Paladin

The city of Rome grew out of the settlements of seven hills, including the first settled, the Palatine Hill. The Palatine Hill includes Bronze Age remains from as early as 1000 BCE as well as the Lupercal, the legendary cave where orphaned twins Romulus and Remus were nursed by a she-wolf in 771 BCE.

Livy (59 BCE to 17 CE), ventured a guess that the Palatine Hill got its name from the Arcadian settlement of Pallantium. Other ideas put forth include origin in the word palis, Latin for stake, as in a fence made of stakes, or palātum, Latin for palate. In short, we don't know.

At any rate, the emperor Augustus (63 BCE to 14 CE) lived on the hill and later emperors, less chary of showing off their imperial status than Augustus, built their palaces here. The word palace comes to us from Palatine.

Whew! Long way around. Anyway, the word paladin, meaning knight or official of the emperor, comes from the same root word, Palatine. The word first shows up in English in 1592, in the first work of a minor poet, Samuel Daniel (1562 to 1619), but came to us by way of the Old French word paladin, used in the Song of Roland (mid-twelfth century) and other early chansons de geste.

The paladins, also known as the Twelve Peers, were in Charlemagne's service just as the Knights of the Round Table were in Arthur's. They were the best of the French warriors, sent to battle the Saracens (the early word for Muslims) in the Crusades.

I first came across the word paladin in 1957, when Have Gun--Will Travel premiered on television. The hero of the show is Paladin (actor Richard Boone), an educated, gentlemanly "knight without armor" who compares his methods to the movements of the knight on a chess board. He says the knight is an "attack piece, the most versatile on the board. It can move eight different ways, over barriers, and [is] always unexpected." ("The Road to Wickenburg," Season 2, Episode 7, October 25, 1958, Have Gun--Will Travel, CBS, Television.)

Our modern-day Paladin does not wear armor, but he does dress distinctively. On the trail he wears all black, and this struck me, even though I was only eleven, because I was an avid consumer of Western movies and tv shows, and the hero always (or almost always) wore a white hat. In other words, the hero was unremittingly good, never tempted, never wrong.