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