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Page 5.

Insight and Translation

In the summer of 2005, as I was researching Roman topology for A Walk in Ancient Rome (a virtual tour of the ancient imperial capital), the Sator Square floated up in some accidental context.

When I first wrote this paper, to my knowledge, to date no exemplar of the Sator Square had yet been found in or near Rome itself. More recently, I have read of an exemplar being found in the ruins under or around a basilica dating to ancient Rome. Had there not been any, that might have set up some need for speculation. As it is, it is perfectly logical to see a find in the area of ancient Rome (which is much smaller than modern Rome). Many of the late Roman structures were built on earlier ruins dating to the pre-Christian era, so no Christian connection need be inferred. At the time of my initial interest in solving this mystery, the closest known were two exemplars from Pompeii, the city destroyed by volcanic ash and debris in 79 CE. Since Pompeii became a sort of time capsule in that year (under the Emperor Titus), we have clear proof that the palindrome in its final form was already existent. That does not necessarily mean it originated in Pompeii in the years just before 79 CE or AD.

In 2005, I did not go looking for Sator. Sator came looking for me, like a cat rubbing against my ankles and purring to be noticed.

I did notice, and it still took me at least two weeks to understand that, contrary to all previous scholarly guesses, the Sator Square consists not of one symmetrical sentence, but two uneven or asymmetric sentences juxtaposed in ironic overall meaning.

As I looked at the words, sator arepo tenet opera rotas, and their usual translation into a single sentence (e.g., some form of the order The sower Arepo holds the wheels with effort, the word rotas caught my eye. That was the first of a series of game changing moments for me.

Rotas can be translated in two ways. One is the noun usually associated with the Sator Square, the wheels, as the direct object of the verb tenet, holds. That in my opinion is entirely incorrect.

What if we translate rotas as a verb? It translates as the present indicative, second person singular, you turn. Apparently, nobody has done this before, so I was walking (to borrow the expression) on untrodden snow or soil.

This opens the Sator Square to a totally new translation. If rotas is a verb, this means we have not one sentence but two. The first sentence has tenet, holds, as its predicate. The second sentence has rotas, turn as its predicate.

A couple of things took me several more weeks to puzzle through. What I ended up with was:

God holds the plow,
(but)
you turn the furrows.

That is the meaning of the Sator Square (or, as some sensational thriller writers might say, the Sator Code).

That is the core of my result.

A surprising amount of consequence follows from that point.

I have concluded that the Sator Square is an ancient aphorism, or motto, entirely in Latin, informed by the agricultural society of early Latium. Rome may have been (arguably) the largest city on earth before London in the 1800s, or one of the largest, but her culture was nurtured in the soil. The Roman was a farmer at heart.

The earliest known exemplar of the Sator Square, found in Pompeii, can be dated as sometime not long before the explosion of Mt. Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii and nearby towns in 79 CE. Since the Sator Square aphorism is not found in any surviving literature, it had to be a popular construct. For several reasons, beginning with the seeder and plow motifs, it probably originated in the countryside, rather than in among the luxury resorts of the Bay of Naples. Since it is Latin, and since the area around Neapolis was part of Magna Graecia (Greater Greece, the name for the collective colonies of Classical Greek city-states in Italy and Sicily), it is likely that the Sator Square was at first a spoken aphorism further north among the farmers of Latium. They might have said: Sator aratrum tenet, sed opera rotas, "God holds the plow, but you turn the furrows." When this became a written artifact, cleverly shoehorned into a palindrome, the sed (but) was dropped, and aratro or aratrum was shoehorned to become arepo. I suspect that Carcopino, if he were still with us, would be delighted at this approbation of his instinct.

Let us take the individual words again, one at a time.

Sator

God—for the moment can be either the monotheos (one God) of Jews and Christians, or Jupiter of the polytheists.

Arepo

Arepo is a shoe-horn of aratro. By shoe-horn, I mean a word form that is forced into a lesser number of syllables, as we might write lite for light or rite for right. The reason for this is obvious--to fit it into the five by five format of the Sator Square. All that the creator of such a square needed was for the reader to readily understand what was meant. And that understanding would be clear from context, as I will show.

Aratro is an ablative case or possibly even a dative case declension of the noun atratrum, -i (n)., plow, meaning 'by means of a plow.' As we saw, Jerome Carcopino picked up on the Gaulish word arepennis, half-acre, which is related to plowing. But, even deeper, I have found a common root in the PIE:

This stem forms the root or basis for many words related to earth, plowing, etc. in the languages derived from PIE, like Latin and Gaulish . The e written backward is a sort of schwa-sound. This can be found in Julius Pokorny's Indo-Germanic Dictionary*, and other PIE lexicons.

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Note in passing that there is an obscure usage of teneo, mentioned in Cassell's Latin Dictionary*, whereby its object takes the dative case when used in the sense of 'holding for' or 'making for' a destination. It appears to be used with the idea of holding a tiller or sail, and in a more general sense to persevere.

The muddle is that we expect the plow to be a direct object, ending in –um, but that is one of the blemishes of the Sator Square, which I will address shortly.

In Latin, it was common to add a neuter suffix like –um or -mentum to a verbal (participle) as a generic 'thing of.' It’s sort of the ending of last resort, when the gender of an object or condition is unclear. It’s kind of like saying “that sugar thing” when referring to diabetes, as a quick example.

We do this in English with suffixes like -ment, -ation, or -ity. For example, the verb arguo, arguere (to explain, put in a clear light) takes the participle (a verbal that is used as a noun or adjective) argutus, -a, -um, depending on the gender, but the common form is argumentum, hence English argument. Similar considerations apply to many other words, like implementum, imperium, instrumentum, etc.

So I'm postulating that whoever invented the Sator Square as a written artifact had to shoehorn something into the second slot to not only fit the five by five format, but also to make sense in context. The closest they could come was arepo.

Who did this? I imagine a clever aristocrat, sipping diluted wine among his peers on a honeyed, balmy afternoon in some Pompeiian villa perhaps, steeped in Homer and Virgil, and outdoing each other in cleverness and conceits in elegant and educated conversation. I hope he (or she) won the laurel crown for best party trick that evening. But the saying itself was probably much more ancient by then, because the entire metaphor smacks of farm and soil and toil.

Here is a remarkable (stunning) bit of concordance to my theory, found in the first known instance of the Sator rebus (in Pompeii), which cannot be later than 79 CE (the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius).

An exemplar of the Sator Square in the palaestra, or exercise area, in downtown Pompeii, has what appears to be a stylized plow blade motif scratched directly over the o in rotas. Here is a cleaned-up version (Federica Pagliari*) of the grainy photograph of the original sgraffito scratched into the wall:

The object above the T in ROTAS is almost certainly a plow blade. The Romans employed a primitive form of cutting plow, unlike the more sophisticated Gaulish (arepennis) deeply cutting plow that came later. In my opinion, this startling image really tends to tighten the connection between arepo and plow, and the entire metaphor as I have reconstructed it.

Latin, unlike English and most modern European languages, is a highly inflected language. That means a lot of information is contained in the endings of words. The ending of most nouns tells us the gender, number, and case of the noun.

Often, the ending of the noun also tells us the use in the sentence, by its case, although that has to be understood in context. With verbs, similarly, the ending tells us the person (first, second, third), number, and tense. This means that you can mix up the order of most Latin sentences, and they'll almost always continue to mean the same thing.

By contrast, in English we have to look to the context and sentence order to get the meaning. "Gerard plucks the rose" does not mean the same as "The Rose plucks Gerard" as it might, in Latin, with the correct case endings.

This loss of inflectedness is a key reason why the Sator Square's meaning became lost after the fall of the Western Roman Empire around 500, and the beginning of the Medieval period.

Tenet

Tenet is the simplest of the words. It simply means "he holds," taking an implied masculine from the –or ending of sator.

The first sentence reads Sator arepo tenet, or God holds the plow. The ironic thrust can be understood when we consider its antithesis in the second sentence.

Let's look at our second sentence: Opera rotas, you turn the furrows.

Opera

Opera is an interesting word. First of all, it takes many meanings on the surface. It's like ordering "the works" on a pizza. Opera is the plural of opus, a work. Because the Latin people of Rome and other cities and towns in Latium were farmers, their original religion and culture were heavily agrarian.

For example, Mars was not originally a war god, but the chief agricultural god, a principal warrior against blight and drought. His name was variously Marmar, Mavors, and other variations. Roman religion is filled with agricultural and pastoral deities, from Faunus to Bacchus, from Flora to Maia.

Latin is also, like all languages, fluid across time and space. For example (one of many) consider that Ianus, the male deity associated with doorways and transitions—who became the two-faced god of January with an old face in back and a baby face in front—was originally Diana, a goddess of the moon and the hunt related to the archaic, feral girl-goddess Artemis of Homeric lore (who I suspect, by some other name, was already a female hunting deity in Stone Age times).

Bottom line: we must not assume that anything in ancient speech is fixed or permanent. Language is always a moving target. Grammarians and linguists don’t sit in the locomotive, driving the train, but usually end up trying to run after the caboose to catch up with spoken language. Those of us who are bugs on grammar, usage, and style however also know that the use of common rules greatly enhances understanding and accuracy in written communications (where body language and other circumstantials cannot serve to shade the meaning).

There is, in Classical literature, a figure of speech called metonymy (Gr meta, change + onoma, name). When we use this tool of speech, we substitute an attribute of something for the thing itself.

Modern teenagers may say wheels instead of car. "I’ve got wheels" in this context does not mean that the person speaking has several wheels hanging around his or her neck; it means he or she proudly owns an automobile.

In the same way, opera (works) has been used by some Roman writers (noted in Cassell's Dictionary* among other sources) to refer to farm work. I believe that is the case in the Sator Square. Opera refers to farm work, but more specifically, in the context of sator and arepo, it refers to plowing.

Rotas

Rotas, if understood as a second person, singular, present indicative verb ("you turn") makes the direct object (opera) of this short sentence even more specific. You are turning the furrows with the plow. Opera refers specifically to the resulting work of the plow. The person plowing cuts rows or furrows into the earth.

An explanation is in order about rotas. The 'turning' does not refer to wheels (a noun or substantive). We do away with the notion of rotas as wheels in the context of plowing. The Romans at this point did not have the more advanced plow with wheels that helped steady it, which was actually a later Gaulish invention. The Roman plow was a much more primitive affair. It was essentially a scratch-plow, for cutting the earth.

Rotas, therefore, has two senses or subtle meanings here. The obvious meaning is that the person operating the plow must turn it at the end of the field to create the next furrow. Interestingly, the ancient Romans had long, narrow properties to minimize the need for turning cumbersome oxen (horses were not standard for plowing). The subtle meaning is that you, the plower, constantly guide the plow, while Jupiter only holds it in his figurative and moral possession.

So what does the Sator Square really mean? Why is it important enough to appear across the empire in important places like military headquarters and public squares?

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