The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic

by Daniel S. Richter

  Latinity is then a norm of preservation and discovery. It is often predicated as pure, but this almost immediately needs explanation, and the explanation is given and seems to be understood in negative terms.6 In other words, Latinity is not an aesthetic ideal; it is a default expectation and it is detected not by virtues of style but by faults, chiefly of accidence and idiom, and to a lesser extent syntax.7 Cicero shows the same understanding. Writing to Atticus on December 9, 50 BCE, first about political matters and then about various private persons and property, Cicero mentions in passing a usage for which Atticus must have faulted him. He had made two alleged mistakes by using the Greek form of a place name and by using a preposition with it (he acknowledges that “all our people” use the Latin form). This is more venial it seems than his use of the preposition with the accusative to denote motion toward a place. The latter is not right with the names of towns (this is the same “fault” that Augustus recommended). Cicero evades the charge by a shift in categories, the place in question, the port of Athens, is not a town but a deme. Two elements of the succeeding discussion are of interest. First, Cicero turns to precedent to defend his usage: he cites two authors who had used the same phrase, “in Piraeum,” Caecilius and Terence. He acknowledges that Caecilius was not a good precedent (“for he was a poor authority of Latinity”). Terence is his trump card. Second, to conclude this little display of erudition and to pass on to a more serious matter, he writes “But since you are a schoolmaster, you will deliver me from a great annoyance if you solve the following cavil” (he uses the Greek word for an academic question, zêtêma). In sum, questions of Latinity are an attack on the authority of the author. He is accused of a slip. An explanation of the correctness of the author’s usage follows, in this case at first with a typical Ciceronian sleight of hand, through redefining the terms of the dispute. The other elements of defense are found more generally: some account of contemporary usage, especially reference to older literary authors, and finally an attack upon the critic as an academic.8 This practical, performative strain of Latinitas lived on in the grammarians and also in such literature as the Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius and the Saturnalia of Macrobius.

  Theoretical discussion of Latinitas is circumscribed, by its original place, as a calque, for Hellenismos in rhetorical theory and by the preoccupation of the earlier Latin rhetoricians with more advanced stages in the curriculum. The author of the Rhetorica ad Herennium had mentioned Latinitas as one component to one of the three virtues of speaking (Cicero, on the other hand, eschews further theoretical treatment and we must turn to Quintilian as an enlarging footnote to Cicero in the De oratore). The author of the Rhetorica ad Herennium (4.17), in enumerating the three virtues of style (with the elimination of the fourth Theophrastan virtue of decorum), distinguished elegantia, compositio (sonorous word patterning), and dignitas (by which he means ornamentation—figures of style and of thought). Elegantia consists of Latinitas and explanatio. The latter is “clarity,” but he means by this proper diction, the use either of common language or of appropriate terms. In turn, the “appropriate” means nonmetaphorical terms. Elegantia, then, hardly qualifies as much of a virtue: the absence of faults of grammar and diction is elegantia. Latinitas is thus the default state of the Roman orator—he uses plain Latin words with a morphology, idiom, phrasing, and syntax which do not offend the Roman ear. In the theoretical progression of the triad, Latinitas is something like the inventio of words. The right words come; these are the stuff of speech (as inventio provides the stuff of argument). Then the orator will form these into oratorical speech.

  Cicero at De oratore 3.48 considers Latinitas as a prerequisite beneath theoretical attention. He actually has Crassus deliver a praeteritio: “Let us pass over therefore the rules for speaking Latin [praecepta Latine loquendi].” He asserts that early education, the study of literature, conversation within the family, and reading the old orators suffice for our topic. As A. D. Leeman put it succinctly, “Cicero’s subject is sermo rather than verba” (Leeman 1963: 123). Quintilian, however, points the way for the developing interest of the imperial grammarians in the precepts for diction and pronunciation. In his first book (1.11) and briefly at 11.3.30 of the Institutio Oratoria, Quintilian treats the faults of speech to be avoided by careful teaching. The latter passage takes up pronunciation and proceeds in a familiar fashion, not so much by argument as by flat declaration that pronunciation should be good. In fact he gives a string of terms for good: pronunciation should be emendata dilucida ornata apta (faultless, clear, artistic, appropriate). The positive characterization does not last: he chooses to explain only the first of these adjectives, emendata, which is in fact a negative compound. It means free from faults. Quintilian explains, “It will be faultless, that is it will lack faults, if the accent is easy, clear, pleasant, and Roman, that is, in which there is not the slightest hint of the country or the foreign” (“Emendata erit, id est vitio carebit, si fuerit os facile explanatum iucundum urbanum, id est in quo nulla neque rusticitas neque peregrinitas resonet”).

  Of course, Cicero and Quintilian could hear the language of Rome’s elite and detect a foreign accent or a country word, but with the spread of education in Latin and the rise of the provinces and provincials (in participation in government, in schooling, and in literary culture) came the necessity to retheorize Latinity. Indeed, the nonstandard target of censure shifts from the variants outside the city proper of Rome to variants described as provincial. In positive terms, the model speaker is no longer the urbanus but the Italus, the citizen of the Italian peninsula (see Morin 2001, 192–201). The later grammatical tradition inherited a fairly advanced linguistic science to help them in this task and a canon of Latin writers to mine for words and idioms. The gap between grammaticality and acceptability would widen as no single living speech community could provide the norms of acceptability. Instead, these had to be preserved and recreated by arguing about, for example, what precedent in earlier literature there was for some peculiar term in Cicero or Vergil. So in addition to research into Rome’s early literature, the grammarians could make use of Hellenistic scientific methods, communicated to Romans chiefly by the voluminous writings of Varro and by the monograph on analogy by Julius Caesar. But before we review the ancient principles that aimed to distinguish proper diction and morphology, it is important to stress how plain and schoolmasterly the teaching of Latinitas could be. The Appendix Probi, probably a third- or fourth-century text, gives a list of dos and donts: “formica non furmica,” for instance, which is to say that the Latin word for “ant” is to be written with an o.9 We are here encountering orthography and perhaps not rules for pronunciation. Low-class classical Romans, late Roman speakers, and the subsequent Romance traditions all share many of the mistakes stigmatized in the Appendix Probi, but just as one can say nait and learn to write “knight” or “night,” so the schoolchildren might at this stage have simply been learning spelling (which of course becomes part of Latinity). Still, this is illustrative of the greater importance of Latinitas as Latin became a school language.

  The great scholar of the Latin language, also a contemporary and peer of Cicero and Caesar, Marcus Terentius Varro, had discussed etymology, morphology, and syntax in the twenty-five books of his De lingua latina. This would prove a treasure trove for the pedants’ hunt for peculiar words, but it also explained, to a degree, and modeled method for deciding the right form of a word. His purpose was to explore the development of words, not to standardize Latin, but his methods could be put to the more utilitarian task. Books 2–7 of the De lingua latina explained impositio verborum, the coinage of words. His topic here was etymology, both uncovering the first form of a word and revealing the connections between words (both phonological and semantic). Books 8–13 treated declinatio verborum, those changes from an original form, which include all the ways that a stem is changed—to another word or to another form of the original word. He set out two extreme approaches, those of analogy and anomaly, and then in
dialogic mode pursued a mean.10 Extreme analogy would eliminate irregularities. Varro, however, was not interested in recovering an older strain of the language as the norm for present speech or writing. His etymology aims ultimately at explaining why a current word means what it does. In explaining Latin words he relies on customary usage, the old Latin poets, and Greek loan words. These are not simply different sources of words but his explanatory categories. Together, they are strikingly traditional. Varro approaches the Latin language with a certain reverence. He will not toss out words because their form is not analogous to other words. Equally, he is no linguistic reactionary or modernist. He presents himself as the careful guide engaged in a vast campaign to restore and make clear the connections among the old Roman things that are Latin words. Despite some ancient efforts at radical analogy and despite modern scholars’ reification of the two tendencies into opposed schools, the traditionalists Varro and Quintilian won the day. The Latin language was not to be reformed but to be conserved and defended.

  The subsequent grammatical tradition used Varro’s linguistic science (or rather a derivative that had made its way into the tradition of Roman grammatical writings) to interesting, different ends. But again, their theory is more systematic than their actual practice (no one will be so radical as the late republican authorities in advocating change in phonology or simplification of syntax). The fourth-century Diomedes (Ars grammatica 2.439) demonstrates the particular orientation of the Roman schools:

  Latinitas est incorrupte loquendi observatio secundum Romanam linguam. Constat autem, ut adserit Varro, his quattuor, natura analogia consuetudine auctoritate.

  Latinity is the reverent pursuit of speaking without fault following the norms of the Latin language. Further it is based on four things, as Varro maintains, nature, analogy, custom, and authority.

  He continues that nature is immutable. He means by nature something like the received facts of language (including irregularities like the feminine gender of a noun ending in -us). The restricted and secondary function of analogy is important:

  analogia sermonis a natura proditi ordinatio est secundum technicos neque aliter barbaram linguam ab erudita quam argentum a plumbo dissociat.

  Analogy is the recasting of a word provided by nature following the [rules of the] grammarians, and it works by distinguishing a barbarous word from a scholarly word just as silver [coin] is distinguished from lead.

  Custom is explained as tertiary, subordinate to analogy. It is supported by the numbers of its advocates. In last place, authority has not even this, for it is one old reading employed without the writer even knowing why. There is a clear hierarchy here and a sequence of operations should we find a flexion, word, or idiom that seems irregular. First, natura—the general practices of Latin—is not to be questioned. Then the grammarians can be checked. This is interesting, for it is not simply the case that we are employing analogy: we follow the grammarians where first we followed (secundum) the Latin language. Should this fail, we can rely on customary usage. This is presented as third, but the deeply conservative features of the whole enterprise should be remembered: this is not a third prompt to change but a third reason to maintain what we see written before us. Diomedes writes of consuetudo that linguistic science does not take second place to but indulges customary practice (“illi artis ratio non accedat sed indulgeat”). Finally, there is authority:

  auctoritas in regula loquendi novissima est. namque ubi omnia defecerint, sic ad illam quem ad modum ad ancoram decurritur.

  Authority comes last in the norms of speaking. When all else fails, we fly to that as to an anchor.

  The science and the conservatism of the grammarians are strongly indebted to Varro. As with Varro, science—nature, analogy, etymology—reveals the underlying structures of language, even its deep systematicity without impelling us to change the surface forms. Excepted are individual cases where we may have to make the decision between two options: whether the form is corrupt (deviant from the various norms of the received language) or erudite (an old word which should not be rejected). This does not amount to positive aesthetic—there is no compulsion to restore an older variant nor to seek archaisms for one’s compositions. The impulse is to preserve, like a very conservative textual critic who will let the text stand just so long as its elements can be found to be Latin or that there is some way it can be construed.11

  In fact, the grammarians have worked significant changes. Latinitas has become a synonym for the Latin language, a fourfold method of conservation or determination of the legitimacy of a form, and as a consequence something of an intellectual template. Diomedes attributed his definition to Varro. This may ultimately be correct, but the extant parallel or source for his words comes from Quintilian, who wrote at 1.6.1 “sermo constat ratione, vetustate, auctoritate, consuetudine” (“speech is determined by reason, antiquity, authority, and custom”). Varro, according to Diomedes, had nature and analogy not reason and antiquity. In fact, ratio would have included analogy (the proportional, rational evaluation of forms—some of the grammarians restrict ratio to analogy and etymology, see Morin 2001, 200). Perhaps Quintilian has substituted vetustas for natura.12Ratio stands against consuetudo and auctoritas as these two champion inconsistent forms. But what is the role of natura? “Nature” has here the broad Roman meaning of the inartificial world, all that we might call the “extra social.” That language is not a social artifact seems very strange to the modern. But the ancient grammatical tradition sees language as a given, a received system just as the atomic process of the physical world is a received system. (It is a bit inconsistent that Stoic linguistic theory undergirds Varro and the subsequent tradition. On the Stoic understanding, an original nomothete imposed words on things, but this act of imposition was natural in that there was of old a transparent relation between signifier and signified.)

  In fact, the naturalness of language is a bit more complex. The grammatical tradition treats language (Latinitas) as a microcosm that reproduces the macrocosm of nature. Latinitas is produced and maintained by nature. Ratio in turn has become the process of seeing the correct correlation of language with nature (Morin 2001, 189). This later tradition defines nature rather broadly as the force which brings things to birth.13 It is then the generative system of language, including errors which human ratio will detect and prune. But ratio has a strongly circumscribed role: it is to be brought to bear on the fecund state of language so as to reveal the system of that natural world. Human beings are not to use ratio to reform language. We have traveled significantly beyond the stock of words and manner of delivery that Cicero would not deign to elaborate. Latinitas is now both the literary and linguistic tradition and a species of natural reality to which men must bring their reason. Sedulius Scottus (58.34) could write simply “Doctrina eloquentiae, hoc est logica” (“The discipline of speech, which is to say logic”).14 This genus of logic can be divided into grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric. The old precepts of speaking have become the science of grammar, itself a reflection of and mirror into the very order of nature.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

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  Baehrens, W. A. 1922. Sprachlicher Kommentar zur vulgärlateinischen Appendix Probi. Gröningen.

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  Courtney, E., ed. 1993. The Fragmentary Latin Poets. Oxford.

  Cousin, J. 1935. Études sur Quintilien. Paris.

  Ferri, R., and P. Philomen. 2010. “Roman Authors on Colloquial Language.” In Colloquial and Literary Latin, edited by E. Dickey and A. Chahoud, 12–41. Cambridge.

  Goldberg, S. M. 1986. Understanding Terence. Princeton, NJ.

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  Kaster, R. A. 1988. Guardians of Language. Berkeley, CA.

  Krostenko, B. A. 2013. “The Poetics of Naevius’ ‘Epitaph’ and the History of Latin Poetry.” JRS 103: 1–19.

  Lebreton, J. 1901. Études sur la langue et la grammaire de Cicéron. Paris.

  Leeman, A. D. 1963. Orationis ratio: The Stylistic Theories and Practice of the Roman Orators, Historians, and Philosophers. Amsterdam.

  Morin, J. 2001. Latinitas: Permanence et transformations d’une formule de norme linguistique latine. Villeneuve d’Ascq.

  Short, W. M. 2007. Sermo, Sanguis, Semen: An Anthropology of Language in Roman Culture. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Berkeley, CA.

  Smiley, C. N. 1906. “Latinitas and Hellēnismos: The Influence of the Stoic Theory of Style as Shown in the Writings of Dionysius, Quintilian, Pliny the Younger, Tacitus, Fronto, Aulus Gellius, and Sextus Empiricus.” Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin, Philology and Literature Series 3, no. 3: 205–272.