Connections

Recipe for a Motto

(07/11/2007)    With July Fourth just past and basil and other herbs at their peak, it’s a good time to pass along a story about the provenance of the motto “E Pluribus Unum” on the Great Seal of the United States. It came via a Sag Harbor friend who keeps in touch with a Latin scholar.  

    Margaret A. Brucia, who teaches Latin at Earl L. Vandermeulen High School in Port Jefferson, elaborates on the meaning of the motto as a “blending together of many light and dark ingredients to create something new and better than any one of its parts” after describing its probable source.

    “E Pluribus Unum,” she explains, is from an ancient 122-line poem, “Moretum,” once attributed to Virgil. It recounts the daily life of Simulus, a Roman peasant farmer, and his female companion, an African woman called Scybale, telling how he rises before dawn, grinds wheat, bakes bread, and prepares “moretum” for the evening meal.

    He selects green herbs from his garden and slowly combines them with garlic, hard cheese, and salt “by mixing them in a mortar and pressing them evenly together with a pestle. Gradually the dark and light colors blend until ‘color est e pluribus unus,’ there is one color from many.”

    Ms. Brucia goes on to say: “Eliminate the masculine word ‘color,’ change the masculine adjective ‘unus’ to the neuter substantive ‘unum’ — one thing — and we have our motto: ‘one [thing] out of many.’ ”

    She tells this story in a scholarly article written in 1997 for a journal called The Classical Outlook. In it, she speculates on how the ancient phrase may have come to the attention of the Continental Congress when it was charged on July 4, 1776, with the task of coming up with a shield for the new country. “Three committees and six years later,” she writes, “a true device was finally adopted.”

    The first committee, composed of Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, turned to a Swiss-born New Yorker named Pierre Eugene Du Simitiere, who had produced seals for several of the new states. Mr. Du Simitiere, she conjectures, may never have read the ancient poem but may instead have seen the motto on the title page of an English journal, Gentlemen’s Magazine, which was read by literate Americans of the time. She traces how the motto may have wound up in the magazine from the ancient text.

    “His (Mr. Du Simitiere’s) phrase was intended to convey a blending together of undefinable elements (disparate national character traits) and definable elements (13 independent colonies) into one new country,” she writes.

    Before the footnotes Ms. Brucia includes a recipe for moretum, including Parmesan cheese. We would call it pesto.   

Helen S. Rattray