clxxix

Theme for this month: False cognates

lucus, luci m.

Definition: sacred grove; or wood, copse, grove in general

Sententia: Ovid Metamorphoses I.187-189

Nunc mihi...

perdendum est mortale genus: per flumina iuro

infera, sub terras Stygio labentia luco!

Now, the mortal race...must be destroyed by me: I swear it by the underground rivers, flowing under the lands in the Stygian grove!

This story in the Metamorphoses is of Lycaon, an impious king of Arcadia. When Jupiter came down from Olympus to test his piety, he doubted that Jupiter was a god, despite having shown signs of it, and plotted to kill Jupiter. Unsurprisingly, this made Jupiter rather angry, and so he turned Lycaon into a wolf. This section is Jupiter ranting about how horrible mortals are, and how he should kill them all, leaving just demigods, nymphs, and the like on the Earth. Found online courtesy of the Perseus Project.

This word is indeed in the Aeneid, in books 1 and 6. It's a bit easy to confuse with the cognate "lake," especially because "lacus" actually does mean "lake." Etymologically, it is a cognate to words like "lux" and "luceo," because it originally was meant in the sense of "clearing." In a similar change of meaning, English's word "forest" (and the word "jungle," for that matter) originally just meant "waste, uncultivated ground," not necessarily a wooded area.