statunculum

Latin

Etymology

From statua (“statue”) +‎ -unculum (diminutive suffix). The formation is somewhat irregular: the ending -unculus was rarely used as a suffix, more often appearing when the diminutive suffix -culus is added to a stem ending in /n/, and the gender of a Latin diminutive usually is the same as that of the base word, but in this case is changed from feminine to neuter.

Noun

statunculum n (genitive statunculī); second declension

1. diminutive of statua (“statue”): small statue, statuette

   Synonyms: staticulum, sigillum

   • c. 27 CE – 66 CE, Petronius, Satyricon 50.6, (spoken by the freedman Trimalchio):

     et ne me putetis nesapium esse, valde bene scio, unde primum Corinthea nata sint. cum Ilium captum est, Hannibal, homo vafer et magnus stelio, omnes statuas aeneas et aureas et argenteas in unum rogum congessit et eas incendit; factae sunt in unum aera miscellanea. ita ex hac massa fabri sustulerunt et fecerunt catilla et paropsides <et> statuncula. sic Corinthea nata sunt, ex omnibus in unum, nec hoc nec illud.

     • 1913 translation by Michael Heseltine

       Do not imagine that I am an ignoramus. I know perfectly well how Corinthian plate was first brought into the world. At the fall of Ilium, Hannibal, a trickster and a great knave, collected all the sculptures, bronze, gold, and silver, into a single pile, and set light to them. They all melted into one amalgam of bronze. The workmen took bits out of this lump and made plates and entree dishes and statuettes. That is how Corinthian metal was born, from all sorts lumped together, neither one kind nor the other.

Usage notes

As Petronius places this word (in the plural) in the mouth of Trimalchio, a freedman, the form possibly did not belong to literary Latin. Adams (2013) suggests the neuter plural form in -a (also found unexpectedly on catīlla from catīllus) could represent in this context a "collective" use "possibly designating weakly differentiated entities". Pliny uses the neuter plural staticula with the same sense.

Declension

Second-declension noun (neuter).

	singular	plural
nominative	statunculum	statuncula
genitive	statunculī	statunculōrum
dative	statunculō	statunculīs
accusative	statunculum	statuncula
ablative	statunculō	statunculīs
vocative	statunculum	statuncula

Further reading

• “statunculum”, in Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (1879) A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
• statunculum in Gaffiot, Félix (1934) Dictionnaire illustré latin-français, Hachette.