A New People

The Date underneath is that of the Declaration of Independence, and the words under it signify the beginning of the new American Æra which commences from that Date, wrote Charles Thomson in his report on the US Great Seal. [1]

He finalized the Seal design, but never provided a translation, that is, he never wrote what the Latin was to mean exactly. It says:
E pluribus unum,
Annuit cœptis,
Novus ordo seclorum.

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Copyright © Teresa Pelka
■Creative Commons License 4.0

Wikipedia derives the phrase Novus Ordo Seclorum from legends about ancient ritualists, sibyls, and Virgil’s Eclogues:
… ab integro sæclorum nascitur ordo.

Wikipedia adds,
The phrase is sometimes mistranslated as a New World Order, by people who believe in a conspiracy behind the design; however, it does directly translate to a New Order of the Ages. [2]

Direct translation from Virgil has never happened so far, and sibyls remain famed for enigmatic phrasings. The 1894 interpretation of Virgil by Archibald Hamilton Bryce was purportedly literal. The preface for it yet says,
Much has been done both by Foreign and by British scholars to amend the Latin text, and to bring out more clearly the poet’s meaning in the many obscure phrases and sentences which occur in his writings. [3]

We are not developing a conspiracy theory, as Americans would first need a regime in own country, to impose over the world, and to imagine the people willing is not only a little too hard. All regimes have always meant plenty of limitations and absolutely excess of discipline, doctrine, and diktat.

The reservation here is, Virgil wrote for Octavian Augustus, who allowed the proscription and execution of Marcus Tullius Cicero. The Framers might have used Virgil to learn Latin, but would they have followed him for the sense in the US Great Seal? Cicero was inspiration to the American republican. [4]

The Latin ■integrum was often used in places where ■unum would work as well, and ■ordo could be interpreted as ■unitas.
Ab integro, nascitur ordo sæclorum, could be paraphrased as from one, many will come. The Seal says the opposite: of many, one, e pluribus, unum.

Further, Charles Thomson was a Presbyterian. Would he regard a sibyl as an elder, an authority, or an executive agency? Sibylline rituals were pagan. They involved narcotics and burnt offerings. The women had no education and spoke instructed by their ancient priests.

■Pär Fabian Lagerkvist gave the ancient prejudice quite an adequate description in his story “Sibyl”, about a simple peasant girl taken to pronounce prophesies in a temple. She does not have mind and status enough to oppose the mythology. She depends on the temple for food, clothing, and a roof over her head.

Great Seals are those to affirm on resolves on behalf of the country. Would an illiterate and intoxicated ancient girl make a proper pattern?

The question obviously is rhetorical. The words in the Seal must have a sense of their own. First things first, it would take a peculiar intellectual discipline to hold age for unrelated to time.

A phrase as a new order of ages implies that time could be changed altogether, and there is no way really to defend a view as ■Romanticism having come before ■Enlightenment, and ■Renaissance only after. It would be as trying to claim the 19th century was before the 18th, and the 16th only after — unlikely the idea by the Framers.

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There is a feature in Mr. Thomson’s report. His Latin spelling did acknowledge the digraph — æ, the graphemic shortcut for a and e together. He wrote:
… the new American Æra…

The “sæclorum” in the Eclogue has the digraph, but the “seclorum” in the Great Seal does not have it. Differences as these were arbitrary, but they were not trivial to the ancients. They marked a discontinuity between the Classic and Roman Empire Latin, and as such they remained with Latin scholars.

Charles Thomson’s seclorum is classic Roman talk. It is really possible the Eclogue is not quoted here, and the Great Seal motto is no imperial Latin.

There was a man of talent for persuasion, whose thought influenced the Framers. The man was Thomas Paine. He titled his work ■Common Sense — unlike any altered view on time. Let us search his work for words related to the Latin word ordo, and paraphrase the usage.

□ Mankind being originally equals in the order of creation…
We can understand the order as a design (before DNA was discovered, words as order and form were used).

□ It is repugnant to reason, to the universal order of things, to all examples from former ages…
The universal order would be for many environments, as “water does not run uphill”.

□ He who can calmly hear, and digest such doctrine, hath forfeited his claim to rationality — an apostate from the order of manhood…

Interestingly enough, if we wanted to render Thomas Paine’s “examples of ages”, in classic Latin the shape would be aevi exempla and not *seclorum exempla. The latter would imply we talk about people of chronological age, as 50 or 60 years old. ■The Curious Case of Benjamin Button does not explain the Seal.

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His sense for ordo would be a type or an organizing principle, and Thomas Paine was not the only such language user (the phrase comes with the fact that we cannot experience all we can talk about). Let us read a few passages from Benjamin Franklin’s memoir.
The family had lived in the same village, Ecton, perhaps from the time when the name of Franklin, that before was the name of an order of people was assumed by them as a surname when others took surnames all over the kingdom. — Autobiography

Those times, second names were often assumed after the line of business, the walk of life. The Frankish word frank meant free, and the English Franklins were freeholders.

Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and Charles Thomson went to grammar schools. Thomas Paine wrote he never learned Latin from the books at school, and yet was able to crunch all the Latin content he needed. Likely all the men began their acquaintance with Latin in early years of life. Linguistics says the years are those of language acquisition.

The Latin in the Seal may be generative, that is, associated with language natural acquisition. Associated, because you do not acquire it all in childhood; the heuristic in the mind remains as for natural “crunching”.

There is no classic quote for the Great Seal because it got created by a speaker — where Benjamin Franklin is my favorite suspect. The Latin is not incorrect. Things like Franklin’s happened every day in Antiquity: people just spoke, without looking up citations in books. It is the present-day habit to insist on citation.

(I was early with my Latin too, before school. I was simply a kid curious about languages and dictionaries. My first Latin dictionary, not exactly the copy, the editon, is with my Internet Archive account, seculum p. 786 in the search field ■here.)

Benjamin Franklin wrote,
My elder brothers were all put apprentices to different trades. I was put to the grammar-school at eight years of age, my father intending to devote me, as the tithe of his sons, to the service of the Church. My early readiness in learning to read (which must have been very early, as I do not remember when I could not read), and the opinion of all his friends, that I should certainly make a good scholar, encouraged him in this purpose of his. — Autobiography

Reports Wikipedia on the ■Treaty of Paris, representatives of Britain were opposed to the US Seal “until mollified by Benjamin Franklin”. I do not imagine he argued a new order of time had come. Likely he explained the Seal motto said there was a new people, a new nation.

It is altogether natural to learn from language usage. For the Classics, we can compare the ■Second Philippic by Cicero. [5]

□ Accuse the senate; accuse the equestrian body (…), accuse every order or society, and all the citizens…

□ at all events you would never have continued in this order or rather in this city…

□ I have been pronounced by this order to be the savior of my country…

□ when you, one single young man, forbade the whole order to pass decrees concerning the safety of the republic…

To picture the sense of the Latin ordo, we would likely think about people and some recognition. Nationality or reference to a country can be such recognition.

Resources continue to differ in presenting the Latin language, and the word shape seclorum is a good example on that. ■The Rudiments of Latin and English Grammar by Alexander Adam, of 1786, page 141, present the form seclor as a consequent of sequor.

We may compare the Latin verb secludere, meaning “to separate oneself”, to stand apart”. It had a participle, seclusus. Latin turned participles into nouns quite regularly. We may compare the verb applicare, to apply:
■applicatus, applied, a participle and adjective;
■applicatio, application, a noun.

If we “crunch” now, we collate seclusus for the participle, and seclum for the noun. The plural genitive of seclum is seclorum.

In English also today, we have the phrase “how come“, to ask or tell how something has become. The text here tells, how come:

When in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the Causes which impel them to the Separation, says the ■Declaration of Independence.

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Already ancients used the Latin seclum for people who have taken their own stand. With the Latin ordo as a principle for some recognition, we can comprehend the Novus Ordo Seclorum as A New People Come, where come is the third form, as spoken, written, etc. A new nation has become.

Ordo did not have to denote a linear arrangement, but it also could: moving through territories, Roman military happened to face local people, some in groups for welcome, and some in battle formations, more or less as here, in the motion picture ■The Eagle. The people are not new to the Roman; they are Scottish.

Secludit is the 3rd person singular praesens of secludere, the very verb to derive seclum and seclorum from.

Records on Scottish parliamentarian activity have ■macaronic uses of the form secludit. The uses were practiced throughout Europe then. The Scottish parliament was expected to prevent separation: Newir to be separatit nor secludit.
■The Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume 4
■The Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, 1424-1707

Thomas Paine rendered such parliamentary resolves null and void, in his Rights of Man: It is not in the power of any generation to intercept finally, 
and cut off the descent.

We might wonder, why Mr. Thomson did not use the word populus, if he meant people?

Paths have happened to diverge, for word sense and etymology. Today, we derive the words equal as well as adequate from the Latin aequus. In practice, adequate remuneration may not mean equal money, and equal money might be inadequate for jobs of different specifics.

We derive the form of the word people from the Latin populus. However, the sense of the ancient populus did not connote nationality or citizenship. The word often referred to laying waste or degrading.

■Perpopulor meant to devastate, pillage. ■Populabilis was close in meaning to destructible.

Ancient Romans did not have much sentiment for nationality. Their culture favored status, and that beyond people’s rights. The Roman ■civitas gave origin to the word civilian, but the sense was originally inseparable from the city of Rome. Well, and the city was not as much or often a republic, as a practice at pretending a liberal government.

The law of the civitas had words as ■aerarius and ■aerarium, for residents who had to pay tax, but were not allowed to vote or hold offices. The living conditions were actually military regime, and made business difficult, giving no sense of national identity to the people at large. Without legal rationale and just upon a whim, Caesars were able effectively to give death verdicts on anyone within the military range, citizens included, also those talented and important as Cicero.

Cicero maybe got verbally into some politics, but all he did was to write and speak, to persuade about events as known. It is no treason nowadays, and it was no treason really then. ■The brutality of his termination denies any human rights truly, about the ancient Rome where the Senatus Populusque ordained for the people who came watch wild animals kill human beings in arenas.

At the time of the US Framers, he word ■ordo remained for a dignified sense, and the Seal does not follow the Imperial Latin in the word seclorum:
Out of many, one;
Favor to the endeavor,
A new people come.

Annuit coeptis meant, with a nod of the head, hence the endeavor — because you would not seek approval for a petty anything. The Latin does not require a Cesar for the head that nods. People who agree to follow the idea are good enough, as in democracy.

The Framers proved that if there are no linguistic means ready, the human being is able to form new language uses. “The instance is without a precedent; the case never existed before”, wrote Thomas Paine about America in 1776.

The Latin ■nātiō would have been an array of other possibilities (not here, yet the “j Latin” is later than the classic where you had “i all the places”).

The people who then went to war for America had not been all born there, and some of those who had been, did not have the citizen or civilian status, because of policies by George III. Says the Declaration of Independence,
He has refused to pass other Laws for the Accommodation of large Districts of People, unless those People would relinquish the Right of Representation in the Legislature, a Right inestimable to them, and formidable to Tyrants only.
He has endeavored to prevent the Population of these States; for that Purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their Migrations hither, and raising the Conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

Place of birth itself does not provide for values in common, and all nations are in fact ordines seclorum, where people of many walks of life — secla — have a preferred recognition — a national ordo. Importantly, you could ask a child to remember, where the people has a future.

Well, and sibyls were women with just word play at hand.

Feel welcome to read about saying the Seal Latin,
■The Latin demeanor.

■This text is also available in Polish.

Endnotes

[1] Facsimile of Charles Thomson’s handwritten ■Report.
[2] Wikipedia, ■Novus Ordo Seclorum.
[3] Bryce, A. Hamilton. 1894. The Works of Virgil, A Literal Translation. London: George Bell. ■Internet Archive.
[4] Wikipedia, Marcus Tullius Cicero, legacy. See ■screenshot / live page.
[5] Wikipedia, Marcus Tullius Cicero, ■Opposition to Mark Antony and death.