The Origin of the Word “Candidate”: Togas and Chalk

Every election fills the streets with candidates, a word that —without anyone noticing— describes a color before it describes a person. In Latin, candidatus meant “dressed in white”, and not just any white: the gleaming white of a toga rubbed with chalk that office-seekers paraded through the Roman Forum. The image we attach to politics today —dark suits, sober ties— is the opposite of what the word holds inside. In its origin, to be a candidate was, literally, to go about in white.

A toga whiter than snow

The root is candere, a Latin verb meaning “to shine, to glow, to be incandescent”. From it came the adjective candidus, “bright white”, the white of light rather than the mere absence of color. And from candidus came candidatus: “the one dressed in white”.

In the Roman Republic, anyone seeking a magistracy —aedile, quaestor, praetor, consul— did not show up in an ordinary toga. He put on the toga candida, a woolen toga bleached and then rubbed with powdered chalk so it would blaze in the sun. The effect was deliberate: to stand out in the crowd of the Forum and, along the way, to suggest the purity and honesty of the man wearing it. The white said, without words, “I have nothing to hide”.

Going about the Forum in white

A Roman campaign was not built on rallies or advertisements but on walking. The candidate worked the Forum greeting citizens, shaking hands and asking for support one by one. That door-to-door canvassing was called ambitio, from ambire, “to go around”: which is, oddly enough, where our word “ambition” comes from. When the going-around crossed the line into bribery, it was no longer ambitio but ambitus, the electoral crime Rome tried again and again to punish with laws that almost never worked.

To avoid getting a name wrong, the candidate usually kept a slave behind him called a nomenclator, whose only job was to whisper in his ear who each approaching citizen was. The office-seeker would then greet the man by name, feigning a closeness that had never existed. Two thousand years later, the scene is uncomfortably familiar. Like so many habits we think are modern and that already annoyed the Romans, the politics of the smile and the first name is far older than it looks.

From brightness to honesty: the relatives of candidate

The family of candere is surprisingly wide and luminous. From the same root came “candle” and “candelabra” (the wax that gives light), “incandescent” (what glows red-hot) and even “incendiary” and “incense”, which burn. And there is a subtler relative: “candid” and “candor”. Originally, to be candid was to be “white, clean, without folds”; from there it came to mean sincere and transparent, and only later took on the shade of naïve. English still keeps that old sense in candid, “frank, honest”.

So candidate and candor share blood: both point back to that whiteness that promised cleanliness. It is an irony that the word we use for those who seek power carries inside it, hidden, the idea of honesty. Like so many words inherited from everyday Latin, “candidate” hides a story far more interesting than its dictionary meaning.

From candidatus to candidate

From Latin candidatus descend, in a direct line, Spanish candidato, Italian candidato, French candidat and English candidate, which entered the language in the 17th century already without togas or chalk: it meant, simply, someone who seeks an office or a prize. Along the way, the word broadened its reach, and today we also speak of a candidate for a job, for a transplant or for an award, without a trace left in it of the color that gave it birth.

And yet the white is still there, hidden in the first letters. The next time you see a candidate’s face on a poster, remember that the word comes from a chalk-dusted toga that a Roman rubbed to look cleaner than he was. It is the same journey taken by other words of Roman power: like “money”, which began as the surname of a goddess, “candidate” started out describing a very concrete thing —the sheen of a cloth— and ended up naming an idea.

References

1. “Candidate”, Online Etymology Dictionary: from Latin candidatus “white-robed”, from candidus “bright white”, because those seeking office in Rome wore a toga whitened with chalk. etymonline.com
2. “Candidate”, Merriam-Webster Dictionary: definition and etymological note linking candidatus to candidus “bright white” and the Roman custom of the white toga. merriam-webster.com
3. “In Toga Candida”, Wikipedia: on Cicero’s speech and the toga candida, the toga whitened with chalk (candidus) worn by candidates during the campaign. en.wikipedia.org
4. “Ambitus: Law and Political Corruption in Ancient Rome”, Brewminate: ambitus as the “going around” of the Roman campaign and the electoral crime attached to it. brewminate.com

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