I am interested in finding information about a certain word: macidus. I have met this word at school in a test which was a paraphrase of Livius. The context implies that the word is related to macies, thinness, and should be taken to mean thin.
But I am not sure the word even exists! I haven’t found in any dictionary of classical latin - I have even had a look in Peter Glares Oxford Latin Dictionary.
I have spoken to a teacher about the problem and I was told that the word is medieval Latin. But I haven’t got any knowledge of medieval Latin whatsoever.
I hope someone out there can help. It would be much appreciated.
a quizzler. it would be of much use if you stated the exact form of the word, and its context if possible. macidus,-a,-um seems a nonsense creation. with apologies for the palaeographical method, i would suggest that if the word is in the femine it would be an easy corruption of macula,-ae; if otherwise perhaps it is from madidus. if macidus itself it could be a misspelling of the gen. of the late Lat macis, -idis.
any more info would be of use. Livy certainly did not write macid-.
Du Cange does not know this word. Neither does Niermeyer. The closest he has is macredo, obviously derived from macer. L&S mentions macio as a post-classical verb. I suppose, one could have maciatus. I could look in a few other places, but one this is certain. Macidus should not be seen anywhere near a paraphrase from Livy.
Thank you, whiteoctave Let me stress that it is a paraphrase - but it was used in an official exam.
The exact quote from the assignment is:
“Cum turba maxima in foro esset, repente senex se in forum projecit. Sordida erat vestis ejus, corpus pallidum ac macidum; promissa barba et capilli efferaverant vultum ejus”.
As you can see the original (Livius, Ab urbe condita II, 23) has been severely altered - so that students at this level can understand and translate…
However, I was, trying to translate this bit, very puzzled by the macidum. I don’t think it is a corruption of macula, -ae since the text is a construction made by a teacher. I have been told that macidum is medieval Latin…
Yes. And pretty darn good ones, too. But medieval Latin is so vast, really. Du Cange is a very old, but quite comprehensive dictionary with quotations. You can get most of the volumes at gallica.bnf.fr.
OK, the fact that your teacher constructed (I think that is an apt word) the piece rules out any emendation. Souter has an entry under macidus (followed immediately by a question mark), suggesting that it is either a mispelling of marcidus (which he doesn’t seem to list, although there is an alternative form macido of the trans. vb. marcido -‘to make withered’) or an alternative of matidus, which equates to madidus. He states that this word, however tentative it may be, is ‘ante 1250’.
in a quick search of some neo-Latin texts I found the word, apparently, in Campion’s Ad Thamesin:
fons mundi speculum est, sed qui speculatur in illo
morbum oculis haurit macidum, et lethale uenenum. (152-3)
the word’s existence seems rather questionable to me. its formation is not necessarily problematic: the adjectival suffix -ido- tends to carry the sense of ‘furnished/provided with’, much like -ulento- and -oso-. having seen that the original Livy passage contains macies, perhaps your teacher got carried away by the analogous rabidus from rabies, or wished to make pallore and macie of the original similar in form, using the Classical pallidum, with the apparently Late/unattested macid-um?
all this said, another etymology lies open. we find in Plautus the intr. maceo - ‘to be thin’. intransitive verbs of the second conjugation are known to form (obv. deverbal) adjectives in -ido-, cf. aridus <areo, nitidus <niteo, calidus <caleo etc. if we have maceo, other than the lack of an attested form, macidus could perfectly plausibly mean ‘thin’, whether pejor., i.e. ‘haggard’, or otherwise.
I checked the Du Cange, too (what a valuable resource btw). I’d love to know if other medieval dictionaries have anything like this, but if not I think this is great.
I also found Campion’s text when googling “macidum”, but sometimes I’ve found www.thelatinlibrary.com a little unreliable. I might have to check up on it. As I understand the last part of your post, whiteoctave, macidus could be formed from maceo in similarity with adjectives derived from 2nd conjugation verbs? And that there is not, however, any attested occurences of the adjective, in Plautus or elsewhere?
I also checked Blaise’s dictionary and found nothing. Whiteoctave mentioned Souter. That’s an Oxford dictionary of Later Latin up to 600 AD.
I suggest you casually ask your teacher to recommend you a very good dictionary (in his or her view) that can be used for translating into Latin. Then check what it has for ‘lean’. Sometimes such dictionaries provide most unusual translations.
I propose that a misunderstood manuscript abbreviation has disguised a clear allusion to Cicero’s De lege agraria 2.34.93 in which we read macie torridus. Clearly in its textual transmission your test passed through a Beneventan scriptorium.
nice point, adz! i seem to recall that the nigh incomparable AEH in a J.Ph. article suggests that uegrandi macie torridum was the result of the incorrect word division of VEGRANDEMACRETORRIDUM, whence uegrandem ac retorridum should be read. at this present moment in time i have access neither to the article nor his collected papers, but i shouldn’t think he dabbles in macidus!
there does not seem an etymological link between marcidus (which was occasionally spelt macidus) and (*?)macidus < macies.
as to my points before, amans, maceo occurs in Pl. but macidus is unattested.
my mention of Souter was a slip - i consulted him at the same time as i consulted Latham, and it was from the latter that my comments about the entry came, hence the ‘ante 1250’.
~D
adz-any news on the bibliog? i recently got Porson’s Letters to Travis, and some more Classical scholars’ letters.
Hi, Deses. No, I didn’t get any recommendations from my teacher. I just bought one: I thought it looked okay from what I could gather. Do you know it? Around 1,000 pages, originally published in 1871, this is a 2000 reissue. It was relatively cheap… around 30 dollars, I think. I’d love to hear your comments.
Oh, thanks, whiteoctave; I am relatively new to classical philology (as you can gather from the very fact that my assignments offer so so profoundly altered texts), - but I understand: a word may occur in a certain writer but that does not mean that a certain form of that word does occur. And macidus is… shall we say, a relatively “free” derivate of maceo?
So, macidus doesn’t occur in Souter either, but in Latham? Except that he has the questionmark you mentioned and the “ante 1250”?
yes macidus occurs in Latham but is deemed questionable on grounds of orthography, suggesting (ut ante dixi) that it is either an alternative form of marcidus (which is Classical in a similar sense to *macidus, although the etymology of macies and marceo is apparently distinct) or, less likely, a misspelling of madidus via the intermediary matidus.
as for Smith and Hall it is a very fine dictionary - the full edition came out in 1871 as you say and was subsequently followed up by many editions of an abridged version, which contains almost as much information in terms of words but less context and citation. it is a good thesaurus (in the more literal sense) but always needs to be checked in terms of Classical usage.
I looked macidus up in a few dictionaries at my university library, and found it in two, CORPVS CHRISTIANORVM, Lexicon Latinitatis medii aevi, a latin-french dictionary of medieval latin. There it was said to mean desséché, or dry, shriveled up.
The second was a german one, Mittellateinisches Glosser by E. Habel & F. Gröbel, 2nd edition. Macidus was translated as mager, dürr; meaning thin, dry or lean.
Hope this helps.
Thanks for checking out those resources. Did you notice if your dictionaries mentioned examples, references to medieval literature or to certain authors? Further: did they have any reservations about the word, as described by whiteoctave?
Nope, just the explanation. The German one is rather small and I was suprised to find that word in it, but the French one is bigger but sadly did not offer any examples or point to sources.
I also checked the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, but not too suprisingly, given that it is a medieval word, it did not list it.
Let me stress that it is a paraphrase - but it was used in an official exam.