Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin

Upper-class education was to retain this early exposure to Greek, to the extent that some believed that Roman children’s schooling should start with Greek, not Latin: children would learn Latin anyway, they felt, and the origins of education were after all Greek. (Quintilian, the consummate rhetorician of the first century AD, was one who shared this view—but in moderation: it would not do to make a fetish of it [SVPERSTITIOSE], in case the children’s Latin should suffer from excess Greek.)

(#litres_trial_promo) From the second century BC it was also increasingly common for the elite to travel to some Greek academic centre in their twenties to complete their education: Athens was supreme, but Pergamum, Smyrna, and Rhodes in Asia, and even Massilia (Marseille) in southern Gaul, attracted many Roman students.

Beyond the elementary level, education without Greek was in fact inconceivable in republican Rome: classes were conducted in it from an early age, and few Greek tutors showed any inclination to learn Latin, so that educated Romans’ competence in Greek, spoken as well as written, was seemingly taken for granted whenever use of languages came up in surviving literature. From 81 BC, it was apparently acceptable to address the Roman Senate in Greek, “to deafen the House’s ears with Greek proceedings,” as the unsympathetic Valerius Maximus put it. Cicero’s professor from Rhodes, Apollonius Molon, established the precedent.

(#litres_trial_promo) The pair of Greek and Latin came to be expressed by the clichés VTRAQUE LINGVA or VTERQVE SERMO ‘both languages’: no other language came into consideration.

The unthinking respect for Greek as the common mark of learning is proved, perversely enough, by the way Greek learning was often dismissed or played down for rhetorical effect. Where Greek was concerned, Romans always felt they had something to prove. The historian Sallust made C. Marius, a populist general in the second and first centuries BC, stress his lack of book-learning, hence Greek: “My words are not refined: I don’t care. True character displays itself quite well enough; those others will be needing technical finesse, as a way for words to disguise their chicanery. Nor did I learn to read and write Greek: there was no point in learning it, since it did no good to the prowess of the people who teach it.”

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And before there was any Latin literature to speak of, Marcus Cato the Censor had set the tone for Helleno-skeptic Romans. Though on a diplomatic mission of some delicacy—when in 191 he needed to persuade his audience to support Rome rather than the Greek emperor Antiochus—he deliberately chose to address the Athenians in Latin, speaking in tandem with an interpreter although he knew Greek himself: “The Athenians, he says, admired the quickness and vehemence of his speech; for an interpreter would be very long in repeating what he had expressed with a great deal of brevity; on the whole he professed to believe that the words of the Greeks came only from their lips, whilst those of the Romans came from their hearts.”

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Yet this was the same man who, while on campaign in Sardinia, had discovered the poet Ennius; by bringing him back to teach and write at Rome as its first “national” poet, Cato did as much as anyone to set Latin literature into its Greek tracks. Cato, however, also went on personally to found Latin prose literature, with a treatise on running a farm (DE AGRI CVLTVRA), and another—his masterwork, though unfinished and now lost—on Roman history (ORIGINES), which was composed from 168 to his death in 149.

A century later, in summing up the early Greek-bound history of Latin literature, Cicero—who was to become its prose master—liked to emphasize the role of the circle of intellectuals who congregated at the house of Cato’s younger friend P. Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus.

(#litres_trial_promo) Cicero, in his dialogues The Republic and Laelius on Friendship, imagines conversations among Scipio’s “flock,” which besides aristocratic politicians included Roman poets such as the satirist Lucilius

(#litres_trial_promo) and the dramatist Terence, and Greek scholars such as the historian Polybius, and the open-minded Stoic philosopher Panaetius, who apparently commuted between Rome and Athens. But here is a typical remark of Scipio: “And so I ask you to listen to me: not as a complete expert on things Greek, nor as someone who prefers them to ours especially in this field, but as one of the political class with a decent education thanks to his father’s generosity, and one who has been burning with intellectual curiosity since boyhood, but who has nevertheless been much more enlightened by practice, and what he was taught at home, than by what he has read.”

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Marcus Tullius Cicero, the eternal doyen of classical prose, who, after a brilliant oratorical career, laid the foundation for Latin as a language for philosophy.

The stance is familiar. Even the most intellectual of Roman politicians were determined to keep their thinking in touch with common sense and (since they were Romans after all) the practice of their distinguished forebears. Nonetheless, they could not overlook that the source of so many interesting ideas was Greek.

Cicero,

(#litres_trial_promo) whose own political career—to his great sadness—had coincided with the final collapse of traditional values in Roman politics, filled the enforced vacuum at the end of his professional career by writing. The task he set himself was to transmute Greek philosophy into a corpus of Latin works that would make sense to Romans. In so doing, he found himself struggling to give Latin some means of expressing abstractions. The word qualitas, for example, is one of the technical terms Cicero invented, turning up here for the first time in his Academic Questions:

“… they called it body and something like quality (‘how-ness’). You will certainly allow us in these unusual cases sometimes to use words that are novel, as the Greeks themselves do who have long been discussing them.”

“As far as we’re concerned,” said Atticus, “go ahead and use Greek terms when you want, if your Latin fails you.” Varro replied, “You’re very kind: but I’ll endeavour to speak in Latin, except for words like philosophy or rhetoric or physics or dialectic, which along with many others are already customary in place of Latin words. So I have called qualities what the Greeks call poiotētas, which even among Greeks is not a word for ordinary people but philosophers, as often. In fact, the logicians have no ordinary words: they use their own.”

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In such works, Cicero ensured that, just like Greek, the Latin literary tradition would progress from classic works in verse (dramatic especially) to classics of artistic prose, in oratory and philosophy. Of course, he was not alone as a writer in the late Republic; but the copyists’ tradition has been kind to him, following the collective judgment of ancient schoolmasters on who was worth reading, and his work now largely stands alone in those fields, along with the historian Sallust (86–35), and Julius Caesar himself (100–44), who also wrote a kind of contemporary history, but of his own campaigns. There is also DE RERVM NATURA ‘On the Nature of Things’, an atheistic epic on science and paleontology written by Lucretius (ca 94–ca 52 BC).

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This corpus was supplemented in the next generation by a small number of poets and historians who were likewise to be selected as classic representatives of their art forms. Three of them were protégés of a single rich and exceedingly well-connected man, Augustus’ aide C. Maecenas: these were Virgil (70–19 BC), the doyen of epic poetry (as well as pastoral and didactic verse—although Virgil was always inclined to weave in political references); Horace (65–8 BC), of lyric poetry, as well as witty, topical verse; and Propertius (ca 50–ca 5 BC), of love elegies. Besides them there were the historian Livy (59 BC–AD 17), author of Ab Vrbe Condita ‘Since the Foundation of the City’, and the poet Ovid (43 BC–AD 17), mostly famous for the wide range of his wit, often on erotic themes. These were the masters of the Golden Age. To them—largely, in deference to later taste—three other love poets are usually added: C. Valerius Catullus (84–54 BC) who was marginally involved in politics in the era of Cicero and Caesar; Albius Tibullus (ca 52–19 BC), who was a friend of Horace’s and Ovid’s, and Sulpicia, the only extant woman poet of the classical era, whose poems have been preserved along with those of Tibullus. With these, the roll call of accepted Golden Age writers is essentially complete.

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Publius Vergilius Maro (Virgil), Latin’s great epic poet. His apparent prophecy of a new age brought in by a virgin and child assured his later reputation among Christians.

In their separate ways, all but Catullus (who died too soon) needed to come to terms with the new dominance of Rome’s first emperor, Augustus. They were then amply rewarded for their optimistic view of the new regime: only Ovid fell foul of the government, but apparently because of a social or personal faux pas, rather than a false move in the political sphere.

More important for the history of Latin, they were all consciously following, imitating, and sometimes even translating Greek originals—inevitably the best they knew of, with greater ambition as their confidence ripened.

So Virgil started with Theocritus, a Syracusan of the third century who had made his name at Alexandria (then the Greek cultural centre) with the invention of highly mannered poetry about the lives of country bumpkins, so-called bucolic (“ox-herding”) verse. Virgil then moved on to Hesiod, whose archaic Works and Days is a guide to farming, but allowed Virgil (in the Georgics, Greek for ‘land-workings’) to express a Roman’s traditional joy in growing things in Italy, while never forgetting the contemporary crisis in land ownership there from a century of civil wars and veterans’ demands for settlement. At last he attempted the ultimate challenge, to measure himself (and Latin) against Homer himself, the author of the universal founding texts of Greek culture. In the Aeneid, by taking the mythical theme of Aeneas’ journey from Troy to Italy (via Carthage), he was able to address a resonantly Roman theme, but still have the freedom given by writing about the mythical past—and since the story contained sea adventures followed by a war, he could neatly draw on, and invite comparison with, both the Odyssey and the Iliad.

Although Virgil is a universal example of Latin literature being built out of Greek, the other authors recognized as great were no less explicit about their models. Horace drew on Archilochus of Paros (mid-seventh century) and Hipponax of Ephesus (late sixth) for his iambics, Sappho and Alcaeus (Lesbos, late seventh century) for his lyrical odes. Even his Ars Poetica is based on the prescriptions of an otherwise obscure Neoptolemus of Parium. Both Catullus and Propertius drew much from the learned Alexandrian poet Callimachus (mid-third century), and Propertius even claimed to be carrying on his inspiration in Roman form. Ovid was less clearly imitating Greeks than trying to outdo some of his illustrious Latin forebears, notably Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius, while consciously exploring new territory. Nonetheless his Ars Amatoria ‘Lover’s Art’ is supposed to be indebted to the explicit prose manual Aphrodisia by Philaenis;

(#litres_trial_promo) his Fasti ‘Calendar’ was influenced by Phaenomena, an astronomical and meteorological poem by Aratus (early third century, Asia); and his masterpiece, the mythological Metamorphoses, has Callimachus’ Aetia ‘Causes’ in the background, a mélange of mythological stories in verse, united only in that they sketch the origins of rites and cities.

In Livy’s field, Roman history, the first works, even by Romans, had actually been written in Greek.

(#litres_trial_promo) And Romans were not the only ones interested to write it: one of Livy’s major sources was the Greek Polybius (of the midsecond century BC). On occasion, Livy paid fulsome homage to Greek learning, calling Greeks “the most erudite race of all, who brought many arts to us for the cultivation of mind and body.”

(#litres_trial_promo) The ground rules for history had largely been set by Greeks, and these were never challenged by their Roman students and successors. Strikingly for moderns, these included a general practice of inventing long speeches to put in the mouths of the protagonists, dramatizing and analyzing their motivation. This was very much in the tradition of Greek and Roman education, where schoolwork was largely oral. Pupils were encouraged to develop their understanding not through essays, but by working up speeches to examine the strengths and weaknesses of famous past situations.

(#litres_trial_promo) And modern analysts of Livy

(#litres_trial_promo) tend to emphasize how incidents in early Rome were recast in the light of episodes from Greek history. So the tale of the rape of Lucretia, which led to the downfall of the Etruscan king Tarquinius, is adapted to mirror the story of the homosexual love affair that was the undoing of the Athenian tyrants Hippias and Hipparchus; and the entry of Gauls into Rome, followed by a massacre of senators, echoes Herodotus’ classic account of the Persian sack of Athens and destruction of the diehards who held the Acropolis. History was all about telling a good story, and the old (Greek) ones were the good ones.

Titus Livius (Livy) dramatized Rome’s past, from the city’s foundation to the present, firmly establishing Latin as a language for history.

So keen were the Romans to be seen as successors to the Greeks (but transcending them, of course) that they had elaborated the origin of Rome as something close to a Greek city: so they had adopted the story of Aeneas the noble Trojan as their foundation myth. Some Greeks had (for unknown reasons) reciprocated early on: both the fourth-century Academic philosopher Heraclides Ponticus and the third-century Macedonian warlord Demetrius the Besieger characterized Rome as a Greek city (pólis Hellēnís) in Italy—strange when we consider how little Rome had in common with real Greek foundations such as Cumae, Syracuse, or Tarentum.

(#litres_trial_promo) Pyrrhus, another Greek warlord (and enemy of Demetrius’), had seen a different significance in the foundation myth: if Rome was the new Troy, it was a fitting target for a Greek crusade.

(#litres_trial_promo) But in the next century, Rome, now with military control of Greece, assimilated itself subjectively to the Greek view of the world as a whole. This was not so much a process of trying to win Greek “hearts and minds”; we have seen that, if there ever was such a process, it did not last beyond the first generation of Roman control. Rather, it was that Romans saw themselves as insiders, in a civilized world, where the Greeks had seen all but Greeks as inferiors and outsiders. Hence the Romans’ appropriation of the unappetizing Greek term for ‘foreigner’, bárbaros (about as respectful as calling aliens “bowwows”).

The first large-scale user of this word in the Latin tradition was Plautus, at the beginning of the Roman wars in Greece, and for him it referred to what was non-Greek, and quite often Roman. It often has a decidedly negative charge: BARBARVM HOSPITEM MI IN AEDEM NIL MOROR ‘I can’t abide a barbar guest in my house,’ says a Greek slave to and of an apparent down-and-out, who is as Greek as he is.

(#litres_trial_promo) Still, Plautus could have been a key influence in changing its meaning from “non-Greek” to “neither Roman nor Greek”: when watching a Plautine play, the Roman audience had to identify with Greeks and so see the rest of the world as barbarous.

One hundred and fifty years later, the word had become, for Romans, the standard one to characterize those lacking in that Graeco-Roman speciality, civilization: Cicero could routinely contrast HVMANVS, DOCTVS ‘humane and cultivated’ with IMMANIS, BARBARVS ‘savage and barbarous’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The quasiracial claim that only Greeks and Romans enjoyed full humanity and civilization is clear, since Cicero was also happy to cast as BARBARI Syrians and even learned Egyptian priests, whose title to learning and literacy was well-known to predate the Romans certainly, and probably the Greeks, by many centuries.

(#litres_trial_promo) Julius Caesar, about the same time, naturally calls BARBARI not only all the peoples he challenged outside the Roman Empire, but his non-Roman “native troops” too.

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Meanwhile, Greeks gave no sign of returning the compliment: the word bárbaros and its derivatives in Greek resolutely went on including the Romans, even among Rome’s Greek admirers. In the first century AD the Greek geographer Strabo unembarrassedly used the term ekbebarbarõsthai ‘barbarized out’ to describe the process whereby Greeks had been supplanted by Romans in southern Italy.

(#litres_trial_promo) And putting the best face he could on the facts, the enthusiastic historian of Rome Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who knew both languages, but believed that Rome was of Greek origin, claimed that Latin was a kind of Greek-barbar creole: “The Romans speak a language that is neither highly barbarous nor thoroughly Greek, but somewhat mixed from both, with the greater part Aeolic, with this sole benefit from the minglings that they do not pronounce correctly all the sounds.”

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This quest of the Romans to be accepted into civilized—i.e., Greek—society, was explicitly pursued in the realm of grammar. As we have seen, Latin and Greek were learned in parallel (pari passu) in the best Roman schools. Since Greek was a “modern foreign language” at the time, as well as the acknowledged classic, it was not at first taught through the grammar rules and translation drills that are familiar to us from more recent classical studies. (The grammar rules had in fact not yet been worked out.) Rather it was taught though memorization and parallel dialogues; something of the style can be seen in surviving hermēneumata ‘translations’, parallel school texts, apparently dating from the third century AD or earlier, filled with everyday language showing how to say the same things in good Latin and Greek, and (like modern phrase books) sometimes illustrating the right words for a crisis:

The Greek language had progressively been analyzed since the fifth century BC, first by the sophistic rhetoricians and philosophers of Athens, who tended to look for general principles such as the division of subject and predicate, later by Stoic philosophers and Alexandrian textual critics, who emphasized more the arbitrary and irregular, which is apparent to anyone studying the profusion of inflexions on Greek nouns, adjectives, and especially verbs. The two aspects were characterized by the Greeks as “analogy” and “anomaly,” and theorists disputed in vain which of the two was truly fundamental to language. Nevertheless, the traditions culminated in the first comprehensive textbook of Greek grammar, Dionysius the Thracian’s Tekhnḗ Grammatikḗ ‘The Scholarly Art’, written around 100 BC. (Dionysius taught at Rhodes.) At the time, the aim of these studies was said to be the criticism of literature. Although the analysis of Greek’s distinctive sounds (largely implicit in the alphabet), and of its noun and verb inflexions, was highly developed, the theory did not cover sentence structure, and this was only to be added by Apollonius Dyscolus (‘the Grouch’) in the second century AD, based on his analysis of the functions of the “parts of speech.”