Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin

(#litres_trial_promo) Yet it had been some 450 years, perhaps twenty generations, since those lands had been absorbed into Rome’s empire.

Greek- and Latin-speaking zones in the Eastern Empire, AD 300. Latin never spread widely in Greece or the Levant, except in army bases and academic centres.

In all the sixteen centuries that the Roman Empire was to last in the east, Latin never spread as a popular language. Some say the Romans themselves were at fault, in never making a determined effort to require its use. But what cultural inducement were the Romans able to offer to the Greeks? They were not offering any serious political rights comparable to Greek aspirations before the Roman conquest, and both Greeks and Romans agreed that the Greeks already had privileged access to the finer side of private life. A passage of particular pomposity from the first century AD suggests that it was usual for Romans to stand on their linguistic dignity:

How much the magistrates of old valued both their and the Roman people’s majesty can be seen from the fact that (among other signs of requiring respect) they persistently maintained the practice of replying only in Latin to the Greeks. And so they forced them to speak through interpreters, losing their linguistic fluency, their great strength, not just in our capital city but in Greece and Asia too, evidently to promote the honour of the Latin language throughout the world. They were not lacking in learning, in everything they held that what was Greek should defer to what was Roman, thinking it improper that the weight and authority of the Empire should be sacrificed for the charm and attractions of literature.

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But be this as it may, the language never expanded out of the functions (army, law, government, and the administration of imperial estates) and the particular cities (Constantinople, Nicomedia, Smyrna, Antioch, Berytus, Alexandria)

(#litres_trial_promo) that had attracted larger Roman populations. Roman citizen colonies in the east had been few (notably Corinth, refounded by Julius Caesar in 44 BC amid the century-old ruins left by L. Mummius) and soon effectively hellenized.

As long as the Empire was united and looked only to Rome as its capital, there was an inducement for the elite, at least, to learn Latin and seek advancement in imperial service. There was even a brief surge in the use of Latin in the east, when the capital was moved to Constantinople in 324. Berytus became a great centre of Latin studies, with a practical bias preparing its students for careers in law.

(#litres_trial_promo) But even so, Latin speakers were increasingly hard to find in the fourth century: Ammianus recorded two high officials appointed to service in the east specifically for their bilingual skills.

(#litres_trial_promo) In the fifth century, from the reign of Theodosius II (408–450) the eastern and western halves of the Empire increasingly went their separate ways. The use of Latin in the east was becoming purely a formality. From 397, governors had been permitted to issue judgments in Greek; from 439, wills too were confirmed to be valid in Greek. The emperor Justinian (527–565), himself a Latin speaker from Illyria, tried to boost Latin again, calling it PATRIA VOX, and (still in Greek) hē pátrios phōné; but he had no choice but to publish most of his famous law code, the CORPVS IVRIS CIVILIS, in Greek as well as Latin, to make sure it was widely understood.

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This period is documented among other sources by the memoirs (in Greek) of John the Lydian (490–ca 560), whose high judicial position in Constantinople, exceptor in the Praetorian Prefecture, had been achieved partly on the strength of his Latin. He witnessed with foreboding the courts’ abandonment of Latin, which happened in his time in office, recalling a prophecy attributed to Romulus, that Fortune would abandon the Romans whenever they should forget their paternal language.

(#litres_trial_promo) Declining use of Latin had become a symbol of the fading importance of traditional learning, especially in the law, where clarity was being sacrificed for ease and accessibility.

(#litres_trial_promo) Still, we know that Latin was hanging on in some of its traditional functions: the emperor Maurikios (who reigned 582–602) wrote in Greek a field manual for the army in which the words of command were listed in Latin.

(#litres_trial_promo) And a new emperor was in these days formally acclaimed in Greek by the populace, but in Latin by the army.

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Then in the early seventh century, after the death of Muhammad in 632, the eastern Empire was buffeted by a series of military disasters that deprived it of all but its solidly Greek-speaking heartland. Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, where Greek had only ever been an elite language, and most spoke Egyptian or Aramaic, would never again be under Roman control. This turned out also to give the quietus to even official uses of Latin: there was no longer a need for it as a distinct, formal unifying language when everyone in the eastern Empire spoke Greek anyway. Looking back from the mid-tenth century, Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus judged that it had been in this early seventh century that the Romans “had been Hellenized and discarded the language of their fathers, the Roman tongue.”

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In a confusing footnote to the career of Latin in the east, the Byzantines were soon calling Greek itself rōmaíika ‘Romanish’ (in contrast with latiniká), a term for Greek that lasted at least until the nineteenth century. When Emperor Michael III (reigning at Constantinople in the mid-ninth century) was reported to have called Latin a “barbarian and Scythian language,” Pope Nicholas I riposted by suggesting that if that was his opinion, he should give up the title Emperor of the Romans.

(#litres_trial_promo) Of that there was never any question. The eastern Empire had abandoned Latin, but that did not mean its citizens had given up on their Roman identity. Quite the reverse: the Byzantines were known as Rūmī to all their threatening neighbours to the east, Arab, Persian, and Turk, for more than eight hundred years, at least as long as their previous allegiance (as Graeci) to Rome in Italy. And when the Seljuk Turks, after 1071, succeeded in dislodging them from most of Anatolia, the Turks called their successor kingdom there the Sultanate of Rum.

In some sense, the Greeks had never “got the point” of being Roman.

They had never agitated for the kind of citizen rights (of trade, marriage, the vote) that exercised their fellow peoples subject to Rome in the west—and which meant that the Roman conquest and assimilation of Gaul, Spain, and Africa was like a continuation of the earlier struggle to expand across Italy. The Greeks’ loyalty to Rome, such as it was, was shown rather through participation in novel religious cults: first they hastily conjured into existence a new goddess, Roma (honoured in Alabanda, Chios, Miletus, Smyrna, Rhodes, as well as Athens); later—bizarrely—they affected to worship the most popular of the proconsuls sent to govern them; and ultimately they offered adoration to the emperor himself. In the first century AD, cities vied for dedicated shrines of worship to the emperor, since they were some kind of badge of status, entitling the city to call iself neōkóros ‘temple warden’. This was most un-Roman behaviour. But religion had always been an important mark of tò Hellēnikón ‘Greekness’—Herodotus

(#litres_trial_promo) related how the Athenians had appealed to it in seeking alliance with the Spartans against the Persian menace in 480 BC. It would be again, after the Christianization of Greece in the fourth century AD. This would offer scope for almost endless doctrinal dispute: henceforth the Greeks would be able to combine the two traditional Greek propensities, for worship and for argument.

Ultimately Greek was little affected by its eight hundred years of cohabitation with Latin, but Latin on the other hand derived much of permanence from its cohabitation with Greek. We have seen that Latin drew from Greek the conception it had of its own grammar, and also the tradition that a gentleman’s education should be general, based on literary classics and the skills of public speaking. But Latin is an heir to Greek in many other ways.

Most concretely, there are far more loans of Greek words into Latin than the reverse, starting with the philosophical and intellectual vocabulary, which has largely been transmitted through Latin’s later career into all the modern European languages at large. But Greek was also the source of many everyday words in the more colourful side of spoken Latin. Although this type of Latin is little known to us directly, outside graffiti, many such words have survived into Latin’s daughter languages. They also bear out the general hints we get from classical literature of the particular sociolinguistic role of Greek (and hence Greek borrowings) in the Latin world.

Gastronomy was a particular strength of the Greeks—the very words for olive and its oil (OLIVA, OLEVM) are old borrowings from Greek (elaiwā, elaiwon)—but this shows up in many names for sauces (GARVM ‘fish sauce’, HYDROGARVM ‘diluted fish sauce’, TISANA ‘barley water’, EMBAMMA ‘ketchup’), vegetables (ASPARAGVS, RAPHANVS ‘radish’, FASEOLVS ‘kidney bean’, CRAMBE ‘cabbage’) and seafood (ECHINVS ‘urchin’, GLYCYMARIS ‘clam’, POLYPUS ‘polyp’, SCOMBER ‘mackerel’, SEPIA ‘cuttlefish’), as well as some foreign delicacies that were to become common (AMYGDALVM ‘almond’, DACTYLUS ‘date’, GLYCYRRHIZA ‘liquorice’, ORYZA ‘rice’, ZINGIBER ‘ginger’). The word for liver, which has been absorbed by so many Romance languages (French foie, Spanish higado, Italian fegato, Rumanian ficat) is from Latin FICATVM, which originally did not mean ‘liver’ at all, but ‘figged’. This was a loan translation of Greek sukōtón, since the liver of animals raised on figs was such a popular delicacy. The word MASSA (which just means ‘mass’) is another borrowing, from Greek mâza, generalized from a mass of barley cake. The whole set of equipment for drinking wine, delivered in an AMPHORA, diluted in a CRATER, and ladled out with a CYATHVS into a large CANTHARVS or SCYPHVS, or an individual CARCHESIVM or CYMBIVM, was labelled in Greek. The culture of drinking too was named in Greek: an aperitif was a PROPIN ‘fore-drink’, a toast PROPINATIO, a game of drunken marksmanship with wine lees had the Greek name COTTABVS.

Most musical instruments had Greek names: SYRINX ‘panpipes’, CYMBALA, TYMPANVM ‘drum’, LYRA, CHORDA ‘string’, PLECTRVM as well as MVSICA itself. More sophisticated engineering tended to be named in Greek, such as the construction terms TROCLEA ‘pulley’, ARTEMON ‘block and tackle’, ERGATA ‘windlass’, POLYSPASTON ‘hoist’, CNODAX ‘pivot’, COCLEA ‘screw mechanism’; and so were the ORGANA of high-tech warfare—CORAX ‘crow’ (battering ram), HELEPOLIS ‘city-taker’ (siege tower), CATAPVLTA ‘off-swinger’, BALLISTA ‘shooter’, ONAGER ‘wild ass’ (all forms of catapult). So, of course, were many terms in the world of school and writing: SCHOLA, ABACUS (‘chequerboard’ as well as ‘abacus’), EPISTVLA ‘letter, missive’, PAPYRVS, CALAMVS ‘pen’, ENCAVSTVM ‘molten wax, ink’, GRAMMATICVS ‘language teacher’, RHETOR ‘oratory teacher’, BIBLIOTHECA ‘library’.

Physical culture too was a Greek speciality. Medical terms taken from Greek have often had a long life (e.g., plaster from Latin EMPLASTRVM, Greek emplastron ‘moulded on’, palsy from PARALYSIS ‘detaching’, dose < DOSIS ‘giving’, French rhume < RHEVMA ‘flow’, for the common cold).

(#litres_trial_promo) The Roman institution of the bath was clearly heavily influenced by its Greek origins too: BALNEVM (from Greek balaneîon) ‘bath’, THERMAE ‘hot baths’, APODYTERIVM ‘dressing room’, LACONICVM ‘sweat room’, HYPOCAVSTVM ‘underfloor heating’, XYSTVS ‘running track’, PALAESTRA ‘wrestling ground’, LECYTHVS ‘anointing bottle’, ALIPTA ‘masseur/trainer’ (from Greek aleiptēs ‘anointer’), were all terms of everyday use at the bathing establishment, all derived from Greek. Perhaps even more interestingly, a number of words for parts of the body in Latin are borrowed from Greek. The usual Romance words for leg (e.g., French jambe, Italian and Old Spanish gamba) are derived from a Latin word, GAMBA, itself derived from veterinary Greek kampḗ, ‘bend, joint’. STOMACHVS, originally meaning ‘maw’, the opening of the digestive tract, was a Greek word for which the Romans had a lot of use, since they thought of it as the seat of anger: STOMACHOSVS meant ‘testy’ and STOMACHARI meant ‘to lose one’s temper’. And curiously the Romans too borrowed their (and hence our) word for moustache: Latin MVSTACEVS, never found in Latin literature, is derived from a Doric Greek word for the upper lip, mustákion or mústax.

(#litres_trial_promo) Its close relative mástax ‘jaw’ was also borrowed in Latin; MASTICARE, a verb derived from it, has resulted in French mâcher ‘chew’ as well as modern English ‘masticate’. What became the favourite word for a punch or blow (seen in French coup, Italian colpo, Spanish golpe) was COLPVS, derived from COLAPHVS, already used in Plautus; in Greek it originally meant ‘a peck’, the blow from a bird’s beak.

Colloquial Latin was also full of Greek-sounding interjections: BABAE or PAPAE ‘wow’, PHY ‘ugh’, VAE ‘oh no’, ATATAE ‘ah’, AGE ‘be reasonable’, APAGE ‘get out of here’, EIA ‘come on’, EVGE ‘hurrah’, all have identical equivalents in Greek. Cicero had been embarrassed to use the seemingly innocuous BINI ‘two each’, since it sounded the same as the Greek imperative bínei ‘fuck!’

(#litres_trial_promo) (Spoken Greek had, in any case, always had, for Romans, overtones of the bedroom.)

(#litres_trial_promo) BASTAT ‘enough’, though unknown in classical Latin, went on to a lively career as a verb in Spanish and Italian and seems to have come from Greek bástaze ‘hold it’.

This last example points to one of the persistent differences between Latin and Greek, namely the accentual patterns. The accent on Greek bástaze made it sound like a two-syllable word in Latin; hence it might be heard by Romans as BÁSTAT. By contrast, Greek names imported into Latin were given new accentual patterns, based on the Latin rule, which have largely stayed with them in modern western European languages: not, as per the original Greek, Athená, Aléxandros, Euripídes, Heléne, Menélaos, Periklés, or Sokrátes, but ATHÉNA, ALEXÁNDER, EVRÍPIDES, HÉLENA, MENELÁVS, PÉRICLES, SÓCRATES. Meanwhile, modern Greek has retained the patterns of ancient Greek.

(#litres_trial_promo) Stress patterns, in the languages that have them—French, for example, and Japanese do not—can be remarkably persistent over the millennia, and modern English has turned out in many ways similar to classical Latin; but Greek and Latin are very different and have remained so.

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Latin, particularly colloquial Latin and poetic Latin, was peppered with Greek words. But to get this in proportion, let us consider some comparisons. Sampling in a moderate Latin dictionary (of about twenty thousand headwords) shows that, excluding proper nouns, some 7 percent of vocabulary in the classical era (200 BC to AD 200) was derived from Greek.

(#litres_trial_promo) By contrast, in 1450, after an equal four hundred years of Norman and Angevin dominance of written expression, something like half the recorded vocabulary of English was of French origin. Another language with massive borrowing, Turkish, has derived 28 percent of its core vocabulary from Arabic, 8 percent from Persian, mostly in the eleventh to sixteenth centuries; but since the nineteenth it has gained as much as 25 percent from French.

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Beside vocabulary, Latin writers and orators absorbed from Greek a particular attitude towards sentence structure, what is called periodic style. Greek language analysis did give rise to what we now recognize as grammar, but no one sways an audience or wins an argument by grammar alone. Greek analysis of how oratory or dialectic becomes effective was every bit as structured as—and considered much more important than—their analysis of declensions, conjugations, or parts of speech. The Greek word períodos means ‘circuit’, literally a ‘go-round’, as in a race. Aristotle, no doubt following up a doctrine that had been elaborated by the Sophists at the height of fifth-century Greek rhetoric, defined a períodos as “an utterance with a beginning and an end in itself, and a length that can be easily taken in,” contrasting it with a strung-out utterance, which has no end in itself, stopping only when what it is talking about comes to an end. The idea was that audiences are made restless by this strung-out style, not knowing what is coming up; and as an added bonus for the speaker, a speech made up of periodic sentences, the so-called terminated style, is much easier to memorize, since it consists of balanced parts, called ‘limbs’ (kôla, MEMBRA) each of them neither too long nor too short. It can even have rhythm, like verse, making it easier to remember; but the actual metres of poetry should be avoided.

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We can get an idea of what Aristotle was talking about, and what every rhetor of Greek or Latin put across to his pupils, by looking at a short period (períodos) of Cicero’s, indeed the sentence that follows on from the sentence cited above, when he was praising the stylistic resources of the Latin language. For immediate convenience, a parallel translation into English is included, but the meaning is not the main point here. Since the structure is, the English phases more or less correspond to the Latin originals, even if the grammatical relations in the sentence are somewhat changed.

This is fairly typical of a well-structured period in a Ciceronian speech or essay. Formally it is a balanced structure of measured clauses, with all sorts of measured contrasts and internal echoes, but it is not really an aid to clarity of thought. The whole thing is contrived, and its meaning is disguised rather than revealed by the form preconceived for the sentence. It starts with a sideswipe at the political constraints under which Cicero was labouring and finishes with a statement of his self-imposed duty to give the Romans a literature they could be proud of, linking them only with the observations that his talents are unused and he does not wish to quarrel with people who are happy enough reading Greek. Aristotle’s “utterance with a beginning and an end in itself” has largely taken leave of the natural form of whatever it was talking about.

The whole sentence can be analyzed with a kind of Chinese-box structure, with parallel constituents signalled by comparable styles of underlining.

EGO VERO,

But I,

DEBEO PROFECTO,

I have a clear duty,

This, then, was the basis of the Greek theory of how to structure sentences in a formal speech. (A full exposition of it would be far more elaborate, naturally.) The theory was widely applied in Latin, and not just by orators. For in the ancient world, all reading was reading aloud, and public recitations of poetry and prose works were common. In this context, some writers—notably the perverse genius Tacitus—delighted in disappointing the expectations raised by periodic theory. His Annales starts with what is almost a hexameter line (the classic epic metre), precisely what was not supposed to happen in a well-regulated prose stylist.

(#litres_trial_promo) And here is his one-sentence analysis of the decline of history writing during the early Empire: