6 January 2021

Titulus

Speakers of Latin generally say titulus to mean the name of a book. This is not completely unfounded, but the much preferable word is inscriptio. (As far as verbs go, titulo and intitulo are late barbarisms, but it’s good Latin to say ‘liber inscribitur ___’ or ‘librum suum ___ inscripsit’.)

Titulus means, in the first place, a label written on hard material, like a tombstone or a statue. In Augustun period, it could refer to a book or chapter’s name: but even here, I think, the word almost always referred to the physical heading itself, and not the book or chapter’s name in the abstract. Thus Ovid wrote ‘nec titulus minio, nec cedro charta notetur’, and Martial:

Addita per titulos sua nomina rebus habebis;
Prætereas, si quid non facit ad stomachum.

Or else it had a slightly negative connotation, and referred to the book’s heading as an extraneous disguise of the book itself, just like we talk of judging a book by its cover. ‘Me non pænitet nullum festiviorem excogitasse titulum’, wrote Pliny, and I think there was a hint of disdain in his word titulum, by which he meant a pompous decoration which he had chosen not to put onto his book. Titulus was not used even in this sense by Cicero, who always used inscriptio for the name of a book . Estienne Dolet noticed this, and in his Commentarii linguæ latinæ (1536), under the entry Inscriptio, he wrote: ‘inscriptio est, quod vulgò titulus dicitur, & planè Barbarè marca.’ (1) ‘An inscriptio is what is popularly called a titulus, and utterly barbarously a marca.’ This is one of many places where we should obey the great master.

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(1) Vol. I., col. 1272.

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