Cultivated plants and domestic animals in their migration from Asia to Europe / by Victor Hehn ; edited by James Steven Stallybrass.
- Victor Hehn
- Date:
- 1891
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Cultivated plants and domestic animals in their migration from Asia to Europe / by Victor Hehn ; edited by James Steven Stallybrass. Source: Wellcome Collection.
455/530 page 455
![languages, and is not wanting in the Magyar, Albanian, Wallachian, and Modern Greek. Diez traces all existing forms of the word to a Low-Latin doga, which itself was derived from the Greek Soxv. The word has passed into the Germanic languages only here and there, but flourishes abundantly in the Slavic both as to forms and meanings ; being, for instance, applied to the rainbow (see Miklosich, Die Fremd- worter in den Slav. Spr., p. 83), whence, as a derivative adjective, it gets the meaning of many -coloured. The centre of diffusion for this word is the wooded regions of the Danube, and there too the thing was native ; but it is quite possible that it was derived from a Graeco- Latin expression, perhaps used in the technical and commercial language of Aquileia. To this day the wood that is used for the barrels sent to the East comes mostly from Hungary, and the hoops made of corylus Pontica are imported by way of Constantinople. A third expression, much used in the richly-wooded Romance countries, and far-spread on every side, is cupa, originally a Greek word (KV7nj). When Maximin, in the year 238, was about to besiege Aquileia, but could not get his army over a tearing rain-swollen river, he was assisted by the extensive wine-trade of the place, for he found a quantity of large empty wine barrels, of which he built a bridge (Herodian, 8, 4> 9 * i>Trtf3a\6v rivtg tGjv rtxvac&v, 7ro\\a iivcu Ktva oivocpopa VKiVT] Trtpnptpovg %v\ov tv Tolg tpr/fioig aypo7g, orig ixpiovro ptv 7Tjoorepov oi KaroLKovvTtg tig inrr)pt<Jiav tavru>v kci'i 7rapcnrtp,7rtiv rov olvov a<j<pdkCjg ro7g dtopitvoig). Jul. Capitolinus, reporting the same event, calls these enormous casks cupce (Maximin. 22 : “ Ponte itaque cupis facto, Maxi- minus jluvium transivit, et de proximo Aquileiam obsidere coepit”). The Massilians must also have possessed such barrels, for when Caesar besieged their town, they rolled them, filled with burning tar and pitch, down from the walls upon the enemy’s trenches {De B. Civ., 2, 11 : “ Cupas taeda acpice refertas incendunt, easque de muro in mus- culum devolvunt”), just as the inhabitants of Uxellodunum in Aquitania had done before in a smaller case {De B. Gall., 8, 42 : “ Cupas sevo, pice, scandulis co?nplent; eas ardentes in opera provolvunF). From the island near Salona, where the poet Lucan makes the Caesarians to be blockaded, these try to get away to the Illyrian mainland by night on rafts made of empty wine-barrels (4, 420 : “ Namque ratem vacuae sustentant zindique cupaen); of which, in that vine-country, where the mountains were still covered with forest, there must have been plenty. The workman who furnished the vine-dressers and merchants with such cupae was a cuparius, as we see, for example, from an inscription at Treves—Orelli, No. 4176 : “ Cuparius et saccarius” (a man who also made sacks, and therefore worked for the freight-trade in general). Among the barbarians the cupa was also used for beer ; and we learn](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b24874309_0455.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
