What is Classical Latin?

The Romans spoke Latin, rather than “Roman”, because the language existed before the foundation of Rome. It was in any case spoken well beyond the original territory of Rome.

We use the term “empire” to refer both to the dominions held by Rome and to the type of government established by Augustus after the fall of the Republic towards the end of the 1st century BC. There is therefore a tendency to think that Rome’s expansion took place somewhat later than it actually did.

Imperial expansion may fairly be said to have started in 295 BC, when the Romans put an end to competition in Italy by defeating a combined force of Samnites, Etruscans and Gauls at the Battle of Sentinum (near modern Ancona, on the Adriatic coast). The Greek historian Polybius claimed that Rome’s victories, first over the Carthaginians in the Second Punic War (218-202 BC) and then over the Greeks, subjugated “practically all the inhabited world” within a period of scarcely fifty years. It was said that, at the solemn conclusion of the census in 142 BC, one of the censors rejected the traditional prayer that the gods should improve and extend the prosperity of the Roman people; he observed that Rome had attained sufficient prosperity, and prayed instead that the gods should preserve it undamaged for ever.

The first emperor, Augustus, preferred to maintain the empire, rather than expand it; he compared the risks and expense of further expansion to fishing with a golden hook, the loss of which would be much greater than the value of any possible catch. Only two emperors significantly reversed this policy: Claudius, who annexed Britain in AD 43, and Trajan, with his substantial conquests in the east in the early 2nd century.

In his magnificent assertion of Rome’s mission as a civilizing force, the elder Pliny, writing in the 70s AD, emphasizes the importance of the Latin language:

This view, however, was never realistic. As the Romans themselves acknowledged, they owed a massive debt to Greek culture. Greek was not “a discordant and uncouth tongue”, and never yielded its supremacy in the eastern Mediterranean: this was to be a significant factor in the eventual transference of imperial power to Constantinople. The Romans were generally broad-minded about the use of languages other than Latin; the Sibylline Books, the closest Roman approximation to holy scriptures such as the Bible or the Koran, were in Greek. On the other hand, the emperor Claudius deprived a man of Roman citizenship for failing to understand a question he had put to him in Latin, saying that a person who did not know the Romans’ language was not fit to be a Roman (Cassius Dio Roman History 60.17).

Greek was an important rival even in Italy itself: as much as a third of the population of the city of Rome in the Augustan period may have been of Greek origin, and Greek was even more widespread in most regions south of Rome and in Sicily. The south of Italy was known as Magna Graecia, “Great Greece”. Even nowadays, Greek holiday companies advertize tours to regions of southern Italy where a form of Greek is spoken.

The continuing success of the Greek language in the Roman empire will seem the more remarkable when contrasted with the fate of other languages; it has been estimated that the expansion of Latin reduced the languages spoken in the empire from some sixty to a mere twelve. In the early 3rd century BC, a Roman ambassador to the south Italian Greek city of Tarentum was mocked and insulted for his barbarous attempt to speak Greek, but Publius Licinius Crassus Mucianus, consul in 131 BC, was able to speak five different Greek dialects. By the first century BC, the ruling classes were sending their sons to Athens and other centers of Greek education, and Latin and Greek were regarded as “the two languages”, to the exclusion of all others.

Contrary to traditional belief, the Greeks themselves were not reluctant to learn Latin. Cleopatra VII, however, is a surprising exception: she spoke at least seven languages, and was the first and only Ptolemaic ruler of Egypt to be able to address her subjects in their own language, but she was said not to have been able to speak Latin fluently, even though she lived in Rome for a period. Moreover, the great physician, Galen, though he spent so many years at the imperial court, felt no need to learn Latin, or any other language but Greek:

Galen includes the Romans among the barbarians, as Greeks almost always did. Even the most pro-Roman Greeks sound rather patronizing: Latin is not entirely barbaric nor is it entirely Greek. It is a mixture of both, but primarily it is like the Aeolic dialect of Greek. The main disadvantage with Latin is that, because of their contact with so many peoples, the Romans do not pronounce every sound correctly (Dionysius of Halicarnassus Roman Antiquities 1.90.1). Exiled by Augustus to Tomi, a distant outpost on the Black Sea, Ovid attempted to inspire pity for the wretchedness to which he has sunk by claiming to have learned Getic and Sarmatian.

Although Latin replaced the indigenous languages in many parts of the empire where there was no competition from Greek, this was not always the case. When the legions were withdrawn from Britain after an occupation of almost four centuries, Latin went with them, not to return until the Norman Conquest. (A small number of Latinate words, mostly nouns [e.g. cheese, sack, street, table], either lingered on or were reintroduced by the Germanic tribes who invaded England soon after the Romans’ departure.) Tacitus notes that the sons of British chieftains took to Latin and to Roman customs more enthusiastically than did the Gauls, but Romanizing the élite had little influence on the population in general.

The importance of the Norman Conquest in 1066 as a linguistic watershed should not be overestimated. The influence of Norman French did not start suddenly; Edward the Confessor (ruled 1043-1066) was half French, and his court was greatly influenced by continental practices. Moreover, the gratest period of acquisition of new English words from Latin did not come till much later, in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Latin was spread primarily by the army, but by the 2nd century AD very few native Italians were serving in the legions, and most soldiers originated in or near the province in which they were posted. The soldiers serving on Hadrian’s Wall in northern England in the early second century seem to have been recruited in northern Europe; they referred contemptuously to the local population as Brittunculi “wee Britons”, a marvellously dismissive term known only from Tabula Vindolandia 164, rather like the diminutive Graeculus, used by the nastily xenophobic Juvenal of the Greeks whom he thought were taking over Rome (Satires 3.78).

The Romans themselves did not distinguish a classical period for their language, but it is logical to focus on 80 BC, when Cicero’s earliest speech was written, and AD 120, approximately when Tacitus died. The relatively few substantial surviving texts which predate Cicero, such as the comedies of Plautus and Terence and Cato’s On Farming, provide very important insights into the earlier development of Latin, but they are set apart by their archaic language and, in the case of the comedies, by their affinities with spoken Latin.

Of course, even in the ‘classical’ period, people complained of linguistic decline. Cicero’s friend, Atticus, for example, looks back to the second century BC as a time of lingustic purity:

Being a formal language rather divorced from colloquial speech, classical Latin is not very rich in idiomatic expressions, in the sense of phrases which cannot be understood by reference solely to the grammatical and logical meaning of the words which constitute them. For much the same reason, it is remarkably free from variations and irregularities in word-formation, spelling, grammar and syntax, such as are typical of languages spoken over a wide area for a long time. Where it has seemed reasonable to do so, such variations and irregularities as do exist have been avoided or minimized throughout this course, as being an unhelpful distraction to the beginner.

Classical and spoken Latin (so-called Vulgar Latin) will have formed a pair, a diglossia, in much the same relation as that of standard (Hochdeutsch) to regional German, of standard to vernacular Arabic, of formal (katharevousa) to demotic Greek, of Sanskrit to the many spoken languages and dialects influenced by it. While classical Latin remained much the same, variant forms of Vulgar Latin were constantly evolving idiosyncrasies in pronunciation, spelling, vocabulary and grammatical structures at different periods in different parts of the empire, and these idiosyncrasies developed into the Romance languages.

There is no consensus on the size of Rome. Scholarly estimates of its population at the height of its prosperity in the early empire vary alarmingly from 500,000 to well over a million. Whatever the actual figure, it is improbable that any other city in the empire was even half so big, and no city, at least in Europe, could match it till the 18th century. Aelius Aristides, a Greek who visited Rome in the 2nd century AD, observed that, were all the buildings in Rome reduced to a single storey, the city would extend right across Italy to the Adriatic. A fire in Rome in AD 238 destroyed an area said to have been larger than the whole size of any other city, but it is hardly remembered.

In his great work, On the Education of the Orator, written at the end of the 1st century AD, Quintilian, who was himself from Spain, emphasizes the need to conform: “our vocabulary and pronunciation should suggest that we were brought up in this city, so that our speech may seem truly Roman, and not merely to have been granted citizenship”(8.1).

Suetonius uses the same metaphor in recording an incident in which two grammarians argued whether a word used by the emperor Tiberius was really Latin: one flatteringly maintained that it was, and that even were it not, it would be now, since Tiberius had used it; the other, a “very offensive guardian of the Latin language”, told Tiberius that he could give citizenship to people, but not to words (On Schoolteachers 22). Septimius Severus, emperor from AD 193 to 211, though he himself spoke Latin with a strong Punic accent, is said to have sent his sister back to Africa because her bad Latin was an embarrassment to him. The pressure to conform to Roman standards is reflected in the proverb “When in Rome, do as the Romans do”, versions of which are found in several European languages, and which can be traced to the advice given by St. Ambrose to St. Augustine in the 4th century AD. (“All roads lead to Rome” seems not, however, to be an ancient saying; in medieval times it referred to pilgrimages to St. Peter’s shrine.)

Linguistic prejudice thrived even within Italy. Asinius Pollio, consul in 40 BC and a friend of Catullus, Vergil and Horace, criticized Livy for his Patavinitas “Paduaness” (No one knows now, nor apparently knew in antiquity either, precisely what he meant by this.) Vergil, from Mantua, near Padua in the Po valley, was parodied for the rusticity of his diction in the opening lines of his 3rd Eclogue, Dic mihi, Damoeta, cuium pecus? an Meliboei?/non, verum Aegonis; nuper mihi tradidit Aegon, “Tell me, Damoetas, whose is the flock? Is it Meliboeus’?/ No, in fact it’s Aegon’s; Aegon handed it over to me recently”. These lines were reworked as Dic mihi, Damoeta: cuium pecus? anne Latinum?/non, verum Aegonis nostri; sic rure loquuntur, “Tell me, Damoetas: is cuium pecus Latin?/ No, in fact it’s our friend Aegon’s; people talk like that in the countryside”. (The parody is, of course, silly; Vergil has used the archaic pronominal adjective cuium, rather than the possessive pronoun cuius, to create rustic color.)

The Po valley is in the far north of Italy, a region not yet part of Italy when Vergil and Livy were born, but the Romans looked askance at the Latinity even of the inhabitants of Praeneste, a town in Latium, scarcely 20 miles from Rome. William Caxton, the first printer in England at the end of the 15th century, tells a story of London merchants asking a farmer’s wife a few miles downriver at the Thames estuary in Kent for eggs; she replied that she did not speak French, but understood them when they changed the form to the Germanic eyren.

Its intellectual achievements gave Athens a leading role in Greek cultural life, but it did not have the same linguistic pre-eminence among the Greek city-states that Rome had in its empire. Doric is regularly mocked in Athenian comedy, but the various Greek dialects were vigorously independent. In the 15th Idyll of Theocritus, who is from Syracuse, a colony of Doric-speaking Corinth, two formidable Syracusan ladies are asked by a fellow-spectator at a parade in Alexandria to stop killing him with their ceaseless broad vowels, but they reply crushingly that “We are of Corinthian descent, and Dorians, I presume, are permitted to speak Doric”.

Quintilian quotes Cicero many hundreds of times, Vergil more than 150 times, all other writers fewer than 200 times. In his own lifetime, Vergil’s stature as a great poet was recognized by all levels of society. “Vergil was extremely shy. He very rarely came to Rome and, if he was spotted in a public place, he would take refuge in the nearest building to escape from those who were following him and pointing him out” (Suetonius, Life of Vergil 11). Given that Vergil’s poetry is so inordinately complex that some modern scholars hesitate to attempt to do research on it, it is perhaps paradoxical that he should be the only Roman poet known to be mobbed by the masses in this way.

Cicero (i.e. Marcus Tullius Cicero) was so prolific and influential that Cicero and Tullius were thought in the Middle Ages to be two different people. (Conversely, the two Senecas were sometimes thought to be a single person.)

The Christian Church was often actively opposed to Cicero and Vergil, as being pagans, but their influence persisted. In the late Middle Ages, with the ousting of Latin by the vernacular languages as the vehicle for everyday communication, there was a shift towards helping students acquire a fluency in spoken Latin, especially for discussing religious and philosophical matters, so the emphasis on classical literary models suffered a decline, but that change affected vocabulary much more than syntax. (Important as were Cicero and Vergil for the canonical development of written Latin, however, they did not have the sweeping influence that Dante exerted on formal modern Italian, both written and spoken.)

St. Jerome, the author of the Vulgate translation of the Bible, dreamed of being flogged by angels for being a Ciceronian, not a Christian. (Letters 22; in the same letter, he admits to reading Plautus, in contrast to whom the biblical prophets seem rough and uncouth.) Elsewhere, citing Deuteronomy 21.10-13, Jerome compares the exploitation of pagan literature to taking a beautiful war-captive and turning her into a true Israelite after she has had her hair cut off and her finger-nails trimmed (Letters 70); St. Augustine similarly compares it to the Israelites’ plundering of the Egyptians’ wealth (On Doctrine 2.60). In the early third century, Tertullian described Vergil as anima naturaliter Christiana “a soul Christian by nature”; at the court of Charlemagne in the early 9th century, however, Alcuin forbade the reading of Vergil. Within fifty years after the introduction of printing in Europe, there were more than three hundred editions of Cicero and almost two hundred of Vergil.

The dominance of Cicero can be seen also in the controversy surrounding his influence. Erasmus stirred up a storm with the publication in 1528 of his satirical Dialogus Ciceronianus, which pillories an imaginary devotee of Ciceronian Latinity. Nosoponus (a Greek name which means both “laboring under a disease” and “made ill by labor”) is so devoted to Cicero that he has pictures of him throughout his house, sees only him in his dreams, knows his works almost by heart, reads books by no other author, and will only use word forms which occur in Cicero: for example, “amabo” invenio, “amabatis” non invenio; rursus “amaveras” invenio, “amaras” non invenio; contra “amastis” reperio, “amavisti” nequaquam “I find amabo, but I do not find amabatis; then again, I find amaveras, but I do not find amaras [the syncopated form of amaveras]; by contrast, I find amastis [the syncopated form of amavistis], but amavisti nowhere”. Nosoponus had once been red-cheeked, chubby, suave and full of wit, but more than seven years of this Ciceronian compulsion has left him larvae similior quam homini “more like a ghost than a human being”.

Marcus Valerius Probus, a distinguished critic of poetry in the mid-1st century AD, expresses his disgust at the negative effect on the appreciation of language exerted by pedantic scholars with their "very rancid rules and grammatical cesspits" (finitiones praerancidae et fetutinae grammaticae). Many Roman teachers, grammarians, and scholars seem to have been rather pompous and opinionated, but the analysis of language is difficult, and it is not surprising that they so often disagreed with each other.

It has been argued that the preservation/fossilization of classical Latin is attributable not only to the conservative prescriptivism of the educational system, but also to the particular influence of the Irish monasteries. The more prosperous, more civilized and more vulnerable parts of Europe were overrun by invaders from the east after the collapse of the Western Empire in the 5th century, and the Latin spoken and written at all levels of society was gradually transformed into the Romance languages. (It took a long time for this transformation to become obvious: French is not fully attested before the 9th century, Italian and Spanish not till the 10th.) Ireland, by contrast, being isolated and impoverished, had very little contact with the Romans, and Latin was learned as a foreign language, free from the influence of an evolving Romance vernacular.

That is not to say that Hiberno-Latin was pure classical Latin; it was deeply influenced by Irish. The role of Irish scholarship in preserving Latin should not be overstated: Alcuin, from the north of England, and most of the other (predominantly Germanic) scholars working and teaching at the court of Charlemagne also learned Latin as a foreign language.

Romanian developed in isolation from the other Romance languages, and has preserved many features of Latin particularly well. (Romania’s links with its Roman past can be seen also in the popularity of certain personal names, such as Traian [Trajan conquered the region], Ovidiu [Ovid was exiled there], Corin(n)a [the mistress celebrated in Ovid’s Amores].)