26
26. On thumbs
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[Renaissance etymologies are often very fanciful, but in the case of the French and Latin words for thumb (pouce, pollex) philologists today continue to accept the derivations advanced by Montaigne and his contemporaries. Our own word ‘thumb’ derives also, it seems, from. Sanskrit word meaning ‘the strong one’.]
[A] Tacitus relates that it was the custom among certain Barbarian kings to make a treaty binding by pressing their right hands together and interlocking their thumbs until they had squeezed the blood to their tips, whereupon they lightly pricked them with a needle and sucked each other’s blood.1
Doctors say that our thumb is our master-finger and that our French word for it, pouce, derives from the Latin verb pollere [to excel in strength].2 The Greeks called it anticheir, ‘another hand’, so to speak. And the Latins seem occasionally to use it to mean the whole of the hand:
Sed nec vocibus excitata blandis, Molli pollice nec rogata, surgit. [Neither sweet words of persuasion nor the help of her thumb can get it erect.]
In Rome it was a sign of approval to turn your thumbs and twist them downwards –
Fautor utroque tuum laudabit pollice ludum [Your fans admire your play by turning down both their thumbs]
–and of disapproval to raise them and extend them outwards:
converso pollice vulgi Quemlibet occidunt populariter.
[when the mob twist their thumbs round, anyone at all is slaughtered to their acclaim.]3
The Romans exempted from war-service those who had injured thumbs since they could no longer firmly grasp their weapons. Augustus confiscated the estates of a Roman knight who had craftily cut off the thumb of two of his sons to stop them being mobilized into the army. Before that, during the Italian Wars, the Senate had sentenced Caius Vatienus to life imprisonment and confiscated all his estates for having deliberately cut off his left thumb to get out of an expedition. Some general or other (I cannot remember his name) cut off the thumb of his defeated enemies after winning a naval engagement so as to deprive them of the means of fighting and of pulling on the oar.4 [C] The Athenians did the same to the men of Aegina to deprive them of their naval superiority.5 [B] In Sparta the schoolmaster punished his pupils by biting their thumbs.