(Piano music) Hello, and welcome to Your Greek Word On A Sunday, a weekly, bite-size podcast for anyone curious on language, etymology and connections. I am your host, Emmanuela Lia and wherever you are in the world, if you want to entertain your brain for a few minutes, this is the podcast for you. Let's Go!

Happy November everyone! Starting the month with a word that is usually mixed up with ‘freedom’, and you’d be both right and wrong to do so. Let me explain: Ancient Greece had a city-state system much like the US today. Athens would govern through all, set the laws for everyone and the city states paid taxes to it. If a city state wanted to follow its own laws, have its own elected politicians etc but still pay taxes to Athens and contribute troops in case of war, it wasn’t a free city state (because that could only happen in very few occasions and the city state would still be supervised). Εαυτός (eaftos/eautos) or αυτός (aftos/autos) means ‘the self’ and νόμος (nomos) means ‘Law’. The combined word that travelled from Greek to Latin to French and English, and kept its political meaning well into the 17th century, developed an individual meaning starting with the Stoics and reaching Immanuel Kant and the Enlightenment. That’s when it started getting very close to the meaning of freedom. According to the stoics, a person who can follow their own rules, directed by their own morality (which better be virtuous) without denying the gods or fate was AYTONOMOΣ/AUTONOMUS

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