vox populi dixit

[Anonymous]

I'm reading Obabakoak by Bernardo Atxaga and confusing myself with the following passage:

"Javier was of unknown parentage...he lived at the inn in Obaba, where he was fed and clothed in exchange for the silver coins furnished to the innkeepers - vox populi dixit - by his true progenitors."

I know vox populi is "voice of the people". The dixit has thrown me for a loop. Wikipedia is the only reference I can find that gives an explanation, but they say it means "said" in a way "used to attribute a statement or opinion to its author, rather than the speaker". That doesn't make sense to me in context. The passage is part of a letter and it doesn't appear that the phrase was added by the person transcribing the letter. So author and speaker appear to be the same person.

Even with that explanation I guess I'm missing the whole comprehension of the sentence and why the Latin was thrown in. Is he saying the townspeople forced the parents to pay for Javier's upkeep despite the "unknown" parentage? At the end of the chapter, the transcriber says he has learned that the letter writer was believed by many to be the true father of Javier. Is the Latin supposed to be a hint to the true parentage or am I reading too much into it simply because I don't understand?

I'm thinking WAY too hard about this. Thanks in advance!

 

[QMF]

Wikipedia was about right, yes. Dixit is the perfect tense of dico, which is "I say", in the third person singular, so it is along those lines. In this case I'd probably say that it is "The voice of the people has spoken." Sounds somewhat like Cicero to me, but I'm probably way off...

 

[scrabulista]

I would take it to mean "the voice of the people said."
(The town scuttlebutt was that there was this fellow Javier, and nobody knew who his parents were, but the rumormongers in town conjectured that his real parents paid the innkeeper to house him. The story was repeated again and again.)

So why did the author write it in Latin? On one hand, it's shorter than what I just wrote, but then again, it's subject to some interpretation, and yours is different from mine.

 

[Imber Ranae]

As the others have said, the phrase literally means "The voice of the people has spoken". I agree with scrabblehack's interpretation of the passage, but maybe I can shine some light on Atxaga's use of the Latin phrase (though, of course, I can't be certain without having read the book).

The word dixit is found in the legal term ipse dixit, which exact phrase, if I remember correctly, was mentioned by Cicero in one of his philosophical treatises (I don't remember which, unfortunately). Cicero explained that it was an oft-used argument of the disciples of Pythagoras, the Ancient Greek Mathematician/Mystic, to simply say "He himself said it" (Ipse dixit in Latin), referring to Pythagoras, presumably because they held him to be such a high authority on all matters. From this the Latin term has since come to be applied to any argument or claim which fallaciously appeals to the authority of the one who first said it, especially when the authority itself is suspect. Atxaga may be alluding to that here, with an obvious ironic intention. Further, by using a high-sounding Latin term which means "the voice of the people", he's really just conferring mock dignity upon the rumormongers (as scrabbleback called them) of the village, whose assertion that Javier's true parents were paying the innkeepers to feed and clothe him is felt to be implicitly absurd by the author. In other words, he's saying he doesn't believe it in the least.

 

[Fulgor Laculus]

Thanks for that enlightening tale about Pythagoras, Imber Ranae - quite interesting, and of practical use too! (How do you know ?? Ipse dixit !!)

 

[Cato]

Cicero, De natura Deorum I.10:

Nec vero probare soleo id, quod de Pythagoreis accepimus, quos ferunt, si quid adfirmarent in disputando, cum ex iis quaereretur, quare ita esset, respondere solitos "ipse dixit"; ipse autem erat Pythagoras: tantum opinio praeiudicata poterat, ut etiam sine ratione valeret auctoritas.

"Nor would I customarily approve of that practice which we admit concerning the Pythagoreans, whom they say, if they assert something in an argument, when it is asked of them why it is so, they only respond "ipse dixit", "ipse" being Pythagoras: An opinion can be so greatly prejudiced that authority can prevail without reason."

 

[scrabulista]

The reason I translated it as past instead of present perfect -- when my mom would say "I have spoken," it was an order, like nranger7's original interpretation. But "the voice of the people said," makes it sound more like hearsay.

I'll admit I was unaware of the Cicero quotation.