Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/157

Rh 145 Q Qwas written in Greek with the straight stroke verti- cal, ? , as in the Phoenician alphabet from which it was borrowed, and was called koppa, the equivalent of the Hebrew koph. It is found sparingly on some old inscrip- tions of Rhodes, of some of the ^Egean islands, of Corinth and of Syracuse, and most frequently in the Chalcidian colonies of Sicily 'and Italy. But it was soon supplanted by kappa, and survived only in numeration as the repre- sentative of the number 90. It went to Home with the Chalcidian alphabet of Cumae, and was written at first with the vertical line ; but the stroke soon became slant, so that the symbol got the form it still retains (Q). There is a slight but real distinction of sound between the so-called palatal and velar k. The first is the ordinary k, for which the back of the tongue is raised against the back part of the hard palate. The second is produced by raising the tongue against the soft palate or velum palati, that is, rather farther back in the mouth. This sound has a tendency to be accompanied by a slight rounding of the lips ; this causes an equally slight w sound after the k. It is probable that the velar k with this parasitic w was in use for a time in Greece, and that it was represented by the koppa ; the symbol would otherwise have been totally unnecessary; also the koppa is generally followed by u or o, which, on this view, is natural. We know that in Greece kw must have been an intermediate sound between k and p in words where k was labialized, such as CTTO/IOI from root sak (see under K). But this intermediate sound was not retained in the language : either the w was dropped and the sound reverted to k, or p was produced by the assimilating force of the w ; therefore all need for a symbol koppa vanished. But in Latin the middle step remained, as in sequor ; therefore the symbol was needed. But the parasitic sound became a complete w ; and to denote this v was regularly written after the q. There- fore even in Latin the symbol was really otiose, for kv would have been quite sufficient, and did actually suffice for the Umbrian and Oscan, which never possessed the q. In old inscriptions we find q alone when the following vowel is, as in Mirqurios, pequnia. In later times, when o passed by weakening into u, a preceding qu was written c ; thus quom became cum, to avoid the double u of quv.m. The qu of the Latin naturally passed on into the Romanic languages. It passed into the Teutonic languages in borrowed words, such as quart, but made its way into Teutonic words also ; thus, in English, cwen, cvjdlan are now spelt queen, quell. QL'ADRILATERAL, a military term applied to any combination of four fortresses mutually supporting each other, but especially to that of the four fortified towns of Mantua, Peschiera, Verona, and Legnago, the two former of which are situated on the Mincio and the two latter on the Adige. The real value of the Quadrilateral, which gave Austria such a firm hold on Lombardy, lay in the extraordinary natural strength of Mantua and in the readiness with which troops and supplies could be poured into Verona from the north. See "The Quadrilateral," in the Cornhill Magazine, 1862; and Professor Malfatti, U Quadrilatero, Milan, 1866. QUADRUMANA. See MAMMALIA, voL xv. p. 444, and APE, vol. ii. p. 148. QUAESTOR was the title of a Roman magistrate whose functions, at least in the later times of the republic, were mainly financial. The origin of the quaestorship is some- what obscure, but on the whole it was probably instituted simultaneously with the consulship in 509 B.C. 1 The number of the quaestors was originally two, but this was successively increased to four (in 421 B.C.), eight (in 267 or 241 B.C.), and by Sulla (in 81 B.C.) to twenty. Caesar raised the number to forty (in 45 B.C.), but Augustus reduced it again to twenty, which remained the regular number under the empire. When the number was raised from two to four in 421 B.C. the office was thrown open to the plebeians, and it was the first office that was so opened. It was the lowest of the great offices of state, and hence it was regularly the first sought by aspirants to a political career. Towards the close of the republic, if not earlier, the successful candidate was bound to have completed his thirtieth year before he entered on office, but Augustus lowered the age to twenty-five. Originally the quaestors seem to have been nominated by the consuls independently, but later, perhaps from the fall of the decemvirs (449 B.C.), they were elected by the people assembled in tribes (comitia tributa) and pre- sided over by a consul or another of the higher magistrates. The quaestors held office for one year, but, like the consuls and praetors, they were often continued in office with the title of proquaestor. Indeed it was a regular rule that the quaestor attached to a higher magistrate should hold office as long as his superior; hence, when a consul regularly presided over the city for one year, and afterwards as proconsul governed a province for another year, his quaestor also regularly held office for two years. Before the election of the quaestors the senate decided the duties to be undertaken by them, and after election these duties were distributed amongst the new quaestors either by lot or by the choice of the higher magistrates to whom a quaestor was assigned. A peculiar burden laid on the quaestors, not so much as an official duty, but rather as a sort of fee exacted from all who entered on the political career, was the paving of the high roads, for which Claudius substituted the exhibition of gladiatorial games. Various classes of quaestors may be distinguished according to the duties they had respectively to discharge. Up to 421 B.C. there were only two quaestors, and when fresh ones were added the two original quaestors were distinguished by the appellation of urban quaestors (qu&stores urbani), doubtless because they were bound to remain in Rome during their term of office. 1. The Urban QusRstors. Originally the duties of the quaestors, like those of the consuls, were of a general and undefined nature ; specialization of function had not yet arisen the consuls were simply the superior, the qujestors simply the inferior magistrates of the republic. From a very early time, however, the quaestors possessed criminal to the exclusion of civil jurisdiction. The very name " quwstor " (from quasrere, " to search out ") means " inves- tigator," "inquisitor." In the code of the Twelve Tables they are designated qu&stores parricidii, " inquisitors of parricide or murder ; 2 and perhaps originally this was their full title, which was afterwards abbreviated into quaestors when their functions as crim- inal judges fell into the background. In addition to parricide or murder we can hardly doubt that all other crimes fell within the jurisdiction of the quaestors ; political crimes only seem to have been excepted. The criminal jurisdiction of the quaestors appears 1 Plutarch (Popl., 12) states that the office was instituted by the first consul. Tacitus, on the other hand (Ann., xi. 22), says that it dated from the time of the kings, but his ground is merely that they were mentioned in the Lex Curiata of the consul Brutus, which Tacitus assumes to have been identical with that of the kings. 2 The etymology and original meaning of parricidium are doubtfnL In the latter part of the word we have, of course, the same root as in casdere, "to kill," but whether or not the former part is from pater, " a father," or from the same root that we have in per-peram, per-jurium, is a moot point. Mommsen takes the latter view. XX. 19