The corpus record — Latin

barathrum

barathrum · n

an abyss

Generated live from the audited Latin corpus — every figure on this page is a database query, not prose from memory.

Where it lives

In Rufinum 2 · 3.49/10k
de Bello Gothico 1 · 2.48/10k
Curculio 1 · 1.62/10k
Carmina 2 · 1.55/10k
de raptu Proserpinae 1 · 1.43/10k
Cathemerina 1 · 1.36/10k
Epistulae 1 · 1.01/10k
Bacchides 1 · 1.01/10k
Carmina 2 · 0.89/10k
Rudens 1 · 0.84/10k
Contra Symmachum 1 · 0.83/10k
Satyrarum libri 1 · 0.7/10k

Densest 12 of 23 attested works shown, by occurrences per 10,000 attested tokens.

What it meant

bărā^thrum — Lewis & Short

bărā^thrum, i, n., = ba/raqron,

I an abyss, chasm, a deep pit, the Lower World (mostly poet; cf. vorago), Plaut. Rud. 2, 7, 12: o barathrum ubi nunc es? ut ego te usurpem lubens (words of one in despair), id. Bacch. 1, 2, 41; Lucr. 3, 966; Cat. 68, 108; 68, 117; 95, 5.—Esp., of the infernal regions: ferri in barathrum, Lucr. 6, 606: imus barathri gurges (Charybdis), Verg. A. 3, 421; 8, 245; Sil. 9, 497: poena barathri, Val. Fl. 2, 86; a pit made by art, a deep dungeon, Vitr. 10, 22, 11.—

B Trop.: quid enim differt, barathrone Dones quidquid habes, an numquam utare paratis? thou throwest into the abyss, i. e. squanderest, Hor. S. 2, 3, 166.—

II Transf.

A Jocosely or satirically, a maw (as insatiable), Plaut. Curc. 1, 2, 29; Mart. 1, 88, 4.—Hence Horace calls a greedy man barathrum macelli, an abyss, gulf of the provision market, Ep. 1, 15, 31.—

B In mal. part., Mart. 3, 81, 1.

In the wild

barathro Claudian, de raptu Proserpinae 1.1.37
barathri Valerius Flaccus, Argonautica 2.192
barathro Apuleius, Apologia 83.p2
barathri Vergil, Aeneid 3.421
barathrum Plautus, Rudens 2.7
barathro Claudian, In Rufinum 2.1.523

6 of 33 attestations shown.

Where it came from

No etymology authority pointer is recorded for this lemma yet — an honest gap, not an omission.

Latin text and lemmatization derived from the Perseus Digital Library (canonical-latinLit), CC BY-SA 4.0. Lewis & Short (public domain) via Perseus. This derived data is shared under the same CC BY-SA 4.0 license.