ago

Ago (AH-goh, "I drive, I do") is one of the great working verbs of Latin, and the record shows it everywhere: 10,770 occurrences across 355 works — a distribution so broad it belongs to no single genre but to the language's ordinary business. It lives densest in the historians and the letter-writers. Livy's Ab urbe condita ("From the Founding of the City") holds 1,028; then Cicero's Letters to Atticus (463), Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria ("The Education of the Orator," 334), the Res Gestae ("Things Done," 325), Cicero's Epistulae ad Familiares ("Letters to Friends," 318), and Seneca's Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales ("Moral Letters to Lucilius," 258). It is a word for narrating deeds and for the daily traffic of correspondence — what men do, drive, transact, spend.

The lexicon is spare because the verb is so central it needs no argument. Lewis & Short (A Latin Dictionary, 1879) marks it a transitive verb and glosses the root sense plainly: "to put in motion." The entry hoards archaic forms — axim for egerim, agier for agi ("to be driven"), agentum for agentium — the debris of a word old enough to have shed several skins. From that first physical sense of driving comes everything else the verb learned to carry: to do, to act, to conduct, to spend time, to plead a case.

On the derivation, the record matches one pointer: the verb is treated in Ernout-Meillet, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine (DELL, 1932; 4th ed. 1959), s.v. ago, entry #289. The record names the authority and the entry but not a reconstructed root, so I leave it there rather than import an ancestry it does not spell out.

The cited surfaces are all Livian, the verb caught mid-inflection in the opening books — agere ("to do"), agens ("doing"), agendo ("by doing"), actae ("done," feminine), actum ("a done thing") — infinitive, participle, gerund, the past made passive. One verb, declined through all its ways of meaning "to act."

When a single word means both "to drive cattle" and "to spend one's life," which sense is the metaphor?