are, however, almost inextricably confused with those of Justus. Joy stands alone as one of our abstract virtue names.
Another word very nearly related to our own glad, is gaudium (joy), still preserved in the adjective gaudy, and in gaudy (the festival day) of a college. It named St. Gaudentius, whence the Italian Gaudenzio, and the old German name of Geila.
Hilaris (cheerful) formed Hilarius, whence was called the great doctor of the Gallican Church, known to us as St. Hilary, of Poitiers; and to France, as[as] St. Hilaire. A namesake was the Neustrian hermit who made Jersey his abode, and thus named St. Helier; and moreover the Welsh called those who traditionally had been named Hilarius, first Ilar, then Elian; and then thought they had found their patron in the Greek Ælianus.
| English. | French. | Italian. | Russian. | Frisian. |
| Hilary | Hilaire | Ilario | Gilarij | Laris |
Portugal likewise has Hilariāo, and Russia Hilarion; and the feminine, Hilaria, was once used in England, and is still the Russian Ilaria, and Slovak Milari.
Lætus (glad) formed the substantive lætitia, which was turned into a name by the Italians as Letizia, probably during the thirst for novelty that prevailed in the Cinque-cento; and then, likewise, Lettice seems to have arisen in England, and must have become known in Ireland when Lettice Knollys was the wife of the Earl of Essex. Thence Letitia, or Letty, have been common among Irishwomen.
Prosperus, from the Latin prosper, formed of pro and spero, so as to mean favourable hope, formed the mediæval Roman Prospero, of which Shakespeare must have heard through the famous condottiere, Prospero Colonna, when he bestowed it upon his wondrous magician Duke of Milan.[[80]]
[80]. Kitto, Bible Cyclopædia; Butler; Pott; Michaelis; Dugdale; Petre Chevalier.
Section X.—Jus.
Jus (right), and juro (to swear), are intimately connected, and have derivatives in all languages, testifying to the strong impression made by the grand system of Roman law.
Justus, the adjective which we render as just, named the Gallic St. Justus, or St. Juste, of Lyons; also the Dutch Jost; Italian Giusto; and Portuguese Justo.
Justa was a virgin martyr, but her fame was far exceeded by that of Justina, who suffered at Padua, and became the patron saint of that city, whose university made its peculiarities everywhere known. The purity of St. Justina caused her emblem to be the unicorn, since that creature is said to brook no rule but that of a spotless maiden; and poison always became manifest at the touch of its horn, for which the twisted weapon of the narwhal did duty in collections. The great battle of Lepanto was fought on St. Justina’s day, and the victory was by the Venetians attributed to her intercession; so that Giustina at Venice, Justine in France, came for the time into the foremost ranks of popularity.
The noted Justinus, whom we call Justin Martyr, was one of the greatest of the early writers of the Church, meeting the heathen philosophers upon their own ground in argument, and bequeathing to us our first positive knowledge of Christian observances. From him the name was widely spread in the Church; and Yestin was one of the many old Roman names that lingered on long among the Welsh. Justin was frequent in France and Germany, and has become confused in its contractions with Jodocus. Josse and Josselin seem to have been used for both in France; and from the latter we obtained the Joscelin, or Joycelin, once far more common in England than at present. The Swiss Jost and Jostli are likewise doubtful between the two names.
In Ireland, the name of Justin has been adopted in the M'Carthy family, as a translation of the native Saerbrethach (the noble judge).[[81]]
[81]. Cave, Lives of the Fathers; Jameson; Irish Society.
Section XI.—Names of Holiness.
The infants whom Herod massacred at Bethlehem were termed in Latin innocentes, from in (not), and noceo (to hurt). These harmless ones were revered by the Church from the first, and honoured on the third day after Christmas as martyrs in deed. The relics of the Holy Innocents were great favourites in the middle ages, and are to be found as frequently as griffins' eggs in the list of treasures at Durham; but names taken from them are almost exclusively Roman. A lawyer of the time of Constantine was called Innocentius, and a Pope contemporary with St. Chrysostom handed it on to his successors, many of whom have subsequently assumed this title, and are called by their subjects Innocenzio.
Pius, applied at first to faithful filial love, as in the case of Æneas, assumed a higher sense with Christianity, and from being an occasional agnomen, became the name of a martyr Pope, under Antoninus Pius, and thus passed on to be one of the papal appellations most often in use, called Pio at Rome, and generally left to the pontiffs, though the feminine Pia is occasionally used in Italy. The Puritans indulged in Piety, and it still sometimes occurs in England, as well as Patience and Prudence, though the givers are little aware that there were saints long ago thus called, St. Patiens, of Lyons, and St. Prudentius, the great Christian poet of primitive times.
In like manner we have Modesty, or Moddy, as a Puritan name in England, taken from the abstract virtue, while the peasant women of Southern France are christened Modestine, probably in honour of a Roman martyr called Modestus, who was put to death at Bezières. Indeed, Modestinus and Modestus were both in use even in the earlier Roman times, and were understood by those who first bore them not in the sense of ‘shamefastness,’ but of moderation or discretion, the word coming from modus (a measure).
To these, perhaps, should be added that which Italy and Spain have presumed to form from that title of the Blessed Saviour, Salvatore, or Salvador, the latter more common in South America than in the Old World.
Cœlum (heaven) formed, in late Latin, Cœlestinus, the name of one of the popes who was martyred, and afterwards canonized, and imitated by several successors, whence the French learned the two modern feminines, Celeste and Celestine.
Restitutus (restored), from re and sisto, seems as if it could be given only in a Christian sense, as to one restored to a new life; yet its first owner known to us was a friend of Pliny, and an orator under Trajan. It came to Britain, and is found in Wales as Restyn.
Melior (better), is a Cornish female name, probably an imitation of some old Keltic one. It is found as early as 1574.
Section XII.—Ignatius.
Ignatius is a difficult name to explain. Its associations are with the Eastern Church; but it occurs at a time when Latin names prevailed as much as Greek ones in the Asiatic portions of the Roman empire, and thus the Latin ignis (fire) is, perhaps, the most satisfactory derivation, though it is not unlikely that the word may come from the source both of this and of the Greek ἁγνός, purity and flame being always linked together in Indo-European ideas.
The birth-place of the great St. Ignatius is unknown, but tradition has marked him as the child whom our Lord set in the midst of His disciples, and he is known to have been the pupil of St. John, ordained by St. Peter, and at the end of his long episcopate at Antioch, he was martyred at Rome by command of Trajan, writing on his last journey the Epistles that are among the earliest treasures of the Church. So much is his memory revered in his own city, that to the present day the schismatic patriarchs of Antioch of the Monophysite sect uniformly assume the name of Ignatius on their election to their see.
The Greek Church has continued to make much use of this name, called in Russia Ignatij, Eegnatie, or Ignascha; and in the Slovak dialect cut short into Nace. The Spanish Church likewise adopted it in early times, and among the Navarrese counts and lords of Biscay, as far back as 750, we encounter both men and women called Iñigo and Iñiga, or more commonly Eneco and Eneca, used indifferently with the other form, and then Latinized into Ennicus and Ennica.
Navarre preserved the name, and it was a Navarrese gentleman, Don Iñigo Loyola, who, while recovering from his wounds, after the siege of Pampeluna, so read the lives of the saints as to become penetrated with enthusiasm as fiery as his name. Where the Jesuits have had their will may be read in the frequency of this renewed Iñigo, or Ignace, as it was in France, Ignaz in Roman Catholic Germany. It is Bohemia, where the once strong spirit of Protestantism was trodden out in blood and flame, that Ignaz is common enough to have turned into Hynek, and in Bavaria that it becomes Nazi and Nazrl.
Our English architect, whose name is associated with the unhappy medley of Greek and Gothic which was the Stuart imitation of the Cinque-cento style, was a Roman Catholic, and was no doubt christened in honour of Loyola. The few stray specimens of Inigo to be found occasionally in England are generally traceable to him; one occurs at St. Columb Major, in 1740.[[82]]
[82]. Michaelis; Cave; Stanley, Lectures on the Eastern Church; Mariana, Istoria de España; Anderson, Royal Genealogies.
Section XIII.—Pater.
The word pater, which, as we have already shown, is one of those that make the whole world kin, was the source of patria (the father-land), and of far too many words in all tongues to recount. Patres Conscripti was the title of the senators, and the patricii, the privileged class of old Rome, were so called as descendants from the original thirty patres. Patricius (the noble) was as a title given half in jest to the young Roman-British Calpurnius, who was stolen by Irish pirates in his youth, and when ransomed, returned again to be the apostle of his captors, and left a name passionately revered in that warm-hearted land. The earlier Irish, however, were far too respectful to their apostle to call themselves by his name, but were all Mael-Patraic, the shaveling, or pupil of Patrick, or Giolla-Patraic, the servant of Patrick. This latter, passing to Scotland with the mission of St. Columba, turned into the Gospatric, or Cospatrick, the boy (gossoon or garçon) of Patrick, Earls of Galloway; and in both countries the surname Gilpatrick, or Kilpatrick, has arisen from it.
Afterwards these nations left off the humble prefix, and came to calling themselves Phadrig in Ireland, Patrick in Scotland; the former so universally as to render Pat and Paddy the national soubriquet. Latterly a bold attempt has been made in Ireland to unite Patrick and Peter as the same, so as to have both patron saints at once, but the Irish will hardly persuade any one to accept it but themselves. The Scotch Pate, or Patie, is frequent, though less national; and the feminine, Patricia, seems to be a Scottish invention. The fame of the curious cave, called St. Patrick’s Purgatory, brought pilgrims from all quarters, and Patrice, Patrizio, and Patricio, all are known in France, Italy, and Spain, the latter the most frequently. Even Russia has Patrikij.
Paternus (the fatherly) was the Latin name of two Keltic saints, one Armorican, the other of Avranches, where he is popularly called Saint Pari.[[83]]
Section XIV.—Grace, &c.
The history of the word grace is curious. We are apt to confuse it with the Latin gracilis (slender), with which it has no connection, and which only in later times acquired the sense of elegant, whereas it originally meant lean, or wasted, and came from a kindred word to the Greek γράω (grao), to consume.
Grates, on the contrary, were thanks, whence what was done gratiis, or gratis, was for thanks and nothing else, according to our present use of the word—whence our gratuitous. So again gratus applied to him who was thankful, and to what inspired thanks; and gratia was favour, or bounty, and was used to render the Greek χάρις; and thus have the Greek Charities come down to us as Graces. Then, too, he was gratiosus who possessed the free spirit of bounty and friendliness, exactly expressed by our gracious; but, in Italy, it was degraded into mere lively good-nature, till un grazioso is little better than a buffoon; and gracieux in France means scarcely more than engaging.
Gratia was used by early Latin writers for divine favour, whence the theological meaning of grace. And from grates (thanks) comes our expression of “saying grace before meat.”
The English name of Grace is intended as the abstract theological term, and was adopted with many others of like nature at the Reformation. Its continuation after the dying away of most of its congeners is owing to the Irish, who thought it resembled their native Grainé (love), and thereupon adopted it so plentifully that Grace or Gracie is generally to be found wherever there is an Irish connection.
Spain likewise has Engracia in honour of a maiden cruelly tortured to death at Zaragoza, in 304; and Italy, at least in Lamartine’s pretty romance, knows Graziella.
Gratianus (favourable) rose among the later Romans, and belonged to the father and to the son of the Emperor Valens, and it left the Italians Graziano for the benefit of Nerissa’s merry husband.
Pulcher (fair) turned into a name in late days, and came as Pulcheria to that noble lady on whom alone the spirit of her grandfather Theodosius in all his family descended. She was canonized, and Pulcheria thus was a recognized Greek name; but it has been little followed except in France, where Chérie is the favourite contraction.
Spes (hope) is the only one of the Christian graces in Latin who has formed any modern names; and these are the Italian Sperata (hoped for), and Speranza (hope). Esperanza in Spain, and Espérance in France, have been made Christian names.
Delicia (delightful) is an English name used in numerous families, and Languedoc has the corresponding Mesdelices, shortened into Médé, so that Mademoiselle Mesdélices is apt to be called Misé Médé in her own country. In Italy, Delizia is used.
Dulcis (sweet, or mild) is explained by Spanish authors to have been the origin of their names of Dulcia, Aldoncia, Aldonça, Adoncia, all frequent among the Navarrese and Catalonian princesses from 900 to 1200, so that it was most correct of Don Quixote to translate his Aldonça Lorenço into the peerless Dulcinea del Toboso. Probably the Moorish article was added by popular pronunciation in Spain, while Dulcia lingered in the South of France, became Douce, and came to England as Ducia in the time of the Conqueror, then turned into Dulce, and by-and-by embellished into Dulcibella, and then by Henry VIII.’s time fell into Dowsabel, a name borne by living women, as well as by the wife of Dromio. Dousie Moor, widow, was buried in 1658, at Newcastle.[[84]]
[83]. Arnold; Hanmer; Irish Society; Lower.
[84]. Facciolati; Butler; Bowles, Don Quixote con Annotaciones.
Section XV.—Vinco.
The verb vinco (to conquer), the first syllable the same as our win, formed the present participle vincens, whence the name Vincentius (conquering), which was borne by two martyrs of the tenth persecution, one at Zaragoza, the other at Agen; and later by one of the great ecclesiastical authors at Lerius, in Provence. Thus Vincent, Vincente, Vincenzio, were national in France, Spain, and Italy, before the more modern saints, Vincente Ferrer, and Vincent de St. Paul, had enhanced its honours.
| English. | French. | Spanish. | Italian. | German. |
| Vincent | Vincent | Vincente | Vincenzio | Vincenz |
| Bavarian. | Russian. | Polish. | Bohemian. | Hungarian. |
| Zenz | Vikentij | Vincentij | Vincenc | Vincze |
| Zenzel |
Even the modern Greeks have it as Binkentios.
Conquest is a word found in all classes of names,—the Sieg of the Teuton, the Nikos of the Greek.
The past participle is victus; whence the conqueror is Victor—a name of triumph congenial to the spirit of early Christianity, and borne by an early pope as well as by more than one martyr, from whom Vittore descended as rather a favourite Italian name, though not much used elsewhere till the French Revolution, when Victor came into fashion in France. Tollo is the Roman contraction, as is Tolla of the feminine.
The original Victoria was a Roman virgin, martyred in the Decian persecution; whence the Italian Vittoria, borne by the admirable daughter of the Colonne, from whom France and Germany seem to have learned it, since after her time Victoire and Victorine became very common in France; and it was from Germany that we learnt the Victoria that will, probably, sound hereafter like one of our most national names.
Section XVI.—Vita.
Vita (life) was used by the Roman Christians to express their hopes of eternity; and an Italian martyr was called Vitalis, whence the modern Italian Vitale and German Veitel.
Vitalianus, a name formed out of this, is hardly to be recognized in the Welsh form of Gwethalyn.
Vivia, from vivus (alive), was the first name of Vivia Perpetua, the noble young matron of Carthage, whose martyrdom, so circumstantially told, is one of the most grand and most affecting histories in the annals of the early Church. Her other name of Perpetua has, however, been chosen by her votaresses.
Vivianus and Viviana were names of later Roman days, often, in the West, pronounced with a B, and we find a Christian maiden, named Bibiana, put to death by a Roman governor, under Julian the Apostate, under pretence of her having destroyed one of his eyes by magic, a common excuse for persecution in the days of pretended toleration. A church was built over her remains as early as 465, and, considering the accusation against her, it is curious to find Vyvyan or Viviana the enchantress of King Arthur’s court.
Vivian has been a name for both sexes, and a Scottish Vivian Wemyss, bishop of Fife in 615, was canonized, and known to Rome as St. Bibianus.
Vitus was the child whom St. Crescentia bred up a Christian, and who died in Lucania with her. His day was the 15th of June, and had the reputation of entailing thirty days of similar weather to its own.
Vitus is Vita, in Bohemia; Vida, in Hungary; Veicht and Veidl, in Bavaria; and is used to Latinize Guy; but it is probable that this last is truly Celtic, and it shall be treated of hereafter.[[85]]
[85]. Fleury, Histoire Ecclesiastique; Butler; Villemarque, Romans de la Table Ronde; Roscoe, Boiardo; Brand, Popular Antiquities; Grimm; Michaelis.
Section XVII.—Wolves and Bears.
The Roman lupus had truly a right to stand high in Roman estimation, considering the good offices of the she-wolf to the founder, and the wolf and the twins will continue an emblem as long as Rome stands, in spite of the explanation that declared that the nurse was either named Lupa, or so called, because the Roman word applied to a woman of bad character, and in spite of the later relegation of the entire tale to the realms of mythology. Lupus was accordingly a surname in the Rutilian gens, and was borne by many other Romans, thus descending to the three Romanized countries. St. Lupus, or Loup of Troyes, curiously enough succeeded St. Ursus, or Ours, and was notable both for his confutation of the Pelagian heresy, and for having saved his diocese by his intercession with Attila. Another sainted Lupus, or Loup, was Bishop of Lyons. Italy has the Christian name of Lupo; Portugal, Lobo; Spain, Lope. The great poet, Lope de Vega, might be translated, the wolf of the meadow.
The bear was not in any remarkable favour at Rome; but the semi-Romans adopted Ursus as rather a favourite among their names. Ursus and Ursinus were early Gallic bishops; whence the Italian Orso and Orsino, the latter becoming the surname of the celebrated Roman family of Orsini. Ours is very common in Switzerland, in compliment to the bears of Berne.
An old myth of the little bear and the stars seems to have been turned into the legend of Cologne, of Ursula, the Breton maiden who, on her way to her betrothed British husband, was shipwrecked on the German coast, and slain by Attila, King of the Huns, with 11,000 virgin companions. Some say that the whole 11,000 rose out of the V. M. for virgin martyr; others give her one companion, named Undecimilla, and suppose that this was translated into the 11,000. Skulls and bones, apparently from an old cemetery, are shown at Cologne, and their princess’s name has been followed by various ladies.
| French. | Swiss. | Italian. | |||
| Ours | Ours | Orso | |||
| Orsvch | Ursilo | ||||
| Ursello | |||||
| FEMININE | |||||
| English. | French. | Spanish. | Portuguese. | ||
| Ursula | Ursule | Ursola | Ursula | ||
| Ursel | Dutch. | ||||
| Ursley | Orseline | ||||
| Nullie | |||||
| Italian. | German. | Swiss. | Russian. | ||
| Orsola | Ursel | Orscheli | Urssula | ||
| Urschel | Urschel | ||||
| Urschla | |||||
| Polish. | Slavonic. | Lusatian. | Hungarian. | ||
| Urszula | Ursa | Wursla | Orsolya | ||
| Bohemian. | Hoscha | ||||
| Worsula | Oscha | ||||
| DIMINUTIVE. | |||||
| Roman. | French. | Polish. | |||
| Ursino | Ursin | Ursyn | |||
Section XVIII.—Names from Places and Nations.
The fashion of forming names from the original birthplace was essentially Roman. Many cognomina had thus risen; but a few more must be added of too late a date to fall under the usual denominations of the earlier classical names.
The island of Cyprus must at some time have named the family of Thascius Cyprianus, that great father of African birth, who was so noted as Bishop of Carthage; but though Cyprian is everywhere known, it is nowhere common, and is barely used at Rome as Cipriano. In 1811, Ciprian was baptized in Durham cathedral; but then he was the son of the divinity lecturer, which accounts for the choice.
Neapolis, from the universal Greek word for new, and the Greek πόλις (a city), was the term bestowed as frequently by the Greeks as Newtown is by Keltic influence, or Newby and Newburgh by Teutonic. One Neapolis was the ancient Sychar, and another was that which is still known as Napoli or Naples.
From some of these ‘new cities’ was called an Alexandrian martyr, whose canonized fame caused him to be adopted as patron by one of the Roman family of Orsini, in the course of the twelfth century. Neapolion, Neapolio, or Napoleone, continued to be used in that noble house, and spread from them to other parts of Italy, and thence to Corsica, where he received it who was to raise it to become a word of terror to all Europe, and of passionate enthusiasm to France, long after, in school-boy fashion, at Brienne, its owner had been discontented with its singularity.
The city of Sidon formed the name Sidonius, which was borne by Caius Sollius Apollinaris Sidonius, one of the most curious characters of the dark ages, a literary and married bishop of Clermont, in the fifth century, an honest and earnest man, but so little according to the ordinary type of ecclesiastical sanctity, that nothing is more surprising than to find him canonized, and in possession of the 23rd of August for a feast day. It is curious, too, that his namesakes should be ladies. Sidonie is not uncommon in France; and, in 1449, Sidonia, or Zedena, is mentioned as daughter to George Podiebrand, of Silesia; and Sidonia, of Bavaria, appears in 1488.
From the city of Lydia was named the seller of purple who hearkened to St. Paul at Thyatira, and to her is owing the prevalence of Lydia among English women delighting in Scriptural names.
To these should be added, as belonging to the same class, though the word is Greek, Anatolius, meaning a native of Anatolia, the term applied in later times by the Greeks to Asia Minor, and meaning the sunrise. St. Anatolius, of Constantinople, was one of the sacred poets of the Greek Church; and after his death, in 458, his name and its feminine, Anatolia, became frequent in the countries where his hymns were used.
A Phocian is the most probable explanation of the name of Φοκας (Phocas), though much older in Greece than the date of most of those that have been here given. To us it is associated with the monster who usurped the imperial throne, and murdered Maurice and his sons; but it had previously belonged to a martyred gardener, under Diocletian, whose residence in Pontus made him well known to the Byzantine Church; and thus Phokas is still found among Greeks, and Foka in Russia.
The Romans called their enemies in North Africa Mauri, from the Greek ἀμαυρός, which at first was twilight or dim, but came afterwards to signify dark, or black.
Maura was a Gallican maiden of the ninth century, whose name, it would seem highly probable, might have been the Keltic Mohr (great), still current in Ireland and the Highlands. She led a life of great mortification, died at twenty-three, was canonized, and becoming known to the Venetians, a church in her honour named the Ionian island of Santa Maura, which had formerly been Leucadia. There was, however, a genuine Greek St. Maura, the wife of Timothy, a priest, with whom she was crucified in the Thebaid, under Maximian. She is honoured by the Eastern Church on the 3rd of May, and is the subject of a poem of Mr. Kingsley’s. From her, many Greek girls bear the name of Maura, and Russian ones of Mavra and Mavruscha.
Mauritius was naturally a term with the Romans for a man of Moorish lineage. The first saint of this name was the Tribune of the Theban legion, all Christians, who perished to a man under the blows of their fellow-soldiers, near the foot of the great St. Bernard. To this brave man is due the great frequency of Maurits, in Switzerland, passing into Maurizio on the Italian border, and Moritz on the German. The old French was Meurisse, the old English, Morris; but both, though still extant as surnames, have as Christian names been assimilated to the Latin spelling, and become Maurice. The frequent Irish Morris, and the once common Scottish Morris, are the imitation of the Gaelic Moriertagh, or sea warrior.
Meuriz is in use in Wales, and appears to be the genuine produce of Maurice; but it is very difficult to disentangle the derivations from the Moor, from ἀμαυρός, and from the Keltic mohr (large) and mör (the sea).
The Saxon Moritz, who played a double game between Charles V. and the Protestant League, was brother-in-law to the great William the Silent, and thus his name was transmitted to his nephew, the gallant champion of the United Provinces, Maurice of Nassau, in whose honour the Dutch bestowed the name of Mauritius upon their island settlement in the Indian Ocean, and this title has finally gained the victory over the native one of Cerine, and the French one of the Isle of Bourbon.
| English. | Welsh. | Breton. | French. |
| Morris | Meuriz | Noris | Meurisse |
| Maurice | Maurice | ||
| Italian. | Spanish. | German. | Danish. |
| Maurizio | Mauricio | Moritz | Maurids |
| Morets | |||
| Russian. | Polish. | Bohemian. | Hungarian. |
| Moriz | Maurycij | Moric | Moricz |
| Mavrizij | |||
| Mavritij |
Germanus cannot be reckoned otherwise than as one of the varieties of names from countries given by the Romans. It does indeed come from the two Teutonic words gher (spear) and mann; but it cannot be classed among the names compounded of gher, since the Romans were far from thus understanding it, when, like Mauritius, it must have been inherited by some ‘young barbarian’ whose father served in the Roman legions.
St. Germanus was greatly distinguished in Kelto-Roman Church history, as having refuted Pelagius, and won the Hallelujah victory, to say nothing of certain unsatisfactory miracles. We have various places named after him, but it was the French who chiefly kept up his name, and gave it the feminine Germaine, which was borne by that lady of the family of Foix, who became the second wife of Fernando the Catholic by the name of Germana. Jermyn has at times been used in England, and became a surname.[[86]]
[86]. Cave; Butler; Revue des deux Mondes; Le Beau, Bas Empire; Liddell and Scott; Lower; Les Vies des Saints.
Section XIX.—Town and Country.
Urbanus is one who dwells in urbs (a city), a person whose courtesy and statesmanship are assumed, as is shown by the words civil, from civis (a city), and polite, politic, polish, from the Greek πὸλις of the same meaning; and thus Urbane conveys something of grace and affability in contrast to rustic rudeness.
Urbanus is greeted by St. Paul; and another Urbanus was an early pope, from whom it travelled into other tongues as Urbano, Urbani, and Urban.
| English. | French. | Roman. | Russian. | Slovak. | Hungarian. |
| Urban | Urbain | Urbano | Urvan | Verban | Orban |
| Banej |
In opposition to this word comes that for the rustic, Pagus, signifying the country; the word that in Italian becomes paese, in Spanish pais, in French pays. The Gospel was first preached in the busy haunts of men, so that the earlier Christians were towns-folk, and the rustics long continued heathen; whence Paganus, once simply a countryman, became an idolater, a Pagan, and poetized into Paynim, was absolutely bestowed upon the Turks and Saracens in the middle ages. In the mean time, however, the rustic had come to be called paesano, pays, paysan, and peasant, independently of his religion; and Spain, in addition to her payo (the countryman), had paisano (the lover of his country); and either in the sense of habitation or patriotism, Pagano was erected into a Christian name in Italy, and Payen in France; whence England took Payne or Pain, still one of the most frequent surnames.
The two Latin words, per (through) and ager (a field), were the source of peregrinus (a traveller or wanderer), also the inhabitant of the country as opposed to the Roman colonist. The same word in time came to mean both a stranger, and above all, one on a journey to a holy place, when such pilgrimages had become special acts of devotion, and were growing into living allegories of the Christian life. This became a Christian name in Italy, because a hermit, said to have been a prince of Irish blood, settled himself in a lonely hut on one of the Apennines, near Modena, and was known there as il pellegrin, as the Latin word had become softened. He died in 643, and was canonized as St. Peregrinus, or San Pellegrino; became one of the patrons of Modena and Lucca, and had all the neighbouring spur of the Apennines called after him. Pellegrino Pelligrini is a name that we find occurring in Italian history; and when a son was born at Wesel, to Sir Richard Bertie and his wife, the Duchess of Suffolk, while they were fleeing from Queen Mary’s persecution, they named him Peregrine, “for that he was given by the Lord to his pious parents in a strange land for the consolation of their exile,” as says his baptismal register, and Peregrine in consequence came into favour in the Bertie family; but in an old register the names Philgram, Pilgerlam, and Pilggerlam, occur about 1603.
| English. | French. | Italian. | German. |
| Peregrine | Pérégrin | Pellegrino | Piligrim |
To these may perhaps be added the Italian Marino and Marina, given perhaps casually to sea-side dwellers; and their Greek equivalents, Pelagios and Pelagia, both of which are still used by the modern Greeks. Pelagius was used by the Irish, or more properly Scottish, Morgan, as a translation of his own name, and thus became tainted with the connection of the Pelagian heresy; but it did not become extinct; and Pelayo was the Spanish prince who first began the brave resistance that rendered the mountains of the Asturias a nucleus for the new kingdom of Spain.
Some see in his name a sign that the Arian opinions of the Visigoths had some hereditary influence, at least, in nomenclature; and, indeed, Ario occurs long after as a Christian name; others consider Pelago’s classical name to be a sign that the old Celto-Roman blood was coming to the surface above the Gothic.
Switzerland likewise has this name cut down to Pelei, or Poli.[[87]]
[87]. Butler; Michaelis.
Section XX.—Flower Names.
Flower names seem to have been entirely unknown to the ancient Romans, but the Latin language, in the mouths of more poetical races, has given several graceful floral names, though none perhaps are quite free from the imputation of being originally something far less elegant.
Thus, oliva (the olive), the sign of peace and joy, is closely connected with the Italian Oliviero; but it is much to be suspected that it would never have blossomed into use, but for the Teutonic Olaf (forefather’s relic). Oliviero, or Ulivieri, the paladin of Charlemagne, may be considered as almost certainly a transmogrified Anlaf, or Olaf (ancestor’s relic); and perhaps it is for this reason that his name is one of the most frequently in use among all those of the circle of paladins. He was a favourite hero of Pulci, and seems to have so nearly approached Orlando in fame, as at least to be worthy of figuring in the proverb of giving a Rowland for an Oliver. The middle ages made great use of his name in France and England. Olier, as it was called at home by the Breton knights, whom the French called Olivier, was the name of the favourite brother of Du Guesclin, as well as of the terrible Constable de Clisson. Oliver was frequent with English knights, and of high and chivalrous repute, until the eminence of the Protector rendered ‘old Noll’ a word of hate and would-be scorn to the Cavaliers—an association which it has never entirely overcome. The feminine was probably first invented in Italy, but the Italian literature that flowed in on us in the Tudor reigns brought it to us, and we were wise enough to naturalize Olivia as Olive, a form that still survives in some parts of the country.
Whether it is true that the “rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” never appears to have been tried, for all countries seem to express both the flower and its blushing tint by the same sound; and even the Syriac name for the oleander (the rose-laurel), “the blossoms red and bright” of the Lake of Tiberias, is rodyon.
The Greeks had their Rhoda, but the Romans never attained such a flight of poetry as a floral name, and the rose-wreath would hardly deserve to be relegated to a Latin root, were it not that the branches spread so widely, that it is more convenient to start from this common stem, to which all are bound by mutual resemblance; besides which, both the saints of this name were of Romance nations. Still, I believe, that though their names were meant for roses when given to them, that the first use of hrôs among the Teutons was a meaning sometimes fame, sometimes a horse—not the flower.
Rohais, or Roesia, most probably the French and Latin of hrôs (fame), or else from hros (horse), is the first form in which the simple word appears in England. Rohais, wife of Gilbert de Gaunt, died in 1156; Roese de Lucy was wife of Fulbert de Dover, in the time of Henry II.; Roesia was found at the same time among the De Bohuns and De Veres; and some of these old Norman families must have carried it to Ireland, where Rose is one of the most common of the peasant names. Rosel and Rosette both occur at Cambrai between 900 and 1200.
During the twelfth century, probably among the Normans of Sicily, lived Rosalia, “the darling of each heart and eye,” who, in her youth, dedicated herself to a hermit life in a mountain grotto, and won a saintly reputation for her name, which is frequent in her island, as is Rosalie in France, and at the German town of Duderstadt, where it is vilely tortured into Sahlke.
St. Dominic arranged a series of devotions, consisting of the meditations, while rehearsing the recurring aves and paters marked by the larger and smaller nuts, or berries, on a string. These, which we call beads from beden (to pray), formed the rosarium, or rose garden, meaning originally the delights of devotion. This rosarium has a day to itself in the Roman calendar, and possibly may have named the Transatlantic saint, Rosa di Lima, the whole of which appellation is borne by Peruvian señoras, and practically called Rosita.
Rosa is found in all kinds of ornamental forms in different countries, and the contractions, or diminutives, of one become the names of another. Thus Rosalia, herself, probably sprang from the endearment Rosel, which together with Rosi is common in Switzerland and the Tyrol; the German diminutive Roschen is met again in the Italian Rosina, French Rosine, English Rosanne; the Rasine, or Rasche, of Lithuania; and Rosetta, the true Italian diminutive, is followed by the French Rosette.
These may be considered as the true and natural forms of Rose. Others were added by fancy and romance after the Teuton signification of fame had been forgotten, and the Latin one of the flower adopted.
Of these, are Rosaura, Rosaclara; in English, Roseclear, Rosalba (a white rose), Rosabella, or Rosabel, all arrant fancy names.
Rosamond has a far more ancient history, but the rose connection must be entirely renounced for her. The first Hrosmond (famous protection, or horse protection) was the fierce chieftainess of the Gepidæ, who was compelled by her Lombard husband to drink to his health in a ghastly goblet formed of the skull of her slaughtered father, and who avenged this crowning insult by a midnight murder.
Even from the fifth century, the period of this tragedy, hers has remained a favourite name among the peasantry of the Jura, the land of the Gepidæ, but it does not appear how it came from them to the Norman Cliffords, by whom it was bestowed upon Fair Rosamond, whose fate has been so strangely altered by ballad lore, and still more strangely by Cervantes, who makes his Persiles and Sigismunda encounter her in the Arctic regions, undergoing a dreary penance among the wehr wolves. Her name, in its supposed interpretation, gave rise to the Latin epigram, Rosa mundi, sed non Rosa munda (the rose of the world, but not a pure rose). The sound of the word, and the popular interest of the ballad, have continued her name in England.
Hroswith, the poetical Frank nun, is certainly famous strength, or famous height, though when softened into Roswitha, she has been taken for a white rose, or a sweet rose.
Rosalind makes her first appearance in As You Like It, whether invented by Shakespeare cannot be guessed. If the word be really old, the first syllable is certainly hrôs, the last is our English lithe, the German lind, the Northern lindre, the term that has caused the Germans to call the snake the lindwurm, or supple worm. The Visigoths considered this litheness as beauty, and thus the word survives in Spanish as lindo, linda, meaning, indeed, a fair woman, but a soft effeminate man. Yet, the linda, meaning fair in Spanish, was reason enough in the sixteenth century for attaching it to many a name by way of ornament, and it is to be apprehended that thus it was that Rosalind came by her name, and possibly Rosaline, whom Romeo deserted for the sake of Juliet. However she began, she has ever since been one of the English roses.
Rosilde, or Roshilda, a German form, is in like manner either really the fame-battle, or else merely ilda tacked by way of ornament to the end of the rose.
Violante is a name occurring in the South of France and the North of Italy and Spain. Whence it originally came is almost impossible to discover. It may very probably be a corruption of some old Latin name such as Valentinus, or, which would be a prettier derivation, it may be from the golden violet, the prize of the troubadours in the courts of love.
The name of the flower is universal; it is viola, in Latin, vas in Sanscrit; and in Greek anciently Γιον, but afterwards ἴον, whence later Greeks supposed it to have been named from having formed a garland round the head of Ion, the father of the Ionians.
That V is easily changed to Y, was plain in the treatment received by Violante, who was left to that dignified sound only in Spain; but in France was called Yolande, or for affection, Yolette; and in the confusion between y and j, figures in our own English histories in the queer-looking form of Joletta. The Scots, with much better taste, imported Yolette as Violet, learning it probably through the connections of the Archers of the Royal Guard, or it may be through Queen Mary’s friends, as Violet Forbes appears in 1571, and I have not found an earlier instance. At any rate, the Scottish love of floral names took hold of it, and the Violets have flourished there ever since. Fialka is both the flower and a family name in Bohemia; as is Veigel in the Viennese dialect. Eva Maria Veigel was the young danseuse, called by Maria Theresa, la Violetta, under which designation she came to England, and finally became the excellent wife of Garrick. Whether Viola has ever been a real Italian name I cannot learn, or whether it is only part of the stage property endeared to us by Shakespeare. The masculine Yoland was common at Cambrai in the thirteenth century; Yolante was there used down to the sixteenth.
Viridis (green, or flourishing) was not uncommon among Italian ladies in the fourteenth century, probably in allusion to some romance.
It is much to be feared that the lily, is as little traceable as the rose. There was a Liliola Gonzaga in Italy in 1340, but she was probably a softened Ziliola, or Cecilia. Lilias Ruthven, who occurs in Scotland, in 1557, was probably called from the old romantic poem of Roswal and Lillian, which for many years was a great favourite in Scotland. The Lillian of this ballad is Queen of Naples, and thus the name appears clearly traceable to the Cecilias of modern Italy, though it is now usually given in the sense of Lily; the English using Lillian; the Scots, Lillias. Indeed, it is quite possible that these, like Lilla, may sometimes have risen out of contractions of Elizabeth. Leila is a Moorish name, and Lelia is only the feminine of Lælius. On the whole, it may be said that only the Hebrew and Slavonic tongues present us with names really taken from individual flowers.[[88]]
[88]. Michaelis; Munch; Pott; Roscoe, Boiardo; Anderson, Genealogies; Douglas, Peerage of Scotland; Ellis, Specimens of Early English Poetry; Butler, Cervantes; Sismondi.
Section XXI.—Roman Catholic Names.
The two names that follow are as thorough evidences of the teachings of the Roman Church as are the epithets of the Blessed Virgin, before mentioned, and can, therefore, only be classed together, though it is rather hard upon good Latin to be saddled with them, compounded as they are of Latin and Greek.
The Latin verus (true), and the Greek εἰκών (an image), were strangely jumbled together by the popular tongue in the name of a crucifix at Lucca, which was called the Veraiconica, or Veronica; and was that Holy Face of Lucca by which William Rufus, having probably heard of it from the Lombard Lanfranc, his tutor, was wont to swear. Another Veronica is the same countenance upon a piece of linen, shown at St. Peter’s. Superstition, forgetting the meaning of the name, called the relic St. Veronica’s handkerchief, accounted for it by inventing a woman who had lent our Blessed Saviour a handkerchief to wipe His Face during the passage of the Via dolorosa, and had found the likeness imprinted upon it.
In an old English poem on the life of Pilate, written before 1305, it appears that the Emperor of Rome learnt that a woman at Jerusalem named ‘Veronike’ possessed this handkerchief, which could heal him of his sickness. He sent for her, and
“Anon tho the ymage iseth, he was whole, anon,
He honoured wel Veronike, heo ne moste fram him gon;
The ymage he athuld that hit ne com nevereft out of Rome,
In Seint Peteres Church it is.”
Thence Veronica became a patron saint; and in the fifteenth century a real monastic Saint Veronica lived near Milan.
Véronique is rather a favourite name among French peasant women, and Vreneli in Suabia. Pott and Michaelis suggest that Veronica may be the Latin form of Berenice, or Pherenike (victory-bringer); but the history of the relic is too clear to admit of this idea. The flower, Veronica, appears to have won its name from its exquisite blue reflecting a true image of the heavens; and the Scots, who have a peculiar turn for floral names, thus seem to have obtained it.
In 1802 an inscription, with the first and last letters destroyed, was found in the catacombs standing thus, lumena pax tecum fi. A priest suggested that Fi should be put at the beginning of the sentence instead of the end, and by this remarkable trick, produced Filumena. There was a real Greek name Philomena, which had fallen into disuse, and of course was derived from Love, but to please the ears of the Italians, the barbarous Latin Filumen was invented.
Thereupon a devout artisan, a priest, and a nun, were all severally favoured by visions of a virgin martyr, who told them the story of Diocletian’s love for her, of her refusal, and subsequent martyrdom; and explained that, having once been called Lumena, she was baptized Filumena, which she explained as daughter of light! Some, human remains near the stone being dignified as relics of St. Filomena, she was presented to Mugnano; and, on the way, not only worked many miracles on her adorers, but actually repaired her own skeleton, and made her hair grow. So many wonders are said to have been worked by this phantom saint, the mere produce of a blundered inscription, that a book, printed at Paris in the year 1847, calls her “La Thaumaturge du 19me Siècle” and she is by far the most fashionable patroness in the Romish Church. Filomena abounds in Rome, encouraged by the example of a little Filomena, whose mosquito net was every night removed by the saint, who herself kept off the gnats. She is making her way in Spain; and it will not be the fault of the author of La Thaumaturge if Philomene is not common in France. The likeness to Philomela farther inspired Longfellow with the fancy of writing a poem on Florence Nightingale, as St. Philomena, whence it is possible that the antiquaries of New Zealand, in the twenty-ninth century, will imagine St. Philomena, or Philomela, to be the heroine of the Crimean war.[[89]]
[89]. Butler; Philological Society; Merriman, Church in Spain; La Thaumaturge du 19me Siècle.
CHAPTER VII.
NAMES FROM HOLY DAYS.
Section I.
The great festivals of religion have supplied names which are here classed together for convenience of arrangement, though they are of all languages. Most, indeed, are taken from the tongue that first proclaimed the glory of the days in question; but in several instances they have been translated into the vernacular of the country celebrating them. Perhaps the use of most of these as Christian names arose from the habit of calling children after the patron of their birthday, and when this fell upon a holiday that was not a saint’s day, transferring the title of the day to the child. Indeed, among the French peasantry, Marcel and Marcelle are given to persons born in March, Jules and Julie to July children, and Auguste and Augustine to August children.
Section II.—Christmas.
The birthday of our Lord bears in general its Latin title of Dies Natalis; the latter word from nascor (to be born). The g, which old Latin places at the commencement of the verb and its participle, gnatus, shows its connection with the Greek γίγνομαι (to come into existence), with γένεσις (origin), and the Anglo-Saxon beginning.
This word Natalis has furnished the title of the feast to all the Romance portion of Europe, and to Wales. There all call it the Natal day; Nadolig in Welsh. France has cut the word down into Noël, a word that at Angers was sung fifteen times at the conclusion of lauds, during the eight days before the feast, and which thus passed even into an English carol, still sung in Cornwall, where the popular tongue has turned the chorus into
“Now well! now well! now well!”
This cry of Noël became a mere burst of joy; and in Monstrelet’s time was shouted quite independently of Christmas. Noel is a Christian name in France; Natale, in Italy; Natal, in the Peninsula. Indeed, the Portuguese called Port Natal by that title in honour of the time of its discovery, but the Spanish Natal must be distinguished from Natividad, which belongs to the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, a feast established by Pope Sergius in 688, on the 8th of September.
That same 8th of September was chosen by the Greek Church as the festival day of St. Natalia, the devoted wife who attended her husband, St. Adrian, in his martyrdom, with heroism like that of Gertrude von der Wart. He is the same Adrian whose relics filled the Netherlands, and who named so many Dutchmen; but while the West was devoted to the husband and neglected the wife, the East celebrated the wife and forgot the husband. Natalia is one of the favourite Greek Christian names; Lithuania calls her Nastusche and Naste; Russia, Natalija, Nataschenka, and Natascha; and France has learned the word as Natalie from her Russian visitors. Natalie, however, occurs at Cambrai as early as 1212.
Our own name for the feast agrees with one German provincial term Christfest. Christmas now and then occurs in old registers as a Christian name, as at Froxfield, Hants, in 1574, and is also used as a surname; but Noel is more usual for Christmas-born children.
The Eastern Church did not originally observe the Nativity at all, contenting itself with the day when the great birth was manifested to the Gentiles, and for this reason there is no genuine Greek name for Christmas-day, and Natalia, though now used as a Greek woman’s name, is of Latin origin.
The Slavonic nations have translated Christmas into Bozieni, and their Christmas children, among the Slovak part of the race, are the boys, Bozo, Bozko, Bozicko; the girls, Bozena.[[90]]
[90]. Church Festivals and their Household Words (Christian Remembrancer); Michaelis; Butler; Jameson; Grimm.
Section III.—The Epiphany.
The twelfth day after Christmas was the great day with the Eastern Church, by whom it was called Θεοφανεία, from Θεός and φαίνω (to make known, i.e., God’s manifestation), or Ἐπιφάνεια (forth showing).
The ancient Greek Church celebrated on the 6th of January the birth of Christ, His manifestation to the Gentiles, and the baptism in the Jordan. Their titles, Theophania and Epiphania, were adopted by the Latins, and when the Latin feast of the Nativity was accepted by the Greek Church, this latter was frequently called Epiphania, while the true manifestation-day was called by a name meaning the lights, from the multitude of candles in the churches in honour of the Light of the World and the Light of Baptism.
But in the West, it was the visit of the Magi that gave the strongest impress to the festival. Early did tradition fix their number at three, probably in allusion to the three races of man descended from the sons of Noah, and soon they were said to be descendants of the Mesopotamian prophet Balaam, from whom they derived the expectation of the Star of Jacob, and they were promoted to be kings of Tarsus, Saba, and Nubia, also to have been baptized by St. Thomas, and afterwards martyred. Their corpses were supposed to be at that store-house of relics, Constantinople, whence the Empress Helena caused them to be transported to Milan by an Italian, from whom a noble family at Florence obtained the surname of Epiphania. Frederick Barbarossa carried them to Cologne.
By the eleventh century, these three kings had received names, for they are found written over against their figures in a painting of that date, and occur in the breviary of Mersburg. Though their original donor is unknown, their Oriental sound makes it probable that he was a pilgrim-gatherer of Eastern legends. Gaspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, are not according to European fancy, and are not easy to explain. The first may either be the Persian, gendshber (treasure master), or else be taken from the red or green stone called yashpah in the East, ἵασπις in Greek, jasper in Latin. This was the only one of these names ever used in England, where it was once common. Gasparde is the French feminine; in English the masculine is Jasper. It is extremely common in Germany; and has suffered the penalty of popularity, for Black Kaspar is a name of the devil, and Kaspar is a Jack Pudding.
| English. | French. | Spanish. | Italian. |
| Jasper | Gaspard | Gaspar | Gaspare |
| Gaspardo | |||
| Casparo | |||
| German. | Bavarian. | Illyrian. | Lett. |
| Kaspar | Kaspe | Gaso | Kaspers |
| Frisjan. | Kasperl | Lusatian. | Jespers |
| Jaspar | Gaspe | Kaspor | |
| Gappe | Kapo | ||
| Kapp | |||
| Kass |
Melchior is evidently the universal Eastern Malek, or Melchi (a king); but he is in much less favour than his companion; though sometimes found in Italy as Melchiorre, as well as in Germany and Switzerland in his proper form, and in Esthonia contracted to Malk.
Balthasar may be an imitation of Daniel’s Chaldean name of Belteshazzar (Bel’s prince). Some make it the old Persian Beltshazzar (war council, or prince of splendour). It is not unlike the Slavonic Beli-tzar, or White-prince, called at Constantinople Belisarius; but indeed it is probably a fancy name invented at a period when bad Latin and rude Teutonic were being mixed up to make modern languages, and the Lingua Franca of the East was ringing in the ears of pilgrims. However invented, Balthasar flourished much in Italy, and in the Slavonic countries, and very nearly came to the crown in Spain.
| Italian. | Spanish. | Portuguese. | Polish. |
| Baldassare | Baltasar | Bathasar | Baltasar |
| Slovac. | Bavarian. | Swiss. | Illyrian. |
| Boltazar | Hanser | Balz | Baltazar |
| Hansel | Balzel | Balta | |
| Lusatian. | Lett. | Hungarian. | |
| Bal | Balsys | Boldisar | |
| Balk | |||
| Baltyn | |||
Some of the Italians devoutly believed that Gaspardo, Melchiorre, and Baldassare, were the three sons of St. Beffana, as they had come to call Epiphania; but, in general, Beffana had not nearly so agreeable an association.
In Italy the Epiphany was, and still is, the day for the presentation of Christmas gifts; and it is likely that the pleasant fiction that la Beffana brought the presents, turned, as in other cases, such as that of St. Nicholas, into the notion that she was a being who went about by night, and must therefore be uncanny. Besides, when the carnival was over, there was a sudden immolation of the remaining weeks of the Epiphany; and whether from thus personifying the season, or from whatever other cause, a figure was suspended outside the doors of houses at the beginning of Lent, and called la Beffana. It is now a frightful black doll, with an orange at her feet, and seven skewers thrust through her, one of which is pulled out at the end of each week in Lent; at least, this is the case in Apulia, where she is considered as a token that those who exhibit her, mean to observe a rigorous fast.
Some parts of Italy account for the gibbeting of the unfortunate Beffana, by saying she was the daughter of Herod, i.e. Herodias; and Berni (as quoted by Grimm) says in his rhymes:
“Il di Befania, vo porla per Befana alla finestra,
Perchè qualcun le dia d’una ballestra.”
At Florence, however, the story was told in an entirely different way. There it is said that Beffana was the Christian name of a damsel of the Epifania family before-mentioned: that she offended the fairies, and was by them tempted to eat a sausage in Lent, for which transgression she was sawn asunder in the piazza, and has ever since been hung in effigy at the end of the carnival, as a warning to all beholders.
In fact, Beffana is the Italian bugbear of naughty children; and it is no wonder that this strange embodiment of the gift-bringing day should not be followed as a Christian name, though the masculine form, Epiphanius, once belonged to a Father, born near Mount Olympus, in whose honour is named Capa Pifani, a headland on that coast, and from whom Epifanio sometimes is found at Rome.
The other form of the name of the day, Theophania, has been much more in favour; indeed, in the days of Christine de Pisane, the feast-day was called la Tiphaïne.
Theophano was a name in common use among the Byzantine ladies, and we hear of many princesses so called—one of whom married the German Emperor, Otho II., in 962, and was then called Théophania. Probably she made the name known in Western Europe, but it is curious that its chief home in the form of Tiphaïne, was in Armorica, whence, as the grumbling rhyme of the Englishman, after the Conquest, declared,
“William de Coningsby,
Came out of Brittany,
With his wife Tiffany,
And his maid Manfas,
And his dog Hardigras.”
Tiffany took up her abode in England, and left her progeny. The name occurs in an old Devon register, within the last two hundred years, but seems now extinct.
The high-spirited wife of Bertrand du Guesclin, was either Theophanie, or Epiphanie Ragueuel, but was commonly called Tiphaïne la Fée, on account of the mysterious wisdom by which she was able to predict to her husband his lucky and unlucky days—only he never studied her tablets till the disaster had happened. Could she have first acquired her curious title through some report of her namesake, the Fairy Beffana? In a Cornish register I find Epiphany in 1672; Tiffany in 1682.
In an old German dictionary, the feast Theophania is translated “Giperahta naht” (the brightened night), a curious accordance with its Greek title. Indeed, before the relic-worship of the Three Kings of Cologne had stifled the recollection of the real signification of the day of the Manifestation, the festival was commonly termed Perchten tac, Perchten naht (bright day, or bright night). Then went on in Germany much what had befallen Beffana in Italy. By the analogy of saints' days, Perahta, or Bertha, was erected into an individual character, called in an Alsatian poem, the mild Berchte; in whose honour all the young farming men in the Salzburg mountains go dancing about, ringing cattle bells, and blowing whistles all night. Sometimes she is a gentle white lady, who steals softly to neglected cradles, and rocks them in the absence of careless nurses; but she is also the terror of naughty children, who are threatened with Frau Precht with the long nose; and she is likewise the avenger of the idle spinners, working woe to those who have not spun off their hank on the last day of the year. Can this have anything to do with distaff day—the English name for the 7th of January, when work was resumed after the holidays? Herrings and oat-bread are put outside the door for her on her festival—a token of its Christian origin; but there is something of heathenism connected with her, for if the bread and fish are not duly put out for her, terrible vengeance is inflicted, with a plough-share, or an iron chain.
That Frau Bertha is an impersonation of the Epiphany there seems little doubt, but it appears that there was an original mythical Bertha, who absorbed the brightened night, or if the bright night gave a new title to the old mythical Holda, Holla, Hulla, Huldr (the faithful, or the muffled), a white spinning lady, who is making her feather-bed when it snows. She, too, brings presents at the year’s end; rewards good spinners, punishes idle ones, has a long nose, wears a blue gown and white veil, and drives through the fields in a car with golden wheels. Scandinavia calls her Hulla, or Huldr the propitious; Northern Germany, Holda, probably by adaptation to hold (mild). Franconia and Thuringia recognized both Holda and Berchta; in Alsatia, Swabia, Switzerland, Bavaria, and Austria, Berchta alone prevails.
Some have even tried to identify Holda with Huldah, the prophetess, in the Old Testament, but this is manifestly a blunder. And, on the other hand, Bertha is supposed to be a name of the goddess Freya, the wife of Odin; but it appears that though Huldr may possibly have been originally a beneficent form of this goddess, yet that there is no evidence of Bertha’s prevailing in heathen times, and therefore the most probable conclusion is that she is really the impersonation of the Epiphany, with the attributes of Holda.
Tradition made her into an ancestress, and she must have absorbed some of the legends of the swan maidens, for she is goose-footed in some of her legends; and she is sometimes, as in Franconia and Swabia, called Hildaberta or Bildaberta, either from the Valkyr, or as a union of both Hilda and Bertha. The goose-foot has been almost softened away by the time she appears as Berthe aux grands pieds (wife of Pepin, and mother of Charlemagne); and the connection with the distaff is again traceable in the story of Charlemagne’s sister Bertha, mother of Orlando, who, when cast off on account of her marriage, and left a widow, maintained herself by spinning, till her son, in his parti-coloured raiment, won his uncle’s notice by his bold demeanour.
Proverbs of a golden age when Bertha spun, are current both in France and Italy, and in Switzerland they are connected with the real Queen Bertha.
Be it observed that Bertha is altogether a Frank notion, not prevailing among the Saxons, either English or Continental, nor among the Northern races. It is therefore quite a mistake to use Bertha, as is often done, as a name for an English lady, before the Conquest. One only historical person so called was Bertha, daughter of Chilperic, King of Paris, and wife of Ethelbert, of Kent, the same who smoothed the way for St. Augustine’s mission. She was probably called after the imaginary spinning ancestress, the visitor of Christmas night, but though bright was a common Saxon commencement or conclusion, we had no more Berthas till the Norman conquest brought an influx of Frank names.
The name was, indeed, very common in France and Germany; and in Dante’s time it was so frequent at Florence, that he places Monna Berta with Ser Martino, as the chief of the gossips. Since those days it has died away, but has been revived of late years in the taste for old names; and perhaps, likewise, because Southey mentioned it as one of the most euphonious of female appellations. One of the early German princesses, called Bertha, marrying a Greek emperor, was translated into Eudoxia, little thinking that she ought to have been Theophano.[[91]]
[91]. Church Festivals and Household Words; Maury-Essaisin; Les Légendes Picuses du Moyen Age; Die Stern du Weisen; Routh; Reliquia Sacra; Grimm; Brand; Stanhope, Belisarius.
Section IV.—Easter Names.
The next day of the Christian year that has given a name is that which we emphatically call Good Friday, but which the Eastern Church knows by the title that it bears in the New Testament, the Day of Preparation, Παρασκευή (Paraskewe), from πάρα (beyond), and σκεύη (gear or implements). Thence, a daughter born on that holy day, was christened among the Russians Paraskeva; and the name that has been corrupted by the French into Prascovie, and which is called for short Pascha, is very frequent in the great empire, and belonged to the brave maiden, Paraskeva Loupouloff, whose devotion to her parents suggested Madame Cottin’s tale of Elizabeth, or the Exiles of Siberia, where the adventures, as well as the name, are deprived of their national individuality in the fashion of the last century.
The Passover was known from the first to the Israelites as Pasach, or Pesach, a word exactly rendered by our Passover, and which has furnished the Jews with a name not occurring in the Scripture—Pesachiah, the Passover of God.
The Greek translators represented the word by Πάσχα. It is Pascha likewise in Latin; whence all modern languages have at least taken some of their terms for the great feast of the Resurrection that finally crowned and explained the Jewish Passover.
Italy inherits Pasqua; Spain, Pascua; Portugal, Pascoa, terms that these two nations pass on to other festal Sundays. Illyria has Paska; Wales, Pasg; Denmark, Paaske; France, Pâques; and we ourselves once used Pasque, as is shown by the name of the anemone or pasque flower.
About 844, Radbert, Abbot of Corbie, put forth a book upon the holy Eucharist, in honour of which he was surnamed Paschasius; and, perhaps, this suggested the use of words thence derived for children born at that season.
Cambrai has Pasqua, Pasquina, Pasquette, from 1400 to 1500. Pasquale, Paschino, Paschina, Pasquier, Pascal, all flourished in Italy and France; and in Spain a Franciscan monk, named Pascual, was canonized. Pascoe was married in St. Columb Major, in 1452; Paschal is there the feminine; and many other instances can be easily found to the further honour of the name. There lived, however, a cobbler at Rome, the butt of his friends, who gave his name of Paschino to a statue of an ancient gladiator that had been newly disinterred, and set up in front of the Orsini palace, exciting the waggery of the idle Romans by his likeness to the cobbler. Paschino, the gladiator, proved a convenient block for posting of lampoons and satires, insomuch that the generic term at Rome for such squibs became paschinado, whence our English word pasquinade.
I have seen Easter as a Christian name upon a tombstone in Ripon Cathedral, bearing the date 1813; but as I have also seen it in a Prayer Book belonging to a woman who calls herself Esther, it is possible that this may be a blunder of the same kind.
There was, however, soon after the Reformation, an inclination in England to name children after the vernacular titles of holy days. In 1675, Passion occurs at Bovey Tracey, in Devon; another in 1712, at Hemiock; and Pentecost is far from uncommon in old registers. At Madron, in Cornwall, in 1632, appear the masculine, Pentecost, and feminine, Pentecoste; and in Essex, an aunt and niece appear, both called by this singular festal name, in honour of Whit Sunday. In 1643, I find it again at St. Columb Major. It means, of course, fifty, and is Greek.
Easter is called Λάμπα (the bright day) in Greek, because of the lighting of candles that takes place at midnight in every church. Can it be from this that the Eastern saint of the 10th of February, who suffered at Antioch in Pisidia, was called Charalampios, Χαραλάμπιος, a name which is still used in the Ionian Islands, and is imitated in Russia as Kharalampia, or Kharalamm. Its component parts are καρα (joy), and a derivative from λαμπάς (a torch); and we might explain it either glad-light, or the joy of Easter.[[92]]
[92]. Kitto, Bible Cyclopædia; Church Festivals and their Household Words; Grimm, Acta Sanctorum; Pott; Michaelis.
Section V.—Sunday Names.
Sabbath (rest), in Hebrew, distinguished the seventh day, set apart from the service of the world in memory, first, of the cessation of the work of creation, and next, of the repose of the Israelites after their labours in Egypt.
While the Sabbath was still the sacred day, it does not appear to have suggested any historical name, except that of the father of Joses Barsabas, whose father must have been Sabas. In 532, however, was born in Cappadocia, Sabas, who became one of the most distinguished patriarchs of the monks in Palestine; and in 372, one of the first converts to Christianity among the Goths, then stationed in Wallachia, who had taken the name of Sabas, was martyred by being thrown into the river Musæus, now Mussovi. The locality attached the Slavonians to his name, and Sava is still common among them, as is Ssava in Russia.
Whether Sabea or Sabra, the king of Egypt’s daughter, whom St. George saved from the dragon, was named with any view to St. Sabas, cannot be guessed. I have seen the name in an old English register, no doubt in honour of the exploit of our patron saint.
The day of rest gave place to the day of Resurrection, the Lord’s day, as we still emphatically call it, after the example of the Apostles.
St. John called it Κυριακή ἡμέρα (the Lord’s day), and in this he has been followed by the entire Greek Church, with whom Sundays are still Kyriakoi.
It seems to have been the translators of the Septuagint that first gave its highest sense to Κύριος (Kyrios), a lord or master, from the verb κυρέω (kyreo), to find, obtain, or possess.
St. Kyriakos, or, as Rome spelt him, Cyriacus, was martyred under Diocletian, had his relics dug up afterwards, and his arm given to the abbey of Altdorff, in Alsace. From him came the Roman Ciriaco and the French Cyriac, all of which may mean either “the Lord’s,” or “the Sunday child.”
At the same time a little Kyriakos of Iconium, a child of three years old, fell, with his mother, Julitta, into the hands of the persecutors of Seleucia. The prefect tried to save the child, but he answered all the promises and threats alike with “I am a Christian,” till, in a rage, the magistrate dashed his head on the steps of the tribunal, and his mother, in her tortures, thanked Heaven for her child’s glorious martyrdom. Their touching story made a deep impression, perhaps the more from the wide dispersion of their supposed relics, which were said to have been brought from Antioch by St. Amator, to Auxerre, about the year 400, and thence were dispersed through many French towns, and villages, in which he was called St. Quiric or St. Cyr.
The ancient British Church became acquainted with the mother and child through the Gallic. Welsh hagiology owns them as “Gwyl Gwric ac Elidan;” and Cwrig has been continued as a name in Wales, whilst, on the other hand, the child is equally honoured in his native East—by Russia, Armenia, Abyssinia, and even the Nestorian Christians. He is probably the source of the Illyrian names Cirjar and Cirko.
| English. | French. | Portuguese. | Spanish. |
| Cyril | Cyrille | Cyrillo | Cirilo |
| Italian. | German. | Russian. | Illyrian. |
| Cirillo | Cyrill | Keereel | Cirilo |
| Ciril | |||
| Ciro |
Kyrillos (Κύριλλος) fell to the lot of two great doctors of the Church—patriarchs, the one of Alexandria, the other of Jerusalem; also to two martyrs, one a young boy, and thus it became widely known. The Welsh had it as Girioel, which really is nearer the pronunciation than our own Cyril, with a soft C. It is a name known everywhere, but more in favour in the East than the West, and of honourable memory to us for the sake of Kyrillos Lucar, the Byzantine patriarch, the correspondent of Laud, and afterwards a martyr. Latterly fashion has somewhat revived it in England; and the feminine, Cyrilla, is known in Germany.
Probably, however, this is only the diminutive of kyrios (a master), and did not begin with a religious import.
The Latin equivalent for the Greek, Kyriake, was Dies Emera Dominica. The immediate derivation of this word is in some doubt. It certainly is from Dominus; but there is some question whether this word be from domo (to rule), a congener of the Greek δαμάω, and of our own tame; or if it be from domus (a house), a word apparently direct from the Greek δόμος, from δέμω (to build); another branch from that same root, meaning to rule or govern.
Dominicus, the adjective formed from this word, is found in the French term for the Lord’s prayer, l'Oraison Dominicale, and it likewise named the Lord’s Day, Dies Dominica; Domenica, in Italy; Domingo, in Spain; Dimanche, in France. The first saint, who was probably so called from being born on a Sunday, was San Dominico of the Cuirass, a recluse of the Italian Alps, whose mortification consisted in wearing an iron cuirass, which he never took off except to scourge himself. He died in 1024; and a still sterner disciplinarian afterwards bore the same name, that Dominico whom the pope beheld in a vision upbearing the Church as a pillar, and who did his utmost to extirpate the Albigenses; whose name is connected with the foundation of the Inquisition, and whose brotherhood spread wherever Rome’s dominion was owned. He is saint for namesakes out of Romanist lands, but in these it occurs, and has an Italian feminine, Domenica; for short, Menica. Perhaps this likewise accounts for the Spanish Mendez and Mencia. This last may, however, be from Monica, the mother of St. Augustine, whose name has never been accounted for. It may be from some unknown language; but is sometimes supposed to be from moneo, to advise. Monique is rather a favourite with French peasants, and Moncha was Irish, but it has not been as common as it deserves.
| Irish. | French. | Italian. | Spanish. |
| Domnech | Dominique | Domenico | Domingo |
| Dominic | Domenichino | Mendez | |
| Menico | |||
| Portuguese. | Slavonic. | Hungarian. | Servian. |
| Domingos | Dominik | Domokos | Dominic |
| Domogoj | Menz | ||
| Dinko | Menzel | ||
| Dunko |
The Slavonians have, however, a name for their Sunday in their own tongue—Nedele; and have formed from it the Nedelco of the Bulgarians; the Nedeljko, Nedan, Nedo, and the feminine, Nedelijka and Neda, of the Illyrians.
I am aware of no other names from the days of the week, except the ‘Thursday October Christian’ of Pitcairn’s Island, who was probably so called in recollection of the Man Friday.
All Saints' Day has furnished Spain with Santos; and France, or rather San Domingo, with Toussaint, unless this last be a corruption, or, perhaps, a pious adaptation, of Thorstein—Thor’s stone, turned into All Saints.[[93]]
[93]. Grimm; Church Festivals and Household Words; Butler; Rees, Welsh Saints; Facciolati; Michaelis.