The Victors

Roy Tappingposted toFor the love of Mary Beard
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Swearing
The Romans could swear. And they could swear spectacularly badly - or well, depending on your view.
Their vocabulary included words for arses, cocks, cunts, shit, fucking and sexual humiliation, along with insults designed to attack a man’s masculinity, status and dignity. What makes Roman swearing interesting, though, is that the words themselves are only half the story. The other half is what they were doing socially.
Take cunnus. It was the principal obscene Latin word for the female genitals, and it was genuinely vulgar. Mentula was the corresponding obscene term for the penis. Culus meant arse or anus, while merda meant shit or excrement. Verpa and mutto were also slang terms for the penis.
So yes, if you dropped a Roman into a modern pub and taught him the words, he would have some immediately recognisable material to work with.
The problem comes when we try to match Roman obscenities to modern swear words one for one. Language does not work quite so neatly.
There was no single Latin word equivalent to “motherfucker”. Matris fututor could literally mean “fucker of his mother”, but it was not a standard compound insult in the way the English word is. Irrumator, meanwhile, referred to a man who performed irrumatio, a specific form of forced oral sex. It was therefore an extremely aggressive sexual insult, but not simply a Roman translation of “motherfucker”.
Roman sexual vocabulary could be vicious because sex itself was closely connected with ideas about power and status. To describe a man as sexually submissive was not merely to make a comment about his sex life. It could be an attack on his masculinity and his standing as a citizen.
Pathicus, cinaedus and fellator could all be used in abusive contexts. The precise meaning depended upon the word and context, but the underlying insult was often that a man had failed to behave according to Roman expectations of masculine dominance.
The distinction between sexual roles mattered enormously. Latin had explicit verbs for different sexual acts, including futuere, paedicare and irrumare. These were not neutral anatomical descriptions. In hostile language, they could turn sex into a vocabulary of domination.
And then there was the Roman talent for telling somebody exactly where to go.
Abi in malam crucem literally means something like “go to a bad cross”. In other words, “go and get yourself crucified”. It is difficult to imagine a more Roman way of telling somebody to fuck off.
Crucifixion was not some abstract swear-word concept. It was a deliberately horrific punishment associated particularly with slaves and others without the protections enjoyed by Roman citizens. So the insult was not merely “leave me alone”. It invoked one of the most brutal punishments in the Roman world.
Roman obscenity could even cause problems for innocent-looking sentences.
Cicero discusses the fact that Romans preferred nobiscum, “with us”, to cum nobis. The reason was that cum nobis, when spoken aloud, could produce an obscene sound resembling cunnos, the plural of cunnus. Latin speakers were therefore perfectly capable of hearing sexual meanings where the speaker had not intended one.
Imagine being so alert to accidental obscenity that you rearrange the words “with us” to avoid making your sentence sound like “cunts”.
That is not quite the same linguistic problem as accidentally texting your boss “ducking”.
Roman obscenity also had its own rules about where filthy language belonged. Words that were perfectly intelligible to an educated Roman could still be considered unsuitable for formal speech or writing. They turn up in comedy, graffiti, insults and other deliberately informal or abusive contexts, where their vulgarity was part of the point.
J. N. Adams puts it rather neatly:
“The basic obscenities in Latin (mentula, cunnus, futuo, paedico, irrumo) were restricted to aggressive, informal, or humorously abusive contexts, and were strictly banned from formal prose.”
J. N. Adams, The Latin Sexual Vocabulary, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982, p. 218.
That gives us a useful warning. The existence of a Roman word for “cock” does not mean that respectable Romans routinely wandered around discussing their mentula over dinner. Obscene vocabulary existed precisely because people knew that some words belonged in particular situations and not others.
And Romans could be very funny about it.
Sexual jokes, bodily functions and deliberately disgusting language appear repeatedly in Roman comedy, satire, epigram and graffiti. The humour often depended upon taking something normally excluded from polite conversation and dragging it into the middle of it.
That is one reason modern readers can misjudge Roman humour in both directions. We can imagine the Romans as prudish and shocked by everything sexual, or we can assume that they were permanently cracking filthy jokes. Neither picture works particularly well.
“We always run two different and opposite risks: both of exaggerating the strangeness of past laughter and of making it all too comfortably like our own.”
Professor Emerita Dame Mary Beard, Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling, and Being a Dog, Sather Classical Lectures, vol. 71, University of California Press, 2014.
The same applies to swearing. A Roman could understand a sexual insult perfectly well while still recognising that the word was obscene. A filthy joke could be funny precisely because it crossed a linguistic boundary. A word could be acceptable in a bawdy poem and completely inappropriate in a formal speech.
Religion is another area where modern assumptions can lead us astray. Romans certainly invoked their gods in everyday exclamations. Hercle, edepol and ecastor meant roughly “by Hercules”, “by Pollux” and “by Castor”. They were ordinary interjections, not Roman equivalents of blasphemous expressions such as “God damn it”.
The Roman profanity system was much more interested in bodies, sex, dominance and humiliation.
That does not mean every Roman insult was sexual. Roman writers had a vast repertoire of abuse involving appearance, intelligence, social class, bodily functions, poverty, cowardice and physical disability. But sexual humiliation was an especially powerful weapon because it could attack not only what someone had done, but what sort of man he was supposed to be.
This is where Roman swearing becomes rather more revealing than a list of ancient equivalents for “fuck”, “cunt” and “shit”.
The Romans were living in a society obsessed with status. Who commanded? Who obeyed? Who was a citizen? Who was enslaved? Who was considered properly masculine? Who was allowed to dominate and who was expected to submit?
Their insults could reduce all of those questions to a single filthy sentence.
So, would modern people have been offended by Roman swearing?
Almost certainly. But not always for precisely the same reasons. A modern listener would encounter explicit sexual language, threats of sexual violence, misogynistic abuse, attacks on perceived sexual passivity and vicious mockery of social inferiors. Some of it would be shocking. Some would be funny. Some would simply be baffling without knowing the social rules behind it.
And some of it would sound remarkably familiar.
Merda still sounds like the sort of word you might mutter when you drop your phone down the lavatory. Culus is recognisably rude. Cunnus needs very little explanation. And abi in malam crucem remains an impressively committed way of saying, “Fuck off.”
The Romans did not invent swearing. They did, however, leave us an astonishingly dirty vocabulary with which to explore how language, sex, humour and social power worked in their world.
They knew exactly how to be filthy.
They also knew exactly when being filthy was the whole joke.