Читать книгу Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin - Nicholas Ostler - Страница 12

EADEM OMNIA QVASI CONLOCVTI ESSEMVS VIDIMVS.

You’re telling me. [Greek, literally: (You’re telling) me my own dream.] We saw everything the same, just as if we had discussed it.

Cicero, Letter to Atticus, 6.9.3

EVEN AT THE END of the third century BC, when Rome already controlled Italy and had twice humbled its only serious rival in the west, the city of Carthage, the Latin language was still to its users little more than a practical convenience. Its speakers and learners did not yet conceive it as an attribute of Roman greatness, a language to equal any in the world. To think in such terms, the Romans would need to encounter Greek.

The discovery of Greek would give the Romans a new idea of what skill in a language could do, for its speakers’ attainments as well as for their reputation. They would start to care about powers of expression, both their own personal powers and whatever was connoted by the language itself. They would begin to use Latin as a symbol of Roman power, for what it said about them. Latin literature was consciously modelled on Greek, and techniques to use it effectively were laboriously abstracted from the best Greek practice. In time—and this took more than three centuries—the new canon of Latin classics became able to stand comparison with the best of Greek. And when that happened, Greek had lost its one unchallengeable advantage: from the self-imagined centre of the world in Italy, after all, there could be no serious comparison between Romans and Greeks as ideals. Thenceforth the temptation was to discard wholesale the old model, of learning the best Latin through Greek: the best Latin could now be learned through Latin itself.

The Latins, and specifically the Romans, had always had the Greeks on the edge of their world. Indeed, the earliest known inscription in Greek letters anywhere is from Gabii, just outside Rome, and dates from the early eighth century BC, a generation or so before the traditional date of Rome’s foundation in 753. The Greeks had the opportunity to pass on the technique of writing during this early period when the dominant regional power was still Etruscan; and in fact the story of Rome’s legendary founders, the twins Romulus and Remus, has them learning their letters at Gabii.¹

Greek visitors soon after this were establishing themselves as regular colonists farther south: Cumae (Greek Kumē), near the Bay of Naples, was founded around 750 BC, and some fifteen years later a clutch of colonies was established in eastern Sicily (Naxos, Syracuse, Catania, Zankle-Messina), followed a little later by more along the southern Italian coasts (Paestum, Rhegium, Sybaris, Crotona, Tarentum). The settlements grew, were reinforced, and sprouted others, until by 450 BC there were sixteen Greek cities in Sicily and twenty-two in Italy.

The south, however, was not the part of Italy that Romans or Latins frequented in these early years, so the early impact of Greek culture came to them indirectly, through Etruscan middlemen. Specifically—and despite what has turned up in Gabii—this included the technique of writing.

When the Greeks first used their alphabet, the direction of writing was rather fluid: right-to-left, left-to-right, or even alternating (which they called boustrophēdon ‘as you turn an ox’). Etruscans—for reasons we can only speculate about—standardized on right-to-left; but the Latins, after a right-to-left period, finally settled on left-to-right, the same choice as the Greeks ultimately made. Etruscan speakers, who did not hear a difference between [g] and [k] (nor indeed [d] and [t], nor [b] and [p]) provided the reason why the letter Γ, Greek gamma, locally written (right-to-left) as ɔ, hence C, came to be pronounced unvoiced as [k], and to be distinguished from K and Q only by the following vowel. (Their rule was, in the early days: K before A, Q before V, otherwise C.)^* The Etruscans also dropped (because it was useless to them) the letter O. Still, the Latins, unlike the Umbrians and Oscans, did manage to preserve or reinstate it, keeping it separate from V. They also retrieved the letters B and D (Greek β, Δ), which the Etruscans had discarded. These are all developments of the fourth century BC or before; but it was not until the first century BC that they reintroduced the letters Y and Z, specifically to represent sounds in words borrowed from Greek.

In the fifth and fourth centuries BC, as their power grew in Italy, Romans were occasionally nudged to look to a wider Greek world. The Sibylline books, key to propitiation of the gods in time of crisis, were written in Greek; they are supposed to have been acquired in the reign of Tarquinius Priscus, in the early sixth century. In 433, in time of plague, the books enjoined the building of a temple to the Greek god Apollo Medicus; but apparently there was a site already dedicated to him at Rome. In the next generation, in 398 and 394, the Romans visited Apollo’s oracle on the Greek mainland at Delphi, first to consult on their fortunes in the struggle with Veii, and then (after victory) to pay their vow to the god. (Understandably, during hostilities with Etruscan neighbours, the Romans’ usual Etruscan soothsayers were not available or reliable.)² At some point in the Samnite Wars of the fourth century, Apollo also caused the erection in Rome of statues to two improbable Greek celebrities, Pythagoras of Crotona and Alcibiades of Athens.³ It was even said that Romans were among the embassies from all over the Mediterranean world who went to Babylon in 323 BC to congratulate Alexander.⁴ Anyway, after Rome had expelled from Italy the campaigning Greek dynast Pyrrhus in 273 BC, it is certain the equally Greek king Ptolemy II of Egypt offered a gratuitous treaty of friendship to this clearly important, rising city. By the early third century, Rome was impressing the Greek world in its own right.

Only when all the Greek cities had fallen under Roman political control did the idea form that something might be done with Latin at all comparable with what the Greeks did with their own language. Even in the late third century, Q. Fabius Pictor, the first known Roman to write Roman history, was writing only in Greek. In those days, the very idea of a written literature was inseparable from the Greek language.⁵ But in 240 BC the half-Greek freedman from Tarentum, L. Livius Andronicus, produced a comedy and a tragedy in Latin for performance at the Roman Games; in all, he is known to have written at least three comedies and ten tragedies, as well as a translation of the Odyssey. These new, literary forms of entertainment caught on at Rome, and the stories from Greek drama and epic dominated Latin literature for the next century. Among the early greats of Latin literature are Cn. Naevius (around 265–204), T. Maccius Plautus (around 250–184), Q. Ennius (239–169), M. Terentius Afer (around 190–159), M. Pacuvius (220–around 130) and L. Accius (170–around 86).^* Among them, Ennius stands out for the variety of what he wrote, not only comedies, tragedies, and an epic of Roman history (Annales), but also epitaphs, theology, satire, and even the Hedyphagetica ‘sweet eatings’, a gourmet’s review, with such deathless lines as:

BRVNDISII SARGVS BONVS EST; HVNC, MAGNVS SI ERIT, SVME.

The sar fish of Brindisi is good; if it is a big one, take it.^†6

Among these writers—all still taken seriously by the critics of the first centuries BC–AD, when the classical canon was being laid down—only the comedy writers Plautus and Terence have been preserved with complete long works to their names. Hence early Latin literature comes down to us with a strong emphasis on a fantasy of Greek life, its situations and characters based in Greek plays. In this world, a universe away from Roman ideals, young men are hopelessly in love, whores have hearts of gold, old men are miserly and dirty-minded, and slaves—realistically, their only resource being their trickery—are more resourceful than their masters. Old women are largely unknown. No one has much on their minds but sex, money, food, mischief, and occasionally concern for their children, especially if long lost: there is not a whiff of military service, farming, or civic piety. Writers thought it worth telling the audience of their Greek sourcing. In the prologue to one play, Terence wrote, “As for the rumours put about by some grouches that the author has spoiled a lot of Greek plays to make just a few Latin ones: he does not deny that’s what he’s done—no worries—and he says he’ll do it again.”⁷

In his prologues, Plautus sometimes gave the name of the Greek author of the original version, but added that it was he who VORTIT BARBARE ‘turned it into foreign’.⁸ Either his tongue was firmly in his cheek, or Roman audiences were amazingly ready in the early second century to take their laughs from a Greek standpoint. Perhaps the explicitly Greek settings kept the feckless content at a safe distance from what would be accepted in real life at Rome, much as Indian Bollywood films in the twentieth century long played out ideas of romantic love in luxurious surroundings for the delight of orthodox Hindu and Muslim audiences who had no place for it in their actual lives.

Comedy may have been king for the Roman in the street, but serious statesmen and intellectuals, as they increasingly looked beyond Italy, were also coming to notice and value the Greek heritage. In 228 BC, when the Romans had cleared the Adriatic of Illyrian piracy, gaining themselves a coastal strip (the coast of modern Albania) as a first base in the east, they sent embassies to Greek cities, notably the trading centres Corinth and Athens, pointing out that the new Roman policing of the seas was very much in their interests. Symbolically, Romans were then invited for the first time to compete in the Isthmian Games, held every other year near Corinth.

Much of the third century was taken up with fighting Carthage at sea or overseas (264–241), and later surviving and then retaliating against the Carthaginian invasion of Italy under Hannibal (218–203); but even interactions with this age-old and non-Greek empire (founded around 900 BC, with a maritime empire since the seventh century) would increasingly have impressed on the Romans that Greek was the language of the wider Mediterranean. Amazingly, the Carthaginian senate had once in an earlier era legislated to outlaw knowledge of Greek at home, to prevent private contacts with the enemy.⁹ Nonetheless, in Rome’s day Carthage’s troops, largely mercenaries, were commanded not in Punic but in Greek.^* Hannibal himself had been educated in Greek and was an author in it, and in fact his old tutor Sosylus of Sparta accompanied him on his campaigns and wrote up their history in the language. Other Greeks, Silenus and Chaereas, also were involved as chroniclers.¹⁰ Phoenicians, like those who founded Carthage, might have been the ones to give the Greeks their original letters (tá phoinikḗia grámmata, as the Greeks still called them); but Carthage’s nobility had nevertheless been drawn into the cultural force-field created by the application of those letters to Greek, recognizing it as the international language par excellence—or more authentically, in Greek, kat’exokhḗn. When, during a lull in his campaign in 205, Hannibal set an altar inscribed with his achievements in the temple of Juno at Lacinia, on the point of Italy’s instep that faced the Ionian Sea, he used both Punic and Greek, but not Latin or Oscan.¹¹

In 202 BC, with Carthage defeated, Rome can with hindsight be seen to have stood at a crossroads. It held, in principle, a score still to be settled with Philip V of Macedon, who had allied with Carthage against Rome; and Antiochus III, widely victorious Seleucid king of Asia, might have been seen as a very long-term threat to Italy—but only if he chose to pursue his conquests in a direction, and to an extent, that no Greek successor of Alexander’s ever had before. Essentially, sleeping dogs here could have been left to lie—and would probably have been so left by a less aggressive, less military society. These major Greek kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean made up a system four generations old, with endemic political problems and rivalries quite unfamiliar to Rome. To choose to enter this was an unprecedented step, whose long-term consequences were quite unpredictable. And it cannot have been popular with everyone to enter into such a new theatre, with no end in sight, two years after the deliverance from Carthage.

Furthermore, foreign wars, without any casus belli in Italy, were strictly illegal. By Rome’s IVS FETIALE, the law of the college of priests charged with opening and closing states of war, the relevant rites could only be performed if Rome was acting in defence of itself or its oath-bound SOCII ‘allies’. Rome had no such SOCII east of the Adriatic. It had treaties of AMICITIA ‘friendship’ (Greek philía) with some of the states there, notably Egypt, but this relationship was unprecedented as a basis for a war of solidarity, and not in any case very relevant to the immediate choice of adversary, Philip of Macedon.

Nevertheless the Senate did resolve to act against the great powers of the east. There is little in the written record to justify this momentous decision.^* Polybius, the main near-contemporary historian and a Greek himself, placed the initiative with the Greeks. Of the conference of Naupactus in 217, which brought Philip V of Macedon and sundry Greeks into ineffectual alliance with Carthage, he wrote:

This was the time and the conference which first brought into interplay Greek, Italian, and Libyan (i.e. Carthaginian) affairs: no longer would Philip or the leading Greek statesmen, when dealing with affairs in Greece, make reference to, war on, or agreements with, each other: from now on they would all look to their aims in Italy … those disaffected with Philip and some with differences with Attalus (king of Pergamum) would no longer turn east to Antiochus (of Asia) or south to Ptolemy (of Egypt), but send missions west, either to the Carthaginians or the Romans. Similarly, the Romans sent to the Greeks, for fear of Philip’s audacity and to forestall any advantage he might take of their current predicament.¹²

But this merely marked the turning point as a Greek might have seen it. Rome chose to keep raising the stakes and extending its involvement until all the Greek regimes, big and small, had been deposed or incorporated into subservient alliances.

Whatever the arguments presented in the Senate, the war—if it could be decisively won—must have been financially tempting. In crude financial terms, the Punic Wars had shown Rome what the benefits of victory over a major foreign power could be: the war reparations adjudged against Carthage were two hundred talents per annum for fifty years, a grand total of ten thousand talents or 240 million sesterces (‘MHS’).^†

The lesson did not go amiss, and the rewards for conquest of Greek powers turned out to be quite comparable. The 24 MHS exacted from Philip V by T. Quinctius Flamininus^* in 197 (half at once, half over ten years) were a mere first fruit of what was to come. When Antiochus was forced to surrender western Asia Minor by the brothers P. and L. Cornelius Scipio^† in 189, he settled for a record indemnity of fifteen thousand talents, or 360 MHS. Annual revenues to Rome at this time were running at 30 MHS. When L. Aemilius Paullus^‡ returned victorious from his war against Philip’s son Perseus in 167, he brought with him at least another 120 MHS in booty. Revenues from Macedon thereafter ran at 2.4 MHS per annum. In all, in the fifty years after 201, Rome would actually receive 648 MHS in indemnity payments, principally from Carthage, Macedon, and Asia, equivalent to 13 MHS annually.¹³

To put this in proportion, the property qualification for a senator was a landed fortune valued at more than 0.4 MHS. Pliny observed that Rome’s treasury coffers in 157 BC held a credit balance of 100.3 MHS.¹⁴ And this sum was to be doubled in 130 BC, when the northwest Asian kingdom of Pergamum was bequeathed to Rome. Then in 63 BC, after Pompey’s conquest of Syria, the level leapt to 340 MHS.¹⁵

Flush with these windfalls of militarism, Rome was to go on a hundred-year spree. The indemnity paid by Antiochus in 189 sufficed to pay off the crippling national debt that Rome had incurred to its citizens during the war with Hannibal, equivalent to 25½ years of tax revenues (TRIBVTVM SIMPLEX).¹⁶ At the same time Livy said that the return of the army from Asia at this time saw the “first influx of foreign luxury” into Rome.¹⁷ In 167, with access to the loot from Perseus’ kingdom in Macedon, Rome ceased to levy taxes on its own citizens, a kind of “war dividend.” Meanwhile, there was a surge in public works spending: in 184, 24 MHS was spent on sewers; in 144–140 a new aqueduct, the Aqua Marcia, was built at a cost of 180 MHS; in 142 the first stone bridge across the Tiber, the Pons Aemilius, went up. Most of the major routes in Italy were built in this same century.¹⁸ Politicians began to see the potential for applying Rome’s wealth in unprecedented ways, directly for the benefit of the poor.

In 122 C. Gracchus involved the state in subsidizing the price of grain; in 58 BC P. Clodius began the policy of a free grain ration for citizens, an extravagant policy that once instituted could never be dropped.^*

These eastern wars were certainly profitable, indeed life-transforming for the citizen populace back home. For a state that had always emphasized the glory of conquest, the new eastern-Mediterranean focus of Rome’s unending willingness to pursue wars far from home needs little special explanation: that was, after all, where the world’s wealth was to be found, and to be plucked.

There is controversy on how money-minded Roman strategy really was, from those who emphasized motives that were more publicly acceptable to the Romans, the preemption of dangerous rivals, and the aspiration for glory from a string of victories.^† These motives were no doubt also present and are not incompatible. And evidently, Roman victories against the greatest and oldest powers then known—for that is what the Greek kingdoms were—may not have seemed so inevitable before the wars were waged. But the Roman attitude can perhaps best be gauged from an anecdote that Cicero put into the approving mouth of even an archconservative, Cato the Censor.^‡ The great national hero M’. Curius Dentatus,^§ sitting at his hearth in his latter years, was brought a great weight of gold by the Samnites, but declined it: it did not seem to him as glorious, he said, to have gold himself, as to rule over those that had it.¹⁹

Whatever the ambivalence about the tangible rewards, Rome’s new enthusiasm for Greek culture provided an effective, and widely acceptable, justification for these interventions. When Romans made policy pronouncements during the wars with Philip, Antiochus, and Perseus, they consistently took the line that Rome’s interest was in the freedom of the Greeks. Their declaration of war in 200 had the effrontery to require Philip to abstain from war against any Greek state.²⁰ In an inconsequential conference with Philip in 198, the Roman general T. Quinctius Flamininus declared that Philip must withdraw totally from Greece. After winning the battle of Cynoscephalae in 197,^* Flamininus announced at the Isthmian Games in 196 that all the Greeks in Asia and in Europe were to be free and enjoy their own laws, a statement that apparently surprised with joy most of his audience, since they had been assuming that Rome would simply take over the control of Philip’s possessions. In 193 he went on to declare that Rome would next liberate the Greeks of Asia from Antiochus. This promise was fulfilled in 188 in the Treaty of Apamea, concluded by the brothers Scipio,^† who had just defeated Antiochus at Magnesia. Again Rome had scored a total victory, but not exacted control of the conquered, or even tranches of their land for settlement. Unlike the previously gained overseas territories in Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, and Spain, no prōvincia was created in Greece with a Roman magistrate in command. Taxes were not exacted. It looked as if the Romans, faced with the Greeks, had found a new—and more restrained—model of empire.

Things began to change immediately afterwards. The kingdom of Macedon under Philip’s son Perseus rebelled and after a three-year war was crushed at the battle of Pydna (168) by L. Aemilius Paullus. Epirus, to its southwest, which had given some aid to the rebels, he also sacked, selling 150,000 of its inhabitants into slavery. In both Macedon and Epirus, land taxes were henceforth payable to the Roman treasury. But the power vacuum so created in the territories was judged to lay them open to unrest. Thus, in 148, Macedonia was annexed as a regular province.

Central Greece too became (for Rome) worryingly unstable in the two generations after Flamininus’ declaration of its freedom. political dissension continued to fizz in the free cities, which frequently appealed to Rome against one another and were felt to harbour undesirable elements on the run from Macedonia. Rome had attempted to eliminate troublemakers by interning one thousand prominent citizens in Italy from 164 to 151, but an anti-Roman rebellion occurred after they returned. It was based in Corinth, at the time the preeminent Greek centre of trade and culture.

In 146 the new governor of Macedonia (Q. Caecilius Metellus^* Macedonicus) crushed the revolt, and his successor, L. Mummius, reorganized Greece into an unstructured but unthreatening mass of unallied city-states, all under Macedonian command. Roman tax gatherers moved in. Mummius is most famous, though, for razing the ancient city of Corinth. Roman punitive action was not light, and not forgotten. Corinth never recovered, but one effect of the action was a sudden appearance of Greek artworks in the Italian mansions of Mummius’ friends and associates. After fifty years of “freedom,” the logic, or rather the accounting,^† of Roman imperium had asserted itself over Greece.

An immediate effect of Rome’s annexation of mainland Greece was a surge of Greek immigrants to Italy. Supply was available to meet the increasingly sophisticated, and urbanized, demand from all levels of Roman society for entertainers, prostitutes, tailors, couturiers, grocers, vintners, cooks, importers, trainers, slave traders, farm labourers, gardeners, nursemaids, butlers, lady’s maids, secretaries, accountants, doctors, architects, tutors, professors.^‡ Greek words in Plautus’ plays, our fullest record of early colloquial Latin, do occur mostly in the speech of lower-class characters, but this reflects the era 205–184 BC, the generation when the Greek wars were still being fought. Many of the newcomers would indeed have been slaves resulting from Roman clearances, but increasingly there were volunteer adventurers from free families seeking their fortunes in the households of the newly dominant “barbarians” across the Adriatic. In an autobiographical incident datable to 167, Polybius, recently brought to Rome as a Greek political internee, said to his new friend, the young aristocrat Scipio, “As for these studies, which you and your brother seem to find more and more enthralling as well as promising for your careers, you will find plenty of people to help both of you: there are masses of scholars whom I can see flooding from Greece into Italy nowadays.”²¹

“These studies” were in grammar and rhetoric, Greek specialities curiously ripe for transplantation, now that significant careers based on public persuasion in the courts and assemblies were less and less possible in a Greece under foreign masters. But such skills were precisely the ones needed to make a mark in Rome’s republican institutions, which in the last two centuries BC were to be increasingly open to talent (if suitably well-heeled), and somewhat less dominated by scions of the old families with distinguished military traditions.^*

Despite the masses of scholars recognized by Polybius as descending on Italy, no noted Greek grammarian or rhetorician taught at Rome until 159. Then one Crates of Mallos, who lived and taught in Pergamum in Asia Minor, came to Rome on an embassy from the king. It does not seem that these inaugural sessions were by invitation, or even deliberate: the story goes that Crates had broken his leg in a street culvert on the Palatine Hill and had to prolong his stay, profiting from the time by giving lectures.²² But many high-class Romans had already had Greek classes in their education for a hundred years: Livius Andronicus and Ennius were famous early family tutors in the later third century (called by Suetonius “semi-Greeks”), and references to a PAEDAGOGVS, a Greek slave who accompanied children to school (and often acted as ‘pedagogue’) go back to the early second century, for example, this jokey line from the comedian Pacuvius:

DEPVLSVM MAMMA PAEDAGOGANDVM ACCIPIT REPOTIALIS LIBER

untimely weaned, he was taken up by the wine god of all-nighters for special “schooling”

Upper-class education was to retain this early exposure to Greek, to the extent that some believed that Roman children’s schooling should start with Greek, not Latin: children would learn Latin anyway, they felt, and the origins of education were after all Greek. (Quintilian, the consummate rhetorician of the first century AD, was one who shared this view—but in moderation: it would not do to make a fetish of it [SVPERSTITIOSE], in case the children’s Latin should suffer from excess Greek.)²³ From the second century BC it was also increasingly common for the elite to travel to some Greek academic centre in their twenties to complete their education: Athens was supreme, but Pergamum, Smyrna, and Rhodes in Asia, and even Massilia (Marseille) in southern Gaul, attracted many Roman students.

Beyond the elementary level, education without Greek was in fact inconceivable in republican Rome: classes were conducted in it from an early age, and few Greek tutors showed any inclination to learn Latin, so that educated Romans’ competence in Greek, spoken as well as written, was seemingly taken for granted whenever use of languages came up in surviving literature. From 81 BC, it was apparently acceptable to address the Roman Senate in Greek, “to deafen the House’s ears with Greek proceedings,” as the unsympathetic Valerius Maximus put it. Cicero’s professor from Rhodes, Apollonius Molon, established the precedent.²⁴ The pair of Greek and Latin came to be expressed by the clichés VTRAQUE LINGVA or VTERQVE SERMO ‘both languages’: no other language came into consideration.

The unthinking respect for Greek as the common mark of learning is proved, perversely enough, by the way Greek learning was often dismissed or played down for rhetorical effect. Where Greek was concerned, Romans always felt they had something to prove. The historian Sallust made C. Marius, a populist general in the second and first centuries BC, stress his lack of book-learning, hence Greek: “My words are not refined: I don’t care. True character displays itself quite well enough; those others will be needing technical finesse, as a way for words to disguise their chicanery. Nor did I learn to read and write Greek: there was no point in learning it, since it did no good to the prowess of the people who teach it.”²⁵

And before there was any Latin literature to speak of, Marcus Cato the Censor had set the tone for Helleno-skeptic Romans. Though on a diplomatic mission of some delicacy—when in 191 he needed to persuade his audience to support Rome rather than the Greek emperor Antiochus—he deliberately chose to address the Athenians in Latin, speaking in tandem with an interpreter although he knew Greek himself: “The Athenians, he says, admired the quickness and vehemence of his speech; for an interpreter would be very long in repeating what he had expressed with a great deal of brevity; on the whole he professed to believe that the words of the Greeks came only from their lips, whilst those of the Romans came from their hearts.”²⁶

Yet this was the same man who, while on campaign in Sardinia, had discovered the poet Ennius; by bringing him back to teach and write at Rome as its first “national” poet, Cato did as much as anyone to set Latin literature into its Greek tracks. Cato, however, also went on personally to found Latin prose literature, with a treatise on running a farm (DE AGRI CVLTVRA), and another—his masterwork, though unfinished and now lost—on Roman history (ORIGINES), which was composed from 168 to his death in 149.

A century later, in summing up the early Greek-bound history of Latin literature, Cicero—who was to become its prose master—liked to emphasize the role of the circle of intellectuals who congregated at the house of Cato’s younger friend P. Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus.^* Cicero, in his dialogues The Republic and Laelius on Friendship, imagines conversations among Scipio’s “flock,” which besides aristocratic politicians included Roman poets such as the satirist Lucilius^† and the dramatist Terence, and Greek scholars such as the historian Polybius, and the open-minded Stoic philosopher Panaetius, who apparently commuted between Rome and Athens. But here is a typical remark of Scipio: “And so I ask you to listen to me: not as a complete expert on things Greek, nor as someone who prefers them to ours especially in this field, but as one of the political class with a decent education thanks to his father’s generosity, and one who has been burning with intellectual curiosity since boyhood, but who has nevertheless been much more enlightened by practice, and what he was taught at home, than by what he has read.”²⁷

Marcus Tullius Cicero, the eternal doyen of classical prose, who, after a brilliant oratorical career, laid the foundation for Latin as a language for philosophy.

The stance is familiar. Even the most intellectual of Roman politicians were determined to keep their thinking in touch with common sense and (since they were Romans after all) the practice of their distinguished forebears. Nonetheless, they could not overlook that the source of so many interesting ideas was Greek.

Cicero,^* whose own political career—to his great sadness—had coincided with the final collapse of traditional values in Roman politics, filled the enforced vacuum at the end of his professional career by writing. The task he set himself was to transmute Greek philosophy into a corpus of Latin works that would make sense to Romans. In so doing, he found himself struggling to give Latin some means of expressing abstractions. The word qualitas, for example, is one of the technical terms Cicero invented, turning up here for the first time in his Academic Questions:

“… they called it body and something like quality (‘how-ness’). You will certainly allow us in these unusual cases sometimes to use words that are novel, as the Greeks themselves do who have long been discussing them.”

“As far as we’re concerned,” said Atticus, “go ahead and use Greek terms when you want, if your Latin fails you.” Varro replied, “You’re very kind: but I’ll endeavour to speak in Latin, except for words like philosophy or rhetoric or physics or dialectic, which along with many others are already customary in place of Latin words. So I have called qualities what the Greeks call poiotētas, which even among Greeks is not a word for ordinary people but philosophers, as often. In fact, the logicians have no ordinary words: they use their own.”²⁸

In such works, Cicero ensured that, just like Greek, the Latin literary tradition would progress from classic works in verse (dramatic especially) to classics of artistic prose, in oratory and philosophy. Of course, he was not alone as a writer in the late Republic; but the copyists’ tradition has been kind to him, following the collective judgment of ancient schoolmasters on who was worth reading, and his work now largely stands alone in those fields, along with the historian Sallust (86–35), and Julius Caesar himself (100–44), who also wrote a kind of contemporary history, but of his own campaigns. There is also DE RERVM NATURA ‘On the Nature of Things’, an atheistic epic on science and paleontology written by Lucretius (ca 94–ca 52 BC).^*

This corpus was supplemented in the next generation by a small number of poets and historians who were likewise to be selected as classic representatives of their art forms. Three of them were protégés of a single rich and exceedingly well-connected man, Augustus’ aide C. Maecenas: these were Virgil (70–19 BC), the doyen of epic poetry (as well as pastoral and didactic verse—although Virgil was always inclined to weave in political references); Horace (65–8 BC), of lyric poetry, as well as witty, topical verse; and Propertius (ca 50–ca 5 BC), of love elegies. Besides them there were the historian Livy (59 BC–AD 17), author of Ab Vrbe Condita ‘Since the Foundation of the City’, and the poet Ovid (43 BC–AD 17), mostly famous for the wide range of his wit, often on erotic themes. These were the masters of the Golden Age. To them—largely, in deference to later taste—three other love poets are usually added: C. Valerius Catullus (84–54 BC) who was marginally involved in politics in the era of Cicero and Caesar; Albius Tibullus (ca 52–19 BC), who was a friend of Horace’s and Ovid’s, and Sulpicia, the only extant woman poet of the classical era, whose poems have been preserved along with those of Tibullus. With these, the roll call of accepted Golden Age writers is essentially complete.^†

Publius Vergilius Maro (Virgil), Latin’s great epic poet. His apparent prophecy of a new age brought in by a virgin and child assured his later reputation among Christians.

In their separate ways, all but Catullus (who died too soon) needed to come to terms with the new dominance of Rome’s first emperor, Augustus. They were then amply rewarded for their optimistic view of the new regime: only Ovid fell foul of the government, but apparently because of a social or personal faux pas, rather than a false move in the political sphere.

More important for the history of Latin, they were all consciously following, imitating, and sometimes even translating Greek originals—inevitably the best they knew of, with greater ambition as their confidence ripened.

So Virgil started with Theocritus, a Syracusan of the third century who had made his name at Alexandria (then the Greek cultural centre) with the invention of highly mannered poetry about the lives of country bumpkins, so-called bucolic (“ox-herding”) verse. Virgil then moved on to Hesiod, whose archaic Works and Days is a guide to farming, but allowed Virgil (in the Georgics, Greek for ‘land-workings’) to express a Roman’s traditional joy in growing things in Italy, while never forgetting the contemporary crisis in land ownership there from a century of civil wars and veterans’ demands for settlement. At last he attempted the ultimate challenge, to measure himself (and Latin) against Homer himself, the author of the universal founding texts of Greek culture. In the Aeneid, by taking the mythical theme of Aeneas’ journey from Troy to Italy (via Carthage), he was able to address a resonantly Roman theme, but still have the freedom given by writing about the mythical past—and since the story contained sea adventures followed by a war, he could neatly draw on, and invite comparison with, both the Odyssey and the Iliad.

Although Virgil is a universal example of Latin literature being built out of Greek, the other authors recognized as great were no less explicit about their models. Horace drew on Archilochus of Paros (mid-seventh century) and Hipponax of Ephesus (late sixth) for his iambics, Sappho and Alcaeus (Lesbos, late seventh century) for his lyrical odes. Even his Ars Poetica is based on the prescriptions of an otherwise obscure Neoptolemus of Parium. Both Catullus and Propertius drew much from the learned Alexandrian poet Callimachus (mid-third century), and Propertius even claimed to be carrying on his inspiration in Roman form. Ovid was less clearly imitating Greeks than trying to outdo some of his illustrious Latin forebears, notably Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius, while consciously exploring new territory. Nonetheless his Ars Amatoria ‘Lover’s Art’ is supposed to be indebted to the explicit prose manual Aphrodisia by Philaenis;^* his Fasti ‘Calendar’ was influenced by Phaenomena, an astronomical and meteorological poem by Aratus (early third century, Asia); and his masterpiece, the mythological Metamorphoses, has Callimachus’ Aetia ‘Causes’ in the background, a mélange of mythological stories in verse, united only in that they sketch the origins of rites and cities.

In Livy’s field, Roman history, the first works, even by Romans, had actually been written in Greek. ^† And Romans were not the only ones interested to write it: one of Livy’s major sources was the Greek Polybius (of the midsecond century BC). On occasion, Livy paid fulsome homage to Greek learning, calling Greeks “the most erudite race of all, who brought many arts to us for the cultivation of mind and body.”²⁹ The ground rules for history had largely been set by Greeks, and these were never challenged by their Roman students and successors. Strikingly for moderns, these included a general practice of inventing long speeches to put in the mouths of the protagonists, dramatizing and analyzing their motivation. This was very much in the tradition of Greek and Roman education, where schoolwork was largely oral. Pupils were encouraged to develop their understanding not through essays, but by working up speeches to examine the strengths and weaknesses of famous past situations.^* And modern analysts of Livy³⁰ tend to emphasize how incidents in early Rome were recast in the light of episodes from Greek history. So the tale of the rape of Lucretia, which led to the downfall of the Etruscan king Tarquinius, is adapted to mirror the story of the homosexual love affair that was the undoing of the Athenian tyrants Hippias and Hipparchus; and the entry of Gauls into Rome, followed by a massacre of senators, echoes Herodotus’ classic account of the Persian sack of Athens and destruction of the diehards who held the Acropolis. History was all about telling a good story, and the old (Greek) ones were the good ones.

Titus Livius (Livy) dramatized Rome’s past, from the city’s foundation to the present, firmly establishing Latin as a language for history.

So keen were the Romans to be seen as successors to the Greeks (but transcending them, of course) that they had elaborated the origin of Rome as something close to a Greek city: so they had adopted the story of Aeneas the noble Trojan as their foundation myth. Some Greeks had (for unknown reasons) reciprocated early on: both the fourth-century Academic philosopher Heraclides Ponticus and the third-century Macedonian warlord Demetrius the Besieger characterized Rome as a Greek city (pólis Hellēnís) in Italy—strange when we consider how little Rome had in common with real Greek foundations such as Cumae, Syracuse, or Tarentum.³¹ Pyrrhus, another Greek warlord (and enemy of Demetrius’), had seen a different significance in the foundation myth: if Rome was the new Troy, it was a fitting target for a Greek crusade.³² But in the next century, Rome, now with military control of Greece, assimilated itself subjectively to the Greek view of the world as a whole. This was not so much a process of trying to win Greek “hearts and minds”; we have seen that, if there ever was such a process, it did not last beyond the first generation of Roman control. Rather, it was that Romans saw themselves as insiders, in a civilized world, where the Greeks had seen all but Greeks as inferiors and outsiders. Hence the Romans’ appropriation of the unappetizing Greek term for ‘foreigner’, bárbaros (about as respectful as calling aliens “bowwows”).

The first large-scale user of this word in the Latin tradition was Plautus, at the beginning of the Roman wars in Greece, and for him it referred to what was non-Greek, and quite often Roman. It often has a decidedly negative charge: BARBARVM HOSPITEM MI IN AEDEM NIL MOROR ‘I can’t abide a barbar guest in my house,’ says a Greek slave to and of an apparent down-and-out, who is as Greek as he is.³³ Still, Plautus could have been a key influence in changing its meaning from “non-Greek” to “neither Roman nor Greek”: when watching a Plautine play, the Roman audience had to identify with Greeks and so see the rest of the world as barbarous.

One hundred and fifty years later, the word had become, for Romans, the standard one to characterize those lacking in that Graeco-Roman speciality, civilization: Cicero could routinely contrast HVMANVS, DOCTVS ‘humane and cultivated’ with IMMANIS, BARBARVS ‘savage and barbarous’.³⁴ The quasiracial claim that only Greeks and Romans enjoyed full humanity and civilization is clear, since Cicero was also happy to cast as BARBARI Syrians and even learned Egyptian priests, whose title to learning and literacy was well-known to predate the Romans certainly, and probably the Greeks, by many centuries.³⁵ Julius Caesar, about the same time, naturally calls BARBARI not only all the peoples he challenged outside the Roman Empire, but his non-Roman “native troops” too.³⁶

Meanwhile, Greeks gave no sign of returning the compliment: the word bárbaros and its derivatives in Greek resolutely went on including the Romans, even among Rome’s Greek admirers. In the first century AD the Greek geographer Strabo unembarrassedly used the term ekbebarbarõsthai ‘barbarized out’ to describe the process whereby Greeks had been supplanted by Romans in southern Italy.³⁷ And putting the best face he could on the facts, the enthusiastic historian of Rome Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who knew both languages, but believed that Rome was of Greek origin, claimed that Latin was a kind of Greek-barbar creole: “The Romans speak a language that is neither highly barbarous nor thoroughly Greek, but somewhat mixed from both, with the greater part Aeolic, with this sole benefit from the minglings that they do not pronounce correctly all the sounds.”³⁸

This quest of the Romans to be accepted into civilized—i.e., Greek—society, was explicitly pursued in the realm of grammar. As we have seen, Latin and Greek were learned in parallel (pari passu) in the best Roman schools. Since Greek was a “modern foreign language” at the time, as well as the acknowledged classic, it was not at first taught through the grammar rules and translation drills that are familiar to us from more recent classical studies. (The grammar rules had in fact not yet been worked out.) Rather it was taught though memorization and parallel dialogues; something of the style can be seen in surviving hermēneumata ‘translations’, parallel school texts, apparently dating from the third century AD or earlier, filled with everyday language showing how to say the same things in good Latin and Greek, and (like modern phrase books) sometimes illustrating the right words for a crisis:

The Greek language had progressively been analyzed since the fifth century BC, first by the sophistic rhetoricians and philosophers of Athens, who tended to look for general principles such as the division of subject and predicate, later by Stoic philosophers and Alexandrian textual critics, who emphasized more the arbitrary and irregular, which is apparent to anyone studying the profusion of inflexions on Greek nouns, adjectives, and especially verbs. The two aspects were characterized by the Greeks as “analogy” and “anomaly,” and theorists disputed in vain which of the two was truly fundamental to language. Nevertheless, the traditions culminated in the first comprehensive textbook of Greek grammar, Dionysius the Thracian’s Tekhnḗ Grammatikḗ ‘The Scholarly Art’, written around 100 BC. (Dionysius taught at Rhodes.) At the time, the aim of these studies was said to be the criticism of literature. Although the analysis of Greek’s distinctive sounds (largely implicit in the alphabet), and of its noun and verb inflexions, was highly developed, the theory did not cover sentence structure, and this was only to be added by Apollonius Dyscolus (‘the Grouch’) in the second century AD, based on his analysis of the functions of the “parts of speech.”

But despite the detailed description of the concrete facts of Greek, the general approach to the language remained loftily philosophical and conceptual. As in the “ordinary language” philosophy of the later twentieth century, analysis of the home language was assumed to yield generalizations of universal validity. There was no sense among Greeks that any language other than Greek deserved such analysis, much less that such an analysis might lead to interestingly different results.

This theory of grammatical analysis was no doubt known to many of the Greeks who came to teach in Italy in the first century BC, but Romans were the ones who showed concretely how it could be applied to Latin. Before its development, L. Aelius Stilo,^* who was born around 150 BC, had paid attention to Latin etymology and tried to analyze archaic texts, but as a Roman had largely been interested in the theory of oratory. Cicero himself studied under him.⁴⁰ The analysis of Latin on Greek principles took off with Aelius’ student M. Terentius Varro (116–27 BC), whose DE LINGVA LATINA ‘On the Latin Language’ included a treatment of Latin inflexion, and who can often be seen thinking like a modern formal linguist.^†

The analysis continued to be elaborated, and simplified versions came to be included in the grammatical syllabus. Q. Remmius Palaemon, a famous practitioner of the first century AD, incorporated most of Greek terminology into Latin in translated form, including the famous mistranslation of aitiatikḗ, the ‘caused’ case, as ACCVSATIVVS ‘accusative’. The most definitive compilations turned out to be the ARS MAIOR ET MINOR ‘greater and lesser treatise’ of Aelius Donatus^‡ in the fourth century, and the monumental INSTITVTIONES GRAMMATICAE ‘grammatical educations’ of Priscianus Caesariensis in the fifth and sixth.^*

Scholars’ adaptations of grammatical theory to Latin gave the language a new source of status, putting it effectively on a par with Greek even at this, most abstract, level. But there was another motivation for developing grammar, one that brings us back to the schoolroom. Foreigners aspiring to learn the language well, especially as it began to change, needed instruction on what was good style; seeing examples of it held up for imitation was no longer enough for learners. Grammatical theory began to be presented, often in simplified form, in the classroom. The word bárbaros / BARBARVS came to be at least as commonly used to denigrate failures in grammar and style (in Greek or Latin) as to point something out as truly foreign. A. Gellius, a scholar of the second century AD, naturally described a correct usage as NON BARBARE DICERE, SED LATINE ‘saying it not barbarously but in Latin’.⁴¹

And while such implicit snobbery against the outsiders continued to prevail, a curious fact was missed. Already by the first century AD, Latin scholars had demonstrated that Greek was not the only language reducible to rule, even if those very rules were inspired by looking at Greek. Other languages too could have a grammar.^†42

Yet it would be another millennium and a half before Europeans would realize the implications of this for languages at large.