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ave atque vale

Latin Phrases
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Hail and farewell; a greeting and valediction spoken together, typically at a grave or parting.

Detailed Definition
Ave atque vale is the closing phrase of Catullus's great elegy to his dead brother, one of the most affecting moments in all Latin poetry. In verse, it concentrates the simultaneous impulses of greeting and leave-taking, love and loss, into a single utterance. The phrase has become a universal formula for any poem of farewell, bereavement, or elegiac conclusion, carrying with it the full weight of the Catullan tradition of intimate, grief-stricken lament.
Example
Example in poetry:
Catullus's poem 101, ending with frater ave atque vale, is the source text, but ave atque vale became a universal formula of poetic farewell; Tennyson's "In Memoriam" is structured as an extended ave atque vale — seventeen years of grief gradually working toward the acceptance that farewell implies; W.H. Auden's "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" is a modern ave atque vale — the younger poet bidding formal farewell to the master while also inheriting and transforming his legacy; A student writing a farewell poem — to a place, a person, a period of life — might study ave atque vale as a model of how to hold greeting and leave-taking simultaneously; Anne Carson's "Nox," a meditation on her dead brother, is a contemporary ave atque vale that consciously echoes the Catullan original — translating, literally and figuratively, the gesture of farewell across centuries
Additional Notes
Ave atque vale is taken from Catullus's poem 101, which describes his journey to Bithynia to perform funeral rites at his brother's tomb. The full phrase in context — multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus...frater ave atque vale — has the quality of immense, exhausted grief: the many nations and seas crossed, the arrival at the tomb, and then only these five words. Students should note that the poem became the model for the elegiac address to the dead in the Western tradition, and that its power lies partly in its linguistic impossibility: you cannot simultaneously greet and bid farewell, yet the phrase insists on doing both at once. This linguistic paradox is the formal equivalent of the emotional paradox of elegy itself. Related terms include frater ave atque vale (brother, hail and farewell), the elegiac mode, and the valediction in its various poetic forms.
Also Known As
hail and farewell hello and goodbye ave vale
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