Actor Charles Heston has just died, and I was reading a wiki article on his movie, Ben-Hur and found this.
The word hortator, while defined in the eponymous novel, does not appear in either the American Heritage Dictionary or the Random House Dictionary. Although it is in the Oxford English Dictionary, the only citation listed is that from the book of Ben-Hur itself.
It was used in the context of (I believe) the drummer on a war galley. Is it true that this word was first used here? When people say 'the Hortator exhorts' they seem pretty near the mark, since that seems like the job of anyone running a galley.