Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin. Nicholas Ostler
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Buttox, or anonymous macaronic punsters, providing Anglo-Latin nonsense:
boyibus kissibus priti girlorum
girlibus likibus wanti somorum.
And then there are the associations with anatomy and sex, where Latin seems a whole language provided for purposes of euphemism: fellatio, coitus interruptus, eiaculatio praecox. When Queen Elizabeth II rather poignantly called 1992 her annus horribilis, the Sun newspaper immediately had the vulgar wit to translate it as ‘one’s bum year’.
Latin is often happy to be ridiculous. Plautus’ twenty-one comedies from the third century BC are the first substantial set of texts that have survived in it; and faced with current events, as Juvenal pointed out in the second century AD, DIFFICILE EST SATVRAM NON SCRIBERE ‘it is difficult not to write a satire’.
But it was not always frivolous: for more than two thousand years written Latin was the preeminent mode of serious expression in Europe. That is a long time, and time for a lot of business. Even so, one of its first recorded poets, Naevius, was coyly doubtful of its future:
ITAQVE POSTQVAM EST ORCHI TRADITVS THESAVRO, OBLITI SVNT ROMAI LOQVIER LINGVA LATINA.
And so after he passed to the vault of Orchus [the Underworld], the Romans forgot how to speak the Latin language. (Naevius, 204 BC)
Naevius’ jocular prediction was not borne out. Yet at the other end of its history, there was just as little comprehension of what the future held in store for Latin. Eighteen centuries later and shortly before it was at long last to go out of active use, a disgraced former chancellor of England, expressing relief at the final publication of his work in Latin, had roundly stated his faith in its durability among languages: “For these modern languages will at one time or another play the bank-rowtes [bankrupts] with books; and since I have lost much time with this age, I would be glad as God shall give me leave to recover it with posterity” (Francis Bacon, AD 1623). Those who lived with and in Latin clearly could not see the full trajectory of its history, the strengths and ultimately the weaknesses revealed during these two millennia. But that trajectory is what this book sets out to reveal.
Ad Infinitum tells the story of how Latin spread, first as the speech of an unremittingly aggressive and expansive city-state, Rome, then as the lingua franca of the barracks, farming estates, and urban trading centres that its empire established across the lands of the whole western Mediterranean; and of how much later it would spread as the medium of a Christian church that went even farther, seeking converts out to the Atlantic coast of Ireland, the fjords of Norway, and the plains of eastern Poland. Latin was a language spread by force of arms, colonial settlement, trading networks, cultural diffusion, military recruitment, and religious conversion. The character of the civilization expressed in this language changed over time, but there were elements—associated with Latin—that did not change.
This common thread of Latin, once the sound of Europe’s distinctive view of the world, is now a universal academic code, but also a thing of nostalgia. Latin, having been the no-nonsense, hectoring voice of Roman power, and then the soaring mood-music of the Catholic Church, has ended up being used above all to provide the scientific formulas that characterize every life-form on earth. But it is also a language of the heart: the foundation for romance—in all its senses—and a common cultural basis for Europe, the ultimate classic of education.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, Latin came to be a schoolmaster’s language, passed on exclusively in the classroom by the inculcation—literally ‘trampling in’—of rules of grammar. (Not that this limited its prospects, or its utility in the wider world of power and propaganda: its influence was undiminished even a millennium later.) The popularity of favourite textbooks could be amazingly long-lasting: the record must be held by one of the first, Martianus Capella’s Marriage of Philology and Mercury, still being given to pupils twelve hundred years after it was first written in the fifth century AD, but honourable mention is due also to Alexander’s Doctrinale (279 editions all over Europe from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries), and William Lily’s Short Introduction of Grammar, which was still regularly being used by English speakers everywhere two centuries after its first edition in 1511. By these standards, Benjamin H. Kennedy’s Latin Primer (first issued in 1866 but still in use today) is a mere latecomer. I was brought up on Kennedy, as was my father before me, and very likely my grandfather too (though I never asked him).
We were latecomers to Latin, then; but also at a turning point. The British Empire, which my father and grandfather had fought to defend, in India and in Africa, was dissolved into the Commonwealth while I was growing up in the 1960s. Right on cue, elementary Latin had ceased to be a requirement for entry to any British university by the end of the same decade. British imperialists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had modelled themselves on the Romans, just as Spanish imperialists had in the sixteenth, and indeed American constitutionalists in the eighteenth. Europeans have in fact been enthralled by the memory of Latin ever since it ceased to be our working language. But in the 1960s the world was turning its back on it.
This Latin winter was sharp. Yet new and rather different institutions were already establishing themselves as the last of the European empires were passing to the vault of Orcus. The new world status of the United States of America after the Second World War was widely characterized with the Latin phrase Pax Americana; here was a new imperial order, but one declaredly without colonies. Could the Roman model apply to it—whether of Empire or Church? And a Europe newly determined to abolish war among its nations has transformed itself into a European Union, choosing for itself a new Latin motto, In varietate concordia. In the twenty-first century, breakdowns in good governance in countries all over the world have tempted foreign-policy makers to reexamine the virtues of imperial-style intervention. The Roman model remains implicit, and that is one reason why Latin’s importance remains controversial to this day. It is time to examine the character of an empire, of a church, of a civilization, whose life was in Latin.
The language itself remained curiously unchanged throughout its long active career. Naevius’ and Bacon’s works are written in a common code, whose stable rules were transmitted intact through eighty generations of grammar school classes: contrast English, which has only existed at all for sixty generations, and which in its modern form has only lasted for twenty. What has changed has been in the handwriting, epigraphy and typefaces that have represented the eternal words on the page. The SQVARE CAPITALS* of the Roman Republic and Empire,
INMORTALES MORTALES SI FORET FAS FLERE, FLERENT DIVAE CAMENAE NAEVIVM POETAM.
which are represented straightforwardly in the first nine chapters, yielded to a variety of rounder and more cursive scripts beginning in the fourth century. First there is rustic:
In the fifth century this was largely replaced by uncial, in the main a Christian innovation:
Then, in the late eighth century, Carolingian style took over, and this lasted for more than four centuries:
But in the thirteenth century this in turn was succeeded by the new Gothic, or Blackletter, style:
Gothic was still in place when the Germans of the fifteenth century invented the first typefaces for printing, and it became the model for them (e.g., for Gutenberg’s Bible). Italians, however, soon attempted to reinstate the old styles that they found in old (uncial and Carolingian) manuscripts and attributed to their beloved Ancients, inventing for the purpose the italic and Roman styles, which have remained characteristic of western European (and hence American) printing to this day.
An grammaticorum, quorum propositum videtur