CHAPTER V

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NAMES FROM ROMAN DEITIES.

SECTION I.

A short chapter must be given to the modern names that, in spite of the canon prohibiting the giving of names of heathen gods in baptism, are either those of Latin divinities, or are derived from them. These, though few in number, are more than are to be found in the Greek class, from the fact that where a Roman deity had become identified with a Greek one, the Latin name was used throughout Western Europe in all translations, and only modern criticism has attempted to distinguish between the distinct myths of the two races. Most of these are, or have been, in use either in France or England, the modern countries most under the dominion of fancy with regard to names.

Aurora (the dawn), so called, it is said, from _aurum_ (gold), because of the golden light she sheds before her, assumed all the legends attached by the Greeks to their Eos, whose rosy fingers unbarred the gates of day. When the Cinque-cento made classic lore the fashion, Aurore came into favour with the fair dames of France, and has ever since there continued in vogue, occasionally passing into Germany. In Illyria, the dawn and the lady are both called Zora, and she in endearment Zorana.[67]

Bellona was not a goddess whose name one would have expected to find renewed in Christian times, yet instances have been found of it in England among those who probably had some idea that it was connected with beauty instead of with _bellum_ (war). In effect, hers is not quite a proper name, being really an adjective, with the noun understood, _Bellona Dea_ (the war goddess). An infant born in the streets of Weimar during the sack that followed the battle of Jena was named Angelina Bellona, as having been an angel of comfort to her parents in the miseries of war. She became a great musician, and won renown for her name in her own land.[68]

The old Latin deities were often in pairs, masculine and feminine. Divus, that part of their title that is still recognized as belonging to the supernatural, is from the same source as the Sanscrit _deva_, Persian _dev_, Greek δῖος, 0εός, Zeus, and was applied to all. Divus Janus and Diva Jana were one of these pairs, who presided over day and night, as the sun and moon. Divajana became Diana; and as groves were sacred to her, and she was as pure a goddess as Vesta, there was every reason for identifying her with the Greek Artemis, and giving her possession of the temple of Ephesus, and the black stone image that “fell down from Jupiter,” or the sky; she had Apollo given as her fellow instead of Janus, and thenceforth was the goddess of the silver bow, daughter of Jupiter and Latona, as Artemis had been of Zeus and Leto. Her name slept as a mere pagan device till the sixteenth century, when romances of chivalry gave place to the semi-classical pastoral, of which Greece was usually the scene. Jorge de Montemayor, the Spanish gentleman who led the way in this flowery path, named his heroine, Diana, and she was quickly copied by the sponsors of Diane de Poitiers, the fair widow whose colours of black and white were worn by Henry II. of France even to his last fatal tournament. Diane thus became so fashionable in France, that when the Cavalier court was there residing, the English caught the fashion, and thenceforth Lady Dye at times appeared among the Ladies Betty and Fanny of the court. In the lower classes, Diana seems to be at times confused with the Scriptural Dinah, though it may sometimes be adopted as a Bible name, since a peasant has been known to pronounce that he well knew who was “greatest ‘Diana of the Ephesians,’—a great lady of those parts, and very charitable to the poor.” At Rome Jewesses now alone bear it, and Italian Christians consequently despise it, and only give it to dogs. However, in the eighteenth century, a Monna Diana existed at Florence, who is recorded as an example of the benefits of a heavy head wrapper, for a large stone fell upon her head from a building, and she took it for a small pebble!

Diana’s fellow, Divus Janus, had a very different career. He was sometimes called Dianus, but much more commonly Janus, and from being merely the sun, he became allegorical of the entire year, and had a statue with four faces for the seasons, and hands pointing the one to 300, the other to 55, thus making up the amount of days then given to the year; and before him were twelve altars, one for each month. He thus presided over the beginning of everything, and the first month of the year was from him called Januarius, as were all gates _jani_, and doors _januæ_; and above all, that gate between the Sabines and the Romans, which was open when they were friends, shut when they were foes. When the two nations had become thoroughly fused together, the gate grew to a temple; but the ceremony of shutting the doors was still followed on the rare occasions when Rome was at peace, and of opening them when at war to let the god go out, as it was now said, to help the Romans. This idea of peace, however, turned Janus into a legendary peaceful monarch, who only wore two heads that he might look both ways to see either side of a question, and keys were put into his hand as the guardian of each man’s gate. His own special gate continued to be called Janicula, and his name passed from the door, _janua_, to the porter, _janitor_; and thence in modern times to St. Peter, who, bearing the keys, was called by the Italians, _il Janitore di Cielo_, and thence the fish, which was thought to bear the mark of St. Peter’s thumb, was _il janitore_, or, as we call it, the John Dory, if not from its gilded scales, _dorée_ or _dorado_. Its Spanish name of San Pedro would favour the janitor theory. The month of Janus, Janvier, January, Gennaro, Januar, has kept its name, like all the other months of the Roman calendar, in spite of the French attempt to displace them with Glacial, Pluvial, &c. Birth in the month of January occasioned the name of Januarius to be given to various persons in the time of the Roman empire, to one of the seven sons of St. Felicitas, to a martyr whose day is the 13th of October, and especially to St. Januarius, of Beneventum, who in the persecution of Diocletian was thrown to wild beasts at Pozzuoli, and on their refusal to hurt him, was beheaded. His blood was already a religious curiosity before the eighth century, when it was thought to have delivered Naples from an eruption of Mount Vesuvius, and it furnishes one of the most questionable and most hotly-defended miracles of the Church of Rome. After this Gennaro cannot fail to be a very frequent Neapolitan Christian name.[69]

SECTION II.—_Florentius._

The goddess of flowers was called from their Latin name _flos_, the same that has passed into all European languages except the German. In late times the name of Florus was formed from that of the goddess, and is memorable as that of the procurator, whose harshness drove the Jews to their last rebellion. Flora was probably first used merely as the feminine of Florus. There is a church at Florence to SS. Fiore and Lucilla, otherwise the first occurrence of any variety of Flora is in Roman-Gothic Spain, where the unhappy daughter of Count Julian was called by the Spanish diminutive Florinda, and thus caused the name to be so much detested, that while Spanish ballads called her _la Cava_, the wicked, her Christian name was only bestowed upon dogs, and curiously enough it was the little spaniel (a Spanish breed), for which Flora was considered in England as an appropriate name. A Spanish maiden, however, who was martyred by the Moors in 851, brought Flora into better repute; and Flore became known to the French, though probably first adopted as a romantic epithet; and through the close connection between France and Scotland, it passed to the latter country, the especial land of floral names, and there became frequent as the English equivalent to the Gaelic Finghin. It was spelt as Florie by the island heroine of the '45. Florentius was the natural product of the goddess Flora, and named a female saint, Florentia, martyred with two others, both men, in Diocletian’s persecution in Gaul, and commemorated by a monastery built over the spot. St. Florentius was likewise a Gaul, and was sent by St. Martin to preach in Poitou. His relics were at first at Saumur, but in the eleventh century were taken to Roye, and in the time of Louis XI., were divided between the two cities. As an Angevin saint, he quite accounts for the prevalence of Florence in the masculine gender among the Anglo-Norman nobles of the middle ages; but it soon died away. The recent revival is chiefly owing to the name having been given to English girls born at the Italian city so called, and it has since acquired a deeper and dearer honour in the person of Florence Nightingale. From the city, or else as a diminutive of Florentius, arose Florentinus, a name borne by various distinguished persons in the latter days of the empire, and saintly in the person of a martyr of Burgundy. Florentina was one of the daughters of St. Leander, of Spain, and the relics of these saints scattered the names of Florentin and Florentine over a wide extent in France. Besides these, should be mentioned the romantic name, Blanchefleur. It is given to Sir Trystan’s mother, and probably translates some Keltic name analogous to the Erse Blathnaid, Finbil, and Finscoth, all of which mean white flower.

The Irish Florence, or Flory, so common among the peasantry, is intended for Finghin, or Fineen (fair offspring); also for Flann, Fithil, and Flaithri.[70]

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Footnote 67:

Keightley; Michaelis.

Footnote 68:

Keightley; Smith; Key, _Latin Grammar_; Madame Scopenhauer, _Memoirs_.

Footnote 69:

Keightley; Smith; Bouterwek; _Istoria de Firenze_; Brand; Butler; _Spanish Literature_.

Footnote 70:

Smith; Butler; _Irish Society_; Pott.

SECTION III.—_Laurentius._

It appears natural to refer Laurentius direct to _laurus_ (the bay or laurel); but there is reason to think that it, as well as the tree, must go farther back to the dim vestiges of early Roman mythology. From the Etruscans the Romans learnt the beautiful idea of guardian spirits around their hearths, whom they called by the Etruscan word _lar_ or _lars_; meaning lord or master. The spirits of great statesmen or heroes became public _lares_, and watched over the welfare of the city; those of good men, or of innocent infants under forty days old, were the _lares_ of their home and family. Their images, covered with dogskins, and with the figure of a dog beside them, were placed beside every hearth; and, curiously enough, are the origin of the name dogs, still applied to the supports on either side of a wood fire-place. They were made to partake in every household festival; cups were set apart, in which a portion of every meal was poured out to them; the young bride, on being carried across her husband’s threshold, made her first obeisance to these household spirits of his family; and on the nones, ides, and calends of each month, when the master returned from the war, or on any other occasion of joy, the lares were crowned with wreaths and garlands. Pairs of lares stood in niches at the entrance of the streets; other lares guarded districts in the country; and the lares of all Rome had a temple to themselves, where stood twin human figures with a dog between them. All these wore green crowns on festival days, especially on those of triumph; and thus there can be little doubt that the evergreen whose leaves were specially appropriated to the purpose was thence called _laurus_, as the poplar was from forming people’s crowns. The special feast of the lares was on the 22nd of December, and it was immediately followed by that of a female deity called Lara, Larunda, Larentia, Laurentia, or Acca Laurentia, who was termed in old Latin _genita mana_ (good mother), received the sacrifice of a dog, and was entreated that no good domestic slave might depart. Thus much custom had preserved to the Romans; but when Greek mythology came in, flooding and corrupting all their own, poor Laurentia was turned into a nymph, so given to chattering (λαλιά) that Jupiter punished her by cutting out her tongue and sending her, in charge of Mercury, to the lower world; and the lares, now allowed to be only two, were made into her children and those of Mercury. Another story, wishing to account for all traditions in one, made her into the woman who nursed Romulus and Remus, and thus disposed of her and of the she-wolf at once, and made the twelve rural Lares her sons; whilst a third version degraded her, like Flora, and made her leave all her property to the state, in the time of Ancus Martius.

Laurentius does not occur in early history; but it belonged to the gentle Roman deacon who, on the 10th of August, 258, showed the “poor and the maimed, the halt and the blind,” as the treasures of the Church, and was martyred, by being roasted over a fire on bars of iron. Constantine built a church on his tomb, and seven other Churches at Rome are likewise dedicated to him. Pope Adrian gave some of his relics to Charlemagne, who took them to Strasburg, and thus rendered him one of the regnant saints in Germany, where the prevalence of shooting stars on the night of his feast has occasioned those meteors to be called St. Lorenz’s sparks. In fact, his gentle nature, his peculiar martyrdom, and his church at Rome, caused him to be a saint of universal popularity; and a fresh interest was conferred on him, in Spanish eyes, by Philip II.’s belief that the battle of St. Quentin, fought on his day, was won by his intercession, and the consequent dedication of the gridiron-palace convent of the Escurial to him.

Besides the original saint, England owns St. Laurentius among the band of Roman missionaries who accompanied St. Augustine, and, in succession, became archbishops of Canterbury. When England, in her turn, sent forth missionaries, another Laurence preached the Word in the North, with such effect as to compel the Trollds themselves to become church builders, much against their will, and to leave his name, cut down into Lars, its primitive form, as a favourite in all Scandinavia. In Ireland, Laurence, whose name I strongly suspect to have been Laghair, a son of Maurice O'Tuathail, of Leinster, was archbishop of Dublin at the time of the conquest by the Norman adventurers, and was thus brought into close connection with Canterbury and with Rome, knitting the first of the links that have made the Irish so abject in their devotion to the Papal See. It was probably on this account that he was canonized, but he was also memorable as one of the builders of St. Patrick’s cathedral at Dublin, and for his charities during a terrible famine, when he supported as many as 300 destitute children. It is he who has rendered Lanty and Larry so common among the Irish peasantry. Besides all these, the modern Venetian saint, Lorenzo Justiniani, worthily maintained the honour of the Christian name already so illustrious in excellence, and it has continued in high esteem everywhere, though, perhaps, less common in England than on the Continent. Germany is the place of its special reign; and in the Harz mountains, to bow awkwardly is called _krummer Lorenz machen_.

┌───────────────┬───────────────┬───────────────┬───────────────┐ │ English. │ Scotch. │ Irish. │ French. │ │Lawrence │Lawrence │Laurenc │Laurent │ │Laurence │Laurie │Lanty │ │ │Larkin │ │Larry │ │ ├───────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────┤ │ Italian. │ Spanish. │ Portuguese. │ Swiss. │ │Lorenzo │Lorenzo │Laurençho │Lori │ │Renzo │ │ │Lenz │ │ │ │ │Enz │ │ │ │ │Enzali │ ├───────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────┤ │ German. │ Wallachian. │ Swedish. │ Danish. │ │Lorenz │Lavrentia │Laurentius │Lorenz │ │ │ │Lars │Lars │ │ │ │ │Lauritz │ ├───────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────┤ │ Norse. │ Russian. │ Polish. │ Bohemian. │ │Laurans │Lavrentij │Vavrzynec │Vavrinec │ │Jörens │ │ │ │ │Larse │ │ │ │ ├───────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────┤ │ Slovak. │ Lithuanian. │ Lapp. │ Hungarian. │ │Lovre │Labrenzis │Laur │Lörencz │ │ │Brenzis │Laures │ │ │ │Lauris │Laura │ │ │ │ │Raulus │ │ └───────────────┴───────────────┴───────────────┴───────────────┘

Some languages have the feminine, but it is not frequent anywhere. The Italian Lorenza is, perhaps, the most frequent.

The name of Laura is a great perplexity. It _may_ be taken from Laurus, and ladies so called consider St. Laurence as their patron; but it may also be from the word Laura, the Greek Λαβρα, or Λαυρα, meaning an avenue, the same as labyrinth, and applied to the clusters of hermitages which were the germ of monasteries. Or again, a plausible derivation is that Lauretta might have commemorated the laurel-grove, or Loreto, whither Italian superstition declared that the angels transported the holy house of Nazareth away from the Turkish power on the conquest of Palestine. Those who call the milky-way the Santa Strada di Loretto, might well have used this as one of their varied forms of seeking the patronage of the Blessed Virgin. The chief objection that I can find to this theory is, that the first Lauretta that I have met with was a Flemish lady, in 1162; the next was a daughter of William de Braose, Lord of Bramber, in the time of King John, a period antecedent to the supposed migration of the holy house, which did not set out on its travels till 1294. Others think it the same with Eleonora, which I cannot believe; but, at any rate, it was the Provençal Lora de Sades, so long beloved of Petrarch, who made this one of the favourite romantic and poetical names, above all, in France, where it is Laure, Lauretta, Loulou.[71]

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Footnote 71:

Smith; Keightley; Loudon, _Arboretum_; Butler; Jameson; Grimm; Pott; Michaelis; Dugdale; Hanmer, _Chronicle of Ireland_.

SECTION IV.—_Sancus._

Sancus, or Sanco-Sancus, was the divinity who presided over oaths, and guarded the marriage vow and treaties between nations. He was afterwards mixed up with Hercules, and so entirely forgotten that his altar was long supposed to have been an early Christian erection bearing the word sanctus.

This word is the past participle of the verb _sancire_ (to decree). It was equivalent to instituted, and was gradually applied to mark the institutions of religion. That “all the congregation are holy,” all under sanctification, all once at least saints, was a faith strong in the Church, and prompted the name of Sanctus among the first Christians.

One Sanctus was a deacon of the band of martyrs at Lyons, and another Sanctus was a Christian physician of Otriculum, a city of central Italy, and was put to death under the Antonines. There is some doubt whether he is the same physician of Otriculum who is also called St. Medicus.

Sanctus was the favourite patron in Provence, Biscay, and Navarre; and Sancho and Sancha were constantly in royal use in the early kingdoms of the struggling Christians of Spain; though as royalty and nobility became weary of what was national and peculiar, they were left to the peasantry, and would have been entirely forgotten, but for that wonderful personification of the shrewd, prosaic, selfish, yet faithful element in human nature, Sancho Panza, whom Cervantes has made one of the most typical yet individual characters of literature.

The Provençals had both the masculine and feminine forms in frequent use; and the co-heiress of Provence, who married our Richard, Earl of Cornwall, king of the Romans, was Sancia, or Sancie; but the name did not take root in England, and sorely puzzled some of our old genealogists, who record the lady as Cynthia, Scientia, or Science. This last name actually occurs several times in the seventeenth century, both in Latin and English, in the register of a small Hampshire parish; but whether meant for Sancha, or chosen in love for abstract knowledge, those who named ‘Science Dear’ alone could tell.

Italy, as in duty bound, remembered her saintly physician as Sancto at Rome, and Sanzio with the ‘lingua Toscana,’ where it came as a family name to the greatest of painters.[72]

SECTION V.—_Old Italian Deities._

Februus was the old Italian god both of the dead and of fertility, to whom February was sacred. The word is thought to mean purification, but after the Etruscan deities were forgotten, Juno, who had also a share in the month, absorbed it all, and was called Juno Februata. Thence, probably, arose the name of Febronia, a nun of Sibapolis on the borders of Assyria, who suffered horrid torments under her persecutors, and was at last beheaded. She is venerated by the Greek Church on the 25th of June, and suggested to Russia the names Fevronia, or Khevronia.

Though not divine, the name of Lavinia should be mentioned here as that of a mythical personage imitated by the moderns, though not by the Romans themselves. In Livy and in Virgil, she is the daughter of King Latinus, and the last wife of Æneas, in whose right he obtained a footing in Italy. Niebuhr and his followers deny her existence, and make her a mere personification of the Latin territory, and whether this be the case or not, hers is certainly a feminine form of Latinus, the _t_ changed to _v_, as happened in other instances. The classical Italians of the Cinque-cento revived Lavinia for their daughters; and by way of recommending the story of the Book of Ruth to the taste of the eighteenth century, Thomson had the audacity to translate the Moabitess into “the lovely young Lavinia,” whence it has happened that this has become rather a favourite with those classes in England who have a taste for many syllables ending in _ia_.

Picus was another old Italian deity who used to be represented with a woodpecker on his head. Whether he or the woodpecker first had the name of Picus does not appear; but in English that term passed to the pyot or magpie, and some recurrence to old tradition caused Pico to be revived in Italy in the person of the famous Pico de Mirandola and his namesakes.

From _fors_ (chance) came Fortuna, the goddess of prosperity and success. She was said on entering Rome to have thrown away her globe, and shed her wings like a queen-ant, to denote that here she took up her permanent abode. She was adored at Rome as early as the reign of Ancus Martius, and to her was ascribed the success of the women’s entreaty in turning away the wrath of Coriolanus.

Her name does not appear to have been used in the heathen times, but in 212 SS. Felix and Fortunatus were martyred at Valence in Dauphiné, and it was probably from the latter that Fortunio became a name among the early Asturian and Navarrese sovereigns.

What shall we think of the augury of names when we find in the parish register of St. John’s, Newcastle, on the 20th of June, 1599, the marriage of Umphraye Hairope, husbandman, to Fortune Shafto, gentlewoman?

A pair of twins, girls, of the Wycliffe family, born in 1710, were christened Favour and Fortune; and Fortune is a surname in Scotland.[73]

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Footnote 72:

Butler; Keightley; Smith.

Footnote 73:

Niebuhr; Arnold; Surius; Keightley; Sir O. Sharpe, _Extracts from Parish Registers_.

SECTION VI.—_Quirinus._

Quirinus, one of the oldest of the war-gods, was called from the Oscan _quiris_ (a spear), which likewise was the source of the old Roman name of Quirites, and of that of the Quirinal Hill. Spearmen alike were the Quirites and their unconquerable foes; the Gjermanner, the Germans, nay, probably _gher_ and _quiris_ are the very same word, equally related to the Keltic _coir_.

Others, however, call Quirinus the mere personified god of the town of Cures. When all had become confusion in the Roman mind as to their old objects of worship, and they had mingled them with “gods whom their fathers knew not,” they took it into their heads that Quirinus was the deified Romulus who had been transported to the skies by his father, Mars, in the middle of a muster of his warriors in the Campus Martius; and when a still later age distrusted this apotheosis, some rationalist Roman suggested that, weary of Romulus' tyranny, the senators had secretly assassinated him during the review, and to prevent detection had cut his body to pieces, each carried a portion home under his toga, and professed to have beheld the translation to the skies. Quirinus had become a cognomen at the Christian era, but first occurs as a Christian name in 304, when St. Quirinus was Bishop of Siscia on the Save, and after a good confession before the tyrant Maximus, was dragged in chains through the cities on the banks of the Danube, and then drowned at Sabaria, now Sarwar. His relics were afterwards taken to Rome, but are now said to be in Bavaria; and in his honour Cyran has become a French name. As a saint connected with Germany, various chapters arose in commemoration of him; and Mrs. Elizabeth Carter describes her meeting with a pretty little _chanoinesse_ at Spa, who wore her medal of St. Quirinus, but was able to give so little account of him that Mrs. Carter, better read in Roman history than in hagiology, concluded him to be the “Saint who built Rome and killed his brother.”

Quirinius was the name of the Roman governor whom St. Luke called in Greek Κυρήνιος, and our translators render Cyrenius.

The name of Romulus is thought by many to have been a mere myth made out of that of his city Roma, a word that probably signified strength, and was no inappropriate title for that empire of iron. Ῥώμη is the Greek word for strength; the same root is found in the Latin _robur_, and it may be in the Teutonic _ruhm_ (fame). Others say that _groma_ (a cross-road) was the origin of this most famous of all local titles.

However this may be, after Romulus Augustulus had seen the twelve centuries of Rome fulfilled, Romolo still lingered on as a name in Italy; the first bishop of Fiesole was thus named, and was so popular at Florence, that Catherine dei Medici was actually christened Romola.

When to be a Roman citizen was the highest benefit a man of a subject nation could enjoy, Romanus was treated as a cognomen. Pliny had two friends so called. There are seven saints thus named, and three Byzantine emperors. But when Teuton sway had made a Roman the meanest and most abject epithet, Romain or Romano died away in popularity, and only occurs now and then in French genealogy, though it is still used in Italy.

They must not be confounded with Romeo and Romuald, which are genuine Teutonic.[74]

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Footnote 74:

Diefenbach; Arnold; Livy; Butler.

SECTION VII.—_Sibylla._

The Sibyls were beings peculiar to Roman mythology, prophetesses half human, half divine, living to a great age, but not immortal. Etymologists used to interpret their name as coming from the Greek Ζεύς and βουλή (Zeus' councils), but it is far more satisfactorily explained as coming from _sabius_, or _sabus_, an old Italian, but not a Latin word, which lives still in the vernacular _Sabio_, thus making Sibulla signify a wise old woman.

Old, indeed! for the Cumean Sibyl, who guided Æneas to the infernal regions, was likewise said to be the same who brought the prophetic books for sale to Tarquinius Priscus, and on each refusal of the sum that she demanded for them, carried them off, destroyed one, and brought the rest back rated at a higher price. The single remaining roll bought by the king was said to contain all the mysterious prophecies that were afterwards verified by the course of events, and above all, that prediction of the coming rule of peace, which Virgil, following Theocritus, embodied in his eclogue as fulfilled in Augustus. That eclogue, flattery though it were, won for Virgil his semi-Christian fame, and caused the learned men of Italy to erect the Sibyls into the personifications of heathen presages of Gospel truth—

“Teste David cum Sibylla,”

as says the glorious hymn uniting the voices of Hebrew and Gentile prophecy; and in this character do Michel Angelo’s magnificent Sibyls adorn the Sistine Chapel; though later painters, such as Guido and Domenichino, made them mere models of female intellectual beauty.

Sibilla, probably through the influence of Campania upon nomenclature, early spread as a Christian name. Possibly the word was the more acceptable to Northern ears from its resemblance to the Gothic _sibja_ (peace, or friendship), the word familiar to us as the Scottish _sib_ (related), forming with us the last syllable of gossip, in its old sense of god-parent. Thence came Sippia, Sib, or Sif, the lovely wife of Thor, whose hair was cut off by Lok, and its place supplied by golden tresses, which some consider to mean the golden harvest.

Perhaps it was this connection that recommended the Italian Sibila to the Norman chivalry. At any rate, Sibila of Conversana was the wife of Robert of Normandy, and Sibille soon travelled into France, and belonged to that Angevin Queen of Jerusalem, whose many marriages gave so much trouble to the Crusaders. It was very frequent among English ladies of Norman blood; and in Spain, Sevilla, or Sebilla, is frequent in the earlier ballads. Sibella, Sibyl, or Sibbie, is most frequent of all in Ireland and Scotland; but I believe that this is really as the equivalent for the ancient Gaelic Selbhflaith (lady of possessions).

Russia has the name as Ssivilla; the Lithuanians call it Bille; and the Esthonians, Pil. Sibilley is the form in which it appears in a Cornish register in 1692; in 1651 it is Sibella.[75]

SECTION VIII.—_Saturn, &c._

Saturnus was a mythical king of ancient Italy, peaceful, and given to agriculture, indeed, his name is thought to come from _satus_ (sown). It is very odd that he should have become the owner of all the fame of the Greek Kronos, infanticide, planet rings, and all; but so completely has he seized upon them that we never think of him as the god of seed-time, but only as the discarded king of heaven and father of Jupiter.

We should have little to do with him were it not that the later Romans formed from him the name of Saturninus, which belonged to sundry early saints, and furnished the old Welsh Sadwrn.

Sylvanus was a deity called from _sylva_ (a wood), the protector of husbandmen and their crops, in the shape of an old man with a cypress-tree in his hand. His had become a Roman name just before the Christian era, and belonged to the companion of St. Paul, who is called Sylvanus in the Epistles, and, by the contraction, Silas in the Acts. This contracted form, Silas, has been revived in England as a Scripture name.

St. Sylvanus, or Silverius, was a pope whom his Church esteems a martyr, as he died in the hands of Belisarius; but sylvan, or salvage, was chiefly used in the middle ages to express a dweller in a forest, rude and hardly human. Silvano, Selvaggio, or Silvestro, was generally the name of monsters with shaggy locks, clubs, and girdles of ivy leaves, who appeared in romance; and Guidon Selvaggio was the rustic knight of Boiardo and Ariosto. Occasionally these words became names, and about the year 1200, Sylvestro Gozzolini, of Osimo, founded an order of monks, who, probably, are the cause that Sylvester became known in Ireland as a Christian name, and has come to us as a surname, while the French have it as Sylvestre.

The son of Æneas and Lavinia was said to have been born in a wood, and therefore called Æneas Silvius, and his name was given to one of the Piccolomini family, Enea Silvio, afterwards pope; and also belonged to an historian. Sylvain, Sylvan, Sylvius, Sylvia became favourite names for shepherds and shepherdesses in the time of the pastoral romance; Sylvia turned into a poetical name for a country maid, and has since been used as a village Christian name, having been perhaps first chosen by some fanciful Lady Bountiful.

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