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frater 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

Brother, hail and farewell; Catullus's grief-stricken address to his dead brother.

Detailed Definition
Frater ave atque vale is the culminating phrase of Catullus's poem 101, one of the most heartbreaking elegies in all of Latin literature. Catullus traveled to Bithynia to perform funeral rites at his brother's grave and addresses him with this simple, devastating phrase. In poetry, it has become the archetype of the elegiac address to the dead, a conjunction of greeting and farewell that encapsulates the paradox of elegy itself: the impossible desire to speak to those who can no longer hear.
Example
Example in poetry:
Catullus's poem 101 is the source and model — frater ave atque vale has shaped every subsequent elegy for a sibling in Western literature; Tennyson's In Memoriam, though addressed to a friend rather than a brother, echoes frater ave atque vale throughout its seventeen years of grief; Anne Carson's "Nox" is a contemporary frater ave atque vale — a meditation on her dead brother that translates, literally and figuratively, the gesture of farewell across time and language; A student writing an elegy for a sibling or close friend might study frater ave atque vale as a model of how to hold the greeting and the farewell simultaneously — the impossibility of the address to the dead, yet the necessity of making it; Wilfred Owen's elegy "Dulce et Decorum Est" can be read as a collective frater ave atque vale — the poet's farewell to the young men who died with him in the trenches, addressed directly to the reader as shared witness
Additional Notes
Frater ave atque vale is taken from Catullus's poem 101, which is one of the most translated and imitated poems in all of Latin literature. The full poem is only ten lines long, and its power comes from its extreme compression and its restraint: Catullus traveled all the way to Bithynia (in modern Turkey) to perform the funeral rites at his brother's grave, and after describing this journey briefly, he arrives at the graveside with nothing to say but ave atque vale. Students should note the formal elements of the poem: it is written in the elegiac couplet (dactylic hexameter alternating with pentameter), the standard form for Latin love and funeral poetry; the address to the dead is in the vocative case; and the final five words are the most carefully positioned in the poem. The poem as a whole is a model of what Seamus Heaney called the watermark of the spirit — the depth of feeling evident in the extreme economy of means.
Also Known As
brother hail and farewell brother hello and goodbye frater ave vale
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