Classical Latin

• 1. Introduction

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  Classical Latin is the form of literary Latin that writers of the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire chose to hold up as their standard. It developed around 75 BC from Old Latin, and by the 3rd century AD it had given way to what scholars would later call Late Latin. What makes this story unusual is that the Romans who spoke it were already arguing about what "good Latin" actually meant, even as they were speaking it.

  Cicero and his contemporaries had a name for the elevated register they prized: Latinitas. They set it against Vulgar Latin, the vernacular of everyday life. Latinitas went by several other names too. Sermo familiaris meant "speech of the good families." Sermo urbanus meant "speech of the city." Sermo nobilis, less often used, meant "noble speech." The adverb latine meant speaking in good Latin, and its comparative latinius meant speaking in even better Latin.

  That distinction between high and low Latin, between the polished and the vernacular, would echo across fifteen centuries of European scholarship. The questions it raised are still argued today. What separates a standard from an artificial language? Who gets to decide when a living tongue has gone wrong? And how did a form of speech last heard in ancient Rome become the model for education across the entire Western world?

• 2. Naming the Standard

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  Marcus Cornelius Fronto, an African-Roman lawyer and language teacher writing in the second century AD, was the first known author to apply the phrase scriptores classici to the writers he admired. The word classicus originally referred to those in the prima classis, the first class of Roman society as ranked by property under the Roman constitution. Classicus carried the nuances of the certified and the authentic, what the Romans called testis classicus, meaning a reliable witness.

  The term itself was a translation project. The Romans devised classicus to render the Greek word egkrithentes, meaning "the approved ones," the authors whose form of Greek was considered a model. Roman grammarians like Quintilian drew up lists called indices or ordines, modeled after the Greek pinakes, which were the original canons of approved authors. Each Latin author in these Roman lists was considered an equivalent to a Greek one. Ennius was the Latin Homer. The Aeneid was the Latin Iliad.

  For centuries, the precise meaning of the word classical stayed fuzzy in European usage. Thomas Sebillet's Art Poetique in 1548 used the phrase "les bons et classiques poetes francois" to describe Jean de Meun and Alain Chartier, the first known modern application of the word to authors. According to Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, the term classical entered modern English in 1599. In Governor William Bradford's Dialogue in 1648, he used it to describe synods of a separatist church as "classical meetings." In 1768, David Ruhnken's Critical History of the Greek Orators applied the word "canon" to the Greek lists of orators, borrowing deliberately from the Biblical canon of authentic scripture, and with what Ruhnken himself described as secular catechism in mind.

• 3. Golden and Silver Ages

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  Wilhelm Sigismund Teuffel's Geschichte der Romischen Literatur, published in 1870, gave Classical Latin the systematic periodization that scholars still use today, with modifications. Teuffel organized the authors of Rome into Golden and Silver Ages, grouping them by political events rather than by literary style. Wilhem Wagner published the work in German and produced an English translation in 1873.

  Teuffel defined the Golden Age as the period from 83 BC to AD 14, spanning from the dictatorship of Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix to the death of the emperor Augustus, which he dated in the old Roman calendar as 671-767 AUC. Within that span, he identified two generations. The Ciceronian Age ran from 83 to 43 BC, ending just after Cicero's death, and was the period when Latin prose reached its peak. The Augustan Age ran from 43 BC to AD 14 and was defined by the rise of poetry. Teuffel further divided the Ciceronian Age at Cicero's consulship in 63 BC.

  Charles Thomas Cruttwell produced a comparable work in English in 1877, acknowledging directly in his preface that Teuffel's work was essential to his own. Cruttwell's contribution was a detailed analysis of style where Teuffel had focused on history. He also extended the Silver Age through the death of Marcus Aurelius in 180 AD, a full century beyond what Teuffel had proposed, in order to include writers like Marcus Aurelius himself whose philosophic prose sat awkwardly in any theory of Latin decline. The Silver Age runs from the death of Augustus in AD 14 to the death of Trajan in AD 117 in Teuffel's own scheme, and is divided into three dynastic sub-periods: the Julio-Claudian period from AD 14 to 68, the Flavian dynasty from AD 69 to 96, and the period of Nerva and Trajan from AD 96 to 117.

• 4. The Ciceronian World

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  Marcus Tullius Cicero, born in 106 BC and killed in 43 BC, is the figure whose prose most thoroughly defines what scholars mean by golden Latin. His works are used in Latin curricula beyond the elementary level, and his dates are often used as the anchors for the entire Republican period of classical writing.

  The canon of Republican authors whose works survive in whole or in part spans a striking range of professions and forms. Marcus Terentius Varro, born in 116 BC, was a grammarian of towering influence. Gaius Julius Caesar, born in 100 BC, was a general, statesman, and historian. Titus Lucretius Carus, known as Lucretius, born around 94 BC, wrote philosophy in verse. Gaius Valerius Catullus, born in 84 BC, wrote lyric poetry of an entirely different register. Titus Pomponius Atticus, a publisher and Cicero's longtime correspondent, was born sometime between 112 and 109 BC.

  Many Republican figures of high reputation left no surviving texts at all. The reputations of Aquilius Gallus, Quintus Hortensius Hortalus, and Lucius Licinius Lucullus rest on their association with the Golden Age rather than on anything a modern reader can verify. The assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC effectively divided the Golden Age in two. The wars that followed cost Rome a generation of Republican literary figures. The surviving writers of the Augustan period, most notably the poets Virgil, Horace, and Ovid, came of age under the old Republican forms but built their careers under the watchful eye of a new emperor. Augustus tolerated some Republican sympathizers, but he exiled Ovid. Imperial tolerance of literary independence did not survive the Julio-Claudian dynasty.

• 5. When Freedom Vanished

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  Tiberius brought what Teuffel called a "sudden collapse of letters." Freedom of speech, Teuffel wrote, had effectively vanished under Tiberius, and what replaced it was a literature defined by anxiety and performance. His analysis of Silver Latin described a style driven by "restless versatility," one in which "simple or natural composition was considered insipid" and in which language was "dressed up with abundant tinsel of epigrams, rhetorical figures and poetical terms."

  Teuffel used the phrase "utter unreality" to describe the artistic strategies Silver Age writers developed under emperors who proscribed the content of new works, exiled or executed authors, and often fancied themselves literary men, typically badly. Cruttwell extended this critique in his own work, calling Silver Latin a "rank, weed-grown garden" and tracing what he saw as a "declamatory tone" that used "frigid and almost hysterical exaggeration" to compensate for the absence of genuine political life.

  Both scholars ran into trouble with their own argument. Cruttwell, even as he decried decline, noted that Pliny's Natural History showed how much remained to be accomplished in fields of great interest. Pliny's best work came under emperors who were as tolerant as Augustus. Marcus Aurelius wrote philosophic prose that sat entirely outside any theory of degeneration. Publius Cornelius Tacitus, whom Teuffel called "the last classic of Roman literature," was in Teuffel's own dating a Silver Age author. The Silver Age also produced the only two complete Latin novels that survive from antiquity: Apuleius's The Golden Ass and Petronius's Satyricon.

• 6. How Romans Studied Their Own Tongue

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  Varro's De lingua latina, written between 47 and 45 BC, Quintilian's Institutio oratoria, and Donatus's Ars grammatica are the three works that preserve the most systematic ancient Roman analysis of Latin itself. Taken together, they document a linguistic self-awareness that was unusually rigorous for the ancient world.

  Quintilian's Institutio oratoria records a phonological detail that would later matter to medieval scribes: the letter c was not yet palatalized, meaning it was always pronounced as the hard sound of k. Quintilian noted that the archaic Greek letter aeolic digamma, representing the w sound, was absent from the Latin alphabet for words like servus or vulgus, so that the letters v and u were not distinguished from each other, both being pronounced as the sound that w represents. He also documented specific phonological changes already underway in the classical period itself, including the shift from mehe to me and from duellum to bellum.

  Donatus defined grammatical errors under two categories. Barbarism was a defect in individual words, whether by addition, subtraction, immutation, or transmutation of letters, syllables, tenses, tones, or aspirations. Solecism was a fault of agreement between words, though Quintilian argued this could also appear within a single word, citing venite addressed to one person as an example of number disagreement. Donatus additionally catalogued other language faults: tautology, or faulty repetition; eclipse, or the defect of necessary words; cacosyntheton, or faulty word combination; and amphibolia, which meant ambiguity in speech.

  Varro's approach to etymology set him against the more cautious Quintilian. Varro preferred tracing Latin words back to other Latin words, so that humilis, meaning humble, derived from humus, meaning soil, on the shared connotation of lowness. Quintilian found many of Varro's derivations counterintuitive, pointing out that it was absurd to relate lucus, a dark grove, with luceo, meaning to shine, or to derive ludus, a school, from ludo, meaning to play, on the grounds that a school was as far as possible from play.

• 7. Borrowed Words and Living Language

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  Greek was so embedded in educated Roman life that children were expected to speak it long before learning Latin. Quintilian himself advocated that children learn Greek first, partly because he believed Latin would be acquired naturally anyway, and partly because he considered Latin to be derived from Greek. He was cautious about the reverse influence, however, warning against allowing Greek accent and idioms to contaminate Latin's purity.

  The debate over Greek loanwords was a live one. Educated Romans used the Greek word kyrttauchena while mocking the Latin equivalent incurvicervicum. The Greek language shaped Latin orthography through the import of letters like k and x, and through digraphs like ei as a non-standard spelling of the long i vowel. The sheer breadth of the Roman Empire meant that Latin absorbed loanwords from every region it touched. Gallic words like rheda, meaning chariot, and petorritum, meaning a four-wheeled carriage, were used by both Cicero and Horace. Mappa, meaning napkin, came from Carthage. Gurdus, a slang term for foolish, came from Spain. Casnar, meaning parasite, came from Gaul. Mastruca, a shaggy garment, came from Sardinia.

  Roman linguists combined borrowed elements freely. The Latin word epirhedium was formed from the Greek prefix epi- and the Gallic word rheda. Varro himself, writing a book about the Latin language, used non-standard spellings throughout. He noted that the language was already changing within the classical period: the word hostis had shifted in meaning from "foreigner" to "enemy." His observation in De lingua latina captures the dilemma every language authority faces: not every word that has ever been applied still exists, because time erases some, and not every word in use was applied without inaccuracy of some kind. The tension between those who wanted to preserve the standard and those who followed popular usage was ancient. The prescriptivists were called analogists; the descriptivists were called anomalists. Quintilian navigated between them by advocating the agreement of the educated as the only reliable guide.