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114 paolo poccetti
(42) Tullius Terentiae suae s(alutem) d(icit). (Fam. 14.12.1)
Tullius sends greetings to his Terentia.
(43) M. Tullius M. f. Cicero pro cos. s(alutem) d(icit) cos. pr. tr. pl. senatui.
(Fam. 15.1.1)
Marcus Tullius Cicero son of Marcus, proconsul, sends greetings to the
consuls, praetors, tribunes of the plebs, and senate.
In both drama and letters considerations of practicality make the thirdperson
address form usable without regard to register. In ordinary face-toface
interaction, however, such considerations would rarely have applied,
and such evidence as we have suggests that in oral interaction this type
of greeting was restricted to formal registers. One preserved example is
the customary address of the combatants to the emperor before games, as
recorded by Suetonius:
(44) sed cum proclamantibus naumachiariis, ‘have imperator, morituri te
salutant!’ respondisset, ‘aut non’, neque post hanc vocem quasi venia
data quisquam dimicare uellet, diu cunctatus an omnes igni ferroque
absumeret, tandem e sede sua prosiluit ac per ambitum lacus non sine
foeda vacillatione discurrens partim minando partim adhortando ad pugnam
compulit. (Suet. Cl. 21)
But when the combatants in the naval battle declared ‘Hail, emperor,
those who are about to die salute you!’ and he responded ‘Or not about
to die’, and after those words no-one wanted to fight, as if they had been
excused, he hesitated for a long time whether to destroy them all with
fire and sword, but finally he leapt from his seat and running around the
perimeter of the lake with his ridiculous wobbling gait compelled them
to fight partly by threats and partly by encouragment.
This greeting, though almost exclusively an oral utterance, was clearly
formal rather than colloquial. Indeed the sentence have imperator, morituri
te salutant is rhetorically constructed with a chiastic structure in which
two greeting expressions enclose the identities of the emperor and the
gladiators.
Another case of formal third-person greeting may come from an interesting
fragment of a praetexta attributed to Naevius: 7
(45) Vel Veiens regem salutat Vibe Albanum Amulium
comiter senem sapientem: contra redhostitur salus. (Naev. com. 5 R.)
‘Vel Vibe of Veii politely greets the wise old king Amulius of Alba.’ The
greeting is returned.
7 The text requires restoration: see Bettini 1982: 166, whose version is followed here.