Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin

But despite the detailed description of the concrete facts of Greek, the general approach to the language remained loftily philosophical and conceptual. As in the “ordinary language” philosophy of the later twentieth century, analysis of the home language was assumed to yield generalizations of universal validity. There was no sense among Greeks that any language other than Greek deserved such analysis, much less that such an analysis might lead to interestingly different results.

This theory of grammatical analysis was no doubt known to many of the Greeks who came to teach in Italy in the first century BC, but Romans were the ones who showed concretely how it could be applied to Latin. Before its development, L. Aelius Stilo,

(#litres_trial_promo) who was born around 150 BC, had paid attention to Latin etymology and tried to analyze archaic texts, but as a Roman had largely been interested in the theory of oratory. Cicero himself studied under him.

(#litres_trial_promo) The analysis of Latin on Greek principles took off with Aelius’ student M. Terentius Varro (116–27 BC), whose DE LINGVA LATINA ‘On the Latin Language’ included a treatment of Latin inflexion, and who can often be seen thinking like a modern formal linguist.

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The analysis continued to be elaborated, and simplified versions came to be included in the grammatical syllabus. Q. Remmius Palaemon, a famous practitioner of the first century AD, incorporated most of Greek terminology into Latin in translated form, including the famous mistranslation of aitiatikḗ, the ‘caused’ case, as ACCVSATIVVS ‘accusative’. The most definitive compilations turned out to be the ARS MAIOR ET MINOR ‘greater and lesser treatise’ of Aelius Donatus

(#litres_trial_promo) in the fourth century, and the monumental INSTITVTIONES GRAMMATICAE ‘grammatical educations’ of Priscianus Caesariensis in the fifth and sixth.

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Scholars’ adaptations of grammatical theory to Latin gave the language a new source of status, putting it effectively on a par with Greek even at this, most abstract, level. But there was another motivation for developing grammar, one that brings us back to the schoolroom. Foreigners aspiring to learn the language well, especially as it began to change, needed instruction on what was good style; seeing examples of it held up for imitation was no longer enough for learners. Grammatical theory began to be presented, often in simplified form, in the classroom. The word bárbaros / BARBARVS came to be at least as commonly used to denigrate failures in grammar and style (in Greek or Latin) as to point something out as truly foreign. A. Gellius, a scholar of the second century AD, naturally described a correct usage as NON BARBARE DICERE, SED LATINE ‘saying it not barbarously but in Latin’.

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And while such implicit snobbery against the outsiders continued to prevail, a curious fact was missed. Already by the first century AD, Latin scholars had demonstrated that Greek was not the only language reducible to rule, even if those very rules were inspired by looking at Greek. Other languages too could have a grammar.

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Yet it would be another millennium and a half before Europeans would realize the implications of this for languages at large.

CHAPTER 6 (#ulink_50ef9aae-1eef-55b7-934e-4ee3152a0d01)

Felix coniunctio—A Partnership of Paragons

GRAECA DOCTRIX OMNIVM LINGVARVM, LATINA IMPERATRIX OMNIVM LINGVARVM

Greek teacher of all languages, Latin commander of all languages

Honorius of Autun, Gemmae Animae, iii.95 (twelfth century AD)

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AT THE VERY END of the Roman Republic, when normal politics had been made impossible by Julius Caesar’s dominance, Cicero withdrew to his study. He would attempt something radically new, to give Latin its own corpus of philosophical writings and, in so doing, put it on a par with Greek, a language that would be adequate to express all aspects of civilization. Amazingly, in the twenty-two months between February 45 and November 44, this he achieved. His writings, especially those that covered the gamut of philosophy from theory of knowledge through to practical ethics, gave Latin the vocabulary to tackle any subject, no matter how abstract. As he put it himself, writing to his good friend Atticus, “You’ll say I must be pretty sanguine about the Latin language, writing such stuff. But they’re copies, not too hard to do. I just bring the words, which come pouring out of me.”

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Possibly more important, since they were respected and remained available from generation to generation, Cicero’s philosophical works allowed the Roman writers who followed him to share his self-confidence in addressing serious factual subjects in Latin. As he said himself, “But my sense is (and I have often discussed this point) that Latin is not only not poor, as they commonly believe, but even richer than Greek. Has there ever been a time, whether for good orators or poets, at least after they had someone to imitate, when their style was lacking in any fine feature, in quantity or quality?”

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Even if the inspiration in the early days was often Greek, the result of Roman writers’ efforts was to be a body of literature that stands alone. Latin literature became “the universal receptacle,” a basis for all the western European literatures that were to follow.

(#litres_trial_promo) For all its derivative roots, it has become an independent treasury of classical models, in every age mostly read and appreciated by people with no knowledge of Greek.

Few contemporary Greeks will have been as generous as Cicero’s tutor, Apollonius Molon, who is supposed to have made these prescient remarks to his amazingly accomplished student, when he heard him declaim in Greek as well as Latin: “I praise and admire you, Cicero, but it worries me for the fate of Greece when I consider that through you the only advantages which we have left, culture [paideía] and language [lógos], are also to pass to the Romans.”

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Mestrius Plutarchus (Plutarch), a moral philosopher and antiquarian who wrote a series of paired biographies of great Greeks and Romans. He never learned Latin well.

Until they started to write in the language themselves, Greeks passed over in silence any serious literature in Latin: evidently it never played any part in their education.

A good example is Plutarch, a Greek gentleman of the first century AD, who was interested enough in Rome and its history to write a series of parallel biographies comparing Greek and Roman statesmen. He even volunteered that, in his day, “pretty much everyone used the Roman language.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Nevertheless, on his own command of it he is modest:

… having had no leisure, while I was in Rome and other parts of Italy, to exercise myself in the Roman language, on account of public business and of those who came to be instructed by me in philosophy, it was very late, and in the decline of my age, before I applied myself to the reading of Latin authors. Upon which that which happened to me may seem strange, though it be true; for it was not so much by the knowledge of words that I came to the understanding of things, as by my experience of things I was enabled to follow the meaning of words. But to appreciate the graceful and ready pronunciation of the Roman tongue, to understand the various figures and connection of words, and such other ornaments, in which the beauty of speaking consists, is, I doubt not, an admirable and delightful accomplishment; but it requires a degree of practice and study which is not easy, and will better suit those who have more leisure, and time enough yet before them for the occupation.

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But the balance was going to shift. Already in the first century AD Greek translations of Virgil’s work at least were appearing, and Virgil’s popularity beyond the Latin-speaking world was reinforced when his Fourth Eclogue began to be interpreted as a prophecy of the Christ child.

(#litres_trial_promo) By the second century a well-to-do North African such as Apuleius could prepare for a career at home by a Greek education at Athens followed by a Latin one at Rome, then go on to write what he called a ‘Greek-style story’ (FABVLAM GRAECANICAM) in Latin, although he laughingly dismissed himself as a ‘rough speaker of that exotic, courtroom language’ (EXOTICI AC FORENSIS SERMONIS RVDIS LOCVTOR).

(#litres_trial_promo) Greek literature went on being written in profusion, but Greeks were becoming increasingly disadvantaged as candidates for imperial service in that they just did not have the Latin for it.

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In practice, Apollonius Molon’s fears for Greek were coming true. Augustine (354–430) was the first top-rank philosopher brought up in Latin to find (with relief) that he could get by without any Greek at all.

But what was the reason why I hated Greek literature, when I had been so steeped in it as a child? Not even now have I fully worked it out. I had fallen in love with Latin… I think it is the same with Virgil for Greek children, when they are forced to learn him as I was [Homer]. The fact is that the difficulty, the difficulty of learning a foreign language at all, wiped out with its gall all the Greek sweets of fabulous stories.

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And now that an education in Latin alone was totally respectable, the value of Greek tutors was plummeting. Libanius, a consummate Greek rhetorician of Antioch (and a friend of the emperor Julian), wrote ruefully in 386 of the poor career prospects awaiting would-be Greek teachers, indeed any who stayed in the east:

You know how the present age has transferred to others [the Latin teachers] the rewards for our language studies, and reversed the ranking of respect to our disadvantage, presenting them as giving access to all good things, while suggesting that we only offer mumbo jumbo and a formation for hard grind and poverty. That is why there are all those frequent sailings, voyages with only one destination, Rome, and the cheers of young people off to fulfil their dreams: of high office, power, marriage, palace life, conversations with the emperor.

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Some Greeks were prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice and write not in their own language but in Latin. One of the most famous in this line is the last great Latin historian of the Empire, Ammianus Marcellinus (ca 330–95), an older contemporary of Augustine’s.

(#litres_trial_promo) Although educated in Greek (like Libanius) in Antioch in Syria, he had a varied military career, which took him all round western Europe, but also to Mesopotamia, where he took part in a failed campaign against the Parthians. His service no doubt gave him a thorough exposure to Latin. In the 380s he moved to Rome and started to write. He took the very Roman historian Tacitus as his model, writing an opinionated history that took up where Tacitus left off (AD 96) and continued to his own day (around 391). He frequently cited Cicero with approval, but with a bicultural touch unknown to previous historians, now and then also quoted in Greek. He appears to have been rewarded with public readings of his works at Rome, a source of reflected glory on his home city of Antioch. Even Libanius was pleased.

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In the eyes of the Empire as a whole, then, Latin was in time able to match and just about supersede its master Greek as preeminent language of culture. This new standing of Latin was clear when viewed from Rome, and the Greek cultural centres that had once attracted so many students from abroad, but felt themselves disfavoured; it was less so when viewed from the rest of Greece, or the provinces of the east. This was because of the stubborn limit on the progress of Latin there: Latin remained unable to displace Greek in the east, as a language actually spoken in daily life, a fact which stands in vivid contrast with the pervasive tendency of Latin in all other parts of the Empire.

This linguistic deficit of Latin in the east was noted at the time. The famed Bible translator Jerome (Eusebius Hieronymus), a native speaker of Latin from Dalmatia, who lived from 331 to 420 and learned to read and translate Hebrew as well as Latin and Greek, spent the latter half of his life in Palestine. In a letter to Augustine, he wrote, “We suffer a great poverty of the Latin language in this province.” In a commentary, he noted by contrast that the Greek language was spoken all over the east.

(#litres_trial_promo) Egeria, a pilgrim from western Europe to Jerusalem around the fifth century, noted that Christian services there were conducted in Greek always, with Syriac interpretation; but in addition, Latin speakers could receive interpreting into Latin “lest they be saddened.”