Addendum...

"Decipio" does translate in my Latin dictionary as "lie", and there is no question that the English word "deceive" stems from this Latin root. However, in its classical form, decipio means to ensnare, trap, entangle... this was obviously the meaning behind its use in Virgil's Aeneid.

I am inclined to think that the authors of the term, in reference to a policy of the Pitt Administration between 1804 and 1805, probably had its "classical" meaning in mind: to trap or ensnare an enemy, as opposed to lying to or cheating the enemy. After all, this is the same era that so famously coined the phrase all's fair in love and war.

I know this is the kind of posts that piss off Ryan to no end. I am not making this point out of a purely symantic argument. But the term nosos decipio describes the said policy perfectly... so to understand the term is to understand, at least in part, the policy itself.

The policy itself can trace its root back to Carthage, and was employed by later states and nations as recently as WWII... by both the Allies and the Axis powers. It is only in the years since WWII, where nations have become so dependant on foreign and over-seas trade for the success of their economies, that the absolute interdiction of ALL foreign, over-seas trade has stopped being standard international wartime doctrine.

Add to this the fascinating aspect of the development... perhaps even a facet of the evolution... of a language that still touches our own today. If we take our own (English) definition of the word deceive (decipio), we see that its means to cheat, lie, or otherwise infer dishonesty... when in Virgil's time, and even further back, it denoted ingenuity, guile, "street-smarts".

Take the Greeks gaining entrance into Troy... were that story penned in classical Latin, rather than Greek, the word would have been decipio. Jacob's hunt for his brother's birthright and his father's paternal blessing would have been decipio, had Genesis been written in Latin, rather than Hebrew. In fact, I would be willing to bet that Jerome's Vulgate translation of the story of Jacob is replete with the use of the term decipio (although I do not own a Vulgate Bible). Jerome's translation was into a form of Latin common to as many people in the Empire as possible, but he was classically educated... thus his understanding of the term would have been the same as Virgil's, while the rest of the Empire reading his work might see another connotation behind the term... thus, the idea that Jacob did something wrong in trying to gain that which wasn't his by right, rather than doing what was expected of him by God.

Okay... I'm done.