This chapter considers first briefly the linguistic environment in which Latin developed, and then within the context of the development of linguistic self-awareness the theorization that the term Latinity (and synonyms) implied. Third, the later significance of the term among the grammarians of the Roman Empire is considered. With the empire, or more precisely in the second century CE, which is the proper concern of this volume, Roman writers and educated Latin speakers were firmly in the grip of Latinitas. It may be unfair to call this a mania, but Latinitas is at this period an intellectual pursuit. For Cicero, a proper Latin was a prerequisite. His attention and intellectual effort lay with later stages of education and composition. Varro and Quintilian had provided magisterial sources of and models for Latinitas. Their methods of etymology and strictures about which words to use and which authors to read and to imitate certainly underlie the new culture. Aulus Gellius and Fronto, on the other hand, love to make literature about philology.2 They love to draw a scene or center a letter on some dispute about Latinity. Indeed, life seems to be made up of philological inquiry and dispute. It is not simply that the evenings are taken up with literary conversation (really discussions about whether this or that is a good Latin word or making fine distinctions about the meaning of a Latin word—and thus finding fault with the careless). Gellius depicts his circle walking through the city of Rome and discussing the old words found on inscriptions (NA 13.25). Repeatedly, like Cicero and Quintilian before him, Gellius intervenes to show that the grammarians are extreme, too systematic and rigid. He then presents himself and his readers not simply as the pars sanior but as reasonable, Roman gentlemen, the descendants of Cicero and Quintilian in an oratorical tradition now gone to books. This is far more than an enthusiasm for more ancient forms of the language. The search for Latinity defines the literary life, and especially in the pages of these two authors, the literary life is the best and most Roman of lives, wrapped up in the discovery and appreciation of the old Roman ways. And it must be said that such a life is imperiled not simply by barbarisms and solecisms but by customary or banal expressions and by the experts. The Roman author must search the ancient literature rather like a cook looking for a sparkling ingredient, but only the old cookbooks will do and one must not follow a recipe. The composition must be new and tasty—the Antonine author wants to read Cato, select from Cato, and have his reader know that his diction is the result of long scholarship and selective taste, but he does not want to ape Cato.
ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT OF LATIN
The question of how Latin speakers came to the area of Rome and differentiated their language from the other Italic languages (all varieties of Indo-European) is complex, and beyond our proper subject, since we are interested in that sensibility to a particular variant of the language which declares it correct and superior. It must suffice here to say that an archaic variant of Latin was the language of the early settlement of Rome (from the eighth century BCE). The language takes its name from the Latini, apparently a group of tribes; so did the wider region about Rome, Latium. After this murky beginning, a solitary piece of concrete evidence: a sixth-century inscription shows that Latin was now written. There was of course nothing inevitable about the spread of Latin. A different Italic language, Oscan, widely spoken south of Rome, was only displaced by Latin as a consequence of Rome’s victory in the Social Wars (89 BCE). The spread of Latin does follow the history of Rome’s conquests, but it is important to stress that Latin was adopted for reasons of its prestige and not simply its functionality in law, trade, or diplomacy. The adoption of the language was one part of cultural assimilation. Again, for our purposes the real history of the development of Latin alongside the many languages of Italy is not quite relevant (Adams 2007, 37 suggests that there were as many as forty languages before Rome took control of the peninsula). We can leap over the ethnic and linguistic variety of early Rome. Nor must we trace the complex question of how Latin became a standardized language (certainly the language was diffused from Rome, but there was regular movement from the provinces back to the capital).
To judge from the literary record, Romans from the Republic on treated Latin as their ancestral language—modified by a certain number of loan words especially from the Sabines and Etruscans, but essentially the language of a tribe that had grown to rule the world. They did not, however, understand Latin as an immobile monolith. Partly on the spur of Hellenistic theories of linguistic change and in great measure for reasons of their own atavism, Roman intellectuals viewed their language through a double lens. On the one hand, proper Latin was a recent, sophisticated, literary and cultural project. Only those who studied rhetoric, literature, and Greek could attain to the best Latin style. There is also at play here the ineffable factor of taste. The lyric poet Catullus and his set have it, for example. Others are stigmatized for linguistic blunders. “Taste” and “judgment” are not very helpful for the modern scholar. They tend of course to mystify native attitudes. On the other hand, the countryside and the past had for the Romans strong cultural authority. Older versions of the language would be authentic and could be recuperated, especially by the diligent studies of the great scholar Marcus Terentius Varro but also by one’s own reading. From the first poets at Rome in the mid-third century BCE, tussles about who has the authority to judge Latinity mark this intellectual discourse as much as any question of method. Still we see that urbanitas and rusticitas and vetustas (the style of speech but also social and cultural attitudes associated with the city of Rome, the countryside of Latium, and the older Latin writers and speakers) will continue as the charged fields, to be traveled in the hopes of finding something old or distinct and valuable, and to be fought over.3 They are both sources for material and aesthetic principles or at least weapons with which to criticize. Thus some writers will be faulted as too urbane, too rustic, or too fond of archaism. Always at play seems to be the Ciceronian principle of balance, even when a Ciceronian fullness of expression may be the target of criticism. When the grammarians of the empire take the field, they will appeal far more to written Latin. Then perhaps we have truly arrived in the arena of Latinity—the effort to police the writing and speaking of the language which has no living regional or familial support but rather the traditions of literature itself.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF A SENSE OF LATINITY
No doubt judgments about a speaker’s or writer’s Latinity involved issues of sociolect and dialect, but the vocal and scribal conventions came to be taught in schools and derived from a canon of writers. This is a literary not a fixed or rigid linguistic project. The first poets at Rome were also the first schoolteachers of a new school culture arising from the Hellenistic world and adapting to Roman realities. These figures, preeminently Livius Andronicus, Ennius, and Naevius, in the mid-third century produced works of literature in Latin and provided schooltexts in Latin, especially epic and dramatic. The need to forge a Latin literary language found in these Greek-speaking and Greek-educated scholar-poets able proponents. For the first time, the Hellenistic literary expert was challenged to translate his literary heritage into a foreign culture. The consequences for Latin literature were profound: Greek genres were imbued with Roman realities; Greek metrical forms had to be adapted to the Latin language; a literary language had to be constructed along with a technical lexicon with calques like versutus to mirror the epithet for Odysseus polytropos, litteratura for grammatica, translatio for metaphora, and indeed Latinitas for Hellenismos. As much later with the European vernaculars, a great “translation” effort helped develop the lexicon, syntax, and stylistics of the target language. But one should add that there was from the start a doubleness or self-consciousness to the idea of translation. The Latin text was not a replacement for the Greek. It drew attention to its status as a translated object through the inclusion of scholarly gestures, such as comments on the act of translating and on the need for calques, and through the deliberate introduction of Roman elements that tended to rupture the fiction that one was
reading a Greek work or even a literary work set in its original world.4
The first Latin poets evidently took pride in their achievement at writing in Latin (Latin had been written for at least four centuries—their achievement was to write Latin literature, plays and poems modeled on Greek genres written in a literary language of their invention). Two epitaphs, one by Ennius and one ascribed to Naevius, depict a rivalry of sorts for the crown of writing Latin. Ennius, originally from Rudiae in southern Italy, famously said of himself that he had three hearts, Greek, Latin, and Oscan. His epitaph concludes with a statement of the poet’s immortality, certainly a topos for Greek poets, but in this case stated in terms of the Roman speech community. He imagines his undying fame not as a fixed monument but as ongoing performance in the speech of the Roman community: Volito vivos per ora virum. The v alliteration in the Latin, which means “I fly alive on the mouths of men,” suggests the vitality of his verba, words. The insistent alliteration is a feature of the old poetry, and the very repetition performs the ongoing life of the poet’s verba, as the v’s continue to color the o’s, so the poet shapes the sound of his speech community (the vibrating consonant buzzing through the ora). The poet Naevius from Campania has likewise a poetic epitaph which declares his claim to literary immortality (Courtney 1993, 47–48). As has recently been well demonstrated, the poem reflects the aesthetics of a century after the generation of the two poets (Krostenko 2013). His concluding line makes a striking response to Ennius’s: obliti sunt Romae loquier lingua latina (“At Rome [after the poet’s death] they have forgotten how to speak Latin”). His liquid, alliterative tongue is perhaps one step better than Ennius’s vital assonance, but both frame their claim to poetic excellence in terms of a living speech community. The fabricator of Naevius’s epitaph may in fact have been disparaging contemporary poets and wishing that stylistic norms had remained those of the older poet. Both epitaphs then make claims to Latinity (avant la lettre) with a particularly pointed claim to correctness or preeminence: literary Latin is important for the constitution of the speech community. Correct spoken Latin, which should be a birthright, the product of a living society and particular place, is in fact dependent on literature.
A supplement to this claim is needed: literature is not yet imagined as a self-consistent whole (as say Atticism will treat the Greek of the Athenian orators and Plato as the nucleus of a canon, ignoring individual differences). The epitaphs declare the authority of one author. Of course, the claims are exclusionary, even polemical (both in the sense that the commemorated poet is preferred to everybody at Rome and because the epitaph of Naevius seems to be an invention a century after the poet’s death which promotes the old style against more recent developments in Latin literary style). A strong current in the ongoing claims to linguistic authority is the presentation of the author as a persona. The auctor has auctoritas, and at this stage this does not mean that he is a bookworm with enviable command of the Latin literary record. The authority has a connection to living speech (even as this shrouds the fact that his achievement comes through the written word), and the proof of his authority comes in demonstrations of his eccentric, personal, and thus perhaps authentic usage.
Eccentricity of speech is marked in the Roman tradition not so much as a key to idiosyncrasy of habits as an emblem of authority. Within Latin literature, peculiarities of speech on behalf of the author indicate his remove from the common. The father of Roman satire, the aristocrat Lucilius writing in the late second century, takes a marked pleasure in his own linguistic peculiarity. His interest in the deficient language, especially speech, of others is part of his claim to be writing authoritatively. So he advises (frag. 356) to use fervo not ferveo (Quint. Inst. 1.6.8; Lucilius book 9). Some notices of linguistic peculiarity reflect a political agenda—L. Cotta adopted a rustic Latin, Clodius changing the pronunciation of his name from the aristocratic Claudius to the plebeian ō. As with the example from Lucilius, it is clear that biforms did exist: ferveo becomes classical, fervo is used before and after the classical period. The aristocrat rather aristocratically shows his taste and judgment. Lucilius in fact seems to launch the tradition of lexical and phonetic recommendations. Instead of giving a rule, the great man recommends individual features of his own practice. Lucilius does censure some pronunciations as rustic; so there are some patterns that can be generalized. He makes fun of a certain Caecilius, a candidate for the praetorship, by extending the rustic pronunciation of his name, with e for ae, to the name of the magistracy: Cecilius pretor ne rusticus fiat (1130 Marx, see Adams 2007, 20). Morphology and phonology continued to be in some flux, and the high valuation of the speech of the city of Rome is a constant; but at least according to the man of letters, we need a guide, or rather a censor.
The great aristocrats at the end of the republic cultivated a highly personal mode of speech, and part of this stylization extended to matters as basic as the elements of Latinity. The recommendations of Augustus and Lucilius for what seem to history nonstandard morphology or phonology did not win the day, no doubt because their writings did not become basic school texts (unlike Cicero's). Our own school grammars present a standardized version of the language, heavily dependent on Cicero and Caesar—staples of the school curriculum for which the grammars were and are prepared, but Augustus himself, though his official inscriptions appear in standard Latin, had certain eccentricities of speech which he recommended. According to the biographer Suetonius (Aug. 87–88), he counseled to write as one spoke, used prepositions with the names of towns, and said domos as the genitive of domus. According to Quintilian, Augustus objected strongly to calidus for caldus (see Adams 2007 29–30 for his other censures). It is of course the case that the contemporaries Varro and Octavian had as much claim to be speaking and writing proper Latin as Cicero or Caesar. By the terms of later Latinitas, as codified by the Latin grammarians, Lucilius, Varro, and Augustus were wrong. But even to make Cicero right required a certain restrictive focus. Cicero himself varied his grammar and lexicon by genre and changed his practice over time (Johnson 1971; Lebreton 1901). It is true here that we may be confusing Latin style with Latinity. And we should be clear that literary or oratorical style, correctness of morphology and syntax, and accent are distinct. (Further, a regional written Latin was not a feature of classical or imperial times. Prof. Adams has written, “No reader of Cicero and Martial, however attentive and learned, could possibly tell from their Latin that the one came from Arpinum in the Volscian territory and the other from Spain.”5) Cicero himself, as we shall see, takes Latinity as a prerequisite, and is concerned with sermo not verba, with speech and style and rhetoric, not individual points of morphology or grammar more generally. The later tradition of Roman linguistic science would be far more concerned with grammar. It is also true that questions of Latinity can never be settled—unless everybody involved agrees on the period of Latin and a rather small canon of authors. But given later Romans’ veneration for their early literature, and indeed given ongoing literary polemics, questions of verba did abide. The issues will become if not more difficult certainly different as Latin writers cease to be Latin speakers or rather speakers of the Latin of their venerated models.
LATINITAS THEORIZED
By the time that the anonymous author of a series of lectures on rhetoric used the term Latinitas about 90 BCE, Latin was both the dialect of Latium, the sociolect of the ruling elite, the language of imperial and military administration, and as a consequence of the last a far-flung language, with all the varieties that one would expect from soldiers and colonists meeting other peoples, perhaps being cut off from the changing Latin of the city of Rome (but not in language islands, since trade and war continued, new colonists came, members of the families of the original colonists moved about, books circulated; see Adams 2007, 18). From its very start, Roman literature records not simply variants of the language but attitudes toward that variance. Direct theoretical reflection on the issues of correct speech comes through the efforts of
rhetoricians at Rome, and their translation of Greek theoretical terms and ideas to the realities of second-century Rome. Romans had been interested in Greek rhetoric for perhaps a century before the first translation of a Greek treatise into Latin. Crates of Mallos, visiting Rome as an ambassador in the mid-second century, offered lectures, showpieces of Greek rhetoric, that were well attended, but the first extant Latin manual of rhetoric, which has the first attested use of the word Latinitas, dates from the very beginning of the first century BCE.
The anonymous author of the Rhetorica ad Herennium writes simply, “Latinitas est quae sermonem purum conservat, ab omni vitio remotum” (4.17: “Latinity is that which keeps speech pure, removed from any mistake”). This definition anticipates, indeed directs, the long subsequent tradition of the purity of Latin style. Latinity is not the same as the Latin language. Cicero is quite clear on this, which is to say he recognizes the need to fashion a literary language from the spoken language of his day. Mere reproduction of spoken Latin would not do. Cicero often joins the terms for pure and Latin to signify the artistic language he has in mind as the orator’s duty (De or. 1.144, “ut pure et Latine loquamur”; Opt. Gen. 4, “ut pure et emendate loquentes, id est Latine”; Orat. 79, “sermo purus erit et Latinus”). How to find sermo purus is what the grammarians will explain and catalog. Cicero will have Crassus in the De oratore (3.45) say that his mother-in-law Laelia spoke an ancestral, pure Latin, but she is of course a memory in a dialogue of fabricated memories (Cicero writing in 55 BCE set his dialog in September 91. He also is seeking a feminine familial authenticity or even primitivism, as he says, “facilius enim mulieres incorruptam antiquitatem conservant”). Cicero never heard her, nor could his readers.
The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic Page 12
