Introduction

In 2022, the fortieth anniversary of the text-based emoticons was celebrated across the globe. The two original masterpieces: the smiley face :-) and the frown face :-( were famously suggested by Scott Fahlmann of the Carnegie-Mellon University on Sept 19, 1982, in a message posted to the computer science department online bulletin board.¹ A storm of derivative inventions followed, including at one point the noseless versions :) and :( that remained anonymous. In the recent years, the latter two emoticons have been gaining popularity not only because they allow saving ink, but also, and mostly, because they are less likely to be intercepted by the editing applications and converted into impassive graphical emojis. At least, that is what history has been telling us.

¹ See https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/sefSmiley.htm.

Today smiley faces are used universally to signal the presence of a rhetorical figure or hidden, often humorous meaning and to warn the reader not to take the text literally. This paper presents evidence that a noseless smiley face :) might have been used in its proper role quite a bit earlier than 1982. We are not talking about a few years or decades but several centuries! The evidence pertains to the famous Latin treatise Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii, or Notes on Muscovite Affairs, written by Sigismund Herberstein and first published in the year 1549. The consistent use of a noseless smiley face can be observed in the Latin version of the treatise starting from the second Latin edition, amended and corrected by the author and issued in Basel in 1551 by the publishing house of Johannes Oporinus.²

² The German version of the treatise, which first appeared in Vienna in 1557 in Herberstein’s own substantially modified translation, avoided respective rhetorical figures and, accordingly, did not make use of a smiley face.

While the author of the present paper suggests that the priority of Sigismund Herberstein in the use of a noseless smiley face :) should be taken seriously, the priority of Scott Fahlmann in the invention of the nosed version :-) remains beyond challenge.

Sigismund Herberstein and his treatise

Baron Sigismund von Herberstein (Siegmund Freiherr von Herberstein, 1486–1566) was an Austrian military officer, a member of the Aulic Council of the Holy Roman Empire, and an imperial diplomat, who on two occasions, in 1517 and 1526, visited Moscow for negotiations with the Grand Prince Vassily III. Originally from Duchy of Carniola (a part of present-day Slovenia), he was familiar with the Slovenian language, which proved to be of great value on his missions to the Muscovite state. Today he is largely remembered as the author of Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii, or Notes on Muscovite Affairs, a treatise in which he summarized the knowledge gained in the course of his two trips. From the first publication in 1549, his work became immensely popular. Already before the turn of the seventeenth century, it appeared in numerous complete and abridged Latin editions as well as in several German editions (in both the author’s version and new translations), and was additionally translated into Italian, Polish, and English.³

Sigismund Herberstein, 1547.

³ See [Poe 2008], 44.

Care must be taken to avoid equating the state of Muscovy that Herberstein visited and described in the first half of the 16th century with the historical and political entities associated with the name Russia.⁵ The expanse of lands over which the Grand Prince could exercise sovereignty in Herberstein’s times was but a tiny fraction of the huge territory that the Russian Empire (1721–1917) would claim as its own. Back in the early 1500s, at the very beginning of Muscovy’s imperial expansion, its boundaries barely extended over the Oka river in the south and the Ob river in the east. In the southwest, the core lands of the Ancient Rus lay outside of the Muscovy territory, being a part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Only in the northwest, the conquest and annexation of the Novgorod Republic in 1471–1478 gave Muscovy the borders that might look familiar to the present-day observer. Still Herberstein’s Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii is by far more than a piece of contemporary historical evidence about a 16th-century political entity captured through the eyes of a Habsburg imperial diplomat. The treatise has long served as a unique source of insights into Muscovy’s political and social texture resonating well beyond the lifetime of the author and into the present days. In this paper, we discover that it is not only the sociopolitical aspects of the future state formations that Herberstein was able to contemplate in his treatise. Amazingly, he seemed to foresee and put to brilliant use at least one symbolic convention of the digital era that at the time of the publication was still more than four centuries away.

Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii, Vienna, 1549.

⁴  The English language somewhat unscrupulously adopted the Latin name of the Ancient Rus, Russia (which in Latin is pronounced with [u] rather than [ʌ]), and the adjective Russian to be applied indiscriminately across different historical epochs and political entities. This unfortunate inaccuracy, which is not uncommon even among scholars, has contributed to considerable distortions and obfuscation of meaning. Characteristically, the English title of Herberstein's tractatus in the Haklyut society edition is Notes upon Russia [Major 1851–52].

There are approximately 1,360 parenthetical clauses in the 1556 Latin edition of Herberstein’s book.⁵ In exactly two cases, a colon precedes the closing parenthesis, forming a combination that today is nearly universally recognized as the noseless smiley face :) with all its associated connotations. It could be tempting to write off these two cases as a manifestation of unsettled punctuation rules (a colon with a parenthesis, perhaps, serving as a separator) or as a random typesetter’s error (accidental use of a colon instead of a spacer). However, a review of multiple editions confirms that from their first occurrence, the two parenthetical clauses ending with a smiley face were reproduced consistently across multiple cities, publishers, editors, and typesetters. Furthermore, a thorough semantic examination reveals that both of them deserve a smile indeed, whereas in one of the cases, the implicit allusions and hidden meanings are so admirably deep that they have apparently escaped detection by the translators and commentators of modern times.

⁵ To obtain this estimate, the searchable electronic version of [Herberstein 2Syn 2007] was used.

Usus enim est interprete locupletissimo :)

The first smiley face belongs to the dedication that Sigismund Herberstein addressed to Ferdinand, King of Hungary and Bohemia, Archduke of Austria and future Holy Roman Emperor. Naming his predecessors who wrote about Muscovy, Herberstein hails Paulus Iovius for elegance and high fidelity, making a remark about the source that the author had at his disposal, — usus enim est interprete locupletissimo. Starting from the 1551 Basel edition this remark appears in the parenthetical form with the noseless smiley face :) in place of the closing parenthesis (see Figure).

Visual quote from [Herberstein 1551], fol. α2V.

Paulus Iovius, or Paolo Giovio (1483–1552) was a historian and a Pope’s confidant, who at the end of 1525 published his famous Libellus de legatione Basilli, or Little book on Muscovite embassy.⁶ Apparently, Herberstein held the book and its author in very high esteem. Speaking of interprete locupletissimo, or, literally, a very wealthy interpreter, Herberstein referred to the envoy sent by Grand Prince Vassily III of Muscovy to Pope Clement VII earlier that year. In the course of several conversations, which took place in October 1525, the Moscow diplomat provided Paolo Giovio with much sought information about Muscovy that formed the basis of his Libellus. Today, the Russian and Western scholars alike know this diplomat by his modernized name Dmitry and the byname Gerasimov, which is easily confused with a family surname.⁷ He is celebrated as a highly educated person, a “Renaissance man” who bridged the gap between the East and the West and who was also a polyglot, a traveler, an explorer, and a cartographer. The investigation of his many talents and achievements is a subject of a separate study. Here we shall briefly touch upon his background to the extent that is relevant to understanding Herberstein’s parenthetical remark.

  Paolo Giovio (1483–1552)

⁶ [Iovius 1525]
⁷ A historically accurate equivalent of the modern Russian personal name Dmitry is Dimitri.

Nowadays, Dimitri Gerasimov sounds like an inconspicuous combination of a common given name and an equally common family surname, which can belong to a person from any strata of the society. However, in the archaic atmosphere of the 16th-century Muscovy, the anthroponymic conventions worked differently. Not only did a personal name serve as an identifier, but also a name style provided an immediate social status indicator. Two people, both of whom received the baptismal name Dimitri, could belong to the opposite ends of the social spectrum: for example, on the one hand, an ambassador and a member of hereditary nobility Dimitri Danilovicz Zagriazhskoj (a three-component style with a formal given name, proper patronym, and a family surname represented by a toponymic adjective referring to the family estate) and, on the other hand, a peasant serf Mit’ka (a single-component style with a derogatory form of the given name). On the scale set by these two extremes, Dimitri Gerasimov (a two-component style with a formal given name and a kinship-based possessive byname) may seems like a respectable member of a middle class. However, in reality it was not until the 19th century when the Russian imperial historiographer Nikolai Karamzin (1766–1826) introduced the style Dimitri Gerasimov to the public.⁸ On the other hand, all contemporary references to this person in the Russian primary sources, up until his 1525 trip to Rome, and even Karamzin’s predecessor Vassilij Tatishchev (1686–1750) used the diminutive form of his given name, Mitia. Occasionally, the diminutive name was paired with an individual nickname – Malyi (the Little, or Junior), or a professional designation – Tolmach (the Interpreter). In the 16-th century Muscovy, such styling was indicative of a person “without family or kin” at the inferior end of the social interaction. In his book, Sigismund Herberstein respectfully identified Giovio’s informant by the full form of the given name: “that Demetrius, who recently went to Rome as an ambassador to the Pope."⁹ This paper will follow Herberstein’s example.

⁸ [Karamzin 1819], 141.


⁹ [Major 1851–52], II:109. In original Latin, Demetrius item ille, qui novissime apud summum Pontificem Romae Oratorem egit, see [Herberstein 2Syn 2007],380.

Dimitri’s personal history may hide a profound drama. He was born some time between 1455 and 1465, according to Paolo Giovio’s perception of him in 1525 as a sexagenarius senex, that is, an old man in his sixties.¹⁰ The circumstances of his life point towards Novgorod as his birthplace and may suggest a wealthy merchant family linked to the Hansa trade as his origin. During his youth years, Dimitri attended a school in Livonia where he mastered both Latin and German.¹¹ Probably, he was preparing for a career in international trade. The annexation of Novgorod by Moscow must have put an end to his career aspirations, but the language skills helped him to stay afloat. At the end of the fifteenth century, Dimitri found himself within a group of intellectuals that assembled around Archbishop Gennady of Novgorod. Here he translated religious and polemical texts, and was involved in compilation of the Gennadian Bible codex.¹² At the turn of the century or soon thereafter, Dimitri moved to Moscow and became an official government interpreter. In that role he must have been facing dual reality. On the one hand, his unique language skills placed him within the handful of the most educated people of his time. On the other hand, his humble origin as a merchant’s son from a recently conquered land must have left him without roots and protection in the metropolitan capital and constrained him to being an outcast within the conservative and nepotistic fabric of Muscovite society. Thus, it appears that in the government service Dimitri never advanced beyond the auxiliary role of an oral interpreter. In that regard, the primacy, including involvement in the written translations of diplomatic documents and making official statements on behalf of the Grand Prince, was firmly held by Grigory Istomin, also known as Istoma Malyi, a son of a prominent Muscovite official.¹³

¹⁰ [Iovius 1525], fol. BiV.


¹¹ On Dimitri's education, the information provided by Paolo Giovio [Iovius 1525], fol. AiiV, is corroborated by Dimitri’s own autobiographical note; see [Jagić Codex], 532/814.


¹²  On Gennadian circle and its participants, see [Wimmer 2005], Chapter 6.


¹³ Istoma Malyi will be honored with a separate article of the Project 1525+500.

Dimitri’s 1525 trip to Rome was his first and only documented independent foreign diplomatic mission. He was to accompany a returning Italian merchant Paolo Centurione, a member of an influential Genovese financial family, who privately came to Moscow in pursuit of alternative trade routes from Europe to India and China.¹⁴ Pope Clement VII seized the opportunity to send with him a personal letter to Vassily III.¹⁵ Responding to a private visit with the full ceremony of a state embassy would have been humiliating for the Grand Prince. It is not surprising that he chose to reciprocate by dispatching a messenger, “an own man with a letter”, and by inviting the Pope to continue the diplomatic dialogue.¹⁶ Dimitri, a low-key government interpreter, must have been an ideal candidate for the reciprocal courier role as his merchant family background could put him on equal footing with the Italian traveler.

¹⁴ On details about Paolo Centurione and his trips to Moscow, see [Pierling 1892], 1–47, 105–110.


¹⁵ [Grigorovich 1834], 7–17. The Pope reemphasized the private nature of Paolo’s visit (ob alias causas veniret) in another letter later that year, see: [Theiner 1861], CCCCLX, 433; [Yaz’kova 2005].


¹⁶ The versions of Vassily III's letter appear in:[Iovius 1525], BiR–BiV; [Grigorovich 1834], 17–21; [Sanuto 1879–1903], 39:480, [Ferraccioli 2005], 29–30.

It was only in connection with the trip to Rome and only in the documents addressed to foreign courts that Mitia the Tolmach was styled Gerasimov for the first time.¹⁷ Domestically, the new byname caused an apparent confusion among the government scribes, who could not figure out who that person was and recorded him as Mikita Garasimov.¹⁸ Dimitri never signed as Gerasimov himself, and the byname never occurred in the primary sources after his return from Rome. All these circumstances may suggest that the new byname was not based on a kinship relation, but represented a mere diplomatic alias that was invented to avoid the embarrassment of dispatching a commoner with a single-component name to a foreign court.¹⁹

¹⁷ [SIRIO 35], 692–698.

¹⁸ [Register 1614], fol. 262, 115; [Register 1626], fol. 390r–390v, 239.

¹⁹ Nowadays, a popular theory considers the byname Gerasimov to be a fratonym derived from the name of Archdeacon Gerasim Popovka, the manager of the Gennadian scholarly circle in Novgorod, who once called the interpreter “brother Mitia.” This theory was firmly refute already in 1903 by A.I.Sobolevskii, who pointed out that their language betrays the one as a Muscovite, the other, as a Novgorodian [Sobolevskii 1903], 42–43. Moreover, for a monk who has renounced the worldly life, the word “brother” would have rather meant a member of brethren than a blood relationship.

Dimitri presented Grand Prince’s letter to the Pope on September 4, 1525.²⁰ The letter attested the Muscovite envoy as a messenger and requested that he be given safe passage for an immediate return. Notably, the letter lacked a credential clause. For an envoy entitled to speak on behalf of the Grand Prince, the credential clause would have invited the addressee to trust the words of the envoy as if those were the words of the Grand Prince himself. An early authentic Latin translation of the letter survives in Venice.²¹ In it, the rendition of courier’s name is phonetically and semantically accurate: Misimus ergo [nunc] ad vos… Dimitrium Erasimi. Here the accusative case of the name Dimitri is combined with a nickname, in which the translator rightly saw the genitive case (that is, the possessive form) of the name Gerasim, pronounced, apparently, in the Greek manner with a soft [G]. While including the text of the letter in his book, Paolo Giovio, among other literary embellishments, replaced the possessive name form with a humanistic one: Demetrius Erasmius. By doing this, he effectively ennobled the Muscovite envoy and drew a thinly veiled parallel between him and his famous contemporary, Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam.

  Pope Clement VII

²⁰ Although Giovio didn't mention this date, it can be found in [Sanuto 1879–1903], 39:480, and [Ferraccioli 2005], 29.


²¹ Museum Correr, MS. Cic. 1323, fol. 61V – 62R; published: [Ferraccioli 2005], 29–30.

A classic case of mistaken identity ensued. Not yet versed in the Muscovite diplomatic customs and wishfully presuming that a formal credential clause was not essential, the Roman Curia became convinced that the visitor from Moscow was an important ambassador who had a secret mission to negotiate reunification of the Churches.²² Consequently, Dimitri was treated with utmost respect and dignity, an experience he had likely never before encountered in his life. He received accommodations within a luxurious part of the Apostolic Palace and was assigned a bishop as his personal escort. Although Curia’s ideological expectations fell through, the hospitality efforts paid off in a different way. On Pope’s instructions, Paolo Giovio engaged Dimitri in a series of conversations, subjecting him to “inquisitive and gentle questioning."²³ In response, the grateful messenger who did not have an authorization to speak on behalf of the Grand Prince became quite forthcoming and volunteered ample information on the matters of geography, history, economy, customs, religion and military institutions of his homeland.²⁴ To appreciate the magnitude of the fortune that befell Paolo Giovio, one may recall the words of a prominent Russian historian, who wrote about the Muscovite diplomatic traditions of that time: "The usual instructions to envoys were to learn as much as possible about the conditions and relations of the state to which they were sent, and reveal as little as possible about their own state." ²⁵

²² Writing at the end of October, Giovio mentions the curia’s expectations that Demetrius would still present his “secret instructions on important matters” [Iovius 1525], fol. BiV–BiiR. A few weeks later, in a letter to Vassily III dated November 18, Pope Clement VII expresses his disappointment that Demetrius did not have any oter orders except those set out in the letter. [Theiner 1861], CCCCLX, 433; [Yaz’kova 2005].


²³ [Iovius 1525], fol. AiiV: curiosa ac leni uestigatione lacessito.


²⁴ The latter item of ths list, religionem militiaeque instituta [Iovius 1525], fol. AiiV, is the most delicate one. The ambiguity of discussing country’s military institutions (i.e., customs and practices) with a foreign official was so startling, that the English translation omitted military institutions entirely [Major 1851–52], II:228, whereas the Russian translaton replaced them with military statutes [Herberstein 1908], 252.


²⁵ Sergey Mikhailovich Soloviev (1820–1879) {Soloviev 1960], 207.

Having clarified the personal circumstances of Giovio’s informant, we now turn our attention to Herberstein’s characteristic of him as interpres locupletissimus. The first observation is that while seemingly praising Dimitri, Herberstein did not mention him by name. This suggests that he and Ferdinand pre-shared some context allowing effective innuendo: both knew who he was talking about. That could be the case, for example, if both had read Giovio’s book. And here enters the second observation: whereas Giovio undoubtedly perceived Dimitri as an ambassador (legatus, in his own words), Herberstein exposes him by referring to Dimitri’s true government position: interpres, or an interpreter. At the same time, he modifies this effectively disparaging noun with an expressly pompous adjective locupletissimus. This is a superlative form of the word locuples that literally means “rich, wealthy, opulent.”²⁶ It should be noted that among its many nuanced usages, the dictionaries also list a transferred figurative sense “responsible, trustworthy, reliable,” supported by a classic quote from Cicero (Pythagoras et Plato locupletissimi auctores).²⁷ However, in this usage, the adjective explicitly refers to a source of the original knowledge, rather than to an interpreter. Thus, upon examination, the simplicity of the phrase interpres locupletissimus proves to be deceptive. For someone who is familiar with Libellus, the noun fits neither Giovio’s perception of his informant as an ambassador, nor his actual role as a narrator but not an interpreter. But even in a superficial view of those who have no knowledge of the context, the combination of the adjective with the noun is an oxymoron. This semantic contradiction surrounding an anonymous interpres long befuddled the translators.

²⁶ [Lewis & Short 1879], 1074.


²⁷ "Pythagoras and Plato, who are most respectable authorities." See [Cicero 1923], 2:119. .

In the 1550 Italian edition of Herberstein, the phrase was rendered literally, ricchissimi interpreti, but it appeared in plural as an attribute associated with the two other authors named by Herberstein: Ioannes Fabri and Antonius Bied (or rather Wied).²⁸ The 1563 German edition highlighted Giovio’s use of an experienced interpreter, ein erfarenen Tolmetschen.²⁹ However, by using the adjective in the simple rather than superlative form, the translation effectively shifted the emphasis from the distinguished trait of a specific individual to the competent language assistance in general. In the 1851 Hakluyt Society annotated English edition, Richard H. Major apparently lost the battle with semantics and chose to modify the syntax: "on account of the abundant use he made of the interpreter."³⁰ Yegor Zamyslovskii, the author of the 1884 Russian monograph, apparently understood that Herberstein was referring to Dimitri, but that from Giovio’s point of view, Dimitri was an ambassador, a narrator and an informant, but in no way an interpreter. He rendered the confusing expression as "highly knowledgeable explainer," cautiously retaining the Latin original along with the Russian translation, as if being in doubt and inviting his readers to judge for themselves.³¹ Working on the 1908 Russian translation, Alexander Malein coined the expression "highly knowledgeable interpreter," but apparently confused Dimitri the Tolmach with one Demetrius Danielis, or Dimitri Danielovich, a boyar whom Herberstein mentioned elsewhere in the book in a completely different context.³² The modern Russian editions of Herberstein follow Malein’s formula.³³

²⁸ [Herberstein 1550], Al Serenissimo Principe, et Signore, il Signore Ferdinando, NP.


²⁹ [Herberstein 1563], Dem durchleuchtigesten Fürsten unnd herren Ferdinando, NP.


³⁰ [Major 1851], I:clx.


³¹ «Онъ пользовался толкователемъ весьма свѣдующимъ—interprete locupletissimo». — [Zamyslovskii 1884], 53.


³² «Онъ пользовался весьма свѣдущимъ толмачемъ». — [Herberstein 1908]. Dedication to Ferdinand, NP. The confusion between two Dimitris is evident from the name index: [Herberstein 1908], 355.


³³ [Herberstein 1988], 55, 285; [Herberstein 3Syn 2008], I:25, II:283.

To appreciate the depth of Herberstein’s remark, we have to immerse ourselves in the intellectual ambiance of the mid-16th-century Europe.

Sigismund Herberstein wrote his dedication to Archduke Ferdinand in 1549. At that time, the adjective locupletissimus often appeared as a component of descriptive book titles. It modified inanimate nouns such as commentarius, index, thesaurus to mean "richest, most comprehensive, most detailed."³⁴ As a matter of particular relevance for us, a book of commentaries on Homer was published in Strasbourg in 1539. It contained the text attributed to Alexandrian philologist Didymus Chalcenterus (с. 63 BC–10 AD) and was edited by Jakob Bedrot (d. 1541). The book bore the title: Ομηρου Εξηγητης: Homeri Interpres. Cum Indice Locupletissimo (see Figure). Here the noun interpres was used in a metaphorical sense to denote the collection of commentaries itself: "Homērou exēgētēs: The Homer Explainer with the most comprehensive index." It might appear as if Herberstein had paraphrased the Homērou exēgētēs title, joining together two words that originally belonged to different inanimate phrases and transferring their combination to describe a person. Such an allusion would have a humorous effect by itself.

³⁴ For example, Herberstein’s contemporaries versed in the subject of geography were likely familiar with C. Iulii Solini Polyhistor, Rerum Toto Orbe Memorabilium thesaurus locupletissimus. Baileae: Michael Isengrin, 1538, (2nd ed.: 1543), which contained one of the first printed maps of Muscovy.

  Homērou exēgētēs, Strasbourg 1539.

Today, almost 500 years later, we can judge the popularity of the book by ubiquitous references to it in the literature and its circulation, by the number of surviving copies. Indeed, nowadays the 1539 Homer Explainer can be found among the holdings of many major rare book libraries and it appears quite regularly in auction catalogues.³⁵ One can safely assume that many educated people in the middle of the 16th century were familiar with or at least aware of this book. In particular, it should not be surprising if Sigismund Herberstein and Archduke Ferdinand shared the knowledge of this book.

³⁵ One recent record indicates that a copy of the 1539 Homer Explainer fetched as little as 100 GBP on an already more-than-modest estimate of 150 GBP — Chiswick Auctions, London, May 29, 2019, lot 312.

It is important to note that among all his contemporaries, Sigismund Herberstein was in a unique position to get genuine insights into the relationship between Paolo Giovio and his informant. On the one hand, he corresponded with Giovio, was familiar with his Libellus, and knew about the key role of the Muscovite envoy in supplying information for the book. On the other hand, as a result of his trips to Moscow, he personally knew that very envoy, Dimitri the Tolmach, and was well aware of the customs and traditions of the Muscovite diplomatic service. The discrepancy between Dimitri’s stellar resumé as an ambassador to many Christian provinces, recorded by Giovio, and his actual modest status in his homeland — one of an interpreter lacking a family surname or a patronym — could hardly escape Herberstein’s attention. Being an experienced diplomat himself, he must have been familiar with the first commandment of the profession: listen more, paying attention to the details; speak less and to the point. It must have been perfectly clear to him that by volunteering information to Giovio, Dimitri significantly overstepped his diplomatic mandate as a messenger. At the same time Herberstein undoubtedly mastered the art of subtlety and didn't rush to make his knowledge public. It was hardly a secret for him that Dimitri’s openness — had it become known in Moscow — could have cost him dearly.

Whether the allusion to the title of Homērou exēgētēs was intentional or accidental, his choice of words was undoubtedly deliberate. It did result in an obscure and partially self-contradictory phrase that, as we observed, presented a challenge to translators. However, now we are just one step away from making a perfect sense out of the words chosen by Herberstein. While remarking that Giovio had at his disposal an interprete locupletissimo, he might have wanted his readers to hear an interprete loqupletissimo. Of course, this homophone is not a proper Latin adjective in a sense that it does not appear in the dictionaries. But as we know, there are many living and well-understood words that most dictionaries prefer to leave out.³⁶ The present-day masters of morphological analysis, such as Google Translate, grasp the meaning of loqupletissimus instantly (“most eloquent”), while ChatGPT, the semantics guru, politely underscores a likely spelling error and suggests that one should use loquacissimus instead (the superlative of loquax, that is, “most talkative”) — thus revealing perfect understanding, too.³⁷

³⁶ The word loqupletissimo can be understood as a combination of loquax (talkative) + plethora (abundance) and a superlative suffix -ssimus in the ablative case.

³⁷ Experiments with automatic translation systems were performed in October 2023 and repeated in January and February 2024.

Thus, addressing the future Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I and praising the fidelity of Paolo Giovio’s book, Sigismund Herberstein subtly hinted that the author of Libellus was blessed with an extremely talkative interlocutor and made efficient use of him in the most elegant way. The present-day netizens should readily agree: a witty literary allusion and a clever word play deserved a smiley face indeed! :)

Prout locupletiorum cupiditati libuit :)

The second smiley face appears in one of the book’s final sections that focuses on Hungary rather than Muscovy. This section was not included into the 1549 edition, was much abbreviated in the 1551 edition, and appeared in its complete form only in the the 1556 Basel edition and subsequent editions in Latin (see Figure). Herberstein describes the corruption scandal involving the royal treasury that rocked Hungary in 1521–1523.³⁸ Amidst what looked like a pretty technical description of an ill-conceived monetary reform, Herberstein included a parenthetical clause (prout locupletiorum cupiditati libuit:), which translates as “just as greed of the wealthy pleased." This is an early example of the literary device that nowadays is known as pathetic fallacy. The term, which was introduced by John Ruskin (1819–1900), relates to ascribing human emotions and characteristics to inanimate objects, nature and animals. This is a form of personification, which is intrinsic to poetry.

Visual quote from [Herberstein 1557], fol. 154V – 155R.

³⁸ [Herberstein 3Syn 2008], II:478, fn.980.

From the perspective of the digital age traditions, indispersing a pathetic fallacy phrase into a dry economic observation would be perfectly worth a smiley. In the 1557 German edition, where the same idea is expressed without personification: und wie den vermüglichern gefallen, the smiley face is not present. In the subsequent editions, the use of this rhetorical device by Herberstein appears to be largely lost in translation. ³⁹

³⁹ An exception is [Herberstein 1866], where the translator, Ivan Anonimov, did capture personification of the greed. [Herberstein 1866], 218.

Summary and conclusions

This paper supports Sigismund Herberstein’s reputation as a prospicient writer. Not only did his Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii contain several insightful and timeless observations, but he also seemed to have anticipated the use of the textual smiley face combination :) as a marker indicating a rhetorical figure, a joke, or a hidden meaning. The paper has reviewed the two occurrences of the :) combination in the lifetime Latin editions of Herberstein’s treatise. In one case, Herberstein attached the :) combination to what appears to be a witty multifaceted remark related to the Italian historian Paulo Giovio and his Muscovite informant Dimitri the Tolmach. For Herberstein’s contemporaries who were able to appreciate the irony of the hidden meaning, it must have been clear that he was making fun of the talkative Muscovite envoy and congratulating Paolo Giovio for skillfully extracting information from him. However, for an uninitiated, the remark would remain obscure, leaving one to guess what the interpreter’s wealth might have to do with the quality of the translation. In the other case, it accompanied a comment that employed rhetorical personification of human greed within the dry economical context related to Hungary. This paper has provided an explanation of the previously overlooked literary allusion and the wordplay that might have been involved in these remarks.

At a superficial glance, it might seem that the circumstances of Dimitri’s trip to Rome half a millennium ago and the content of his conversations with Paolo Giovio are nothing more than ghosts of the distant past, which in our day are of no interest to anyone but a handful of out-of-touch scholars. Rarely will any misconception be further from the truth than such an opinion! Dimitri the Tolmach, an inconspicuous civil servant with no lifetime patronymic or family name, who until his old age responded to the diminutive name Mitia, but who left behind a number of historically significant translations (plus several works whose attribution to him is disputed), managed to make a stellar posthumous career. Relying solely on Paolo Giovio’s book and on the favorable assessment allegedly given to him by Sigismund Herberstein, Soviet historiography elevated him to the rank of an outstanding ambassador, cartographer, explorer, and pioneer of the idea of sailing to China and India via the Arctic Ocean around the Northeast Asia. In today's Russian Federation, the year 1525 is seen as the starting point of the history of the Northern Sea Route (known elsewhere as the Northeast passage), and the year 2025 marks its 500th anniversary. The towering figure of Dmitry Gerasimov, like a mythological giant, occupies the center stage of the planned quincentannial celebrations⁴⁰ In this context, Herberstein's hidden irony about the Moscow courier becomes surprisingly relevant, and a closer look at the events of 1525 proves imperative.

⁴⁰ See, for example, the web site of the Northern Sea Route Public Council:
https://www.arcticway.info/en/history-development (Accessed on February 20, 2024 г.).

However, irrespective of this historical review outcome, by every possible measure, the appearance of the combination :) in the 1551 Latin edition of Sigismund Herberstein’s Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii is, so far, the earliest traceable evidence of the use of this emoticon in print.

Bibliography