By Water & Blood

Book 1, Chapter 6: Origin of the Name Praetextatus

On the next day all among whom there had been a gathering the day before were present early at the house of Vettius. When Praetextatus had received them into the library, in which he was awaiting them, he said: "I see that it will be a brilliant day for me, since both you are present and those whom it was resolved to invite to the fellowship of our gathering have pledged that they will be present. To Postumianus alone the care of preparing defenses seemed more important; in the place of him declining I substituted Eusebius, a rhetor famous for both Greek learning and eloquence, and it was intimated to all that from the rising of day they should indulge us, since indeed it was not lawful today to be occupied with any public offices: certainly no one in toga or trabea or paludamentum or praetexta is seen on this day."

Then Avienus—as was his custom of interrupting—said: "When, Praetextatus, you refer your name, sacred to me and to the republic, among the vocabularies of diverse dress, I am reminded of a question not, as I judge, playful. For since the clothing of the toga or trabea or paludamentum has made no use of a proper name from itself, I ask of you why antiquity has taken this from the dress of the praetexta alone, or what origin has befallen this name?"

During these words of Avienus, Flavianus and Eustathius, a distinguished pair of friendship, and a little after Eusebius, entered and made the gathering more cheerful; and having received and returned greeting they sat down, asking what conversation they had interrupted. Then Vettius said: "You have arrived most opportunely for one seeking a champion. For our Avienus moves for me a question of the name and so demands its origin as if faith of the lineage must be exacted from it! For since there is no one who is called by his own name either togatus or trabeatus or paludatus, he demands that it be brought into the open why a praetextatus has a name. But also since 'Know yourself' (γνῶθι σεαυτόν) is inscribed on the doorpost of the Delphic temple, and that same is the saying of one of the number of the Seven Sages, what am I to be judged to know in myself if I am ignorant of my name? Of which now both origin and cause must be told me.

"Tullus Hostilius, third king of the Romans, when the Etruscans had been conquered, first instituted that at Rome there should be the curule chair and lictors and the embroidered toga and the praetexta, which were the insignia of the Etruscan magistrates. But in that age boyhood did not use the praetexta: for it was, like the rest which I have enumerated, a dress of honor. But afterward Tarquinius, son of the exile Demaratus of Corinth—Priscus, whom some report was called Lucumo—king third from Hostilius, fifth from Romulus, celebrated a triumph over the Sabines. In which war he both praised before the assembly his own son fourteen years old, because he had struck an enemy with his hand, and presented him with a golden bulla and a praetexta, marking a boy brave beyond his years with the rewards of manhood and honor. For just as the praetexta was of magistrates, so the bulla was the wearing of triumphators, which in the triumph they bore before them, with remedies enclosed within it which they believed most powerful against envy. Hence was drawn the custom that the praetexta and bulla were taken into the use of noble boys for the omen and for vows of winning virtue like that of him to whom in his first years those gifts had fallen.

"Others think that the same Priscus, when with the skill of a provident prince he was ordering the status of citizens, counted also the dress of freeborn boys among things of chief importance and instituted that patricians should use a golden bulla with the toga bordered with purple, at least those whose fathers had held a curule magistracy. But to the rest it was allowed to use the praetexta only, yet up to those whose parents had earned due military pay on horseback. But to the sons of freedmen it was by no right lawful to use the praetextae, and much less to foreigners, who had no bond with the Romans. But afterward the praetexta was also granted to the sons of freedmen for such a cause as M. Laelius the augur relates, who says that in the Second Punic War the duumvirs by decree of the Senate, because of many prodigies, approached the Sibylline books and, when these had been inspected, announced that there must be a supplication on the Capitol and a lectisternium made from a collected contribution, so that freedwomen also who used the long robe should supply money for that matter. Therefore the solemn prayer was performed by freeborn boys and likewise by freedmen's sons, and also by maidens having living father and mother pronouncing a hymn: from which it was conceded that the sons of freedmen also, who had been born at least from a lawful matron of a household, should wear the toga praetexta and a thong on the neck in place of the adornment of the bulla.

"Verrius Flaccus says that when the Roman people was suffering from a plague and the response had been that this happened because the gods were being looked down upon (despicerentur), the city was anxious because the oracle was not understood, and it happened that on a day of the Circensian games a boy from an upper room looked down (despiceret) upon the procession from above and reported to his father in what order he had seen the secrets of the rites arranged in the chest of the car: and when he had announced the deed to the Senate, it was resolved that those places be veiled where the procession was carried, and so when the plague was settled the boy who had resolved the ambiguity of the lot obtained as a gift the use of the toga praetexta.

"Those most skilled in antiquity relate that in the rape of the Sabine women one woman named Hersilia, while she clung to her daughter, was seized at the same time: and when Romulus had given her as wife to a certain Hostus from the Latin field, who had fled to his asylum, conspicuous for virtue, a boy was born from her before any other of the Sabine women brought forth offspring: him, because he was first begotten in enemy territory (in hostico), his mother called Hostus Hostilius, and the same was honored by Romulus with a golden bulla and the insignia of the praetexta. For when he had called the seized women to console them, he is said to have pledged that he would give a distinguished gift to the infant of her who first bore him a Roman citizen. Some believe it was attributed to freeborn boys that they fasten the figure of a heart in a bulla before the breast, looking at which they should then at last think themselves men if they excelled in heart, and that the toga praetexta was added to them so that by the redness of the purple they might be ruled by the shame of free birth.

"We have said whence the praetexta; we have also added the causes by which it is judged to have been granted to boyhood: now in a few words it must be explained by what argument the same dress passed into the use of a name. It was formerly the custom for senators to enter the curia with their sons in the praetexta. When in the Senate some greater matter was being deliberated and it was put off to the following day, it was resolved that no one should announce this matter about which they had treated before it was decreed. The mother of the boy Papirius, who had been with his parent in the curia, asks her son what the fathers had done in the Senate. The boy answered that it must be kept silent and that it was not lawful for it to be said. The woman becomes more eager to hear: the secrecy of the matter and the silence of the boy lashes her mind to inquire; she therefore asks more closely and more violently. Then the boy, with his mother pressing, takes counsel of a witty and festive lie. He said it had been treated in the Senate whether it seemed more useful and more in the interest of the republic that one man should have two wives, or that one woman should be married to two. When she heard this, she grows afraid in mind, goes trembling from the house, brings it to the other matrons, and on the next day crowded troops of mothers of households flow together to the Senate. Weeping and beseeching they beg that rather one woman be married to two than two to one. The senators entering the curia wondered what that intemperance of women was and what that demand meant for itself, and they dreaded that shameless madness of the modest sex as a prodigy of no small matter. The boy Papirius removes the public fear. For advancing into the middle of the curia he narrates just as it had been what his mother had insisted on hearing, what he himself had pretended to his mother. The Senate kisses the faith and talent of the boy and makes a decree that thereafter boys should not enter the curia with their fathers except that one Papirius alone, and afterward to that boy a surname was given by decree for the sake of honor, Praetextatus, because of his prudence of keeping silent and of speaking in the praetexta age. This surname afterward stuck to our family as a name. Not otherwise were the Scipiones so called except that Cornelius, who guided as a staff his father of the same name deprived of light, was surnamed Scipio and gave the name from the surname to posterity. Thus your Messala, Avienus, was so called from the surname of Valerius Maximus who, after he took Messana, the most noble city of Sicily, was surnamed Messala. Nor is it wonderful if names have been born from surnames, since on the contrary surnames also have been drawn from proper names, as from Aemilius Aemilianus, from Servilius Servilianus."

Here Eusebius added: "Messala and Scipio, the one from piety, the other from valor, as you relate, found surnames. But Scrofa and Asina, which are surnames to men not of middling rank, I wish you to say whence they befell, since they seem nearer to insult than to honor." Then he: "Neither honor nor injury but chance made these names. For the surname Asina was given to the Cornelii because the chief of the Cornelian clan, when a farm had been bought or a daughter given to a husband, and sureties were solemnly demanded of him, led forth into the forum a she-ass with a load of money as a present pledge in place of sureties. But Tremellius was surnamed Scrofa by such an event. That Tremellius was in a villa with his household and children. When a sow (scrofa) wandered from a neighbor, his slaves stole and dressed it: the neighbor, having called watchmen, surrounds everything so that it cannot be carried out anywhere, and appeals to the master that the beast be restored to him. Tremellius, who had learned the matter from the steward, places the carcass of the sow under the patchwork quilts on which his wife was lying, and permits the neighbor the search. When they came to the bedroom, he forms the words of an oath: that there is no sow in his villa, 'except that one,' he says, 'which lies in the quilts,' and points to the little bed. That most witty oath gave Tremellius the surname Scrofa."