Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin. Nicholas Ostler

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.

       CHAPTER 6

      Felix coniunctio—A Partnership of Paragons

      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