Chapter CIII: Section IV: Sancus

Sancus, or Sanco-Sancus, was the divinity who presided over oaths, and guarded the marriage vow and treaties between nations. He was afterwards mixed up with Hercules, and so entirely forgotten that his altar was long supposed to have been an early Christian erection bearing the word sanctus.

This word is the past participle of the verb _sancire_ (to decree). It was equivalent to instituted, and was gradually applied to mark the institutions of religion. That “all the congregation are holy,” all under sanctification, all once at least saints, was a faith strong in the Church, and prompted the name of Sanctus among the first Christians.

One Sanctus was a deacon of the band of martyrs at Lyons, and another Sanctus was a Christian physician of Otriculum, a city of central Italy, and was put to death under the Antonines. There is some doubt whether he is the same physician of Otriculum who is also called St. Medicus.

Sanctus was the favourite patron in Provence, Biscay, and Navarre; and Sancho and Sancha were constantly in royal use in the early kingdoms of the struggling Christians of Spain; though as royalty and nobility became weary of what was national and peculiar, they were left to the peasantry, and would have been entirely forgotten, but for that wonderful personification of the shrewd, prosaic, selfish, yet faithful element in human nature, Sancho Panza, whom Cervantes has made one of the most typical yet individual characters of literature.

The Provençals had both the masculine and feminine forms in frequent use; and the co-heiress of Provence, who married our Richard, Earl of Cornwall, king of the Romans, was Sancia, or Sancie; but the name did not take root in England, and sorely puzzled some of our old genealogists, who record the lady as Cynthia, Scientia, or Science. This last name actually occurs several times in the seventeenth century, both in Latin and English, in the register of a small Hampshire parish; but whether meant for Sancha, or chosen in love for abstract knowledge, those who named ‘Science Dear’ alone could tell.

Italy, as in duty bound, remembered her saintly physician as Sancto at Rome, and Sanzio with the ‘lingua Toscana,’ where it came as a family name to the greatest of painters.[72]