Etymologically
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talaria

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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]

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