Читать книгу Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin - Nicholas Ostler - Страница 13

GRAECA DOCTRIX OMNIVM LINGVARVM, LATINA IMPERATRIX OMNIVM LINGVARVM

Greek teacher of all languages, Latin commander of all languages

Honorius of Autun, Gemmae Animae, iii.95 (twelfth century AD)¹

AT THE VERY END of the Roman Republic, when normal politics had been made impossible by Julius Caesar’s dominance, Cicero withdrew to his study. He would attempt something radically new, to give Latin its own corpus of philosophical writings and, in so doing, put it on a par with Greek, a language that would be adequate to express all aspects of civilization. Amazingly, in the twenty-two months between February 45 and November 44, this he achieved. His writings, especially those that covered the gamut of philosophy from theory of knowledge through to practical ethics, gave Latin the vocabulary to tackle any subject, no matter how abstract. As he put it himself, writing to his good friend Atticus, “You’ll say I must be pretty sanguine about the Latin language, writing such stuff. But they’re copies, not too hard to do. I just bring the words, which come pouring out of me.”²

Possibly more important, since they were respected and remained available from generation to generation, Cicero’s philosophical works allowed the Roman writers who followed him to share his self-confidence in addressing serious factual subjects in Latin. As he said himself, “But my sense is (and I have often discussed this point) that Latin is not only not poor, as they commonly believe, but even richer than Greek. Has there ever been a time, whether for good orators or poets, at least after they had someone to imitate, when their style was lacking in any fine feature, in quantity or quality?”³

Even if the inspiration in the early days was often Greek, the result of Roman writers’ efforts was to be a body of literature that stands alone. Latin literature became “the universal receptacle,” a basis for all the western European literatures that were to follow.⁴ For all its derivative roots, it has become an independent treasury of classical models, in every age mostly read and appreciated by people with no knowledge of Greek.

Few contemporary Greeks will have been as generous as Cicero’s tutor, Apollonius Molon, who is supposed to have made these prescient remarks to his amazingly accomplished student, when he heard him declaim in Greek as well as Latin: “I praise and admire you, Cicero, but it worries me for the fate of Greece when I consider that through you the only advantages which we have left, culture [paideía] and language [lógos], are also to pass to the Romans.”⁵

Mestrius Plutarchus (Plutarch), a moral philosopher and antiquarian who wrote a series of paired biographies of great Greeks and Romans. He never learned Latin well.

Until they started to write in the language themselves, Greeks passed over in silence any serious literature in Latin: evidently it never played any part in their education.

A good example is Plutarch, a Greek gentleman of the first century AD, who was interested enough in Rome and its history to write a series of parallel biographies comparing Greek and Roman statesmen. He even volunteered that, in his day, “pretty much everyone used the Roman language.”⁶ Nevertheless, on his own command of it he is modest:

… having had no leisure, while I was in Rome and other parts of Italy, to exercise myself in the Roman language, on account of public business and of those who came to be instructed by me in philosophy, it was very late, and in the decline of my age, before I applied myself to the reading of Latin authors. Upon which that which happened to me may seem strange, though it be true; for it was not so much by the knowledge of words that I came to the understanding of things, as by my experience of things I was enabled to follow the meaning of words. But to appreciate the graceful and ready pronunciation of the Roman tongue, to understand the various figures and connection of words, and such other ornaments, in which the beauty of speaking consists, is, I doubt not, an admirable and delightful accomplishment; but it requires a degree of practice and study which is not easy, and will better suit those who have more leisure, and time enough yet before them for the occupation.⁷

But the balance was going to shift. Already in the first century AD Greek translations of Virgil’s work at least were appearing, and Virgil’s popularity beyond the Latin-speaking world was reinforced when his Fourth Eclogue began to be interpreted as a prophecy of the Christ child.⁸ By the second century a well-to-do North African such as Apuleius could prepare for a career at home by a Greek education at Athens followed by a Latin one at Rome, then go on to write what he called a ‘Greek-style story’ (FABVLAM GRAECANICAM) in Latin, although he laughingly dismissed himself as a ‘rough speaker of that exotic, courtroom language’ (EXOTICI AC FORENSIS SERMONIS RVDIS LOCVTOR).⁹ Greek literature went on being written in profusion, but Greeks were becoming increasingly disadvantaged as candidates for imperial service in that they just did not have the Latin for it.¹⁰

In practice, Apollonius Molon’s fears for Greek were coming true. Augustine (354–430) was the first top-rank philosopher brought up in Latin to find (with relief) that he could get by without any Greek at all.

But what was the reason why I hated Greek literature, when I had been so steeped in it as a child? Not even now have I fully worked it out. I had fallen in love with Latin… I think it is the same with Virgil for Greek children, when they are forced to learn him as I was [Homer]. The fact is that the difficulty, the difficulty of learning a foreign language at all, wiped out with its gall all the Greek sweets of fabulous stories.¹¹

And now that an education in Latin alone was totally respectable, the value of Greek tutors was plummeting. Libanius, a consummate Greek rhetorician of Antioch (and a friend of the emperor Julian), wrote ruefully in 386 of the poor career prospects awaiting would-be Greek teachers, indeed any who stayed in the east:

You know how the present age has transferred to others [the Latin teachers] the rewards for our language studies, and reversed the ranking of respect to our disadvantage, presenting them as giving access to all good things, while suggesting that we only offer mumbo jumbo and a formation for hard grind and poverty. That is why there are all those frequent sailings, voyages with only one destination, Rome, and the cheers of young people off to fulfil their dreams: of high office, power, marriage, palace life, conversations with the emperor.¹²

Some Greeks were prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice and write not in their own language but in Latin. One of the most famous in this line is the last great Latin historian of the Empire, Ammianus Marcellinus (ca 330–95), an older contemporary of Augustine’s.¹³ Although educated in Greek (like Libanius) in Antioch in Syria, he had a varied military career, which took him all round western Europe, but also to Mesopotamia, where he took part in a failed campaign against the Parthians. His service no doubt gave him a thorough exposure to Latin. In the 380s he moved to Rome and started to write. He took the very Roman historian Tacitus as his model, writing an opinionated history that took up where Tacitus left off (AD 96) and continued to his own day (around 391). He frequently cited Cicero with approval, but with a bicultural touch unknown to previous historians, now and then also quoted in Greek. He appears to have been rewarded with public readings of his works at Rome, a source of reflected glory on his home city of Antioch. Even Libanius was pleased.¹⁴

In the eyes of the Empire as a whole, then, Latin was in time able to match and just about supersede its master Greek as preeminent language of culture. This new standing of Latin was clear when viewed from Rome, and the Greek cultural centres that had once attracted so many students from abroad, but felt themselves disfavoured; it was less so when viewed from the rest of Greece, or the provinces of the east. This was because of the stubborn limit on the progress of Latin there: Latin remained unable to displace Greek in the east, as a language actually spoken in daily life, a fact which stands in vivid contrast with the pervasive tendency of Latin in all other parts of the Empire.

This linguistic deficit of Latin in the east was noted at the time. The famed Bible translator Jerome (Eusebius Hieronymus), a native speaker of Latin from Dalmatia, who lived from 331 to 420 and learned to read and translate Hebrew as well as Latin and Greek, spent the latter half of his life in Palestine. In a letter to Augustine, he wrote, “We suffer a great poverty of the Latin language in this province.” In a commentary, he noted by contrast that the Greek language was spoken all over the east.¹⁵ Egeria, a pilgrim from western Europe to Jerusalem around the fifth century, noted that Christian services there were conducted in Greek always, with Syriac interpretation; but in addition, Latin speakers could receive interpreting into Latin “lest they be saddened.”¹⁶ Yet it had been some 450 years, perhaps twenty generations, since those lands had been absorbed into Rome’s empire.

Greek- and Latin-speaking zones in the Eastern Empire, AD 300. Latin never spread widely in Greece or the Levant, except in army bases and academic centres.

In all the sixteen centuries that the Roman Empire was to last in the east, Latin never spread as a popular language. Some say the Romans themselves were at fault, in never making a determined effort to require its use. But what cultural inducement were the Romans able to offer to the Greeks? They were not offering any serious political rights comparable to Greek aspirations before the Roman conquest, and both Greeks and Romans agreed that the Greeks already had privileged access to the finer side of private life. A passage of particular pomposity from the first century AD suggests that it was usual for Romans to stand on their linguistic dignity:

How much the magistrates of old valued both their and the Roman people’s majesty can be seen from the fact that (among other signs of requiring respect) they persistently maintained the practice of replying only in Latin to the Greeks. And so they forced them to speak through interpreters, losing their linguistic fluency, their great strength, not just in our capital city but in Greece and Asia too, evidently to promote the honour of the Latin language throughout the world. They were not lacking in learning, in everything they held that what was Greek should defer to what was Roman, thinking it improper that the weight and authority of the Empire should be sacrificed for the charm and attractions of literature.¹⁷

But be this as it may, the language never expanded out of the functions (army, law, government, and the administration of imperial estates) and the particular cities (Constantinople, Nicomedia, Smyrna, Antioch, Berytus, Alexandria)^* that had attracted larger Roman populations. Roman citizen colonies in the east had been few (notably Corinth, refounded by Julius Caesar in 44 BC amid the century-old ruins left by L. Mummius) and soon effectively hellenized.

As long as the Empire was united and looked only to Rome as its capital, there was an inducement for the elite, at least, to learn Latin and seek advancement in imperial service. There was even a brief surge in the use of Latin in the east, when the capital was moved to Constantinople in 324. Berytus became a great centre of Latin studies, with a practical bias preparing its students for careers in law.^* But even so, Latin speakers were increasingly hard to find in the fourth century: Ammianus recorded two high officials appointed to service in the east specifically for their bilingual skills.¹⁸ In the fifth century, from the reign of Theodosius II (408–450) the eastern and western halves of the Empire increasingly went their separate ways. The use of Latin in the east was becoming purely a formality. From 397, governors had been permitted to issue judgments in Greek; from 439, wills too were confirmed to be valid in Greek. The emperor Justinian (527–565), himself a Latin speaker from Illyria, tried to boost Latin again, calling it PATRIA VOX, and (still in Greek) hē pátrios phōné; but he had no choice but to publish most of his famous law code, the CORPVS IVRIS CIVILIS, in Greek as well as Latin, to make sure it was widely understood.¹⁹

This period is documented among other sources by the memoirs (in Greek) of John the Lydian (490–ca 560), whose high judicial position in Constantinople, exceptor in the Praetorian Prefecture, had been achieved partly on the strength of his Latin. He witnessed with foreboding the courts’ abandonment of Latin, which happened in his time in office, recalling a prophecy attributed to Romulus, that Fortune would abandon the Romans whenever they should forget their paternal language.²⁰ Declining use of Latin had become a symbol of the fading importance of traditional learning, especially in the law, where clarity was being sacrificed for ease and accessibility.²¹ Still, we know that Latin was hanging on in some of its traditional functions: the emperor Maurikios (who reigned 582–602) wrote in Greek a field manual for the army in which the words of command were listed in Latin.^* And a new emperor was in these days formally acclaimed in Greek by the populace, but in Latin by the army.²²

Then in the early seventh century, after the death of Muhammad in 632, the eastern Empire was buffeted by a series of military disasters that deprived it of all but its solidly Greek-speaking heartland. Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, where Greek had only ever been an elite language, and most spoke Egyptian or Aramaic, would never again be under Roman control. This turned out also to give the quietus to even official uses of Latin: there was no longer a need for it as a distinct, formal unifying language when everyone in the eastern Empire spoke Greek anyway. Looking back from the mid-tenth century, Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus judged that it had been in this early seventh century that the Romans “had been Hellenized and discarded the language of their fathers, the Roman tongue.”²³

In a confusing footnote to the career of Latin in the east, the Byzantines were soon calling Greek itself rōmaíika ‘Romanish’ (in contrast with latiniká), a term for Greek that lasted at least until the nineteenth century. When Emperor Michael III (reigning at Constantinople in the mid-ninth century) was reported to have called Latin a “barbarian and Scythian language,” Pope Nicholas I riposted by suggesting that if that was his opinion, he should give up the title Emperor of the Romans.²⁴ Of that there was never any question. The eastern Empire had abandoned Latin, but that did not mean its citizens had given up on their Roman identity. Quite the reverse: the Byzantines were known as Rūmī to all their threatening neighbours to the east, Arab, Persian, and Turk, for more than eight hundred years, at least as long as their previous allegiance (as Graeci) to Rome in Italy. And when the Seljuk Turks, after 1071, succeeded in dislodging them from most of Anatolia, the Turks called their successor kingdom there the Sultanate of Rum.

In some sense, the Greeks had never “got the point” of being Roman.

They had never agitated for the kind of citizen rights (of trade, marriage, the vote) that exercised their fellow peoples subject to Rome in the west—and which meant that the Roman conquest and assimilation of Gaul, Spain, and Africa was like a continuation of the earlier struggle to expand across Italy. The Greeks’ loyalty to Rome, such as it was, was shown rather through participation in novel religious cults: first they hastily conjured into existence a new goddess, Roma (honoured in Alabanda, Chios, Miletus, Smyrna, Rhodes, as well as Athens); later—bizarrely—they affected to worship the most popular of the proconsuls sent to govern them; and ultimately they offered adoration to the emperor himself. In the first century AD, cities vied for dedicated shrines of worship to the emperor, since they were some kind of badge of status, entitling the city to call iself neōkóros ‘temple warden’. This was most un-Roman behaviour. But religion had always been an important mark of tò Hellēnikón ‘Greekness’—Herodotus²⁵ related how the Athenians had appealed to it in seeking alliance with the Spartans against the Persian menace in 480 BC. It would be again, after the Christianization of Greece in the fourth century AD. This would offer scope for almost endless doctrinal dispute: henceforth the Greeks would be able to combine the two traditional Greek propensities, for worship and for argument.

Ultimately Greek was little affected by its eight hundred years of cohabitation with Latin, but Latin on the other hand derived much of permanence from its cohabitation with Greek. We have seen that Latin drew from Greek the conception it had of its own grammar, and also the tradition that a gentleman’s education should be general, based on literary classics and the skills of public speaking. But Latin is an heir to Greek in many other ways.

Most concretely, there are far more loans of Greek words into Latin than the reverse, starting with the philosophical and intellectual vocabulary, which has largely been transmitted through Latin’s later career into all the modern European languages at large. But Greek was also the source of many everyday words in the more colourful side of spoken Latin. Although this type of Latin is little known to us directly, outside graffiti, many such words have survived into Latin’s daughter languages. They also bear out the general hints we get from classical literature of the particular sociolinguistic role of Greek (and hence Greek borrowings) in the Latin world.

Gastronomy was a particular strength of the Greeks—the very words for olive and its oil (OLIVA, OLEVM) are old borrowings from Greek (elaiwā, elaiwon)—but this shows up in many names for sauces (GARVM ‘fish sauce’, HYDROGARVM ‘diluted fish sauce’, TISANA ‘barley water’, EMBAMMA ‘ketchup’), vegetables (ASPARAGVS, RAPHANVS ‘radish’, FASEOLVS ‘kidney bean’, CRAMBE ‘cabbage’) and seafood (ECHINVS ‘urchin’, GLYCYMARIS ‘clam’, POLYPUS ‘polyp’, SCOMBER ‘mackerel’, SEPIA ‘cuttlefish’), as well as some foreign delicacies that were to become common (AMYGDALVM ‘almond’, DACTYLUS ‘date’, GLYCYRRHIZA ‘liquorice’, ORYZA ‘rice’, ZINGIBER ‘ginger’). The word for liver, which has been absorbed by so many Romance languages (French foie, Spanish higado, Italian fegato, Rumanian ficat) is from Latin FICATVM, which originally did not mean ‘liver’ at all, but ‘figged’. This was a loan translation of Greek sukōtón, since the liver of animals raised on figs was such a popular delicacy. The word MASSA (which just means ‘mass’) is another borrowing, from Greek mâza, generalized from a mass of barley cake. The whole set of equipment for drinking wine, delivered in an AMPHORA, diluted in a CRATER, and ladled out with a CYATHVS into a large CANTHARVS or SCYPHVS, or an individual CARCHESIVM or CYMBIVM, was labelled in Greek. The culture of drinking too was named in Greek: an aperitif was a PROPIN ‘fore-drink’, a toast PROPINATIO, a game of drunken marksmanship with wine lees had the Greek name COTTABVS.

Most musical instruments had Greek names: SYRINX ‘panpipes’, CYMBALA, TYMPANVM ‘drum’, LYRA, CHORDA ‘string’, PLECTRVM as well as MVSICA itself. More sophisticated engineering tended to be named in Greek, such as the construction terms TROCLEA ‘pulley’, ARTEMON ‘block and tackle’, ERGATA ‘windlass’, POLYSPASTON ‘hoist’, CNODAX ‘pivot’, COCLEA ‘screw mechanism’; and so were the ORGANA of high-tech warfare—CORAX ‘crow’ (battering ram), HELEPOLIS ‘city-taker’ (siege tower), CATAPVLTA ‘off-swinger’, BALLISTA ‘shooter’, ONAGER ‘wild ass’ (all forms of catapult). So, of course, were many terms in the world of school and writing: SCHOLA, ABACUS (‘chequerboard’ as well as ‘abacus’), EPISTVLA ‘letter, missive’, PAPYRVS, CALAMVS ‘pen’, ENCAVSTVM ‘molten wax, ink’, GRAMMATICVS ‘language teacher’, RHETOR ‘oratory teacher’, BIBLIOTHECA ‘library’.

Physical culture too was a Greek speciality. Medical terms taken from Greek have often had a long life (e.g., plaster from Latin EMPLASTRVM, Greek emplastron ‘moulded on’, palsy from PARALYSIS ‘detaching’, dose < DOSIS ‘giving’, French rhume < RHEVMA ‘flow’, for the common cold).^* The Roman institution of the bath was clearly heavily influenced by its Greek origins too: BALNEVM (from Greek balaneîon) ‘bath’, THERMAE ‘hot baths’, APODYTERIVM ‘dressing room’, LACONICVM ‘sweat room’, HYPOCAVSTVM ‘underfloor heating’, XYSTVS ‘running track’, PALAESTRA ‘wrestling ground’, LECYTHVS ‘anointing bottle’, ALIPTA ‘masseur/trainer’ (from Greek aleiptēs ‘anointer’), were all terms of everyday use at the bathing establishment, all derived from Greek. Perhaps even more interestingly, a number of words for parts of the body in Latin are borrowed from Greek. The usual Romance words for leg (e.g., French jambe, Italian and Old Spanish gamba) are derived from a Latin word, GAMBA, itself derived from veterinary Greek kampḗ, ‘bend, joint’. STOMACHVS, originally meaning ‘maw’, the opening of the digestive tract, was a Greek word for which the Romans had a lot of use, since they thought of it as the seat of anger: STOMACHOSVS meant ‘testy’ and STOMACHARI meant ‘to lose one’s temper’. And curiously the Romans too borrowed their (and hence our) word for moustache: Latin MVSTACEVS, never found in Latin literature, is derived from a Doric Greek word for the upper lip, mustákion or mústax.^† Its close relative mástax ‘jaw’ was also borrowed in Latin; MASTICARE, a verb derived from it, has resulted in French mâcher ‘chew’ as well as modern English ‘masticate’. What became the favourite word for a punch or blow (seen in French coup, Italian colpo, Spanish golpe) was COLPVS, derived from COLAPHVS, already used in Plautus; in Greek it originally meant ‘a peck’, the blow from a bird’s beak.

Colloquial Latin was also full of Greek-sounding interjections: BABAE or PAPAE ‘wow’, PHY ‘ugh’, VAE ‘oh no’, ATATAE ‘ah’, AGE ‘be reasonable’, APAGE ‘get out of here’, EIA ‘come on’, EVGE ‘hurrah’, all have identical equivalents in Greek. Cicero had been embarrassed to use the seemingly innocuous BINI ‘two each’, since it sounded the same as the Greek imperative bínei ‘fuck!’²⁶ (Spoken Greek had, in any case, always had, for Romans, overtones of the bedroom.)^* BASTAT ‘enough’, though unknown in classical Latin, went on to a lively career as a verb in Spanish and Italian and seems to have come from Greek bástaze ‘hold it’.

This last example points to one of the persistent differences between Latin and Greek, namely the accentual patterns. The accent on Greek bástaze made it sound like a two-syllable word in Latin; hence it might be heard by Romans as BÁSTAT. By contrast, Greek names imported into Latin were given new accentual patterns, based on the Latin rule, which have largely stayed with them in modern western European languages: not, as per the original Greek, Athená, Aléxandros, Euripídes, Heléne, Menélaos, Periklés, or Sokrátes, but ATHÉNA, ALEXÁNDER, EVRÍPIDES, HÉLENA, MENELÁVS, PÉRICLES, SÓCRATES. Meanwhile, modern Greek has retained the patterns of ancient Greek.²⁷ Stress patterns, in the languages that have them—French, for example, and Japanese do not—can be remarkably persistent over the millennia, and modern English has turned out in many ways similar to classical Latin; but Greek and Latin are very different and have remained so.^†

Latin, particularly colloquial Latin and poetic Latin, was peppered with Greek words. But to get this in proportion, let us consider some comparisons. Sampling in a moderate Latin dictionary (of about twenty thousand headwords) shows that, excluding proper nouns, some 7 percent of vocabulary in the classical era (200 BC to AD 200) was derived from Greek.²⁸ By contrast, in 1450, after an equal four hundred years of Norman and Angevin dominance of written expression, something like half the recorded vocabulary of English was of French origin. Another language with massive borrowing, Turkish, has derived 28 percent of its core vocabulary from Arabic, 8 percent from Persian, mostly in the eleventh to sixteenth centuries; but since the nineteenth it has gained as much as 25 percent from French.²⁹

Beside vocabulary, Latin writers and orators absorbed from Greek a particular attitude towards sentence structure, what is called periodic style. Greek language analysis did give rise to what we now recognize as grammar, but no one sways an audience or wins an argument by grammar alone. Greek analysis of how oratory or dialectic becomes effective was every bit as structured as—and considered much more important than—their analysis of declensions, conjugations, or parts of speech. The Greek word períodos means ‘circuit’, literally a ‘go-round’, as in a race. Aristotle, no doubt following up a doctrine that had been elaborated by the Sophists at the height of fifth-century Greek rhetoric, defined a períodos as “an utterance with a beginning and an end in itself, and a length that can be easily taken in,” contrasting it with a strung-out utterance, which has no end in itself, stopping only when what it is talking about comes to an end. The idea was that audiences are made restless by this strung-out style, not knowing what is coming up; and as an added bonus for the speaker, a speech made up of periodic sentences, the so-called terminated style, is much easier to memorize, since it consists of balanced parts, called ‘limbs’ (kôla, MEMBRA) each of them neither too long nor too short. It can even have rhythm, like verse, making it easier to remember; but the actual metres of poetry should be avoided.³⁰

We can get an idea of what Aristotle was talking about, and what every rhetor of Greek or Latin put across to his pupils, by looking at a short period (períodos) of Cicero’s, indeed the sentence that follows on from the sentence cited above, when he was praising the stylistic resources of the Latin language. For immediate convenience, a parallel translation into English is included, but the meaning is not the main point here. Since the structure is, the English phases more or less correspond to the Latin originals, even if the grammatical relations in the sentence are somewhat changed.

This is fairly typical of a well-structured period in a Ciceronian speech or essay. Formally it is a balanced structure of measured clauses, with all sorts of measured contrasts and internal echoes, but it is not really an aid to clarity of thought. The whole thing is contrived, and its meaning is disguised rather than revealed by the form preconceived for the sentence. It starts with a sideswipe at the political constraints under which Cicero was labouring and finishes with a statement of his self-imposed duty to give the Romans a literature they could be proud of, linking them only with the observations that his talents are unused and he does not wish to quarrel with people who are happy enough reading Greek. Aristotle’s “utterance with a beginning and an end in itself” has largely taken leave of the natural form of whatever it was talking about.

The whole sentence can be analyzed with a kind of Chinese-box structure, with parallel constituents signalled by comparable styles of underlining.

EGO VERO,

But I,

DEBEO PROFECTO,

I have a clear duty,

This, then, was the basis of the Greek theory of how to structure sentences in a formal speech. (A full exposition of it would be far more elaborate, naturally.) The theory was widely applied in Latin, and not just by orators. For in the ancient world, all reading was reading aloud, and public recitations of poetry and prose works were common. In this context, some writers—notably the perverse genius Tacitus—delighted in disappointing the expectations raised by periodic theory. His Annales starts with what is almost a hexameter line (the classic epic metre), precisely what was not supposed to happen in a well-regulated prose stylist.^* And here is his one-sentence analysis of the decline of history writing during the early Empire:

TIBERII GAIQVE ET CLAVDII AC NERONIS RES (FLORENTIBVS IPSIS) [OB METVM] FALSAE, (POSTQVAM OCCIDERANT) [RECENTIBVS ODIIS] COMPOSITAE SVNT.

Of Tiberius and Gaius and Claudius and Nero the events (while they themselves still flourished), [out of fear] were misrepresented, (after they had passed away), [in a setting of recent bitterness] were recounted.³¹

The translation gives some sense of the rhythm of the whole, but notice how the “limbs” are deliberately mismatched. Three different words for and (underlined) link the four emperors’ names, and then two fairly simple clauses follow, each begun with two short adverbials. In a sense they are parallel (as shown by the parentheses and square backets), but formally they jangle, and the two that ought, by their similar endings (-entibus, -īs), to be parallel and so in contrast, simply are not. Aristotle and Cicero would not have appreciated this monkeying with hard-won stylistic norms. But it only makes sense if readers knew the rules that Tacitus was breaking.

And to counterweight the periodic balance further, Latin had always had some maxims of its own that emphasized substance over style. They tended to be associated with Cato the Censor (see pp. 70–71). For him, the essence of a fine orator was VIR BONVS DICENDI PERITVS ‘a good man skilled in speaking’. Virtue will out, and damn your technique! Instead of spending too much time planning well-balanced periods, he recommended as preparation for a speech the policy REM TENE: VERBA SEQVENTVR ‘get a grip on the facts and the words will follow’.³²

Besides these explicit rules on how to put a text together, both the Greeks and the Romans were extremely selective in whose work they accepted as models for good language. They showed extreme prejudice in favour of particular eras, which were thought to have nourished the best writing.

For Greek, the model was always the language as used by authors writing in the Attic dialect in the fifth and fourth centuries BC. This was the dialect of the city of Athens, and the linguistic mark of quality was naturally discerned in all the writers of this period whose works had survived: they include the tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides; the comedian Aristophanes; the historians Thucydides and Xenophon; the philosophers Plato and Aristotle; and orators such as Demosthenes, Isocrates, and Lysias. “Atticism” has been the ideal that Greeks have striven for in every age over the succeeding twenty-three hundred years until (at long last) the last quarter of the twentieth century. Flexibility and freshness may well have been the virtues that had first made those authors great; they have not been virtues, at least as far as choice of linguistic style is concerned, for any generation of Greek writers until the modern era.

The value of Atticism remains hard to perceive from outside the charmed circle of the Greek-language community. It really had to do with keeping up technical features of the old language, such as the distinction between genitive and dative cases for nouns, the use of optative mood in inflecting verbs in certain subordinate clauses, and in general the conscious maintenance of words and usages that had come naturally in the fourth century BC, but were stilted already in the first AD. Greeks came to think it a superior way to use the language because of its association with the great works of the past—which none felt able, or perhaps even worthy, to match—and because the ability to use it was the unforgeable proof of a good education. But what to an insider are associations with quality are, to an outsider, difficult to distinguish from sheer obscurantism and snobbery. English has a much shorter continuous written tradition than Greek, but it is as if all modern English writing could only be taken seriously if it employed the spelling and phraseology of the Elizabethan Age.

For the Romans too the best language was defined ad hominem as the language of the best writers, but they gave themselves somewhat more latitude. Schoolmasters were to define a Golden Age, which covered the century to the death of Augustus in AD 14, and a following Silver Age, which lasted up to AD 150 or 200. The Golden Age included the historians Sallust, Caesar, and Livy, the orator and philosopher Cicero, and the poets Lucretius, Catullus, Virgil, Horace, Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid. The Silver Age would take in letter writers Seneca the Younger and Pliny the Younger, epic poets Lucan and Statius, epigrammatist Martial, historians Suetonius and Tacitus, satirical poets Persius and Juvenal, novelists Petronius and Apuleius, and the encyclopedists Pliny the Elder and Aulus Gellius. (Curiously, this meant that some of the most widely read authors, the dramatists Plautus and Terence, from the second century BC, were simply timed out.)

The term classic itself was invented by M. Cornelius Fronto in the middle of the second century AD, on the analogy of the topmost class of citizens: “Go now then, and when you have the time, ask whether ‘QVADRIGAM’ or ‘HARENAS’ was said by anyone from that cohort, at least the more ancient one, whether a significant orator or poet, I mean a significant, ranking [CLASSICVS], landed [ASSIDVVS] writer, not a common sort [PROLETARIVS].”³³

The focus on a small subset of extant authors as being the sole proponents of good language—and hence fit as models for imitation—was certainly accepted by the Romans; but it was less an obsession for them than the Greeks, who as the centuries wore on increasingly had only their language, and strict rules for using it well, to fall back on as a prominent symbol of their identity.^*

Stylistic quality, apparently so important for ancient writers and readers, was a deceptive thing. In essence, language was seen as high quality in itself just because it was associated with writers whose work was judged to be elegant and important. Although the Latin-using world imitated the Greek in taking this cultural stance, the content of the preferred styles for the two languages can hardly be equated, beyond the patterns for periodic sentences that have been described. As different languages they had different stylistic hang-ups, of no more concern universally than the split infinitive is in English. Furthermore, the next great cadre of Latin writers, the Church Fathers, would pride themselves on dispensing with what they saw as artificial classical norms.

Time, though, would bring a full turn of the wheel of fortune. Ironically, the greatest vogue for classicism in Latin did not occur in the second or third century AD, but over a millennium later, in the Renaissance and the centuries afterward. Then, to achieve liberation from the perceived turgidity of Christian and medieval Latin, the fashion would dictate a return to the classic authors and, in writing, a renewed fidelity to their language.

The Greeks were extremely lucky to have the Romans as their cultural successors, though they seldom recognized it. (They would naturally have preferred to continue their own tradition, without the need for any alien—i.e., necessarily barbarian—followers or replacements at all.) Although Rome had disabled them militarily, it was content for a good five centuries to be their cultural disciple, and indeed to use its unprecedented power to project aspects of Greek culture to the farthest parts of northern and western Europe: paideía