I've been reading a great book written by Peter Jones who is very much interested in bringing the classics to everybody, because not only linguistically do we owe the classics a lot, but also just in culture, as well. So I'm going to talk about the Romans again. In Roman time, whatever a father's special qualities, the key to a successful family was the wife's capacity to produce children. That was just all-important. I suppose in some cultures, not much has changed. But fertility itself comes from the Latin fero, meaning I carry. It's linked to ferry, and indeed the fare that you might pat to travel in the ferry. And they all very relevant to a fertile woman. But this is because of her depended the continuation, not just of the family, but of citizen children, and so the Roman states and of the gods that they worshipped, et cetera, so it was this very complicated interwoven thing that was all-important. And the word for blessed, felix, which of course gave us felicity and felicitous, applied to her. But if you go all the way back to thst very ancient root, you'll find it's linked to femina, so we get feminine from that - that was a woman. Fecundus, which means fecund. And foetus, as well. They're all linked, they all go back to the same ancient root, meaning to suckle. But I thought I'd mentioned that link with foetus, because you know the word effete? We talk about something over-refined today as being slightly effete or maybe just a little bit feeble, but actually, for the Romans, that was the worst fate of all, because it literally meant out-wombed. It's linked to foetus, it means worn out by bearing too many children, so a woman would be effete, essencially barren, because she had just produced too many offspring. But onto a slightly happier nite, when it comes to children - if children were lacking or didn't quite have the qualities that were hoped for, they were adopted quite regularly from otheh families to ensure the survival of the line. But I menyioned this because adoption, if you look back to its root in Latin, it's actually really lovely, because it means to choose to come to. So you were choosing someone to come to your family, which I think is a really nice way of looking at it. And it was all about, as I say, helping the family to succeed, and often it wasn't babies that came over, but it was adults, ao adults would be adopted into a family, and Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, Hadrian, so many people were adopted into another family in order to keep up the power, if the womb of the all-important mother hadn't quite done its job.
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