Article révisé par les pairs
| Résumé : | In the Res rusticae (II, 1, 5), Varro names some wild goats from Sabine (and from Samothrace) rotae. This name would be an ancient Latin noun, from the same root as the Latin homonym rota, "wheel", and the Old-Irish verb rethid, "he runs", (this terms derive from the Indo-European root ∗Hrot-o/h2). So the rotae would be "the runners"; but since the (wild) goat aroused ready-made ideas in the Greco-Latin thought, the Latin people put both nouns in the same category and ascribed the circular motion (whirling or roll) to the animal. Thus the noun rota is not a word from foreign origin, and the text of Varro must not be emended. Furthermore, Varro thinks the goats of Samothrace and Sabine survived the Floods, as their inhabitants survived the invasions; the Sabine goats are too native and have a surname that is perhaps their primeval feature. |
