Riggsby/Fear:1

I. Introduction: Cognition, Semantics, and Philology

As the organizers have pointed out to us, there has been a strange lack of attention
to fear, at least in the broader classical culture.1 That gap in the research pulled me
toward a very basic and, in many respects, old-fashioned approach. As a starting point, I
want to look at fear by looking at Latins many words for fear, the Lexicon of my title.
There is a long tradition of glancing attention to the question in the context of language
pedagogy, primarily in Latin prose composition. There have been a few more scientific
studies, both general and author-specific (HO). Yet, even in traditional philological terms,
this is still a task that hasnt been completed, but I hope also to add two other things
rooted in two of my long-term research interests. Ive long been concerned with the
cultural relativization of the process of persuasion. Here I want to look at how the lexicon
of fear helps form the rhetoric of fear. How does the shape of the notion of fear make it
useful in specific, particularly political, contexts?
But to do that, we must first define that shape. To that end I want to suggest a
cognitive approach, and here I have a fairly specific model in mind as a starting point,
Robert Kasters excellent 2005 study Emotion, Restraint, and Community in Ancient Rome.
Here he studies what he calls the emotions of social inhibition, such as shame, disgust,
envy, regret. In this book, he specifically disclaims the attempt to explain the Latin terms
by studying the few native-speaker definitions or by picking English glosses. (So, in fact,
is not a study of shame, disgust, etc. but of pudor, paenitentia, verecundia, and invidia)
Moreover, he studies the contexts and associations of each term throughout the corpus
and constructs for each a stereotypical script describing its operation. For instance, a
pudor-experience involves me seeing (in fact or prospectively) myself being seen in
discreditable terms, which in turn leads to an unpleasant psychic response, and perhaps a
blush. Moreover, there are a number of optional by standardized tracks through which
the the story may flow, depending on whether, say, the discredit is due specifically to

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inappropriate extension, retraction, or lowering of the self. All of the main possibilities
are graphically summarized in the chart I reproduce on the handout. By contrast,
verecundia is a feeling that averts one from overly self-assertive action (that would injure
anothers face) and overly self-effacing action (that would injure ones own). Its script
involves the constant (re-)calculation of relative social standing as a guide to on-going
action.
I said that I hoped to offer a cognitive account of fear. In fact, Kasters study is
cognitive in two senses. On the one hand, that is an apt description of his general
approach to semantics. It has been observed that words are often best defined not by
catalog of abstract necessary and sufficient conditions, but by reference to mental model
which builds in assumptions about how the world works. The two classic (if not 100%
uncontroversial) examples are the English words bachelor and lie. Bachelor has
been defined as something like unmarried adult human male. The pope is an
unmarried adult human male, as was John Cage but most of us would hesitate to
describe one or both as bachelors. The term is built into a frame of reference that defines
a normal life course, from which Benedict and Cage opted out entirely. Thus the
question of whether either is or is not a bachelor is in a sense incoherent2. Kasters pudor,
etc. are defined with respect to a complex world that models a great deal of social
organization. So, for instance, the notion of self-assertion is such that neither slaves nor
soldiers have verecundia since neither (in different ways) is in charge of their own selves.
Such an approach could obviously be applied to the study of almost any words.
But Kasters study is also cognitive insofar as it puts cognition at the heart of the
particular emotions he studies. That is, a crucial step in the scripts for all the emotions he
studies the the judgment that this or that state of affairs obtains. Paenitentia requires that I
judge that OTOH an actual situation X exists (say, that I have a healthy piece of fruit) but
that OTOH X falls short of some notional alternative Y (say, the triple-chocolate layer

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cake I could have gotten). Judgment is of course a cognitive feature. Now, such a
study does not exhaust list of questions one might wish to ask about an emotion. It might
not even address the most important ones, at least those most important to some. Still,
the departitioning of cognition and emotion is an important point. It is conceivable that
there is such a thing as a cognition-free emotion (perhaps in a less socially-defined
sphere), but that is emphatically not something that can be assumed.
Kaster doesnt make much effort to separate these two arguments, these two
senses of cognitive. Ive spent so much time on it becauseto anticipate some of my
conclusionsfear is most productively studied in a slightly different way than shame.
On the one hand, my general approach is cognitive in the broader sense, and Im fairly
close to him on matters of pinrciple. To carry out that program, however, will require
considerable difference in detail and in particular the introduction of some additional
mechanisms of lexical semantics. On the other, while fear also has a cognitive
component, its role is slightly different than in the case of shame. I hope it will be
particularly interesting to compare a more basic emotion like fear to the more social
emotions to see if there is a difference in how cognitive they are.3
A brief outline, then, of my talk:
1) I examine the generic features of fear as they appear from a lexical study. Most of these
will be unsurprising to those of us whose intuition is English-based, but that perhaps
makes it all the more important to note the differences.
2) I will argue that this picture of fear not only defines a general semantic field, but in fact
serves as a definition for each of the individual terms, which are thus (at least in some
sense) synonym.
3) At the same time there are observable (if only statistically so) differences in usage
context of the various terms.

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4) The observations in (2) and (3) can be reconciled by means of a revised model of how
lexical meaning might be represented.
Parts (3) and (4) will be more interwoven that this outline suggests, but I think this gives a
fair idea of where I am going.

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II. The Basic Fear Process

Quite a number of different Latin words could brought into a discussion of fear.
I wil generally limit myself to the most important nouns and verbs. Respectively, these
are: metus, timor, and terror (and to a lesser extent pavor and formido) and metuo, timeo, and
vereor (and to a lesser extent pertimesco and horreo). But before I attempt any kind of
distinction, let me try to lay out some commonalities of Roman fear. We can describe the
stereotypical process or experience in roughly the same kinds of terms as Kaster.
The fear experience begins with attention to a potential state of
affairs, which is significant and undesirable to the experiencer. The
judgment that this is so produces a variety of reaction on the levels of
the mental, the physical, and of action-orientation that I will describe
below.
Before proceeding with my attempt to support these claims, it is worth reiterating a
methodological point. I take it that whats cognitive about this analysis lies mostly in
the bundling of features (for instance, in the form of a narrative), many of which will not
be visible in any given occurrence of a fear term.4 More positively, we should we be
especially interested in passages in which there is not just association, but presupposition,
unspoken inference or unexpected surprise. So, for instance, the difference between a
phrase like bright but uneducated (perfectly understandable) and the superficially
parallel bright but educated (at least surprising, if not entirely inexplicable) tells us
something about the assumptions about intelligence and education underlying those
various words.
The most obvious component of Roman fear for an American audience is probably
the undesirable element, which Ill call simply bad. Often this rises to the level of
actual threat or danger, as illustrated by frequent association with words like periculum
and minae/minor, for instance:
Nam timor abit si recedas, manet amor, ac sicut ille in odium hic in
reverentiam vertitur. Plin. 8.24.65

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But actual harm need not be in view. The source of fear need only be dispreferred. Here
the most common parallel is with odium/odi, whether in a humorous incarnation:
omnes hi metuunt versus, odere poetas. Hor. Sat. 1.4.30
or in the more ominous but proverbial:
oderint, dum metuant.
Dum implies a at least compatibility between hating and fearing, and the fact that this
particular expression became regularized [Otto #1277] suggests a closer tie than that.
Perhaps the point is made most directly, however, in cases where we have a verb of
fearing with a clausal complement, the fear clause both hated and feared by students of
Latin prose composition:
Metui, si impetrasset, ne tu ipse me amare desineres. Att. 6.1.56
While examples can certainly be found where the source of fear is in fact dangerous,
examples like this with little or no sense of danger are perfectly ordinary. Finally, it is
perhaps not entirely trivial to point out that the badness of the bad thing is observer
relative. Thus Cicero finds it disparaging, but not incoherent to claim that his enemies
fear peace:
non modo non expetere pacem istam sed etiam timere visus est. Att.
7.8.4 (cf. Brut. 1.15.4)
(Here he is speaking of Antony, in turn speaking on behalf of Caesar, before the outbreak
of civil war.) He, of course, regards peace as good in both these cases, but can model his
foes thoughts well enough to attach the fear label appropriately. The same point
perhaps lies behind the Stoicizing claim in the Tusculan Disputations (4.13) that the truly
wise man does not feel metus, but cautio. From this point of view, any assessment of an
external as bad is inherently mistaken, but that does not make the fear any less real, it
just makes fear a common error. Conversely, fear can be faked, say to conceal envy (Phil.
5.48). Here, some surely see a real evil (too much power for Octavian), but Ciceros
targets hide behind this to euphemize their jealousy of Caesars heir. Hence they do not
actually fear.

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Only slightly less obviously to an audience raised on Anglophone fear, the object
of attention must rise to a certain level of significance. Otherwise, the beholder will
contemere instead:
timebam Oceanum, timebam litus insulae; reliqua non equidem
contemno, sed plus habent tamen spei quam timoris magisque sum
sollicitus exspectatione ea quam metu. Q.fr. 2.15.4
There are several contrasts involved here, and I will return to the others shortly, but for
now I just want to note the first one. It involves the issue of presupposition I raised a
couple of minutes ago. Cicero professes not to fear a variety of bad things and feels the
need to explain that that is not (as his audience would apparently assume) because he
does not take them seriously. Or consider this example:
mortem, quam etiam...Erechthei filiae, pro patria contempsisse
dicuntur, ego vir consularis tantis rebus gestis timerem? (Sest. 48)
Now, Cicero does not mean that death is actually desirable; he is not contemplating
suicide. Rather it is a minor ill in the context of a danger to the state as a whole.
(Incidentally, we will also return to the gendering of fear later.)
We see a greater divergence between English and Latin fear when we turn to my
third term, potential. Latin fear, I suggest, is generally and perhaps necessarily a matter
of suspense. Cicero says as much in the explicit definition of metus offered at TD 5.52:
Est enim metus futurae aegritudinis sollicita exspectatio
We just saw a passage (Q.fr. 2.15.4) in which hope was the opposite of fear, and there
are many other such. Rather than cataloging these, however, let us look at a couple of
other kinds of evidence:
Iam misericordia movetur, si is, qui audit, adduci potest ut illa, quae
de altero deplorentur, ad suas res revocet, quas aut tulerit acerbas
aut timeat, ut intuens alium crebro ad se ipsum revertatur de Or.
2.211 (cf. Phil. 1.13)

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Here (and in a closely parallel example I wont quote) Cicero distinguishes two reactions
to largely the same set of bad things. In both cases, he fears for the future, but not for
the present. Or consider again Horaces line:
omnes hi metuunt versus, odere poetas
Why this distribution of hate and fear (besides the meter)? Let me suggest an at least
possible interpretation. The versus are particular poems yet to be written; they are still
potential. The poetae, by contrast, are with us already; they are a given.
The situation may be a little clearer if we bring in two further terms. A famous
letter of Ciceros appears to list a set of contrasting pairs:
laetitiam, molestiam, spem, timorem; Fam 5.12.5
Laetitia and molestia are clearly opposed, as are spes and timor. I would suggest that the
two oppositions are furthermore analogous, and that these four emotional states (each
describable in several ways) form a tight system.
future
bad

metus, timor, etc.

good

spes,
expectatio(?)

present/past
luctus, dolor,
aegritudo
laetitia, gaudium

So, then we can make sense of Ciceros grief over his own exile, versus his fear for
potential collateral damage to his brother:
a me tibi luctus meae calamitatis, metus tuae, desiderium, maeror,
solitudo ceciderunt? Q.fr. 1.3.17
He is already unhappy in his current state (miser, aerumnis, luctibus); it is the threat of
future dangers that makes him fear (metu, suspensus). Contrast passages in which, say,
fear and joy are paired. These turn out to be the kind of exception which proves the rule:
Obstipuit simul ipse simul perculsus Achates
laetitiaque metuque; avidi coniungere dextras
ardebant; sed res animos incognita turbat. Aen. 1.513-515

Riggsby/Fear:9
cum equites procul uisi non sine terrore ab dubiis quinam essent, mox
cogniti tantam ex metu laetitiam fecere Liv. 4.40.2 (cf. Sall. BJ 53)
In Livy we go not only from bad to good, but from uncertainty to certainty. Vergil
bifurcates they things resolved happily and the things still in suspense and perhaps bad.
That last point leads me to one other issue about how to write this part of the definition. I
have mostly spoken of present and future, as Cicero does, and this is certainly the
prototypical case, but Id like to at least leave open the possibility that uncertainty is the
real issue. You can in fact fear for something that has already happened (one way or the
other) if you dont know the outcome:
nullam me epistulam accepisse tuam post comitia ista praeclara...ex
quo vereor ne idem eveniat in meas litteras. Fam. 2.10.18
Despite the present subjunctive, Cicero (1) goes on to talk about past letters, and (2) seems
to be ironic in his chiding of Caelius. Thus I take it that not the supposed loss lies in the
future, but the learning of it.
Normally, however, uncertainty is for the future, and that brings up an interesting
instance in which fear is generally lacking in Latin: the sacking of cities. Consider
Caesars parody of worries of a Catilinarian take-over of Rome (via Sallust):
Quae belli saevitia esset, quae victis acciderent, enumeravere: rapi
virgines, pueros, divelli liberos a parentum complexu, matres
familiarum pati, quae victoribus conlubuissent, fana atque domos
spoliari, caedem, incendia fieri, postremo armis, cadaveribus, cruore
atque luctu omnia conpleri.
Grief, but no fear. Now, this is obviously a short passage, so the lack of any given word is
not too significant. But we perhaps have some idea of who offered these images, or at
least one of them. Ciceros Fourth Catilinarian, given on the same occasion, goes on for
more than a page on just this topic, and he does not mention fear either. Or rather, his
own fear comes up twice, but never that of the envisioned victims. And consider
probably the most famous sack in all of Latin literature, the fall of Troy in Aeneid 2. There
we find exactly one instance of fear:

Riggsby/Fear:10
Urbs antiqua ruit, multos dominata per annos;
plurima perque vias sternuntur inertia passim
corpora, perque domos et religiosa deorum
limina. Nec soli poenas dant sanguine Teucri;
quondam etiam victis redit in praecordia virtus
victoresque cadunt Danai: crudelis ubique
luctus, ubique pavor, et plurima mortis imago. (Aen. 2.363-9)
I would suggest that it is not a coincidence that this happens at the very beginning of the
episode. At this point the precise outcome, at least for individuals, remains in doubt. At
the end only dolor will remain. And to add one other set of examples. Caesar, a fan of
fear language in general, does not use it in any of the sacks in his work.
Fear then is taken to hinge on a number of judgments. This basic emotion has a
cognitive basis, just as the more social emotions studied by Kaster. Cicero even points
to this himself when he refers to a friends fear that she will not receive a hoped-for
inheritance:
sed Lepta ex triente. veretur autem ne non liceat tenere hereditatem,
omnino, sed veretur tamen. Att 13.48.1:
That the computation is wrong () still implies that there is a computation in the
first place. But, as we noted above, that does not make the fear less real, and that is not
surprising since it has other components.
A fear experience includes several reactions of different types. Analytically, we
might divide these into physical, mental, and what I will call action-tendencies. The
physical tendencies are shuddering, bristling hair, and (more rarely) turning pale.
Nothing surprising and I will not go into these. The mental effects are similarly intuitive
confusion and disturbance (abicio, frango, suspendo, perturbo):
multaque praeterea mortis tum signa dabantur:
perturbata animi mens in maerore metuque, Lucr. 6.1179-809
As for the action tendencies, this is another area where we see some divergence between
Latin and English. English fear tends to provoke what we call a fight or flight response,

Riggsby/Fear:11

not entirely for reasons of prosody. Latin, however, seems to lack fight almost entirely.
Instead, the typical options appear to be flight and paralysis. Fear disrupts the ability to
act a all (debilito, impedio, and recovery from same):
Is postquam magnitudine facinoris perculsus ad tempus non venit
metusque rem impediebat Sall. BJ 70
proprio in metu qui exercitam quoque eloquentiam debilitat Tac.
Ann. 3.67
Tum ille dixit, cum vix se ex magno timore recreasset, a P. Lentulo se
habere ad Catilinam mandata et litteras Cic. Cat. 3.7
More rarely, fear brings about some action. One of these is, of course, flight:10
Volsci, qua modo simulato metu cesserant, ea in ueram fugam effusi
Livy 6.24.11
The first of these is simply an example of a common association. The second tells us a
little more. The Volsci do not actually feel fear (at least not at first), but their flight makes
it natural to infer that they did. This shows a presumed association. The other instances
generally involve the imposition of a course of action from the outside:
Sic vocibus consulis, terrore praesentis exercitus, minis amicorum
Pompei plerique compulsi inviti et coacti Scipionis sententiam
sequuntur . Caes. BC 1.2.611
The former is an acute instance; the latter is chronic. In fact, it makes a common
association between fear and imperium, producing a generalized obedience to authority.
The net result of these action possibilities is well summed up by a passage from the
Philippics:
Dicebam illis in Capitolio liberatoribus nostris, cum me ad te ire
vellent, ut ad defendendam rem publicam te adhortarer, quoad
metueres, omnia te promissurum; simul ac timere desisses, similem te
futurum tui. 2.89
The person acting under the influence of fear, here Mark Antony, is not not himself. Now
this passage drips with irony. Tony Corbeill (2004:152ff) has recently showed us how
much Romans, especially of this period, valued self-similarity, principally expressed by
this very phrase. In general times, one wanted to be able to negotiate the social and moral

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worlds one the basis of clear information. In the ideal world, the good guys could really
be identified by their white hats, or at least by the modest cut of their togas. In Antonys
case, however, the illusion is actually preferable to the reality. But the important point
here is that fear is not a component of Antonys subjectivity, it replaces it. Similarly,
obedience to Octavian involved, for Suetonius, a loss of will:
quos metus magis quam voluntas contineret, Suet. Aug. 15.1
This aspect of the model ties in with another philological observation. The spatial
metaphors surrounding fear are overwhelmingly exteriorizing. One can go or be in metu,
in metum, ad metum, cum metu (or similarly with the timor and terror).12 Something can be
full of fear (plenus) in Latin, but this normally means it is a source, not the experiencer.
Ciceros formal, Stoic analysis makes fear a part of us, a dysfunctional passion, to be sure,
but something very much internal. Normal Latin usage, however, externalizes it. It is an
enemy of the self.13

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III. How Unified is Roman Fear?

Many of the terms in Kasters shame family overlap without quite being
synonymous. The same circumstances can evoke both, say, verecundia and pudor, even
(roughly speaking) the same features of those circumstances. So, for instance, Cicero
appeals to both in this letter to Curio:
Ego, si mea in te essent officia solum, Curio, tanta quanta magis a te
ipso praedicari quam a me ponderari solent, verecundius a te, si quae
magna res mihi petenda esset, contenderem. Grave est enim homini
pudenti petere aliquid magnum ab eo de quo se bene meritum putet,
ne id quod petat exigere magis quam rogare et in mercedis potius
quam benefici loco numerare videatur. Fam 2.6.1
Verecundia refers to the balancing of his own and Curios claims, to the internal dynamic
of the exchange. Cicero has some claims on Curio, but Curio has some face to maintain as
well. Does this favor tip the balance too far? Ciceros claim to pudor, on the other hand, is
oriented towards a more general evaluation of himself on the basis of how he negotiates
that transactionthat is on whether he is imagined to have engaged in a discreditable
extension of the self.
The various versions of fear, I will argue, are more tightly bound than this. As a
first approximation, l will claim that they are all synonymous, though I will eventually
want to return and interrogate the notion of synonym. I offer four lines of argument here,
in increasing order of complexity. The first two are essentially statistical claims about
frequency or co-occurrence. (1) The analysis of my first section could have been done on
a term-by-term basis. Of course, no number of demonstrated similarities conclusively
rules out differences, but they to tend in that direction. (2) The stylistic conventions of
literary Latin celebrated copia abundance, expressed in a variety of ways, but most
simply by a profusion of words to make the same point. Cicero complains of the burdens
of the consulship that he must bear all sufferings, all sorrows and tortures (omnis
acerbitates, omnis dolores cruciatusque perferrem; Cat 4.1). Of course, any proposed instance

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of this is open other interpretations. Cities are threatened ferro flammaque by fire and
sword throughout Latin literature not because the two are the same, but because their
very difference points to the whole range of possibilities within the super-category of
dangerous things. Or, even with words that overlap semantically, we might still see a
similar attempt to establish a range (ablatum, captum, coactum, conciliatum, aversum; lex
Acil. 3) or an escalation of degree or emphasis in a phrase like abiit, excessit, evasit, erupit
(II Cat. 1). As I say, this kind of reading might be defensible in any particular case, but it
is harder to imagine its application to the whole network of terms we are looking at here.
If we look for all the possible pair-wise combinations of fear and of to fear we find
that all are in fact attested, and and at roughly the frequency youd expect from the
frequencies of the individual words. It is impossible to prove the negative claim that this
distribution is due to some very delicate partitioning of the semantic field, but is is
certainly easier to suggest that the words are, in fact, interchangeable.14
The third argument is based on closer readings and in particular on what has been
called semantic echo. That term describes a situation in which a phenomenon is
described by some term in a given text, then shortly later the same phenomenon is
described by another term. Let me give a couple of fear-based examples.
Nam, quod M. Cicero de stilo, ego de metu sentio: timor est, timor
emendator asperrimus Plin 7.17.1315
The catalog of these cases could be extended at great length, but let me just point to the
summary tables 2 and 3 on your handout. On these I display all the possible pair-wise
combinations of words for, respectively, to fear and fear. For each pair, the upper
citation is to a passage which displays semantic echo. (I will return to the lower citation
shortly). Again, there is in principle room for reinterpretation of individual cases here,
though less than in the case of co-occurrence. One can imagine semantic echoing in the
case of two words that differ in degree (fear and terror in English) or in breadth (say,

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assassinate and kill). But it is also seems unlikely again that this could be extended
systematically through all the attested combinations.
My fourth argument also relies on close reading, but takes the converse form of the
previous approach. What I want to look at is the use of fear words in explicitly
contrastive expressions, and in particular in cases where there are multiple terms in both
parts of the contrast. As a concrete example, consider the following piece of modern
political rhetoric:
The economy we seek is one thats no longer based on maxed-out
credit cards...but rather one thats built on a solid foundation.
The items begin contrasted, here credit cards and the metaphorical solid foundation, are
the foci of the contrast. The fixed background terms are the topic. Some formal
variation is possible in the wording of the topic, as here between based and built, but
there is little room for difference in meaning at least under the metaphorical
interpretation we must attach to the second half. If all the variables are potential foci of
contrast the sentence becomes hard to follow and (at the least) rhetorically ineffective.
Again, let me give some fear examples:
metus hostilis in bonis artibus civitatem retinebat. Sed ubi illa formido
mentibus decessit, scilicet ea, quae res secundae amant, lascivia atque
superbia incessere. Sall. BJ 4116
Again, Ive checked all the pair-wise possibilities, and nearly all of them can be equated
by their shared position as topic of contrast. I give citations for these in the lower half of
each box in tables 2 and 3. Now this is a more specific rhetorical situation than cooccurrence or even echoing, so one would not expect it to appear too often, regardless of
the meaning of the underlying words. Still, one can check off most of the pairs, and in all
the ones not attested, one or both words are less common, so they co-occur more rarely.
One could go even further in constructing similar charts if one cross-referenced the
nouns and verbs (and adjective not even considered here). The point would remain the

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same. All these terms are synonymous in the sense that it is difficult to imagine a
circumstance in which any one could not be substituted for some one of the others.

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IV. Cracks in the Wall of Synonymy

Having made this claim of synonymy, let me now make, as promised, the reverse
claim. There are perceptible differences in the usage and even meaning of the various
terms weve just been looking at. The easiest to analyze would be passages which
explicitly contrast two of our words, and there are a couple:
Ubi [parentes] malunt metui, quam vereri se ab suis. Afranius 34
Quae res in civitate duae plurimum possunt, eae contra nos ambae
faciunt in hoc tempore, summa gratia et eloquentia; quarum alterum,
C. Aquili, vereor, alteram metuo. Cic. Quinct. 1
In both cases the difference seems to have to with a meta-judgment. That is, not on does
fear rest on an assessment of preference, significance, and the like, the choice between
vereor and metuo rests on an assessment of whether the existence of fear is itself a good or
at least natural thing. (Donatus prescribes something similar in commenting on a couple
of passages of Terence.) There are a few additional passage which lend themselves to this
reading, though they dont strictly require any distinction to make sense of them. For
instance:
Tenebat non modo auctoritatem, sed etiam imperium in suos:
metuebant servi, verebantur liberi, carum omnes habebant. Cic. Sen.
37; cf. Fam 8.10.1, Cat. 1.17, Her 4.48
On the one hand, this is not particularly surprising. Cicero himself lists metuo and vereor
in a list of pairs of potential-synonyms in de Oratore [3.117]; he doesnt explain why, but
the pairs all seem to differ in that one member is more ameliorative. Prose composition
books and dictionaries gloss vereor as reverence in addition to fear. Yet that does
nothing to explain the facts about interchangeability outlined above, and particularly the
use of vereor in the face of something like famine, nor Ciceros expressed uncertainty that
there is a difference in the first place. Moreover, if the difference is as straight-forward as
is sometimes suggested, then it is surprising that direct contrast is so rare.

Riggsby/Fear:18

So, what to do? Are they the same or arent they? To answer that question, I think
we need to take a hard look at notions like synonymy and even meaning, and to do
that well have to depart more radically from the kind of cognitive machinery that Kaster
used.
First, lets have another look at the schema I reproduced at the beginning of the
handout. At a glance, this kind of tree-diagram looks very much like the scripts
developed by Shank and Abelson, whose language Kaster borrows (HO). But in fact it is
rather different. All the steps in a traditional script tree represent stages in the action; the
branchings represent different, essentially narrative, paths that action can take. In
Kasters diagrams, the script proper is compressed in the top line or two. The
subsidiary branching organizes various salient features and free variables within that
narrative. Kaster seems to intend these trees as devices of convenience, not the graphic
realization of any stronger cognitive theory, but I think he is in fact on to something. The
long-term trend in cognitive science has been away from highly structured
representations like the Shank and Abelson scripts, with their fixed paths and multiple
types of components. This has be replaced in various ways by networks with denser but
simpler articulation. The work is done less by being built into the structures themselves
than by assigning different weights to the various associations.17 The inspiration here is
of course the actual functioning of networks of nerve cells. The application to higher
level abstractions is, frankly, based more on analogy than direct observation or rigorous
deduction at this point. In particular, there seems to be little specific justification for some
of the more rigorously numerical formulations (except as a practical necessity for AI), but
still the approach seems to have been broadly successful. So, for instance, once the notion
of an evaluation is built into paenitentia, then is is easier to connect that directly to
domains of evaluation like utilitas and honestas, than to put those, redundantly, at a lower
level in the tree. Similarly, Kaster notes that all of his trees could be doubled up by

Riggsby/Fear:19

considering what he calls the dispositional and occurrent forms of the emotionsthat is,
the direct experience of each vs. the tendency to experience them. This is also better
treated by association than by repeating large, complex structures.
This view of cognition is that flattening out mental structure in this way tends to
de-modularize it, and that has specific consequences for the present project. Part of this is
already implicit in the first claims of my paper. The distinction between lexical and socalled encyclopedic knowledge has been questioned. Instead of knowing a language
and knowing about the world, our linguistic knowledge is part of the same database that
contains everything else. But the leveling goes further. The boundaries between
phonology, semantics, syntax, and pragmatics have started to come radically apart. Ill
go into this in some detail in a few minutes, but the basic idea is fairly straight-forward.
Distinctive features of the morphology of a word (say the fact that all the nouns have
defective paradigms) or its syntax (say, the different distribution of complements taken by
vereor, metuo, and timeo) not only can be relevant to its meaning, but are likely to be so.
Historical coincidences (say the purpose and directional uses of the preposition ad) are
likely to be more tenacious and substantive than is often imagined.
Finally, I will have occasion to talk about metonymy. Metonymy and metaphor
share similar life stories. Both were identified millennia ago, but for most of that time
have been thought of as marginal, peripheral features of language. In the past few
decades they have risen to new prominence as fundamental, central modes of thought.
Metaphor has perhaps been the more visible of the two, particularly in the general
academic public, thanks in large part to the tireless PR work of George Lakoff. But
metonymy is a similarly valuable tool, and I think it wil be of more use here.
Lets start with the verbs. In particular, I want to examine the three most common
of these: metuo, timeo, and vereor. Much of the analysis so far has been collocational.
What kinds of words appear with our fear terms? Classicists have been doing this for

Riggsby/Fear:20

centuries, just look at how our lexica are organized, and it is a perfectly legitimate
approach. However, recent work in corpus-based linguistics has pointed to certain
weaknesses in it as well. Any given collocation is likely to be so rare that it is hard to
make statistically interesting comparisons between two words on such a basis.18 This may
be addressed by what is referred to in the literature by the unfortunate term
collostructural analysis. This relies on broader patterns of usages, such as deviations of
actual paradigms from the notional norm (nearly all nouns in inflected languages are
essentially defective) and preferences for classes of modifiers or syntactic contexts. In
the linguistics world this work is generally carried out by teams of researchers working
with highly marked-up databases. Computers then troll through enormous amounts of
data comparing many, many features to suggest possibly significant points of contrast.
My research so far has been more individually hand-crafted, and so my conclusions must
have a much more provisional character. Still, I think I can offer some plausible and
potentially stimulating suggestions about how these words are related to each other.
I begin with two three-way comparisons in verbal compliments. All three verbs
can take the so-called fear clause, but there is a clear statistical distinction. This is the
normal usage of vereor; it is quite rare with timeo; and metuo falls somewhere in between.
All three can also be used absolutely, but with the reverse order of frequency: timeo most
commonly, vereor least so, metuo somewhere in between. Let me suggest immediately
very speculative explanation of these spectra, then go back and introduce a few other
observations which can be explained by the same hypothesis. Among all the components
of the fear process, vereor is most strongly associated with the execution of the judgments
early in the script. Timeo, by contrast, is tied to the experience that follows, perhaps most
specifically its psychological components. We might provisionally suggest that metus is
unmarked in this respect, not particularly tied to any part of the scheme, though I will
want to revise that notion shortly.

Riggsby/Fear:21

As for timeo, it has another property that fits this scheme. It is more likely than the
others to be quantified by adverbial modifiers (magnopere, valde, maxime, etc.). This is
easily explained if we imagine that the experience is more easily quantified than other
aspects of the experience. The contrast in usage is clear from a simple count, but a closer
reading suggests that simple counting actually understates the difference. A number of
the instances with metuo and vereor are of the following sort:
metuendus magis quam metuens Liv. 2.18.8
quinque consulatus eodem tenore gesti vitaque omnis consulariter
acta verendum paene ipsum magis quam honorem faciebant. Liv.
4.10.9
Here the quantification seems not to be of the degree of fear, but of the necessity
expressed in the gerundive construction or the source of fear (i.e. magis = potius).
Conversely, it may not be coincidence that timeo and metuo are placed as they are in Fam.
1.5a.2:
sed tamen, in eius modi perturbatione rerum quamquam omnia sunt
metuenda, nihil magis quam perfidiam timemus (cf. Cat. 3.3)
metuo is unqualified; timeo has degrees. The single case obviously doesnt prove much,
but it does illustrate the kind of distinction we might look for in the future.
As for metuo, I want to return briefly to a more collocational form of analysis.
Verbs of favoring and disfavoring (odi, amo, diligo) tend to cluster around metuo in
preference to vereor and timeo:
nolo ego metui, amari mavolo Plaut. As. 835
qui se metui quam amari malunt, Nep. Di. 9.5
Metuo is also closer to these verbs in regularly taking a direct object, rather than a fear
clause or standing absolutely. How can a noun stand in for a clause, given the kind of
judgment that has to be made as part of the fear process? Metuo seems to have a built-in
reflexivity. If I metuo some noun X, the default interpretation is that I fear that X will have
an (unspecified) bad effect on me. This collapses the temporal distinction somewhat (the

Riggsby/Fear:22

thing is present already, even if the danger is not), and brings metuo closer to odi, amo,
etc. But it remains unmarked and therefore unquantified.
As for vereor, I think it presents the clearest case for my hypothesis just on the basis
of the evidence of complements. If, however, we look at the few cases where it takes
something besides a fear clause, a secondary pattern appears. The explanation of this
pattern will require some additional machinery, so I will defer it a bit further, and move
on to the nouns. In doing so, I will again point to a combination of collocational and
collostructural features.19 Timor perhaps parallels timeo by stressing the the individual
experience(s). Hence, the fearful person is timidus, not metuosus. Terror is more sourceoriented. It is tied to the threats that produce the fear (and so is frequently associated
with minae/minor). This explains why deliberate spreading of fear is so often expressed
by infero terrorem, not timorem (or metum). All this is unsurprising in a word derived
from the verb for causing, not feeling, fear. Metus, by contrast, may stand for the fear
process as a whole (much as metuo does). Moreover, we may separate the three on the
basis of their different paradigms. Metus has no dative or genitive forms; timor has both;
terror has only the genitive. Timors genitive is very frequently used with causa or plenus
(the latter, as we saw, nearly equivalent), and its dative is most often the so-called dative
of purpose. All three are essentially ways of separating the cause of fear from its effect.
This is redundant with the generic metus or the source-oriented terror. Both also exhibit
the partive genitive; they (but not metus) are quantifiable.
Metus is also overwhelmingly the form of fear from which one is freed (libero).
The substance of this action generally involves removing the potential evil from
possibility:
ut intra paucos dies metu et periclo praesenti populum universam
liberarem impensa et cura mea. (Aug. RG 5)

Riggsby/Fear:23

But that doesnt really equal what has been done to/for the freed party. They have
been spared the process as a whole. Similarly, a variety of prepositions expressing
causation prefer metus over the other nouns (ob/per/propter/ex). Simply by being
unmarked, we might expect a statistical preference for metus, but I think there is a
stronger claim to be made. It is no particular part of the fear process that produces realworld results; it is the entire fear-process:
quidam militum iuxta rogum interfecere se, non noxa neque ob
metum, sed aemulatione decoris et caritate principis. Tac. Hist. 49
Now I have to come back to the verbs, and do so by way of a noun I have not
really discussed. I have largely left verecundia out of the analysis up to this point partly as
a matter of division of laborwe have Kasters excellent studyand partly on the
strength of conventionwe typically translate it not by fear but respect, reverence.
Let me add an additional consideration to suggest that the convention grouping of
verecundia with the shame words rather than the fear ones has some real basis in the
Latin. Kaster notes (mostly just to dismiss it) a common ambiguity in all his shame terms.
Each has an occurrent form, that is, the action experience of the emotion, and a
dispositional one, that is, a general tendency to undergo that experience. Now, there is
such a thing as a disposition to fear in Latin, but it is not represented by any of our fear
noun; rather it is called timiditas. Similarly the tendency to anger is not (generally) ira, but
iracundia. This suggests a distinction between what might be thought of as more basic
emotions (fear, anger) and second-order, social ones (shame, embarrassment, etc.). But a
distinction between primary and secondary doesnt itself explain the difference between
polysemy and monosemy. That, I would claim, has to do with a pragmatic requirement
of the culture. Most of ones life experience is neutral with respect to fear and anger, or a
least it is for most people. Social interaction, by contrast, requires constant monitoring
and judgment. That is, even if one does not feel pudor, verecundia, and the like most of the

Riggsby/Fear:24

time, it is still necessary to perform those judgments on an on-going (we might say realtime) basis both to avoid error ourselves and to assess the behavior of others. This need
may stem from a general fact about human social life or from Romes peculiarly
spectacular culture, or likely from some combination of both. More research would be
needed. What I want to take away from this discussion in the present context is the idea
that there is a principled reason to treat vereor as part of the fear network, while pulling
verecundia largely out of it. Vereor, as weve already seen, fits in well with metuo and timeo.
Verecundia exhibits behavior that would group it not with metus, timor, and the like, but
with pudor, invidia, and their cousins.
Vereor is typically used in one of two ways. One is with a clausal complement (I
fear that thus-and-such will be the case.) or with a pronoun that amounts to the same
thing (Thus-and-such may happen. This is what fear.). The other is with a direct
object, as is more common with metuo and timeo. When this construction occurs with
vereor, however, the range of nouns represented is remarkably narrow. Virtually all
express fear of an adverse evaluation by a superior and/or collective: paternum aspectum,
Stoicos, vituperationem, fratrem maiorem, auctoritatem, famam. Now this subset of uses
obviously takes us in the direction of verecundia, with its interest in social interaction, but
the parallel is not precise. The judgment is one-sided and external, like Kasters version
of pudor, not an internalized balancing act like we see for verecundia. The specialized
sense of vereor is thus a blend of its narrower sense and of the related noun. From the
former, it takes the absolute (not balancing) element; from the latter it takes a normative
force. To make this a coherent package in a Roman cultural context, the blend develops a
third, emergent property. To be authoritative, the judgment has to be from above (that is
a superior or the community). Thus vereor + noun is upward-looking in a way that
neither vereor + clause nor verecundia is.

Riggsby/Fear:25

V. Conclusion: More Cognition

The first point to be made is a reformulation of something I have already
suggested. I noted above the tendency to externalize fear. Let me suggest now that this is
a matter of a standing metonymy between the fear process and its components. The
modern, cognitive understanding of metonymy starts with classic part-whole
relationships, then generalizes them both to weaker connections (contact or even mere
adjacency) and to more abstract domains like time or causation. Its also worth noting
here, that it is probably necessary to posit this kind of mechanism anyway; Im not
making it up just to clean up this set of examples. So, to take another example from the
realm of fear, Greek phobos appears to derive from word originally meaning flight.
Cause and effect form a metaphorical adjacency pair, and so the diachronic evolution is a
simple metonymy. I propose to appeal to a very similar mechanism in a synchronic way.
The various fear terms are typically metonymic projections up to the shared referent of
the fear-process as a whole from different individual elements of the narrative. This is
straight-forward part-whole.

So, if the various fear terms are project from different parts

of the model, that accounts for two kinds of behavior. First, it explains the individual
differences in usage patterns. Timor shows up with causal constructions; metuo takes
persons as direct objects. Second, it explains why those differences are statistical rather
than absolute. Vereor has the closest attachment to the various judgment involved in the
fear experience, but it is not alone in having those connections. Once in a while, one of
those others will come to the fore, especially if non-semantic factors also come into play
(meter, assonance, variatio). This model might also be taken to explain a third set of facts,
the synonymy effects described above. If all point to the same set of features, then all are
in some sense equivalent. But I think that would actually be too facile. Shared features
might explain drifts in usage over time or shared associations, and perhaps even semantic
echoing, but it would not allow for the focus-topic phenomena I discussed. The

Riggsby/Fear:26

differences in association strength would still provide potential foci of contrast and so
unwanted ambiguity. Instead, I want to propose a different, stronger mechanism for
synonymy, which is (and I cant avoid the rhyme) metonymy, now in a second
application. The individual terms involve, in most cases, metonymy from part to whole
of the fear process (though metus and metuo may exist only at the top). But this brings
those terms into contact with each other in an other sense. That allow for them all the
intersubsitute by means of metonymy in the slightly broader sense: adjacency rather than
part-whole. That is, words that are close enough to start with can, in a sense, become
entirely the same at least some of the time.
When I began this project, I really was thinking about fear. My own fear, however,
is that in the end my topic has really become the lexicon and the question of how we
can even go about attributing meanings to words. Still, that may just be how things are,
and if words have this much structure to them, so much the better for ancient
practitioners of rhetoric or modern ones of cultural analysis. At any rate, I suspect that
the two projects (fear and the lexicon) are so entangled that one cannot make progress at
one without helping the other out. I hope I have made a small contribution this
afternoon.20
1 It is claimed in the advertising for this conference that [w]hile recent studies have contributed extensively to our understanding on how the ancients
conceptualized anger, shame, pity, and envy, less attention has been given to fear.. When I first read that, I thought thats absurd; that cant be right. Then, looking
seriously into the issue, I found that the organizers were of course entirely correct
2 As for lie, it has three main components:
a) speaker believes statement is false
b) speaker intends to deceive
c) statement is false
Experiments show these are not of equal weight in assessing whether a give statement is a lie, and I have given them in descending order. Yet the least important of
these, untruth, is far and away the most commonly cited by those attempting an explicit definition. Why? Without going into full detail, the central point seems to
be that lie is set in a world whose general assumptions about communication make A, B, and C equivalent. 1) speech is information transfer. 2) belief is
knowledge.
3 A technical note for those who want to try this at home. Kaster examined all instances of the salient words in the classical Latin corpus, in both their nominal and
verbal forms. I have used a smaller, but still quite substantial data base, the Perseus collection of texts, for two reasons. First, the fear words are far more common, so
even with the smaller set of texts, Ive been working with more individual instances. Second, this set of texts is searchable by the powerful Philologic system created

Riggsby/Fear:27
at the University of Chicago, allowing the mechanization of a lot of labor that would otherwise be unrealistic. When I make general statistical claims in this paper, it
is to this set of texts that I will be referring. For certain questions requiring more human input, I have restricted my self to the corpus of Ciceros writings. In part,
this is a matter of convenience and prejudice. Cicero is the Latin author with whom I am personally most familiar. But there is also a less egocentric reason. Cicero is
one of the three or four Latin authors most invested in fear, and two of the others (Lucretius and Tactius) already have studies dedicated to their use of the notion.
4 That approach, however, does not relieve us of traditional philological responsibilities. In fact, many of my arguments for the individual features below will hinge
on observing common associations and contexts of the term in the surviving corpus. I will, however, try to call special attention to bits of evidence that incidentally
reveal the bundling as well. I argued some years ago in a study of the Roman cubiculum (like and not like our bedroom) I will give particular attention to texts in
which the term cubiculum is used more-or-less synecdochically to signify a particular activity, even when that activity is not clearly described. When the space of the
cubiculum can be used as a figure for something else, it reveals a particularly strong association.
5 Quibus rebus permota civitas atque inmutata urbis facies erat. neque bellum gerere neque pacem habere, suo quisque metu pericula metiri. Sall. Cat. 31
6 Etiam illud verendum est ne brevi tempore fames in urbe sit. Fam. 12.12.1
7 or the similar distinction between past and future ills entirely within his own life:
equidem adhuc miser in maximis meis aerumnis et luctibus hoc metu adiecto maneo Thessalonicae suspensus nec audeo
quicquam. Att. 3.8.2
8 So, for instance, Cicero expresses doubts about a report from his sons tutor in the following terms:
non est fidentis hoc testimonium sed potius timentis. Att. 14.16.3
Now this could be read as fear for young Marcus future actions, but it seems to me at least as plausible that it is suspicion of his on-going character.
9 Interea Vespasianus iterum ac Titus consulatum absentes inierunt, maesta et multiplici metu suspensa civitate Tac. Hist. 4.38
10 omniaque erant tumultus, timoris, fugae plena, adeo ut, cum Caesar signa fugientium manu prenderet et consistere iuberet, alii admissis equis eodem cursu
confugerent, alii metu etiam signa dimitterent, neque quisquam omnino consisteret. Caes. BC 3.69.4
11 esse enim se provinciales et ad omne proconsulum imperium metu cogi. Plin 3.9.15, cf. Sal BJ 18
12 There are exceptions. To inicere fear is a well-established, if not wildly common collocation. But even this is used of groups with but two exceptions (Plaut. Cas.
587; Suet. Jul. 20.4).
13 This self-effacement also leads us to an ideologically significant point about the internal structure of fear. One the one hand, fear arises from an unrealized
potential, so in principle one might always hope to preempt the bad thing. On the other, the consequences of fear tend to prevent just that. Fear prevents action or at
least coherent actoin. As a practical matter, fear is then itself a bad thing. But it is also morally bad. It is, as Kaster notes in his discussion of verecundia, a vice for a
Roman (or at least an aristocratic male Rome) not to exercise a certain level of self-assertion. But fear, as weve just seen blocks that. Hence, fear not only allows the
potential evil to come to be; fear is several times said to be worse that the ill itself:
O vitam miseram maiusque malum tam diu timere quam est illud ipsum quod timetur! Att. 10.14.1
I noted above, in connection with Ciceros comparison of himself with the daughters of Erechtheus, that the emotion could take on a gendered force. Here I think we
see the source of that. Men are assigned a higher threshold of appropriate self-assertion, so fear is a greater danger.

14 The TLLs article on metuo provides a helpful chart showing the number of instances of that verb and of timeo as well as of the noun metus and timor. While a more
sophisticated analysis might become available, I would suggest there is no real pattern here, except that authors who prefer one verb tend to prefer the corresponding
noun [CHECK]. The lack of any coherent pattern based on period or genre suggests idiosyncratic, presumably stylistic variatio among interchangeable terms.
15 veteranos non veremur (nam timeri se ne ipsi quidem volunt), quonam modo accipiant severitatem meam? Phil. 12.29
16 Cum perscribunt Flacco nominatim, nihil timent, nihil verentur; cum operi publico referunt, idem homines subito eundem quem contempserant pertimescunt.
Flacc. 44
17 Individual nodes are activated (possibly in different degrees), and then contribute to the activation or de-activation of their neighbors in proportion to these
associational weights. These effects feed on themselves until some kind of equilibrium is reached. Finally, the experience of this whole process alters the underlying
network by changing the weights to bias them in favor of the recently activated associations.
18 Instead, the analyst is forced to fall back on very subjective intuitions about the comparanda, merely pushing the original question back a step. I am less worried
than some linguists about the latter point, especially if such analysis is only part of the package. The statistical objection strikes me as more worrying
19 Metus largely lacks a plural; the other two do not. The choice of the plural is not critical to any (most?) of these passages, but is at least comprehensible. The fears
in question (whether timores or terrores) are in principle distinguishable as belonging to different people (you and I both fear the big dog in front of us) or different
judgments (you fear that Pres. Obama is a Socialist; I fear he is not):
sed nostrae consanguineus non mediocris terrores iacit (Att. 2.23.2)
Bis consul fuerat P. Africanus et duos terrores huius imperi, Carthaginem Numantiamque, deleverat (Mur. 58)
That is, they divide up the components of fear, and one of them comes in multiple copies.

Riggsby/Fear:28
20 One result of all this is to suggest that one of the terms Ive used a lot here has to go. The notion of synonymy has become highly problematic. Given the
enormous complexity of the cognitive structures that go into lexical semanticsweighted associations, metaphor, metonymy, blending, multiple framingits hard to
see how two words could ever mean exactly the same thing. Frankly, Im not even sure how self-similar a word can be. But we are left with analyzable pieces of
meaning, and standard ways in which they can be put together. Theres very little that is simply impossible in the construction of meaning, but some things are easier
and more natural than others. And the study of those constructions can be informative in two ways. On the one hand, to the extent that they tie in to the world
beyond fear (or whatever the theme of interest) they are revelatory of the culture more broadly. So, for instance, the gendered implications of fear discussed above
have clear (Roman) political implications. More subtly, the externality of fear could affect views of responsibility or the blending of vereor and vercundia the
difference between the latter and the fear-emotions in terms of the occurrent/dispositional distinction speak to the centrality of spectacle in Roman culture. On the
other hand, where there is rich polysemy, there is the most fertile ground for rhetoric. Although this is one of my principal professional interests, I have not really
engaged with the rhetorical consequences of my reading, let me end by suggesting one possibility. I have claimed that metonymy between the components of fear is a
crucial aspect of their structure. Once consequence of this, it seems to me, is that you can always choose to misunderstand an accusation of fear from your political
enemies. That is, you can always easily change the subject to the part of the fear process most favorable to yourself. So, for instance, when Cicero has to defend his
manhood after fleeing the city in the face of possible trial for state-sponsored murder, he can shift the object of concern so as to turn flight (normally the sign par
excellence of fear) into a positive action to prevent the evil. Hence, he has shown paradigmatic masculine resistance to the pitfalls of fear. This is the briefest possible
sketch, but I trust it is clear that the better we analyze this basic concepts, and particularly the ones that can appear the most natural, the better we can understand all
the social transactions they underlie.