Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin. Nicholas Ostler
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an attribute of Roman greatness, a language to equal any in the world. To think in such terms, the Romans would need to encounter Greek.
The discovery of Greek would give the Romans a new idea of what skill in a language could do, for its speakers’ attainments as well as for their reputation. They would start to care about powers of expression, both their own personal powers and whatever was connoted by the language itself. They would begin to use Latin as a symbol of Roman power, for what it said about them. Latin literature was consciously modelled on Greek, and techniques to use it effectively were laboriously abstracted from the best Greek practice. In time—and this took more than three centuries—the new canon of Latin classics became able to stand comparison with the best of Greek. And when that happened, Greek had lost its one unchallengeable advantage: from the self-imagined centre of the world in Italy, after all, there could be no serious comparison between Romans and Greeks as ideals. Thenceforth the temptation was to discard wholesale the old model, of learning the best Latin through Greek: the best Latin could now be learned through Latin itself.
The Latins, and specifically the Romans, had always had the Greeks on the edge of their world. Indeed, the earliest known inscription in Greek letters anywhere is from Gabii, just outside Rome, and dates from the early eighth century BC, a generation or so before the traditional date of Rome’s foundation in 753. The Greeks had the opportunity to pass on the technique of writing during this early period when the dominant regional power was still Etruscan; and in fact the story of Rome’s legendary founders, the twins Romulus and Remus, has them learning their letters at Gabii.1
Greek visitors soon after this were establishing themselves as regular colonists farther south: Cumae (Greek Kumē), near the Bay of Naples, was founded around 750 BC, and some fifteen years later a clutch of colonies was established in eastern Sicily (Naxos, Syracuse, Catania, Zankle-Messina), followed a little later by more along the southern Italian coasts (Paestum, Rhegium, Sybaris, Crotona, Tarentum). The settlements grew, were reinforced, and sprouted others, until by 450 BC there were sixteen Greek cities in Sicily and twenty-two in Italy.
The south, however, was not the part of Italy that Romans or Latins frequented in these early years, so the early impact of Greek culture came to them indirectly, through Etruscan middlemen. Specifically—and despite what has turned up in Gabii—this included the technique of writing.
When the Greeks first used their alphabet, the direction of writing was rather fluid: right-to-left, left-to-right, or even alternating (which they called boustrophēdon ‘as you turn an ox’). Etruscans—for reasons we can only speculate about—standardized on right-to-left; but the Latins, after a right-to-left period, finally settled on left-to-right, the same choice as the Greeks ultimately made. Etruscan speakers, who did not hear a difference between [g] and [k] (nor indeed [d] and [t], nor [b] and [p]) provided the reason why the letter Γ, Greek gamma, locally written (right-to-left) as ɔ, hence C, came to be pronounced unvoiced as [k], and to be distinguished from K and Q only by the following vowel. (Their rule was, in the early days: K before A, Q before V, otherwise C.)* The Etruscans also dropped (because it was useless to them) the letter O. Still, the Latins, unlike the Umbrians and Oscans, did manage to preserve or reinstate it, keeping it separate from V. They also retrieved the letters B and D (Greek β, Δ), which the Etruscans had discarded. These are all developments of the fourth century BC or before; but it was not until the first century BC that they reintroduced the letters Y and Z, specifically to represent sounds in words borrowed from Greek.
In the fifth and fourth centuries BC, as their power grew in Italy, Romans were occasionally nudged to look to a wider Greek world. The Sibylline books, key to propitiation of the gods in time of crisis, were written in Greek; they are supposed to have been acquired in the reign of Tarquinius Priscus, in the early sixth century. In 433, in time of plague, the books enjoined the building of a temple to the Greek god Apollo Medicus; but apparently there was a site already dedicated to him at Rome. In the next generation, in 398 and 394, the Romans visited Apollo’s oracle on the Greek mainland at Delphi, first to consult on their fortunes in the struggle with Veii, and then (after victory) to pay their vow to the god. (Understandably, during hostilities with Etruscan neighbours, the Romans’ usual Etruscan soothsayers were not available or reliable.)2 At some point in the Samnite Wars of the fourth century, Apollo also caused the erection in Rome of statues to two improbable Greek celebrities, Pythagoras of Crotona and Alcibiades of Athens.3 It was even said that Romans were among the embassies from all over the Mediterranean world who went to Babylon in 323 BC to congratulate Alexander.4 Anyway, after Rome had expelled from Italy the campaigning Greek dynast Pyrrhus in 273 BC, it is certain the equally Greek king Ptolemy II of Egypt offered a gratuitous treaty of friendship to this clearly important, rising city. By the early third century, Rome was impressing the Greek world in its own right.
Only when all the Greek cities had fallen under Roman political control did the idea form that something might be done with Latin at all comparable with what the Greeks did with their own language. Even in the late third century, Q. Fabius Pictor, the first known Roman to write Roman history, was writing only in Greek. In those days, the very idea of a written literature was inseparable from the Greek language.5 But in 240 BC the half-Greek freedman from Tarentum, L. Livius Andronicus, produced a comedy and a tragedy in Latin for performance at the Roman Games; in all, he is known to have written at least three comedies and ten tragedies, as well as a translation of the Odyssey. These new, literary forms of entertainment caught on at Rome, and the stories from Greek drama and epic dominated Latin literature for the next century. Among the early greats of Latin literature are Cn. Naevius (around 265–204), T. Maccius Plautus (around 250–184), Q. Ennius (239–169), M. Terentius Afer (around 190–159), M. Pacuvius (220–around 130) and L. Accius (170–around 86).* Among them, Ennius stands out for the variety of what he wrote, not only comedies, tragedies, and an epic of Roman history (Annales), but also epitaphs, theology, satire, and even the Hedyphagetica ‘sweet eatings’, a gourmet’s review, with such deathless lines as:
BRVNDISII SARGVS BONVS EST; HVNC, MAGNVS SI ERIT, SVME.
The sar fish of Brindisi is good; if it is a big one, take it.†6
Among these writers—all still taken seriously by the critics of the first centuries BC–AD, when the classical canon was being laid down—only the comedy writers Plautus and Terence have been preserved with complete long works to their names. Hence early Latin literature comes down to us with a strong emphasis on a fantasy of Greek life, its situations and characters based in Greek plays. In this world, a universe away from Roman ideals, young men are hopelessly in love, whores have hearts of gold, old men are miserly and dirty-minded, and slaves—realistically, their only resource being their trickery—are more resourceful than their masters. Old women are largely unknown. No one has much on their minds but sex, money, food, mischief, and occasionally concern for their children, especially if long lost: there is not a whiff of military service, farming, or civic piety. Writers thought it worth telling the audience of their Greek sourcing. In the prologue to one play, Terence wrote, “As for the rumours put about by some grouches that the author has spoiled a lot of Greek plays to make just a few Latin ones: he does not deny that’s what he’s done—no worries—and he says he’ll do it again.”7
In his prologues, Plautus sometimes gave the name of the Greek author of the original version, but added that it was he who VORTIT BARBARE ‘turned it into foreign’.8 Either his tongue was firmly in his cheek, or Roman audiences were amazingly ready in the early second century to take their