#also tbh though i don't really have a strong enough grasp on bahorel's characters atm to say a lot abt him with much confidence | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

fluentisonus · 3 months ago

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@pilferingapples sure!! so in latin hercle is a short version of the interjection hercule (sometimes mehercule), which means "by Hercules!" -- hercule is pretty common & you get it all over the place from different authors (Cicero for example uses it A Lot), however hercle is something I at least (<- comedy enjoyer so grain of salt) really associate with roman comedy & that sort of 'style' of speaking, it's very characteristic of it & shows up as an exclamation/swear similar to this ^ almost constantly in the dialogue there (i think it gets used like more than 600 times across various plays iirc), and to my knowledge the majority of the examples we have of hercle being used in latin in general are from Plautus & Terence (the two main roman comedians that survive) -- hence why i was joking about Bahorel having gotten it from roman comedy & him mimicking that particular style & tone of speaking here haha

yayyy hercle....... bahorel latin comedy enjoyer Real

#hopefully that makes sense!!#also tbc i wouldn't say this means hercle is a genre thing per se like it's not inherently comedic so much as it's indicative of a certain #casual/informal/conversational way of speaking you get a lot more of in stuff like comedy than in other latin literature -- i wouldn't be #surprised if it's something a lot of people would have been saying on the street etc and that it just happened to be mainly comedy that #preserved that way of speaking. <- some of the other few places we get it iirc do seem to be more along those ordinary/conversational lines #But I would imagine to a guy in 1830s france that'd be the fastest/easiest way of acquiring that term Unless he just like picked it up from #a peer or something indirectly. idk much abt the post-classical use/reception dskjfhjsak maybe they were using it all the time #also tbh though i don't really have a strong enough grasp on bahorel's characters atm to say a lot abt him with much confidence #thoughts #les mis #also unrelated but an interesting fact is that using 'hercle' in roman comedy is something only men do - women would swear by #castor or pollux! <- men also swore by pollux but never by castor that was only for women. really strange & interesting conventions #plautus

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