Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin

Latin had been literate, then, but not literary: scribes will have noted down important utterances, but few will have consulted those records after the immediate need for which they had been made. One ancient historian recounted that important laws were stored on bronze pillars in the temple of Diana on Rome’s Aventine Hill,

(#litres_trial_promo) and at least one ancient inscribed stone has been found in the Roman Forum.

(#litres_trial_promo) There was a tradition at Rome that the law was set down publicly on Twelve Tables in 450, but the fragments that survive, quoted in later literature, are all in suspiciously classical-looking Latin.

(#litres_trial_promo) It seems unlikely that there was any canon of texts playing a part in Roman education in this early period.

(#litres_trial_promo) Famously, the important written texts, such as the Sibylline Books, consulted at times of crisis by the Roman government, were not in Latin but in Greek. The absence of a literary tradition in Latin until the second century seems to have allowed speakers to lose touch with their own language’s past, in a way that would have been unthinkable, say, for Greeks in the same period.

The Duenos ceramic, a tripartite vase of uncertain, but perhaps erotic, use. It holds the earliest substantial inscription in Latin (sixth to fifth centuries BC).

In fact, about three generations after Naevius, the historian Polybius managed to locate the text of a treaty that had been struck between Rome and Carthage, explicitly dating it to the first year of the Roman Republic, 508 BC (“under Lucius Junius Brutus and Marcus Horatius, the first consuls after the expulsion of the kings, twenty-eight years before Xerxes crossed into Greece”). He commented, “We have transcribed this, interpreting it to the limits of accuracy possible. But such a great difference in dialect has arisen between modern and ancient that the most expert Romans can barely elucidate parts of it, even after careful study.”

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He then quoted it in full, but tantalizingly only in Greek translation. However, one of the few inscribed survivals from earlier Latin may offer a hint at the kind of difficulties those Roman experts were encountering. Latin grammar had moved on quite smartly in those two hundred years; and many old inscriptions remain enduringly obscure, even though we now can approach them with a comparative knowledge of other Indo-European languages inconceivable to contemporaries.

Consider for example the oldest substantial example, on the famous DVENOS ceramic, a tripartite, interconnecting vase rather reminiscent of a Wankel engine. Found in Rome in 1880, it is dated to the sixth or early fifth century BC, the same period as that early treaty.

The inscription is in three lines, which may be transcribed as

IOVESATDEIVOSQOIMEDMITATNEITEDENDOCOSMISVIRCOSIED

ASTEDNOISIOPETOITESIAIPAKARIVOIS

DVENOSMEDFECEDENMANOMEINOMDUENOINEMEDMALOSTATOD

and which are conjectured to mean

He who uses me to soften, swears by the gods.

In case a maiden should not be kind in your case,

but you wish her placated with delicacies for her favours.

A good man made me for a happy outcome.

Let no ill from me befall a good man.

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This is unlikely to be fully correct—some of the vocabulary may simply be beyond our ken because the words died out—but even if it is, it presupposes that the words here must have changed massively over three centuries to become part of a language that Naevius would have recognized. Here is a reconstruction into classical Latin, with the necessary changes underlined:

iurat diuos qui per me mitigat.ni in te_comis virgo sietast [cibis] [fututioni] ei pacari vis.bonus me fecit in manum munus. bono_ne e me_malum stato

Virtually every word had changed its form, pronunciation, or at least its spelling between the sixth and the third centuries BC. This shows what rapid change for Latin occurred in these three centuries, comparable to what happened to English between the eleventh and the fourteenth centuries AD, when Anglo-Saxon (typified by the Beowulf poem), totally unintelligible to modern speakers, gave way to Middle English (typified by Chaucer’s writings), on the threshold of the modern language.

The inscription that circles the Duenos ceramic. Written in a highly archaic form of Latin, it appears to offer a love potion.

Yet (again like English), as reading and writing became more widespread, the pace of change in the language was to slow dramatically. Naevius’ poetry of the third century remained comprehensible to Cicero in the first, and indeed Plautus’ comedies, written in the early second century BC, were still being performed in the first century AD. Those plays are in fact written in a Latin close to the classical standard, canonized by Cicero and the Golden Age literature that followed him, a literary language that was simply not allowed to change after the first century BC, since every subsequent generation was taught not only to read it but to imitate it.

But why did this language, which only came to a painful self-awareness in the third century BC, go on to supplant not only all the other languages of Italy but almost all the other languages of western Europe as well? In the sixth century BC, a neutral observer could only have assumed that if Italy was destined to be unified, it would be under the Etruscans; and in the third century BC, Latin was still far less widely spoken than Oscan. Where did it all go right for Latin, and for Rome?

CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_e1835eec-aede-52bb-aa6b-eddfd5845450)

Sub rosa—Latin’s Etruscan Stepmother

thesan tins, thesan eiseras seus, unus mlakh nunthen thesviti favitic fasei, cishum thesane ushlanec mlakhe luri zeric, zec athelis sacnicla cilthl spural methlumesc

Dawn of the Day-god, Dawn of All the Gods, you in your goodness I invoke in the east and in the west with a libation, and three times, at dawn, at high noon, and by the serene brightness (of the stars), as written by the ancestors, for the citizens of the tribe, the city, and the nation.

Etruscan prayer

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THE ETRUSCANS ARE FAMOUS for their attendant mystery. The puzzle of their origins goes back three thousand years; but when we first have evidence of which named people lived where in Italy, the Etruscans were already firmly ensconced in the northwest, richer and more powerful than any of the other residents. The identity of their language is at the heart of the mystery, since it was clearly unrelated to all the Indo-European languages, most of them Italic languages, that surrounded it on every side. Unlike them, it was an agglutinative language—which means that it was structurally more like Central Asian Turkish or Peruvian Quechua than Latin or Gaulish, or indeed other neighbouring languages such as Greek (in Sicily) or Punic (in Sardinia). Any words that it shared with its neighbours are seen as individual cultural borrowings; they are not the kind of similarities, more distant yet more systematic, that could stand as evidence of a common origin.

Rome was to establish itself as the successor to the Etruscans, but before it could do so, it first had to extricate itself from their dominance. More permanently, this political transition would lead to the linguistic spread of Latin, as the successor language in Etruria.

The Etruscans were clearly the dominant power in Italy in the period when the Greeks, farther east, were establishing their classical culture. This raises the question why they were so much more outgoing and culturally influential than their local neighbours, who spoke Italic languages: for the Etruscans in their heyday were challenged only by the two seafaring powers, the Carthaginians (who were largely their allies), and the Greeks (who largely opposed them).

This period was largely documented through Greek sources: Greeks were literate and well-travelled in the middle of the first millennium BC. But it was also revealed through the discovery of inscriptions, and the Etruscans’ distinctive black bucchero pottery. In it we can see evidence of the Etruscans expanding their power and commercial reach around what became known as the Tyrrhenian (i.e., Etruscan) Sea, as well as eastward overland from their famed “Twelve Cities.” In the eighth century BC they were colonizing Campania in the southwest, but also northern Italy across to the Adriatic. With Greeks from Euboea they established a trading presence in Ischia. In 540 BC, in alliance with Carthage, they defeated the Phocaean Greeks at the Battle of the Sardinian Sea and established a foothold in Corsica.

Etruscan “forward policy,” 750–475 BC. Etruscan influence extended beyond the “Twelve Cities” of Etruria north into the valley of the Po and south along the Campanian coast.

They suffered a major reverse in 511 at Aricia, just south of Rome, when they lost to an alliance of Cumaean Greeks and Latins; two generations later in 474, they were defeated at Cumae itself by the combined naval forces of Cumae and Syracuse. Thereafter they rapidly lost their southern Italian bases and dependencies. It was the end of the Etruscan “forward policy,” which had lasted for three hundred years. The next two centuries of Etruscan history were taken up with a long, drawn-out series of unsuccessful defences, as one by one each of their cities yielded to the encroaching new power, Rome. The first city to engage Rome, in 477, was Veii, Rome’s close neighbour north of the Tiber; but the struggle continued for eighty-one years, until Veii’s annihilation in 396. The last one, Volsinii, fell in 264, 132 years later.

One clue to Etruscan identity lies in their various names for their nation. Their name for themselves was rasna or rasenna, but this turns out (like so many accepted ethnonyms all over the world) to be just their word for ‘people’. The Greeks, however, were introduced to them as tursānoi.

(#litres_trial_promo) In the Ionian Greek accent (which was characteristic of the Euboean and Phocaean colonists active in the area), this comes out as tursēnoi; and in Attic Greek (which, being Athenian, became the standard) as turrēnoi. (This was Romanized as ‘Tyrrheni’, still seen in the name of the Tyrrhenian Sea, modern Italian Mare Tirreno, which had once been the Etruscan lake.) Some Greeks knew them as turranoi, perhaps a compromise pronunciation; their own dedication plaque left at Delphi is marked in Greek TURRANO; and Hiero of Syracuse, on helmets taken at the battle of Cumae and dedicated at Olympia, wrote the name TURAN.

(#litres_trial_promo) By contrast, the Latin name for them was Etrusci or Tusci. If the final consonant here is an adjectival ending (compare Graii vs. Graeci for Greeks, Poeni vs. Punici for Carthaginians), then the root looks like TRUS or TURS, also seen in tursanoi.

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Now, it is a remarkable fact that apparently this same root underlies the Greek words for Troy (troia) and Trojans (trōes), namely TRŌS.

(#litres_trial_promo) So Troia and Etrūria would have the same origin: they are Greek and Etruscan-Latin developments, respectively, of the root TRŌS-IA.

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Coins showing Venus on one side with Aeneas carrying his father to safety on the reverse, and a votive statue of Aeneas and his father. Aeneas, the Trojan refugee to Italy, was a cultural hero of the Etruscans before the Romans.

For this, the cultural background turns out to fit pretty well. Not only is there a story in Herodotus

(#litres_trial_promo) that the Tyrsēnoi migrated from Asia Minor (admittedly it is a story that they came from Lydia, about two hundred kilometres south of Troy),

(#litres_trial_promo) but Hellanicus, a contemporary historian whose works have not survived, also apparently related that the Tyrrhenians were Pelasgians (i.e., pre-Greek inhabitants of the Aegean) who had migrated to Italy when driven out by the Greeks.