homo

Homo (HOH-moh, "a human being") is one of the great populous words of Latin: the record holds 13,563 occurrences across 334 works. It lives everywhere, but the concordance's heaviest concentrations are the historian and the orator arguing about human affairs: Livy's Ab Urbe Condita ("From the Founding of the City," 728), Cicero's In C. Verrem ("Against Verres," 725), and Pliny's Naturalis Historia ("Natural History," 582). Then the record turns Christian and antiquarian: Adversus Marcionem ("Against Marcion," 503), Gellius's Noctes Atticae ("Attic Nights," 455), and Cicero's Epistulae ad Familiares ("Letters to Friends," 346). The word is at home in history, in the courtroom, in the study of the world, and in theology.

The lexica keep the sense plain because it is not in doubt. Lewis & Short (A Latin Dictionary, 1879) glosses homo simply as "a human being," and preserves the archaic forms the old grammarians reported — hemonem (Paulus, from Festus) and homōnem (Ennius). Beside the headword it notes humanus, "human," and derives nēmo, "no one," from ne-hemo, "not-a-man" — the word for a person, negated into the word for none. Walde–Hofmann (Lateinisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 1938–54) records the same old stock — inscriptional omó, Old Latin hemō — and is the record's one matched etymology pointer, treating homo under the root candidates *homon-, *ho-, *homūn-.

The cited surfaces are all Livy, and all inflection: homines, hominum, hominis, hominibus — the word declining through its cases across the opening books of Rome's history, never once the abstract lemma, always men, doing and suffering the founding.

If homo is kin to humanus, "human," and, negated, becomes nemo, "no one" — ne-hemo, "not-a-man" — is a person what the word affirms, or what it denies?