Decanus means "chief of ten" in Late Latin. The term originated in the Roman army and became used thereafter for subaltern officials in the Byzantine Empire, as well as for various positions in the Church, whence derives the English title "dean". It is unrelated to the position of deacon (Latin diaconus, Greek διάκονος).
Decanus means "chief of ten" in Late Latin. The term originated in the Roman army and became used thereafter for subaltern officials in the Byzantine Empire, as well as for various positions in the Church, whence derives the English title "dean". It is unrelated to the position of deacon (Latin diaconus, Greek διάκονος).
==History and functions== The decanus was originally the leader of a 10-man contubernium, which consisted of the squad of eight legionaries who lived in the same tent, plus the two support units/servants of the contubernium. The title must not be confused with the decurio, which was a title given to civic officials and to leaders of 30-strong squadrons (turmae) of cavalry. Decanus is equivalent to the rank of the dekarchos ("commander of ten") in Greek texts.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).