A Cursory History of Swearing

by Julian Sharman

The Romans of old are said to have played with two sorts of dice, the tali and the tesseræ. The tali had four even surfaces, the tesseræ six. On opposite faces of the four-sided figure were marked respectively the numbers one and six, the numbers three and four appearing respectively on the other surfaces. The tessera, or six-sided figure, bore on its additional faces the numbers two and five. Both tali and tesseræ were usually knuckle-bones of an animal, frequently the gazelle; the uneven ends being planed smooth in the case of the tesseræ, while for the tali they were left in their natural condition. The game admitted of various rules and of various degrees of skill, and it would seem that the more ancient Greek sculptures represent the children and maidens of Athens manipulating the tesseræ in much the same manner as school-boys still play at the game of knuckle-bones. But whatever element of dexterity may have originally pervaded the pastime, it was very rapidly dispelled, and both tali and tesseræ became, as they have since remained, the instruments of wagering and gain. The best throw, called the Venus, only happened when each of the upturned surfaces presented different units. The worst throw was when the four pieces exposed the same number on each, and that number an ace. This single pip was technically known as the unio, the side of six as the senio; while the name by which the throw of four aces was chiefly distinguished among the gamesters of antiquity was the canicula or canis.

“Jure etenim id summum quid dexter senio ferret
Scire erat in voto, damnosa canicula quantum
Raderet.” Persius, Sat. iii.

The deduction has been drawn that the player, baulked in his luck, and turning angrily upon the prone dice as they disclosed the four upturned aces, sought passing relief by hurling at them an insensate malediction. In this way, after a long interval and by a slow process of development, the damnosa canicula of the Roman gamester is said to have become, or more strictly to be represented by, the sacré chien of a nearer civilisation.

The force of association has so indelibly connected the mention of this animal with whatever is inferior or contemptuous, that there is at first no room for surprise at finding it used in its present application. So imperceptibly has this turn of thought entered into our habits of mind, that, without further inquiry, such an application would appear perfectly natural and proportionable. But upon the very slightest reflection a sense of inappropriateness cannot fail to be forced upon us. Surely the nomenclature of the animal world is sufficiently varied as to admit of the dishonour done to it being more equally divided. One would expect to find the members of the canine family at the least no more than sharers in the distinction in common with other creatures of the brute world. But no such equal distribution would appear to prevail. The question therefore that remains is, how it is that the name of the most sagacious of animals should be universally identified in the vernacular tongue with whatever is the most ignoble and despicable of its kind? The wild rose is called the dog-rose, the scentless violet the dog-violet; bad Latin is termed dog-Latin; and in Ovid we have verba canina as denoting abusive conversation.

Although the author of Gallus goes the length of saying that among the ancients the names of the lower animals were seldom heard as particles of abuse, the opprobrious application of the name of the dog will be found to be most classical. The use made of the word in the conversation of ancient Greece should be in easy recollection, bringing down as it did upon the Athenian people the accusation of being their popular oath of asseveration. Socrates, we are to believe, rarely used in his swearing any other form of expression. “By the dog! Polus,” he is made to exclaim in Plato’s ‘Gorgias,’ “I am really in doubt each time you speak whether you are stating your own views or are asking my opinion.”[17]

When, therefore, we find in the twelfth century an archbishop of Juvavia interdicting his countrymen from ratifying their treaties with an oath taken by the dog, we gain some insight into the portent of the canine oath of Thebes and Athens. The superstition and mysticism attaching to this animal are brought still closer home by a passage from De Joinville, which mentions the sacrificing of a living dog as a Byzantine method of confirming an obligation. Moreover, on the coins of Syracuse the dog as the emblem of constancy is represented in company with the goddess Diana. That a sacrificial ceremony, barbarous at once and ineffectual, should have received any countenance among a people of culture, is only in accordance with the view expressed at an earlier part of these pages, that the progress of true civilisation may be clearly traced by comparing the relative values of the veracity. The cities of Greece were full of straw-shoes, men who distinguished their calling by a straw at their feet, and who were ready at the bid of a suitor to give the lightest evidence for the heaviest fee. Confidence had little place among a nation far too volatile and specious to be able to rely upon any system of reciprocal good faith. From this circumstance it was that the Greeks earned for themselves the repute of being the least trustworthy of all the untruthful nations of antiquity. In such a community the fragile safeguard of an oath is, from sheer helplessness, the more rigorously demanded. The Hellenic people may be said to have been eminently a swearing people. The character had so persistently clung to them, and was descended from so remote an antiquity, that Juvenal, in the Sixth Satire, can only refer their immunity from swearing to the period when innocence was said to have prevailed upon earth and before Jupiter had begun to let his beard grow.

But while Greek and Roman riveted oath upon oath and laid ceremony upon ceremony, to accomplish that simple understanding which should be effected by the mere parole of right-thinking men, there is no evidence to show that swearing was carried to the precise point to which it has been brought among ourselves. That at the lightest stir of the emotions they were ready to apostrophise the ruling divinities as well as the shapes of field and flood, of earth and air, must pass as uncontradicted,[18] but never do they appear, as in the modern world, to have forged their poetic oaths into weapons of malevolence and hurt. There would seem to have been no actual counterpart in these languages to the vituperative swearing of modern days. The difference in this respect is somewhat singular, but it may readily be accounted for. With the ancients, oaths were employed in guarding as efficiently as they could the public conscience and the public security. With the moderns they have been for the most part released from this unstable duty, and accordingly, with untrammelled energy and ungovernable vigour, they have entered upon a system of privateering upon their own account.

Not only had the ancient mythology to struggle against the constant infraction of the sanctity of the deliberative oath, but the minds of heathen votaries must have been strongly biassed by an acquaintance with instances of light swearing in the gods themselves. To render the practice the less capricious and incontinent, a notion of an individual property or trade-mark in oaths came to be perceptibly encouraged. The specific appropriation of some distinctive oath raised the presumption that it implied an unequivocal pledge of sincerity. In this way Zeno, the founder of the Stoics, swore continually “by the caper.” Pythagoras, we are told, was accustomed to swear by the number four, μα την τετρακτον. This numeral came to be regarded in consequence as symbolical of the divinity, and the Pythagorean school gravely inculcated it as a point of morals to abstain from intruding upon so illustrious an example.

Besides the oath of Socrates, “by the dog,” he is reported to have sworn variously by the goose and by the plane-tree. Those who argue in favour of the piety of the philosopher, explain that the habit was assumed as a foil to the irreverent mention of the gods that was then so universal. Lucian attaches an intelligible meaning to these flippant expletives, and represents Socrates as justifying their use. “Are you not aware,” he is presumed to reason, “that the dog is the Anubis of Egypt, the Sirius of the skies; and in hell is the keeper Cerberus?” and Plutarch is also found to comment on the oath, “those that worship the dog have a certain sacred meaning that must not be revealed; in the more remote and ancient times the dog had the highest honours paid to him in Egypt.” In the copiousness of the ancient swearing the notion of an oath accommodated itself to all the varieties of monstrous gods. The divinities Isis and Osiris were invoked in witness of a sacred pledge no less than the garlic, the leek, and the onion, and indeed every other deity which, as was said by the Roman satirist, grew and flourished in the market-gardens of Alexandria.

We are admitted to a just appreciation of the levity of Athenian swearing through the medium of one of the most remarkable performances ever placed upon the stage, whether of the modern or the ancient world. When, returning from an expedition, Socrates repaired to the theatre to witness Aristophanes’ comedy ‘The Clouds,’ he found himself portrayed upon the scene as the central figure of the drama. He was even represented swung up in a basket in his own thinking-shop and giving utterance to innumerable heresies and follies. When Strepsiades offers to swear by the gods, he is at once interrupted by Socrates in the basket, who reminds him that the gods are not current coin in his system of philosophy. “By what then do you swear?” asks Strepsiades; “by the iron money, as they do at Byzantium?” Unhappily the query remained unanswered.