LATIN LANGUAGE

The language of the Romans was the Latin,, language originally spoken in the plain lying south of the Tiber. Like the other ancient Italian dialects (Oscan, Umbrian, ) it is a branch of the Indo-European or Aryan family of languages, and is more closely allied to the Greek than to any other member of the family.

At first spoken in only a small part of Italy, it spread with the spread of Roman power, till at the advent of Christ it was used throughout the whole empire. The Latin language is one of the highly inflected languages, in this resembling Greek or Sanskrit; but as compared with the former it is a far inferior vehicle of expression, being less flexible, less adapted for forming compound words, and altogether less artistic in character.

The earliest stage of Latin is known almost wholly from inscriptions. During the period of its literary development many changes took place in the vocabulary, inflection, word formation, and syntax. In particular, considerable additions to the vocabulary were made from the Greek. At the same time the language gained in refinement and regularity, while it preserved all it. peculiar force and majesty. The most perfect stage of Latin is that represented by Cicero, Horace, and Virgil in the 1st century B.C.; and the classical period of the Latin language ends in the 2nd century A.D.

The decline may be said to date from the time of Hadrian (117 - 138). In the 3rd century the deterioration of the language proceeded at a very rapid rate. In the 4th and 5th centuries the popular speech, no longer restrained by the influence of a more cultivated language, began to experience that series of transmutations and changes which formed the transition to the Romance languages. Latin, however, still remained, through the influence of the church and the law, the literary language till far on in the middle ages; but it was a Latin largely intermixed with Celtic, Teutonic, and other elements, and is now usually called late or low Latin. The study of Latin is of great assistance in acquiring an accurate knowledge of English, as a great part of the English vocabulary is of Latin origin, being either taken from the French or from classical Latin directly.

LITERATURE

The history of Roman literature naturally divides itself into three periods of Growth, Prime, and Decline. The first period extends from about 250 B.C. to about 80 B.C. The second period ranges from 80 B.C., to the death of Augustus in 14 A.D., and includes the greater part of the Roman literature usually studied in schools and colleges. The period of decline then follows Poetry in this language, as in all others, preceded prose. The oldest forms of Latin poetry were the Fescennine verses, which were poems of a jocular and satirical nature sung at marriages said country festivals; satires or improvised dialogues of miscellaneous contents and various form; and the Atellanæ fabulæ, a species of grotesque comedy supposed to resemble the modern Punchinello. The first known writer was Livius Andronicus a Greek freedman taken prisoner at Tarentum (272 B.C.) and afterwards emancipated, who about 240 B.C. exhibited at Rome a drama translated from the Greek, and subsequently brought out a translation of the Odyssey. He was followed by Nævius, who wrote a historical poem on the first Punic war, besides dramas ; by the two tragic writers Pacuvius and Accius or Attius; and by Ennius, author of eighteen books of metrical annals of Rome and of numerous tragedies, and regarded by the Romans themselves as the founder of Roman poetry. Mere fragments of these early works alone remain.

The founder of Roman comedy was Plautus (254 - 184 B.C.), who was surpassed for force of comic humour by none of his successors. Next followed Cæcilius; and then Terence (195 - 159 B.C.), a successful imitator and often mere translator of the Greek dramatist Menander and others, and, although an African by birth, remarkable for the purity and excellence of his Latinity. These three comic writers took the New Comedy of the Greeks as their model (Comoedia palliata ); and we still possess a number of plays by Plautus and Terence. On the other hand, Afranius, with a few others, introduced Roman manners upon the stage (Comoedia togata ) ; Lucilius (148 - 103 B.C.) was the originator of the Roman poetical satire, the only kind of literary composition among the Roman which was of native origin. Lucretius (B.C. 98 - 55), a writer full of strength and originality, has left us a philosophical poem inculcating the system of Epicurus, in six books entitled De Rerum Natura. Catullus (94 - 54 B.C.) was distinguished in lyric poetry, in elegy, and in epigrams. With the age of Augustus a new spirit appeared in Roman literature. The first of the Augustan poets is Virgil (B.C. 70 - 19), the greatest of the epic poets of Rome, author of eclogues or pastoral poems; the Georgics, a didactic poem on agriculture, the most finished of his works; besides the long epic poem entitled the Æneid. Contemporary with him was Horace (B.C. 65 - 8), the favourite of the lyric muse, and also eminent in satire. In the Augustan age Propertius and Tibullus are the principal elegiac poets. Along with these flourished Ovid (B.C 43 - 18 A. D.), a prolific and sometimes exquisite, but too often slovenly poet. During the age of Augustus the writing of tragedies appears to have been a fashionable amusement, but the Romans attained no eminence in this branch.

After the death of Augustus the department of poetry in which greatest excellence was reached was satire, and the most distinguished satirists were Persius, and after him Juvenal (flourished about 100 A.D.), both of whom expressed, with unrestrained severity, their indignation at the corruption of the age. In Lucan (A.D. 38 - 65), who wrote the Pharsalia, a historical epic on the civil war between Cæsar and Pompey; and Statius (flourished about 85 A.D.), who wrote the Thebaid, we find a poetic coldness which vainly endeavours, to kindle itself by the fire of rhetoric. In the epigrams, of Martial about 43 - 104 A.D ) the whole social life of the time is mirrored with attractive clearness. Valerius Flaccus (about 70 - 80 A.D.), who described the Argonautic expedition in verse, endeavoured to shine by his learning rather than by his originality and freshness of colouring. Silius Italicus (25 - 100 AD.), who selected the second Punic war as the subject of a heroic poem, is merely a historian employing verse instead of prose. To this age belong the ten tragedies under the name of L. Annæus Seneca, the rhetorician. Here also we may mention the Satyricon of Petronius, a contemporary of Nero; for although this work, a kind of comic romance m which the author depicts with wit and vivacity the corruption and bad taste of the age, is written mainly in prose, it is interspersed with numerous pieces of poetry, and cannot be classed with any other prose work belonging to Roman literature. After a long period of poetic lifelessness Claudian (flourished about 400) wrote poems inspired with no little of the spirit and grace of the earlier literature.

In the Roman prose literature, eloquence, history, philosophy, and jurisprudence are the principal departments. Prose composition really began with Cato the Censor (234 B.C.), whose work on agriculture, De Re Rustica, is still extant. Among the great Roman prose writers the first place belongs to Cicero (106 - 43 B.C.), whose orations, philosophies and other treatises, and letters, are very numerous. Varro's Antiquities; Caesar's Commentaries; the lives of Cornelius Nepos, probably an abridgment of a larger work; and the works of Sallust are among the more important historical productions down to the Augustan period. Livy the historian I (B.C. 59 - 11 A.D.), author of a voluminous history of Rome, is by far the chief representative of Augustan prose. Under Tiberius we have the inferior historian Velleius Paterculus, the anecdotist Valerius Maximus, and Cornelius Celsus, who has left a valuable treatise on medicine. The most important figure of the period of Nero was Seneca the philosopher, put to death by that tyrant in 65 A.D. His chief works are twelve books of philosophical dialogues,' two books on clemency addressed to Nero, seven on investigations of nature, and twenty-two books of moral letters. Quintus Curtius compiled a history of Alexander the Great, and a contemporary writer, Columella (about 50 A.D.), a treatise on agriculture.

The leading prose writers of the next period were Pliny the elder, whose Natural History is still extant (23 - 79 A.D.),. lengthy history and minor treatises being lost; Quintilian (35 - 118 A.D.), who wrote the Institutes of Oratory; and Sextus Julius Frontinus, who has left us treatises on aqueducts and on military devices. In the reigns of Nerva, Trajan, and Hadrian we have two great prose writers - Cornelius Tacitus (about 54 - 119 A.D.) and Pliny the younger (61 - 115 AD.). The former produced a Dialogue on Orators, a life of his father - in - law Agricola, a work on Germany, and two works on Roman history - the Histories and the Annals. The latter, giving the history of the period between the death of Augustus and the death of Nero, is one of the greatest works of the kind in any literature, but unfortunately only part of it is in existence. Pliny the younger has left ten books of Epistles, and a panegyric in honour of Trajan. C. Suetonius, secretary to Trajan, has left lives of the twelve Caesars; Cornelius Fronto, the tutor to Marcus Aurelius, a collection of letters, discovered only early in the 19th century; and with the Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius (2nd century) - a literary, grammatical, and antiquarian miscellany - the classic Roman prose writers come to a close.