Latin Quarter

“ The ear of the South has always felt the charm of rhythmical or melodious speech, with a keenness of pleasure generally denied to our colder temperament. And the Augustan age had, in a single generation, performed miracles, under Greek inspiration, in moulding the Latin tongue to be the apt vehicle of every mood of poetic feeling. That inspired band of writers, whose call it was to glorify the dawn of a world-wide empire and the ancient achievements of the Latin race,966 rose to the full height of their vocation. ”

“ As for popular Latin, it has never ceased to exist. It is the language of France, Spain, Italy, Roumania, and all the Romance countries to-day. Its history has been unbroken from the founding of Rome to the present time. Various scholars have tried to determine the date before which we shall call the popular speech vulgar Latin, and after which it may better be styled French or Spanish or Italian, as the case may be. Some would fix the dividing line in the early part of the eighth century A.D., when phonetic changes common to all parts of the Roman world would cease to occur. ”

“ After the division of the Roman empire, the western kingdom adopted for itself the name of the Latin kingdom; and its subdivisions were called the Latin kingdoms. The church connected with those kingdoms was also emphatically called the Latin church. Says Dr. More: “They Latinize everything. Mass, prayers, hymns, litanies, canons, decretals, bulls, are conceived in Latin. The Papal councils speak in Latin. Women pray in Latin. The Scriptures are read in no other language under the Papacy than Latin. In short, all things are Latin.” ”

“ II. A review of the revival of Augustan diction in a long list of humanists proves nothing specific concerning imitation, much concerning pride in humanistic Latin. Scholars, however, are not well paid. Doctors and lawyers write bad Latin. Teachers are incompetent. The vernacular has come even into the schools; and even Cicero is translated. Let us all combine to save Latin style. ”

“ The young Germans and Englishmen who study Greek and Latin, who translate Cicero or construe Horace, assimilate the Latin spirit, are brought ideally and morally nearer to us, are prepared without knowing it to receive our intellectual and social influence in other fields, are made in greater or less degree to resemble us. ”

“ So long as the Empire held together the unifying influence of official Latin, and the constant intercommunication between the provinces, preserved the essential unity of Latin throughout the world, but when the bonds were broken, the naturally divergent tendencies which had existed from the beginning, but had been held in check, made themselves felt, and the speech of the several sections of the Old World developed into the languages which we find in them to-day. ”

“ That Latin was the common speech of the western world is attested not only by the fact that the languages of France, Spain, Roumania, and the other Romance countries descend from it, but it is also clearly shown by the thousands of Latin inscriptions composed by freeman and freedman, by carpenter, baker, and soldier, which we find all over the Roman world. ”

“ For English pupils learning Latin the reconciliation ought to present little difficulty; but nearly every great nation of Europe has its points of contact with Rome, and therefore its opportunities of constructing Latin Readers which are national in more senses than one. On the modern side they may be patriotic in tone, and inspired by that love of nature which appeals so directly to the youthful mind ”

“ How the armies of Rome mastered the nations of the world is known to every reader of history, but the story of the conquest by Latin of the languages of the world is vague in the minds of most of us. If we should ask ourselves how it came about, we should probably think of the world-wide supremacy of Latin as a natural result of the world-wide supremacy of the Roman legions or of Roman law. But in making this assumption we should be shutting our eyes to the history of our own times. A conquered people does not necessarily accept, perhaps it has not commonly accepted, the tongue of its master. ”

“ Perfection of style attained in one of the two great branches of a national literature cannot fail to react on the other. It was the peculiarity of Latin literature that this perfection or high accomplishment was reached in prose sooner than in poetry. The contemporaries of Cicero and Caesar, whose genius impelled them to awaken into new life the long silent Muses of Italy, were conscious that the great effort demanded of them was to raise Latin verse to a similar perfection of form, diction, and musical cadence. ”

“ Any one who knows how singularly difficult it is to find suitable matter and suitable forms for the higher intellectual culture of youth, and how much more difficult it is to set aside the matter and forms once found, will understand how it was that the Romans knew no mode of supplying the desideratum of a more advanced Latin instruction except that of simply transferring the solution of this problem, which instruction in the Greek language and literature furnished, to instruction in Latin. ”

“ Yet the Latin language is still the necessary foundation of one half of human knowledge, and the forms created by Roman genius underlie the whole of our civilisation. So long as mankind look before and after, the name of Rome will be the greatest of those upon which their backward gaze can be turned. ”

“ Thus the term Latin came to mean not so much a man of a certain stock as a man with a certain legal position, and so it continued for many centuries, while the new power rising to prominence in the world came to be known not as Latin, but as Roman. ”

“ It was with my knowledge as with my passions: day after day I worked feverishly: whenever I met a passage such as the building of the bridge in Caesar, I refused to burden my memory with the dozens of new words because I thought, and still think, Latin comparatively unimportant: the nearest to a great man the Latins ever produced being Tacitus or Lucretius. ”

“ No one who has ever stood on the Janiculum, and looked down on the river and the city, and across the Latin plain to the Alban mountain and the long line of hills—the last spurs of the Apennines—enclosing the plain to the north, can fail to realise that Rome was originally an outpost of the Latins, her kinsmen and confederates, against the powerful and uncanny Etruscan race who dwelt in the undulating hill country to the north. ”

“ It was Romanised very effectively all over the south, and with the Latin language the people used Latin letters like their fellows in Gaul and Spain. Like other Roman citizens, the Britons became Christians, underwent subjugation by pagan barbarians, and lost their lives or their Latinity, those who escaped massacre being absorbed by the invaders. So far as writing is concerned, they have left nothing beyond some lapidar inscriptions; but these and whatever else they produced in the form of MSS. during the first four centuries were no doubt as wholly Roman as anything of the kind in Italy. ”

“ The clever boys are, as a rule, well provided for; but, even for them, the methods of this book have been found to be the shortest road to accuracy and style in translation. Moreover by this means they have gained a firsthand acquaintance with Latin literature and the sources of Roman history.
It is impossible here to enter into ‘the question of the close and striking correspondence between the history, the literature, and the language of Rome. It was not until the history of Rome threw its mantle over her poetry that the dignity of the poet was recognised and acknowledged. ”

“ If ever there be a true Latin renascence, which is scarcely to be hoped for, it will come, not from a writer who is saturated with French, Russian, German, and English influences, but one who has the Latin genius, the Latin temper, unalloyed. ”

“ Theodoric the Goth, Charlemagne, and Alfred the Great, the chief patrons of the literature of their age, sought to carry on, side by side, and to improve, these two literatures, the Latin and the vernacular. They aimed to refine and educate man by the Latin, and to increase the national spirit by preserving their national poetry. While these old heroic poems of the different races are full of interest and charm for us, we must not forget that the Latin kept alive and preserved from extinction the whole of classical and Christian antiquity. ”

“ Much evidence in the language, the religion, the institutions and, the civilization of early Rome points to the same conclusion. The speech of the Romans is from the first Latin, [8] though showing many traces of contact with the neighbouring dialects of the Sabines and Volscians and also of Etruscans; the oldest gods of Rome—Saturn, Jupiter, Juno, Diana—are all Latin; “rex,” “praetor,”, “dictator,” “curia,” are Latin titles and institutions. ”

“ Latin is no longer necessary as a medium for the interchange of thought, and the increasing number of arts and sciences restricts the prominence of any one study. On the other hand it is no less true that almost every considerable writer and speaker of the century had received that more recent form of Latin education which consists in an accurate and tasteful study of the words, styles and thoughts of the best, or most classic, of the Roman writers—Catullus, Lucretius, Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Livy, Ovid—rather than Lucan or Statius. ”

“ The Latinizing of northern Italy, Spain, and Gaul was part of the expansion of Roman dominion. Throughout these lands, alien peoples submitted to the Roman order and acquired new traits from the training of its discipline. Voluntarily or under compulsion they exchanged their institutions and customs for those of Roman Italy, and their native tongues for Latin. The education and culture of the upper classes became identical with that gained in the schools about the Forum, and Roman literature was the literature which they studied and produced. ”

“ For a further 1000 years and more Latin remained the common speech of educated men throughout Europe: the 'Universal Language.' Greek had been smothered by the Turk. Through all that time—through the most of what we call Modern History, Latin reigned everywhere. ”

“ Latin was the common language of scholars and remained so even down to the days of Shakespeare. Even yet it is more nearly than any other tongue the universal language of the learned. The life of to-day is much nearer the life of ancient Rome than the lapse of centuries would lead one to suppose. You and I are Romans still in many ways, and if Cæsar and Cicero should appear among us, we should not find them, except for dress and language, much unlike men of to-day. ”

“ Everything that reminded them of the slow decay of Rome, sometimes even their religion itself, sounded ill in their fastidious ears. Nothing was so much at heart with the Italian scholars, as to write a Latin style, not only free from barbarism, but conformable to the standard of what is sometimes called the Augustan age, that is of the period from Cicero to Augustus. ”

“ The Roman Plautus and Terence are practically plagiaries of the Greek Menander and his like. Latin literature is, in a very large degree, Greek literature borrowed, adapted to inferior taste, played upon like studies with variations.
When Rome became the mistress of the world, it aspired to greater glory than mere conquest can ever impart, to the glory of culture and the arts. ”

“ In another connection, a year or two ago, I had occasion to speak of the literary merit of some of these metrical epitaphs,52 of their interest for us as specimens of the literary compositions of the common people, and of their value in indicating the æsthetic taste of the average Roman. It may not be without interest here to speak of the literary form of some of them a little more at length than was possible in that connection. Latin has always been, and continues to be among modern peoples, a favored language for epitaphs and dedications. ”

“ Although it is very probable that the historic population of Rome was the result of a fusion of several racial elements—Latin, Sabine, Etruscan, and even pre-Italian, nevertheless the Romans were essentially a Latin people. ”

“ She was borne on the wings of the Roman eagles. She followed in the footsteps of the victorious legions, and as Rome and time went on with devouring steps, she caught the conqueror and the conquered both in her mystic net, and reigned among the Latin-Celtic races. Rome was the world’s lawgiver. The Latin genius is essentially legislative and authoritative. Subtlety, accuracy, and lucidity were the necessary human elements for the outward expression of the divine truth which the church carried in her bosom ”

“ However, with three genders, five declensions for nouns, a fixed method of comparison for adjectives and adverbs, an elaborate system of pronouns, with active and deponent, regular and irregular verbs, four conjugations, and a complex synthetical method of forming the moods and tenses, the pitfalls for the unwary Roman were without number, as the present-day student of Latin can testify to his sorrow. That the man in the street, who had no newspaper to standardize his Latin, and little chance to learn it in school, did not make more mistakes is surprising. ”

“ That Latin passion for intellectual sincerity and articulation—that quality which makes the Latin the most sympathetic and at the same time the most satisfactory person in the world, [Pg 256] because you can always know that his outward expression bears some relation to his inward feeling—had resulted, as in France, in the duplication of parties, which were constantly holding congresses and issuing programs, and then splitting up into dissentient groups. ”

“ The contemplation of the city, however, produces the effect of a vast and solid reading of history. Each of the great representations of the city, always and differently mistress of the world, seems to have chosen its respective quarter—the Rome of the kings and emperors is spread out on the Palatine, Esquiline, and Quirinal; republican Rome occupies the Capitol and Aventine; whilst Christian Rome, isolated and solitary, reigns on the Cœlian and Vatican eminences. ”