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December 20, 2022 - October 19, 2023
Although Latin was part and parcel of a good education in the entire Western world well into the twentieth century, Latin literature of the modern era is by far the least known body of literature.
How is such collective amnesia possible? Superficially, the explanation is rather simple. The exclusion of Latin does not relate to its entire history but rather to the centuries in which Latin was still used alongside the newly developing written languages of Europe, that is, from the High Middle Ages up to about 1800.
Spoken language was viewed, and to a certain extent still is, as the only legitimate object of linguistic analysis. Written norms and all forms of external influence on language were interpreted as cultural epiphenomena not to be identified with the essence of the language as such.
The Roman poet Ennius (239–169 BCE) arrived in Rome from southern Italy, and although Latin was a language he had to learn, his contribution to Roman literature was great. He confessed to having three hearts: Roman, Oscan (the standard Italic language of southern Italy), and Greek. He did not even mention Messapian, the local dialect of his home region. That, in a nutshell, is the essence of multilingualism both in antiquity and in the modern world.
One of the core arguments of this book is that Latin, like all other world languages of premodern times, attained this status only after it had detached its standards from those of a concrete linguistic community and had to some extent become a “dead” language.
No person of ambition in the Greek world could any longer afford to speak the language that had been learned at home but was forced to learn the elevated Attic idiom. This was more or less true even for Athenians, whose spoken vernacular, four hundred years after the classical period, was no longer that of Aristophanes. From then on, Attic Greek was passed on from teacher to student, not from parent to child.
The first Greeks who arrived in Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and triggered a renaissance in Greek literature among the Italian humanists—writers like Constantinos Laskaris, Cardinal Bessarion, and Michael Marullus—wrote and taught classical Greek as “their own” language, not as a historical artifact.
Nonetheless, this underlying diglossia and the art status of High Arabic are fundamental to the culture of the Arab world. It is as if all of the Romance countries of Europe used an updated form of Latin exclusively in written communications while the Romance languages themselves were relegated to the spoken word.
The Arabic model of a language unchanging for centuries with a language community bound together by a high language based on literary norms, below which one or several oral vernaculars are in a constant state of evolution, is a model attested to in numerous societies.
It was not so much that the French wanted to supplant “dead” Latin with a living language; rather, the intent was to imbue the language of France with all of the qualities of Latin and in particular render it eternally immutable.
One might perhaps say that the Romance languages are the daughters of Latin, while the other successor languages that did not emerge from Latin itself but converged with Latin as a result of secondary cultural and historical constellations may be viewed as Latin’s adoptive daughters.
Awareness that Latin was a “dead” language was conceivable only once it was possible to dispense with Latin completely.
In addition, European linguistic history since the sixteenth century has been characterized by an “ideology” favoring a living vernacular learned at home and not at school, which has led to a deprecation of grammatically standardized languages.
Nor does the fact that Latin was the language of power in Rome mean that the Romans forced their language on the empire. The type of language imperialism practiced by modern national states, leading to the cultural conflicts that are all too well known to us, did not exist in the Roman Empire in this form.
The variety of languages mirrors this political reality. It was almost as if arguments had broken out in England after the conquest of India over whether the inhabitants of Exeter were actually English citizens or whether Welsh should be given an official role in the political life of the country.
The Romans never suppressed a language if it already had an established written tradition when they arrived. In this, Roman expansionism differed markedly from that of Islam, which suppressed the old written languages of Syriac, Coptic, Greek, and, at least until the tenth century, Persian.
Rather, we need to recognize that the connection between Greek literature—or, more concretely, Greek theatrical practices and epics—and Italic forms of culture had already been introduced wherever the Greeks settled before the ascent of the Romans.
What is most likely is that practitioners of the theater had used Greek texts for dramas in their respective Italic mother tongues well before they arrived in Rome. If this is true, then the Romans did not actually imitate Greek literature directly but adopted from their neighbors the habit of translating Greek literature into an Italic language. The actual cultural transfer of literature, which has until now been ascribed exclusively to the Romans, had, in all probability, already been accomplished by other Italic peoples.
When imagining the Italic reworking of epic poetry, we also find it useful to think in terms of oral performance. However, epic texts based on Homer, along the lines of those used in Greek writing classes, may also have been used as school textbooks from the very beginning. We have good reasons to believe that Livius Andronicus’s Latin translation of the Odyssey, the oldest Latin epic, from the middle of the third century BCE, may well fall into this category.
At issue is something far more fundamental: the Greeks possessed a written language that was standardized over a supraregional territory and could be learned in their academies based on an actual literary tradition.
The process of linguistic standardization began with the adoption of Greek literature in Rome.
Textual language was always special but not primarily because (as in the bourgeois nineteenth century) literature was aimed at an educated class but rather because writing was per se something special, and no one expected a written text to reflect the spoken word.
What we do know is that the fixing of the Latin language proceeded from literature and not from administrative necessity.
This tendency probably began with Lucretius, whose didactic poem “De rerum natura” was, in terms of form, a Roman reworking of the didactic poem “Peri physeos” (About Nature), by Empedocles (ca. 494–434 BCE). Empedocles was a very widely read author. Cicero modeled his dialogues De oratore, De re publica, and De legibus on the tradition of Platonic dialogues and those of Aristotle.
Only the works of Ovid, virtually impossible to pigeonhole in any tradition, seem not to have had Greek counterparts.
If Caesar had not been murdered, if the Battle of Philippi (42 BCE) had never been waged against his murderers, or if the Battle of Actium against Antonius (31 BC) had turned out differently, there would never have been an Augustan culture. But Rome’s new engagement with the Greeks had begun much earlier, and if Augustus had lost the civil war, others would have completed the process in their own way.
The fact that the Romans succeeded so brilliantly that they have continued to influence Europe for two thousand years is attributable to the genius of their classical writers. Stroh’s praise of the beauty of the classical language is fully justified. But their miracle was a result of their response to a question, a specifically Roman questione della lingua.
As Fuhrmann noted, if only in passing, the peculiar development of Latin literature and language cannot be explained without reference to Greek.30 However, we need to understand that the Roman Empire, which achieved its greatest territorial expansion during the second century, was organized rather idiosyncratically. Greek continued to be the first language in the eastern part of the empire.
Other literary genres flourished in Greek as well. Plutarch and Dion of Prusa (called Chrysostomos, or “golden mouthed” because of his skillful use of language) wrote around 100 CE. Lucian, Galen, Aelius Aristides, Appian, and Arrian wrote in the second century, and Athenaios, Philostratus, and Herodian in the third. These authors, whose output alone exceeds by several orders of magnitude the surviving literature from Homer to the end of the Hellenistic period,
At least in terms of literature in the narrower sense, Greek, not Latin, was the world language of the Roman Empire.
Over the entirety of the Roman Empire, Latin was the language of administrative affairs, while Greek was the preferred medium for rhetorical training and literature.
The astonishing “gap” in Latin literature between the middle of the second and the end of the third century CE demonstrates that the effort to Romanize the culture, which had characterized the classical period between Cicero and Horace, had not met with the intended success. The attempt to create a Roman literary canon on a par with that of the Greeks had not really displaced Greek as the prime language of literature and philosophy even in the western parts of the empire.
Literary historians and linguists have long examined the special position of Africa. Although the region is no longer considered to have had a specifically “African” Latinity of its own, during the period in question it was undoubtedly an economically and culturally vibrant province, and Emperor Septimius Severus (146–211), who founded the last great imperial dynasty before the crisis of the third century, was born there.
As had occurred centuries earlier with the Greek language, this was the step that turned Latin into a historical culture language that was completely independent of its living language community. This was where Latin first became a world language.
In English, on the other hand, the regional variants continued to diverge. There is no concentrated effort to establish a supranational standard, and the use of English around the world evolves more or less at will. One exception is in pronunciation, where extreme divergence is already leading to considerable difficulties in communication, as a Bostonian vacationing on Jamaica might attest. One suggestion for dealing with this divergence is to establish a common minimum standard, a “core lingua franca” to ensure the viability of transnational communications.
The Neoplatonic school was founded in Rome by Plotinus (ca. 205–ca. 270 CE), who was probably born in the East, during the high point of the imperial crisis of the third century, which apparently did not have as deleterious an effect on Greek as on Latin literature. Plotinus’s most important student, Porphyrios (d. 305), continued to live in Rome. After that, the history of Neoplatonism, and of philosophy as a whole, shows a clear split between a fairly large number of philosophers who lived in the East (in Athens, Asia Minor, Syria, and perhaps Alexandria) and wrote in Greek and those who
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The first printed book was not Gutenberg’s famed forty-two-line Bible but rather Donatus’s Ars minor, which Gutenberg, correctly sizing up the market, hoped to sell in class sets to schools.
There was, however, never a complete integration. The fundamental problem may be summed up by the famous dream of Jerome (twenty-second letter), which had a powerful effect well into the early modern era.
Although the Romans came to be known more for their deeds than their literary aesthetic, this contradiction in Latin was more pronounced than in Greek, where a conceptual struggle such as was personified by Jerome’s dream is much less documented.
The synthesis of these two trends, which was brought about during Augustine’s generation, did not, however, do away with the contradiction between the humanistic self-glorification of humankind and Christian humility.
In essence, this was a repetition of the process of cultural transfer that had occurred a thousand years earlier in the constitution of Latin as a written language. Just as the written Latin culture was based on the Greek template, so the new, written European cultures absorbed much from Latin. In both cases, the first literary works were often translations or free adaptations of works from the older written culture.
The Christian church (that is, the Roman Catholic Church up to the Anglican schism and the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century) stood at the center of this European cultural identity.
Nonetheless, the ancient pagan tradition clearly remained integral to European Latin culture.
Retranslation of the Bible, whose text was itself a translation, into Latin was therefore much less problematic.
The written European languages that we know today could have developed only within a common framework that secured written communication. And this framework was created by Latin.
For every text that needed to be accessible over the centuries—the Bible, liturgical texts, legal tracts, and scientific and literary texts—continuity was ensured by Latin alone.
The various battles fought in modern times over the use of Latin and vernacular languages in politics, administration, science, and literature, which began in the sixteenth century and continued on into the nineteenth, might well be compared to the separation process experienced by adolescents and their parents.
The history of Latin teaching clearly demonstrates how this competence was achieved. Wherever Latin was actually used in communications, it was taught based on “real” situations, much like any modern foreign language today.
It is estimated that, in the early 1990s, approximately 80 percent of global communications in which English was used as a second or third language, involved no native speakers whatsoever.
And in construction teams consisting of workers from around the world who use English as a lingua franca, we make do with an even lower level of language competence just so long as everyone on the team understands what needs to be done. Of course, this is how every lingua franca works. But what has become characteristic of English is that its use as a lingua franca has become the norm while native languages fade into the background.
