Etymon #67
Pots broken silently
The word entered English in the 1580s, centuries after the procedure it names had fallen out of use in Athens. Thomas North, a Cambridge-educated lawyer, brought an early form of the word into English in his 1579 translation of Plutarch’s Lives, which compared notable Greeks and Romans. It described a procedure that had not been exercised anywhere in the ancient world since the fifth century BC. Themistocles, the strategist behind the Athenian victory at Salamis against Persia in 480 BC, and one of the greatest military leaders in Greek history, later suffered it, at the hands of the Greek democracy his strategy had helped save.
Erasmus, the Dutch scholar whose editions of Greek texts helped drive the Renaissance recovery of the ancient world, used a Latin form of the word before 1536, translating a procedure most Europeans had never heard of. French scholars adopted their own version by 1535, describing the same forgotten procedure for readers hungry for classical Greek history. English took the word soon after, though scholars still debate whether it arrived by way of French, Modern Latin, or directly from Greek.
Behind the word lies a Greek word for a broken piece of pottery. Citizens used these fragments to vote on fellow citizens they saw as a threat to the state or a potential tyrant. Many Athenians could not write, so a scribe would scratch the targeted citizen's name onto a fragment of pottery on their behalf. The piled-up fragments gave the whole procedure its name. Further back lies a Proto-Indo-European root, *ost-, meaning bone, which also produced the Greek word for shell.
OYSTER and OSTEOPATHY share the same ancient root. OYSTER reached English in the late thirteenth century, from Old French and Latin, from the same Greek word for shell as this word. Shakespeare gave it its most famous line in 1602, in The Merry Wives of Windsor, when Pistol declares that the world is his oyster, his to prise open with a sword. OSTEOPATHY is newer, formed in 1857 from the Greek words for bone and suffering, and originally meant a disease of the bones rather than a way of treating them.
The procedure began in Athens around 506 BC, credited to Cleisthenes, the reformer who helped create Athenian democracy. It was first used nearly two decades later, in 487 BC, against Hipparchos, a relative of the tyrant Peisistratos, whose family had ruled Athens for over three decades before being driven out. For the vote to count, at least six thousand citizens had to cast a pottery fragment against the same person, a quorum high enough that the procedure was actioned only a dozen or so times in the century it was in use. By 1602 the word had taken on a broader, figurative sense, no longer needing a vote or a fragment of pottery. John Donne, the poet and later Dean of St Paul's Cathedral, used it before his death in 1631 to describe virtue itself turned away by the hearts of courtiers.
Nine letters.
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