Senior managing editor and logophile Andy Hollandbeck reveals the sometimes surprising roots of common English words and phrases. Remember: Etymology tells us where a word comes from, but not what it means today.
He heard it, but he heeded not — his eyes
Were with his heart, and that was far away;
He reck’d not of the life he lost nor prize,
But where his rude hut by the Danube lay,
There were his young barbarians all at play,
There was their Dacian mother — he, their sire,
Butcher’d to make a Roman holiday …
Thus wrote Lord Byron in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Canto IV, stanza 141). Published in four parts between 1812 and 1818, Byron’s long narrative poem depicts an English nobleman, Childe Harold — childe was a Medieval title for a young man who was a candidate for knighthood — traveling Europe and being disillusioned by what he finds.
In this stanza, Harold is in Rome, and when he witnesses the ruins of the Colosseum, he imagines the gladiatorial games that were once held there. But he does not focus on the jubilance of the crowds nor the glory of the victors, but on the final moments in the life of a gladiator who has lost. (The “it” that the fallen gladiator heard in the first line is, from the preceding stanza, “the inhuman shout which hail’d the wretch who won.”) In his final moments, the gladiator’s thoughts turn not toward his loss or to the glories of his past, but to his wife and sons back in Dacia, a land that covered modern-day Romania and parts of Ukraine in the Carpathian Mountains.
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage was a hit in its time … but its history and influence aren’t why we’re here. What this stanza contains as far as word history is the first known use in print of the phrase “Roman holiday,” in 1818.
You never can tell what parts of a poem will catch on with the public, but this particular story within the larger poem was often quoted over the coming decades, solidifying Roman holiday as a set phrase in people’s minds. While Byron referred to literal Roman holidays, which often involved gladiatorial games — which involved, at heart, the killing and maiming of men for the entertainment of the crowds — the phrase “Roman holiday” took on a larger sense of any spectacle in which entertainment or profit was derived from the injury or death of another person.
Though we might not hear that particular phrase often today, it isn’t because that type of entertainment has disappeared: boxing and UFC fighting certainly qualify, as do certain genres of film, though the violence there is all special effects. Sadly, humanity as a whole doesn’t seem to be losing its love of graphic violence and pain.
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Comments
I appreciate Bob McGowan’s entiments, but “evolve” doesn’t necessarily mean to become better or more civilized. Albeit the customary assumption that that is its meaning, the word at its simplest means to change (from Latin, e-, out of +volvere, to roll; hence, to “roll” out of one state/place into another). Humanity is continually evolving new ways to be disgusting, hateful, hurtful, and deadly.
On the other hand, “devolve” doesn’t mean to evolve in a downward or backward direction. It means to transfer (from Latin, de-, down + volvere, to roll; hence, to “roll” downward from one person/organization onto another): responsibility for a mistake usually devolves upon somone who can’t evade it.
What a fascinating little stanza we have here from Lord Byron’s ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’. I did not get the full meaning at first glance. I must presume the vintage 1953 film ‘Roman Holiday’ was meant as festive, light entertainment; not THIS kind at all.
I certainly agree with your last paragraph, though I’d swap out ‘special effects’ for ‘standard crutches’. Humanity definitely hasn’t evolved with more education and technology than ever before, but in fact is devolving at an accelerated rate, which is both sad and frightening.