amatio

Amatio (ah-MAH-tee-oh), a Latin feminine noun for love-making — "love, caressing, fondling" — lives an almost invisible life in the record. It appears just five times, spread one apiece across five works, and every one of them is Plautus: the Captivi ("The Captives"), Casina (KAH-see-nah), Mercator ("The Merchant"), Poenulus ("The Little Carthaginian"), and Rudens ("The Rope"). On this evidence amatio is a creature of the Roman comic stage and almost nowhere else.

Only one lexicon entry attaches to the lemma. Lewis & Short (A Latin Dictionary, 1879) gives the headword as ămātĭo and glosses it "love, caressing, fondling," adding the dry qualification that the word is "perhaps only in Plautus." The dictionary quotes the Casina line the concordance also preserves: tua mihi odiosa est amatio — "your love-making is tiresome to me." The one surface form the record holds elsewhere is the singular amatio again in the Captivi, and inflected shapes in the other three plays: the plural amationibus ("acts of love-making") in the Mercator, and the contracted amatiost (for amatio est, "it is love-making") in both the Poenulus and the Rudens.

An etymology pointer is matched here, though a shallow one: Lewis & Short's own etymology block derives amatio from the verb amo ("I love"). No deeper root or cognate is attested in the record beyond that link — the separate etymology field carries nothing further. Five attestations are too few to draw a life from. What they draw instead is a habitat: a single word that lived in one room of the language, the comic theatre, and named the very thing that theatre was mostly about.

Does a word that survives only on the stage belong to the language, or to the play?