Personally I'd have preferred to discuss Catullus' 'nox perpetua est una dormienda' but then again that's just me and this is just an English journal asking if I agree with the proverb 'testis unus testis nullus'. That or of course the immortalized saying from Petronius' Cena Trimalchionis would also be nice to to talk about,

"eheu, nos miseros, quam totus homuncio nil est.
sic erimus cuncti, postquam nos auferet Orcus.
ergo vivamus, dum licet esse bene."

I digress.

I agree. Definitions are crucial in this matter though. We must define who one (unus) is, which we shall keep simple and define as one person, and must define what testis is. (We'll assume that nullus is just nothing and leave it at that.) Testis has trickled down to the English verb of testify, although perhaps the meaning has digressed itself a small bit, as is customary in such a long linguistic odyssey as that of the English language. At any rate, we shall take testis to mean a person who testifies to something, since testis is indeed a noun in the Latin source.

Now Roman law is perhaps one of two outstanding things that the Romans didn't copy. What other nation has as many famous lawyers as it does famous generals? The exposition is perhaps a bit of a stretch, but given whatever point of view, law was of the greatest importance to Roman society. When the Romans would say 'testis unus, testis nullus,' we can guess that it had some legal support, although to dismiss the phrase as a mere legality is to leave off both its sources and applications.

For the present paragraph though, we shall examine the phrase as a mere legality. In most cases, one witness was not enough to incriminate one person. Ancient Hebrew scripture only allows capital punishment for murder if two witnesses were present to see the murderer commit the crime. Centuries and centuries of legal precedent before the Romans had declared that one witness was not enough as a burden of proof. As the Romans began calcifying their legal system, they quickly decided that the proof of someone's actions lay behind both testimonial and physical evidence. One witness and no physical evidence would show nothing in most legal cases, because the likelihood of a witness to perjure was relatively high. With two witnesses, the chances decreased, naturally. Not only was it harder for two witnesses to tell the same story, but it was less likely that two witnesses would perjure. Thus, the idea of one witness being of no use if there was no other evidence became a strong legal concept.

But as always in the course of human society, the phrase's legality stems from a societal observation. The Romans had acutely observed, as have many cultures of the time and of the present, that people had the ability to lie. Falsehood is no rarity in the human experience, but in societies such as that of the Roman Republic and Empire, it was indubitably an intergral part of daily life. Bribery, extortion, and immorality were all parts of Roman life, as was the inevitable untruth. Facts beyond common knowledge would often be mistrusted, especially when merely one person was professing the facts. Celebrity, plurality, and money all had a good factor in a Roman's or some Romans' believability.

The humanist might be prone to ask if such distrust is yet present in today's society and even ponder the consequences of the response. Today's society is not that unlike the society of ancient Rome regarding this issue of believability. For some people it is almost instinct that upon hearing some fact they can't immediately verify, they go out and try to verify it for themselves rather than simply believe the informant's words. Is this cynicism or a mere loss of naivete? The difference is of course a matter of values but not the matter at hand at any rate.

In a society that doesn't believe the words of one person, one finds a distrust, but also a search for one's own personal truth. There is a dependency not on the words of others, but on the experiences of oneself. To believe something from one person, even if is true, is a loss if one does not explore the truth of the matter oneself. What truth is there in understanding the concepts of a unit circle, if one has not gone through the proofs of the matter oneself? Such is the intellectual issue of 'testis unus, testis nullus,' a term that most likely had some societal beginning, then a legal codification, and then an intellectual quality.

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