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meaning but need to be seen merely as farewell formulae pronounced by
the living to the departing dead:
(23) Varro in libris logistoricis dicit, ideo mortuis ‘salve’ et ‘vale’ dici, non quod
aut valere aut salvi esse possunt, sed quod ab his recedimus, eos numquam
visuri. hinc ortum est ut etiam maledicti significationem interdum ‘vale’
obtineat, ut Terentius ‘valeant qui inter nos discidium volunt’, hoc est
ita a nobis discedant, ut numquam ad nostrum revertantur aspectum.
ergo cum mortuo dicitur ‘vale’, non etymologia consideranda est, sed
consuetudo, quod nullis ‘vale’ dicimus nisi a quibus recedimus.
(Serv. Aen. 11.97; cf. Riese 1865: 253)
Varro in his Libri logistorici says that for this reason one says ‘be safe’ and
‘be well’ to the dead, not because they are capable of being either safe or
well, but because we are departing from them, never again to see them.
Hence it arose that ‘be well’ can have even the meaning of a curse, as
Terence [has characters say] ‘be well’ when they want to get away from
each other, meaning ‘may they depart from us in such a way that they
never return to our presence’. Therefore when one says ‘be well’ to a dead
person, we should look not at the etymology, but at the usage, because
we say ‘be well’ only to those from whom we depart.
This contrast between the lexical and social meanings of such expressions
may give rise to puns, especially in Plautus (see Roesch 2005: 929):
(24) AR. vale, . PH. aliquanto amplius valerem, si hic maneres.
AR. salve. PH. salvere me iubes, quoi tu abiens offers morbum?
(Pl. As. 592–3)
AR. Farewell! PH. I should fare much better if you’d stay with me.
AR. And God bless you! PH. You ask God to bless me when you curse
me yourself by going?
When greeting formulae are used in funerary contexts a comparison of literary
documentation and epigraphic materials reveals a more complicated
picture. In address to the dead the difference between Latin terms for greeting
(salve,(h)ave)andfarewell(vale) is neutralised: the two are used together
to emphasise that real interaction with the deceased is no longer possible.
As is well known, this Latin distinction has no parallel in Greek, which
uses the same term () for both greeting and farewell (like modern Italian
ciao in colloquial speech). Indeed Greek means not only ‘hello’
and ‘goodbye’ but also a number of other things, including ‘welcome’ and
‘cheers!’, and so can be used in place of a wide range of Latin expressions.
The Romans’ awareness of this difference is revealed in ironic depictions
of those who imitated Greek manners. An instance is a well-known passage
in Lucilius, where T. Albucius, ‘who aspired to be more Greek than the