culeus

Forms

cūleus m (genitive cūleī); second declension^[1] It is also spelled culleus, the form under which the OLD enters it.^[2][1] Cato has a neuter plural cullea and a genitive plural culleum.^[2]

Etymology

Wiktionary and Köbler take it as borrowed from Ancient Greek κολεός (koleós, “sheath”), and Lewis & Short equate it with that word and its Ionic form κουλεός (kouleós).^[1][3][4] The OLD calls it apparently cognate with the Greek word.^[2] De Vaan, comparing κολεόν (koleón, “sheath of a sword”), thinks it probably a loanword from a non-Indo-European language taken into Latin and Greek independently.^[5]

Earliest recorded meaning

De Vaan and Köbler date it from Plautus,^[5][3] who writes of oil to be brought in leather sacks.^[2]

Semantic evolution

It is a leather sack for liquids, especially wine: Varro has country people pouring wine into a jar or sack, Nepos many skins and sacks gathered, and Pliny the Elder wagons loaded with wine sacks.^[2] It is also the largest liquid measure, twenty amphorae, used by Cato, Varro, Columella and Pliny for wine.^[2] It was above all the sack in which parricides were sewn up and drowned: Plautus already has the order to sew someone in a sack and carry him out to sea, and Cicero, Quintilian, Juvenal and Suetonius use it of the punishment.^[2] The elder Seneca quotes the joke that someone put his brother in a wooden sack, an unarmed ship.^[2] De Vaan takes cōleī “testicles” as probably a variant of the same word.^[5]

Timeline

• c. 250–184 BC – Plautus of oil sacks and of the parricide's sack.^[2][3]
• 234–149 BC – Cato of the wine measure.^[2][3]
• 81–43 BC – Cicero of the punishment of the sack.^[2][3]
• c. 35–95/96 AD – Quintilian quotes the law on parricides.^[2][3]

Meanings

Noun

1. A large leather sack for liquids, especially wine.^[2][4][1]
2. A liquid measure of twenty amphorae.^[2][1]
3. (law) The sack in which a parricide was sewn up and drowned; that punishment.^[2][1]

Word family

• cōleus

References

1. ^ a b c d e f Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o Glare, P. G. W., ed. (2012), Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
3. ^ a b c d e f Köbler, Gerhard (2010), Lateinisches Abkunfts- und Wirkungswörterbuch für Altertum und Mittelalter, online ed., koeblergerhard.de
4. ^ a b Lewis, Charlton T.; Short, Charles (1879), A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
5. ^ a b c de Vaan, Michiel (2008), Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 7, Leiden; Boston: Brill