Camilla

Camilla is a Latin name, and the Romans meant something exact by it. A camillus or camilla was a freeborn child who assisted a priest at sacrifices and rites, carrying the sacred vessels while the ceremony went on. The short meaning kept from that world is a noble-born temple attendant, in Polish szlachetnie urodzona. So the name begins in the temple, not in the nursery.

Virgil gave the name its most famous bearer. In the Aeneid, Camilla is a Volscian warrior maiden, swift enough to run across a field of grain without bending the stalks, who fights and dies in the war over Latium. Readers met her there for centuries before the name settled into ordinary use.

From Italy the name traveled north, and Scandinavia took it up as its own. The Norwegian writer Camilla Collett, born in 1813, put it on the map of letters with her novel of that country's early realism. Today an Italian Camilla and a Danish or Norwegian Camilla share one Roman root without knowing it.

Picture the imieniny in July, a Kamila blowing out candles. The card still spells out the older sense: noble-born, born to serve at the altar.