talaria

Forms

tālāria n pl (genitive tālārium); third declension^[1]

Etymology

It is from Latin tālāris (“of the ankles, reaching to the ankles”), whose neuter plural is used as a noun.^[2][3][4] The adjective is formed from tālus (“ankle”).^[5]

Earliest recorded meaning

Its first recorded use is in Cicero,^[2] who in his Aratea writes of feet bound with fitting winged sandals (pedēs vīnctōs tālāribus aptīs).^[2]

Semantic evolution

In Classical Latin it usually means the wings fastened to the ankles, the winged sandals of myth: Cicero says that a fifth Minerva is given them,^[2][4] Virgil gives them to Mercury, and Ovid to Perseus.^[2][4] Cicero also uses it as a figure of speech: tālāria videāmus, “let us look to our winged sandals”, that is, let us get ready to flee.^[2][4]

The OLD takes a line of Ovid, where the wind blows back the tālāria of a runner, as the lower part of an ankle-length tunic;^[2][4] Gaffiot gives it there as a long trailing robe.^[2][4] Seneca uses the word for an instrument of torture,^[2][4] and says of an illness that it began to tighten the tālāria.^[2]

It was also a word for shoes: bilingual glossaries equate it with Greek words for shoes and sandals,^[6] and Old High German glosses of about 1000 render it with words for shoe.^[5]

Timeline

• 81–43 BC – Cicero writes of winged sandals.^[2][5]
• 70–19 BC – Virgil uses it in the Aeneid.^[2][4][5]
• 57/46–12 BC – Propertius uses it.^[2][5]
• 43 BC–18 AD – Ovid gives the winged sandals to Perseus.^[2][4][5]
• 4 BC–65 AD – Seneca uses it of an instrument of torture.^[2][4][5]
• 25–101 AD – Silius Italicus uses it.^[2][5]
• c. 1000 – Old High German glosses render it as “shoe”.^[5]

Meanings

Noun

1. Winged sandals, wings fastened to the ankles.^[2][4]
2. (perhaps) The lower part of an ankle-length tunic, the skirts.^[2][4]
3. An instrument of torture applied to the ankles.^[2][4]
4. (Medieval Latin) A shoe, sandal.^[5][6]

Related words

• tālāris
• tālus

Usage notes

Gaffiot also gives the sense “ankles” for one passage of Seneca's letters, which the OLD reads as the torture instrument.^[4][2]

References

1. ^ Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t Glare, P. G. W., ed. (2012), Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
3. ^ Lewis, Charlton T.; Short, Charles (1879), A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
4. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Gaffiot, Félix (2016), Dictionnaire latin-français, new ed. by Gérard Gréco et al. (Gaffiot 2016), online ed.
5. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Köbler, Gerhard (2010), Lateinisches Abkunfts- und Wirkungswörterbuch für Altertum und Mittelalter, online ed., koeblergerhard.de
6. ^ a b du Cange, Charles du Fresne, et al. (1883–1887), Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis, augmented ed. by Léopold Favre, Niort: L. Favre