The Monastic Rules of Visigothic Iberia - eTheses Repository ...

The second is monophagia, „a single meal‟. This union of two Greek words, κόλνο +
θαγεῖλ, the aorist infinitive of ἐζζίσ, „to eat‟, is very rare in Latin sources. 531 It is found once
in the Rule of Fructuosus: “Ieiuniis ista oportet tempora obseruare, a Pascha usque ad
Pentecostem reficiendum ad sextam est; et monophagia, idem conseruanda per diem”. 532 It
is found also in the Appendix Probi, which lists monofagium as a misspelling of homfagium,
the latter coming from either ὀκθάθηνλ, „verjuice‟, or ὠκνθαγία, „meat eaten raw‟. In the
Rule of Fructuosus, however, the use most probably refers to „a single meal‟, and also in the
Appendix Probi is seems that hompohony led to a judgement of „misspelling‟, when in reality
they are two different terms (Powell 2007: 692).
The use of these two terms, paximatium and monophagia, is interesting because in the
first instance it highlights well the Greek roots of the origin of much of the Christian Latin
lexis. It seems clear that these Greek words would have been by now thoroughly Latinised,
especially given that the audience of the monastic rules could probably not understand Greek.
It also shows just how far such linguistic innovations could spread. The north-west peninsula
existed on the edge of the then known world, but its literary culture was clearly receptive to
influences from the wider world.
Notwithstanding Graecisms, another source of borrowing is Germanic, from which
various words have remained in modern Romance. Other texts demonstrate a much higher
frequency of Germanic loan-words than the Visigothic monastic rules; see, for example, the
531 The word can be found only rarely in the Brepolis library of Latin texts.
532 Rule of Fructuosus 17.
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