Ancient & modern
The footballer David Beckham has had new tattoos imprinted on his arms, complete with Latin tags. One reads petfectio in spiritu, 'perfection in spirit', the other ut amem et foveam, 'to love and to cherish', translated into Latin from the Solemnisation of Matrimony in the 1552 Book of Common Prayer. What is going on?
Tattoos have a long history going back to 11th-dynasty Egypt (c. 2000 Bc). They were especially popular in Britain —Britanni, originally Pretani or Priteni, meant 'painteditattooed people' (cf. Latin Picti). These days they have become a form of heraldry, marking the body rather than the shield with one's personal 'coat of arms', for sexual as well as social purposes.
When the idea of heraldry first emerged from the Crusades in the 12th century, mottos tended to be in French, usually battle cries (Dieu et Mon Droit!). Latin, however, came into favour from the 16th century. One can perhaps identify three broad reasons. First, over the centuries, Latin had acquired claims to a sort of universality. It had been, after all, the common European language of politics, religion and education from the fall of the Roman empire onwards. It was therefore neutral and could be universally applied. One notorious example is the use of the model of Latin grammar to describe modem languages, however little the language in question actually resembled it. English, for example, has no inflected case system, but that did not prevent generations of schoolchildren saying, '0 table'.
Second, as the Frenchman Ferdinand Brunetiere said, 'There are languages that sing, others that draw or paint. Latin engraves, and what it engraves is ineradicable. One might say that something that is not universal or ineradicable cannot be Latin.' Latin, in other words, surviving in countless bronze and marble inscriptions, established claim to being the eternal language: put it in Latin and it will last for ever. No wonder 20th-century fascist Italy, with its will to power and immortality, revived the Roman epigraphic tradition.
But Latin was not only a language with a vocation to state the universal and eternal. It was also the language of cultural aspiration. A Latin motto bestowed an indefinable class on a family, business or football club — and now on a footballer? The fact that Beckham chose to have words in English from the Book of Common Prayer translated into Latin makes his case all the more interesting.
Peter Jones
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