International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

Elisabeta Negrău
Bucharest, Romania; 
[e-mail]
A Quotation from Theophylact Simocatta by Theophanes Confessor 
in an 8
th
-Century Tract? 
Torna, Torna, Frater
Revisited
The well-known passage from the Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor (c. 810), which relates an 
episode of the Byzantine-Avar war in 586-587, was discussed on several occasions, since it contains a 
phrase in vulgar Latin that has aroused the interest of many historians. Among the burden carriers in 
the army of General Comentiolus arises a trivial incident, which generates a disturbance among the 
soldiers and finally causes the fleeing of the troops and the failure of the attack. The cargo of one of 
the animals was overturned, and one comrade cried to the horseman in his ancestral language, torna, 
torna, frater, cry which was interpreted by the others as the signal for troops to withdraw. The episode 
is recounted first by Theophylact Simocatta, but he only reproduces the cry of the flying soldiers: torna, 
torna. Some historians have seen in these three words the first evidence of a Proro-Romanian language. 
The Greek edition of the Theophanes Confessor’s Chronicle by Carl de Boor (1883) mentions also 
the form fratre as a variant found in some manuscripts. A recent study alleged that fratre is a mistake 
of a later copyist in Theophanes’ Chronicle and therefore must be ignored, since fratre could not give 
the form frate in Romanian and in the other south-eastern Romance dialects. However, an ongoing 
research conducted as part of the European project Dictionnaire Étymologique Roman shows that in 
many Romance languages, among which Romanian and the other Vlach dialects, the word “brother” 
has evolved from the Latin Accusative fratre through dissimilation. Albeit it cannot be established that 
it existed originally in Theophanes’ text, the form fratre should not be completely discarded.
Another bias of modern historians is that frater was a common military appellative in the 
6
th
-century Byzantine army. Michael Whitby, the editor of Theophylact Simocatta, argued that in 
Theophanes’ Chronicle appears some information that is not found at Simocatta and, therefore, the 
early 9
th
-century author had to have also another source, probably a lost chronicle contemporary to the 
reign of Maurice, which was used as source also by Simocatta. Cyril Mango and Roger Scott remark 
that the passage in question from Theophanes is clearer than at Simocatta and suggest that Theophanes 
used here another source, i.e. the lost chronicle of the wars of Maurice. But Simocatta mentions only 
the command torna, torna, and we have no reasons to suppose that he discarded from his source quite 
the phrase that generated the incident. Therefore, we suspect that Theophanes introduced the spoken 
words of the carrier, torna, torna, frater. Although some of his passages are more obscure than those 
in his source, in others Theophanes prefers a clearer phrase than the heavy rhetoric of Simocatta, and 
sometimes introduces personal addings and commentaries apart from his sources.
Theophanes was an autodidact. He had not benefited from a systematic education, and, 
according to Warren Treadgold, neither him nor George Syncellus seemed to know Latin. As Latin 
was no longer spoken for 100 years in the Empire (in the mid-860s, Michael III was naming the Latin 
a “barbarous and Scythian tongue”!), Theophanes might have learned the words torna and frater 
from the native speakers of an 8
th
-century Romance dialect. Groups of fugitive Vlachs, craftsmen 
and animal breeders, probably took refuge around Constantinople after the occupation of Moesia 
and Thrace by Slavs and Bulgarians during the 7
th
century.

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