Ancilla

Here's the the passage from the Vulgate which gave me my blog title, as translated by me on my about page:

dixit autem Maria ecce ancilla Domini fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum

However, Mary said, "Behold the handmaiden of the Lord; let it be for me according to your word."

— Luke 1:38 (translation mine)

Ancilla is the word I'm concerned with today. I'm working on a project about the term ancilla dei ("handmaiden of God") in Latin epigraphy^[1] for a class, which has me thinking about the word pretty intensely. I keep thinking about how I've translated it here: "handmaiden".

Lewis and Short via Logeion^[2] notes, significantly, that it is "com[monly] used as [the] fem[inine] of servus, instead of serva". I can't think of a circumstance in which I'd translate servus as anything but "slave". So why would I translate ancilla as something else?

Part of it is tradition: in this context, ancilla is typically translated as "handmaiden" or similar; "female slave" would be seriously jarring. This isn't a reasoning to which I typically bow down in the realm of translation, but it does have some weight to it.

Part of it is the gendered aspect. "Slave" is unmarked, gender-wise, while ancilla is very much marked: in addition to being feminine (where masculine is the Latin default gender), it is also a diminuitive of the less-common ancula, "female slave". It isn't just "female slave", then, but something more like "little slave girl". But think of how different this sounds:

However, Mary said, "Behold the little slave girl of the Lord; let it be for me according to your word."

That feels very different, and in a bad way. To me, it reads as almost playful, which is not at all the mood. This is better, but not by much:

However, Mary said, "Behold the slave girl of the Lord; let it be for me according to your word."

It's also important to note here that there aren't really words for "servant" in classical Latin that don't also mean "slave". That's simply not a significant category in ancient Rome: either you're free and you work for yourself, or you're unfree and you work for someone else. Even being paid a wage puts a qualifier on your freedom:

A free man might be called a slave because he lets his desires rule, or is a flatterer, or of non-Greek/Roman origin, or because he works for wages.

—Zelnick-Abramowitz, "Terminologies", 2

I don't know. I'm sticking with "handmaiden" for now, but I don't feel great about it.

Works cited

Zelnick-Abramovitz, Rachel. “Greek and Roman Terminologies of Slavery.” In The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Slaveries, edited by Stephen Hodkinson, Marc Kleijwegt, and Kostas Vlassopoulos. Oxford University Press, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199575251.013.41.