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How to say ‘please’ in Classical Latin

How to say “please” in Classical Latin

By Eleanor Dickey

The Classical Quarterly, Volume 62:2 (2012)

ancient romans

Introduction: When asked to translate into Latin an English word that had different Latin equivalents at different periods, a well‑trained Classicist normally produces the Ciceronian term; coming up with a Plautine word that was superseded or even largely superseded by the first century B.C. is the mark of a specialist in early Latin. But the word ‘please’ is different: when asked to give the Latin for ‘please’, Classicists have a tendency to think first of the Plautine terms sis and amabo, both of which are rare in the works of Cicero and indeed everywhere except in early Latin. This tendency has several causes. There is a striking morphological similarity between sis (contracted from si vis, ‘if you want’) and English ‘please’ (shortened from ‘if you please’); although in extant texts Latin sis does not really mean ‘please’ at all, this point of usage is often overlooked because of the morphological similarity to English ‘please’. Amabo is equally striking for other reasons: its literal meaning ‘I shall love’ makes no sense in context, and therefore readers of Plautus are forced to think about its ‘please’ meaning. Moreover, the Plautine ‘please’ words are very interesting both linguistically and socially, and much excellent work has been done on them. All these factors have led to a lack of attention to the Classical Latin polite request formulae; such lack of attention is a pity, for the Classical equivalents of ‘please’ present a subtle system of usage that amply repays further investigation.

In his detailed study of politeness in Cicero’s letters, Jon Hall discusses a wide variety of different strategies that Cicero and his correspondents used to make requests polite: as in English, politeness is often conveyed by indirect phrasing or other means that do not involve the use of ‘please’ equivalents at all. Hall’s study is most enlightening, but he avoids discussion of the meaning and usage of particular words in favour of concentration on when, how and why politeness was deployed in Roman letters. As a result, his work offers no answer to the question of how Cicero or one of his contemporaries would have said ‘please’.



Rodie Risselada has written extensively on requests and commands in Latin, which she analyses using speech act theory; although much of her corpus comes from early Latin she also looks at usage in later authors. Risselada provides much useful information on the words and constructions that Romans used to make requests polite, but because the focus of her work is elsewhere she does not address the basic question of how a first‑century B.C. Roman would have said ‘please’.

A ‘please’ equivalent can be defined as a word or phrase commonly attached to requests to make them more polite. By this definition there is of course a  sliding scale of frequency, and no absolute cut‑off point can be named. In English one expression, ‘please’, is by far the most frequent, but the same cannot be said of Classical Latin: there is no one word or phrase that is overwhelmingly more common than all the others. Instead there are four common terms that complement each other by being used in slightly different ways; these four terms are velim (‘I would like’), rogo (‘I ask’), peto (‘I seek’) and quaeso (‘I ask’).

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