A natural history of Latin
king, Alexander, embarked on an extraordinary series of conquests, with the result that he became the ruler of all the countries that surrounded the eastern Mediterranean from Greece to Libya and of the territory that constitutes modern-day Iraq and Iran and right over to Pakistan and India. That empire soon fell apart, but it was the Greeks who ruled over the different states, which therefore kept Greek as the official language.
So to the east of the growing Roman empire there was a huge area which was in every respect more developed. The Greek-speaking world also extended to southern Italy and Sicily, where the Greeks had already had colonies since the eighth century BCE. When the Romans took over those areas they immediately came into contact with Greeks, Greek culture, and the Greek language. This was to lead to great changes for the Romans and their language. Before then, there had been a considerable distance between them and this people with their well-developed educational system and their great literature. The Romans may have had the alphabet for a long time, but they had almost entirely used it only to write down contracts and laws and for inscriptions on gravestones. Now, along with a lot else, they had the chance to learn that written language can also be used to create works of art and simply for the pure pleasure of reading.
The Greek influence developed gradually over a period of several hundred years. During that time the Romans also came to wield greater and greater political power in the eastern Mediterranean. By the birth of Christ they had subjugated both Greece itself and all the other areas which had had Greek as their official language ever since the time of Alexander. In consequence the Romans were deeply influenced by the Greek way of life, Greek science, Greek art, and not least Greek literature. In time, all Romans with any claim to education could read and speak Greek. The Greek and Roman civilizations can almost be said to have merged into one common culture. But it was a long process, and one that was never totally completed.
Literature was probably the field where Greek ideals meant most. The Romans in fact took over the whole idea of writing literature from the Greeks, and the first works were straightforward translations of
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Greek originals. But gradually the Romans evolved their own topics and themes, and soon they were competing with their models and indeed trying to surpass them. Latin literature slowly freed itself from Greek influence, and in due course it was Latin literature that served as the model for the whole of Europe for the next two thousand years.
Theatre for the people
The oldest literature in Latin which has been preserved are a number of plays by a man called Plautus, written about 200 BCE and staged in Rome. The models for these pieces were contemporary Greek plays that Plautus translated, at the same time adapting them to the Roman context. They were about the life of what we would call the affluent middle classes. The characters were merchants and landowners and their wives, children, and slaves, and the plots revolved around themes like young lovers who are finally united or lost sons or daughters who turn up unexpectedly. The setting was always a port, with ships arriving from many different places. Rome was developing into just such a cosmopolitan community, and the plays quickly caught on there.
This kind of play has subsequently turned out to be very longlived. Shakespeare took several themes and plots from Plautus—for example The Comedy of Errors is an adaptation of the plot of Menaechmi—and in our own times the same basic idea lies at the heart of long-running soap operas like Dallas. But Plautus was funnier. He does not worry a lot about plot, concentrating instead on quick-witted slaves and comical misunderstandings, and making fun of boastful generals and bossy fathers.
Slaves often play important roles in these plays and sometimes behaved in ways that they would have been forbidden to do in Rome. In one play, Plautus explains in the prologue that in the course of the play two slaves will marry, and he appreciates that the audience will
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A natural history of Latin
be scandalized. Yet this, he says, is what they are allowed to do in other places, in Graecia et Carthagini, et hic in nostra terra, in Apulia ‘in Greece and Carthage, and here in our own land, in Apulia’. In Apulia (modern Puglia), in the far south of Italy, which had only recently become part of the Roman empire, the customs were clearly those of Greece, whereas the Romans did not let slaves do anything which was legally binding, such as buying land, borrowing money, or getting married. Such acts might infringe the rights of the slave owner.
In this way Plautus’ plays taught the Romans something about what went on in the wider world. He did not like the old Roman virtues although—or perhaps exactly because—he was a near contemporary of Cato. He calls the old Romans pultíphagi ‘porridgeeaters’ because they had not yet learnt to bake bread. The baker’s oven was one of the many advances in civilization the Romans took over from the neighbours to the east and the south.
The plays are about family intrigues.A key word is of course amor ‘love’, and amare ‘to love’, but just as important is something else, the family’s fortune or money. The general word for ‘money’ is pecúnia (derived from pecus ‘livestock’, since the bartering of animals preceded the use of money), but the Romans also had coins of silver (argentum) and gold (aurum). Hence in French the word for money is argent, from the Latin word for silver while the word gold is the source of öre, the name of the smallest unit of currency in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway (worth approximately a tenth of a penny). The value of money has, as we all know too well, changed with time.
The fortune itself often went by the name res, a word we have already met in the combination res pública. The basic meaning of res is ‘thing’; one’s fortune is all the things one owns. In one of Plautus’ plays, a character is talking about how you have lots of friends when you are rich but none when you are poor, and he sums the situation up in the maxim res amicos facit ‘the fortune makes the friends’. The Romans were very fond of such short, pithy sayings. Sometimes they sounded rather moralizing, but just as often they were, like this
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one, resigned or even cynical. Plautus is a master at delivering this kind of moral punch in the middle of all the comic confusion and practical jokes.
The age of revolutions
For several hundred years Rome was in principle ruled in the same way—by the officials and senators who had been chosen by the assembly of the people—but gradually the empire had become very large. And yet the people’s assembly still consisted only of the free men from the city of Rome itself, and the senators came in fact mainly from a small number of very rich Roman families. All power and almost all the money was concentrated in a few people in a single city. This naturally led to widespread dissatisfaction amongst the poor in Rome and amongst everyone in the rest of the empire. In the long run such a state of affairs became untenable.
And yet it did not prove easy to change things. For a little over a century a serious power struggle went on in Rome. It started with a proposed land reform, which would have meant that the rich could no longer own huge tracts of land and work them with slaves. Instead they would have to give up land, which would then be divided into small lots and given to the poor and in particular to soldiers who had served their time. The man who advocated this reform was called Tiberius Gracchus. He was murdered in 133 BCE, and so was his brother Gaius Gracchus, who took up a similar idea ten years later. Their ideas, however, lived on and gave rise to a loose grouping of people, who called themselves populares, a word which derives from populus ‘people’ and means ‘the people’s party’. Their opponents were the rich senators and their followers, who styled themselves optimates ‘the best’. In a way there was now a radical party and a conservative party.
The struggle between these groups went back and forth for many decades while the Romans were simultaneously making war on
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other states and extending their empire further and further. The army was obviously an important player in this power game, and the crucial balance of power was increasingly in the hands of successful generals, who allied themselves with one party or the other. Some of these names have become very well known, such as Marius, who was close to the populares, and Sulla, who belonged to the optimates.The political strife was intense, and on several occasions developed into a real civil war. It is easy to believe that the whole empire was on the point of falling apart. One Roman historian says of Rome just at the end of this period: magnitúdine sua labórat ‘it is sinking under its own greatness’.
The best-known of the generals during the period of revolution is Gaius Julius Caesar. He belonged to an old Senate family himself and was very able both as a politician and a soldier. He was also a man imbued with an incredible amount of energy. In 58 BCE he became governor of the province of Gallia Cisalpina, which literally means ‘Gaul on this side of the Alps’, in other words northern Italy. From there, more or less on his own, he started a war against the Gauls who lived to the west and north; after eight years he had conquered all of what we now know as France, and in 55–54 BCE invaded Britain. Moreover, he had created a large army whose soldiers were loyal to him personally rather than to Rome. What is usually emphasized is how clever Caesar was. He was also completely ruthless. According to his own estimates, his armies killed 1.2 million Gauls and took 1 million prisoners, whom he sold as slaves and thereby enriched both himself and his soldiers. Today this kind of rampage would quite simply be labelled genocide.
After the Gallic war, Caesar found himself in conflict with the Senate. It was illegal for him to be in command of troops outside his own province, but he nonetheless marched south with his army so that when he came to the Rubicon, the river which constituted the border between Cisalpine Gaul and Italy, he was faced with a crucial decision. It is on this occasion that he uttered the famous words ‘The die is cast’. What he actually said, according to the source we have, was iacta álea est! It is worth noting the order of words here.
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Alea means ‘die’ (or ‘dice’ as we more usually say in modern English), and if we imitated the Latin word order in English it would be ‘Cast die is!’, which sounds very strange. It is not the most usual way to put it in Latin either, but it is much less uncommon than in English to rearrange the words like this within the sentence.
With this act Caesar started a major civil war, which in the end he won. As a result, for some years he was virtually the sole and autocratic ruler of Rome under the title dictator. In a short period, he managed to carry through a considerable number of reforms, of which several became a permanent part of the statute book. However, many people were opposed to his dictatorship, and on 15 March in the year 44 BCE he was assassinated, stabbed to death by a number of senatorial conspirators led by his friend Brutus. He is reputed to have uttered another famous remark as he died: Et tu, Brute ‘Even you, Brutus’. This remark too deserves comment in a number of respects. The word et, which we have already encountered, usually means ‘and’ but can also be used in the sense of ‘too’ or ‘even’. Brute is of course his addressee’s name, which has the form Brutus in the nominative. This form with the ending -e is called the vocative and is used when you speak to or call someone. In written texts we do not come across so many vocatives, but the Romans obviously used them constantly in their everyday lives when they said hello to each other or called their children.
After the death of Caesar, civil war broke out again and it was a full fifteen more years before the long and confused period of revolutions was over, and Rome finally acquired a functioning long-term leadership again. From the description of politics and war during this long period it sounds as if Rome was assailed by an endless sequence of misfortune and misery, but actually this was not the case. One reason for the trouble was that throughout this period the economy was in very good shape and many people wanted to have their share of the prosperity. Trade was very successful and a lot of people became incredibly rich. The level of education increased substantially across the board, and Roman society adopted many aspects of Greek culture as well as developing in its own way.
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A natural history of Latin
One thing which made particularly notable progress in this period was the written language. Even by this time only a very limited number of books in Latin existed. We do know that there were quite a few writers besides Cato and Plautus, whom we have already mentioned, and in particular we have many works by another writer of comedies, Terence. But, as far as we know, the works that have been lost are not terribly many and they were probably not of any great value. On the other hand, during the first century BCE there were a substantial number of extraordinarily good writers, and many of their works have been preserved. This is the beginning of the golden age of Roman literature, which continues on into the first century CE. The two centuries from about 100 BCE to 100 CE are often called Rome’s classical period.
Writing, reading, listening, and speaking
What do we mean when we say that the Romans had a literature? We are obviously not thinking of printed books which are sold in bookshops, distributed by publishers and written by writers who for the most part have writing as their profession. In Rome things were rather different. The Romans lived in a society where the written language played a much smaller role than it does for us. In the towns many people were able to read and write, but among the population as a whole the majority were probably illiterate. There was also considerably less to read than we have nowadays.These differences have a lot to do with differences in technology. The Romans obviously did not have computers, and neither did they have printing presses or photocopiers. Each text had to be written out by hand, and if a text was to be distributed in several copies, it meant that the original had to be copied again and again until the required number of copies had been made. That went for everything from posters to poetry. The only small texts which it was actually possible to mass produce were coin inscriptions, which could be stamped in great numbers. The inscriptions (and even
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pictures) on coins were therefore much used as propaganda by those in power.
Apart from coins there was no cheap way of producing texts. One way, albeit an expensive one, which was quite widely used was to carve inscriptions on stones or copper tablets. Inscriptions were very durable, and could be located in conspicuous places so that all the inhabitants of a town would be able to read them. This technique was suitable not only for tombstones and mausoleums but also for promulgating laws, regulations, and the like. We still have tens of thousands of inscriptions from all over the Roman empire.
If anyone had a more ephemeral message, they might well paint or scrawl it on a wall. Most of that has disappeared, of course, but the town of Pompeii, which was buried under ashes from an eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE, gives us some idea of what this kind of writing looked like. Many of the walls have all sorts of messages scribbled all over them: advertisements for fruit shops, calls to vote for a particular election candidate, declarations of love, and any number of insults and obscenities. Here and there, too, there are poems, often ones composed by well-known poets.
However, inscriptions and walls were not suitable for bookkeeping or private letters or fiction. For that kind of thing there were two main options. One was wax tablets, strictly speaking pieces of wood which had been coated with a layer of wax. It was then easy to write letters in the wax with a pointed stick called a stilus (from which our word style comes and which literally means ‘a way of writing’). Once the message was no longer needed, the wax could be smoothed out and a new text inscribed.This method was eminently suitable for notes, short letters, and the like which did not have to be saved. Indeed, people often bundled together several tablets to make a sort of notebook.
The material for larger texts which people wanted to save was papyrus. This looks and feels more or less like paper, but it is quite thick and stiff. It is made from the plant papyrus which, like reeds, grows along river banks and in marshes, primarily in the Nile delta. The Egyptians invented the technique of writing on papyrus, and it
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had spread throughout the Mediterranean area by about 2000 BCE. On papyrus you write with pen and ink so the writing is permanent. Unfortunately the material itself does not last forever. After a few hundred years papyrus rots away in a normal climate, which means that we do not have the original texts that were written in antiquity. What we have are copies, and how they came into existence I will explain later. However, under special circumstances papyrus can be preserved for a very long time, especially if it happens to end up in a completely dry place. The papyri which have survived from antiquity have usually been found in deserts, and in caves around the Dead Sea. The texts are mainly in Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic, but there are some in Latin too.
Papyrus could be used as loose leaves for letters and that sort of thing. Long texts were written on strips of papyrus eight inches to a foot wide and up to ten yards long fixed to a wooden stick at each end. Usually the papyrus strip was rolled around one of the sticks. As you read, you unrolled the text, which was written across the roll, from one stick and rolled it up onto the other one. The text was written on one side of the roll only, which ordinarily had space for the equivalent of thirty or forty modern book pages. The Romans used to call such a roll liber, which is usually translated as ‘book’. These books were much more difficult to handle than the kind we are used to and also much shorter. There might be enough space for a collection of poems or a play on a liber, but anyone who wrote something longer than that would have to break it down into short parts, each of which could fit on a roll. Ancient works were therefore not divided into chapters but into ‘books’, commonly of about twenty to forty pages in length.
The ancient book rolls were a good deal less practical than a modern book: you could not just turn to any individual page when you wanted to, and the process of unrolling and rolling them up again meant that they wore out quite fast. They were also expensive to produce, so probably only very few people had access to any books at all. Nonetheless, anyone with the money and the interest could build up a big collection, and in Rome public libraries were gradually
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established. Still, reading did not play anything like the same role for the Romans as it does for us today. For practical reasons, most people, even if they had learnt how to, probably read very little. And yet the Romans were intensely interested in their language and in the art of using it well. It was simply that their access to their language was in the traditional way, through their ears. Using your eyes to take in what someone had to say must have seemed to them a much more circuitous route to language than it does to us.
A written text was always seen as a way of recording the spoken word, and so whenever someone read something they always read it aloud. Of course people could always read to themselves, but rich people had educated slaves who read aloud to their master and often to his family and friends. What is more, writers often read aloud from their own works. This was an entirely normal way of introducing new works to the public, especially poetry, and such occasions gradually became important social events in Rome.
Writing good poetry and reciting it was actually a way of achieving success and fame in Rome. But there was another kind of verbal art which was much more important in Roman society, and that was oratory. This was not something people did for fun or to show off; it was rather an absolutely necessary skill for those who sought glory in public life, and the fact that this was so reflects important differences between their society and ours.
Speeches, politics, and trials
When modern politicians want to canvass public opinion, they write articles in the newspapers or get themselves interviewed on TV or radio. If there is a lot to be said, a report or a White Paper is published. They could also make a long speech in Parliament, but then there is a great danger that nobody will listen to it. In Rome, on the other hand, there were no newspapers in our sense of the word and no TV or radio or electronic media, and there was no system for circulating
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