Latin Language and Literature. Latin is one of the members of the Aryan or Indo-European family of languages. In ancient Italy several languages were in use; of which the Etruscan, spoken in Etruria (q.v.), and the Iapygian, spoken in the south-east of the peninsula, were non-Aryan, and very distinct from one another and from all the other Italic tongues. The latter fall into two main groups: the Umbro-Sabellian, including Umbrian, Oscan or Samnite, and Sabine; and the Latin, spoken in Latium, and probably at one time in Campania and Lucania, afterwards partly Hellenised. This Italic group seems to have had closer affinities with the Celtic tongues than with Greek (see GREECE, Vol. V. p. 384). For the relation of the Italian tribes to one another, see ROME. Latin was the language of Rome. The growth of Rome led to the dominance of the Latin over the others; and under Greek influence Latin became a great literary tongue.
Latin has played a great part in the history of language, entering largely, as it did, after Rome's conquests into the dialects of Spain and Gaul, countries thoroughly permeated by Roman life and civilisation. The Romance languages are built up on Latin, are indeed Latin in a new dress. Italian may be described as modern Latin; French and Spanish, the latter especially, are based mainly on Latin; and English, of course, has borrowed largely from Latin. (See ROMANCE LANGUAGES, the relevant sections on the Italian, French, Spanish, and other Romance tongues, and ENGLISH LANGUAGE.)
Latin reflects admirably the leading characteristics of the Roman people. It is the language of a practical, hard-headed people, who felt themselves called to rule, to give laws, and to establish order. Virgil's famous verse, 'Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento' (Æneid, vi. 852), happily expressed the genius of Rome. Latin, it has been said, is the voice of Empire and of Law; it suits history, politics, jurisprudence, the business of the law-court, but it is not pliant or flexible enough to lend itself to the subtleties of philosophical speculation or to the refinements of the highest poetry. Horace, with all his skill, evidently found, in the composition of his odes, that Latin did not run very easily into a lyric mould.
Of literature, properly so called, there was nothing at Rome till the 3rd century B.C. It then took the form of annals; we can hardly dignify it with the name of 'history.' These annals were, in part at least, based on old family chronicles, which the conservative spirit of the Romans jealously guarded. Family life in the great houses of Rome was intensely strong; a funeral was always a very solemn and impressive ceremony, and was never complete without an oration commemorating the merits of the deceased man. These orations, or at any rate the heads of them, were committed to writing and treasured in the family archives, and in them the annalists of the 3d century B.C. found their materials. The early history of Rome would, in fact, be made up of the memorials of a few noble families. The systematic treatment of it was undertaken towards the close of the 3d century by Fabius Pictor and Cincius Alimentus, who, however, wrote in Greek, feeling no doubt that as yet Latin was hardly equal to the demands of literary composition. The famous Marcus Porcius Cato, the Censor, as he was styled, who had fought in the great war with Hannibal, and who lived on into the middle of the 2d century B.C., seems to have been the father of Latin prose. His history of his own time, and his Origines, in which he discussed the origin of Rome and of some other cities of Italy, were the first important works written in the Latin language. Only a few meagre fragments have come down to us.
Contemporary with these men were two poets, Nævius and Ennius—metrical annalists we may call them—who gave the Romans histories in verse of the first and second Punic wars. Nævius wrote in the old native Italian metre—Saturnian, as it was termed; Ennius (half a Greek by birth) introduced the Greek hexameter. With these two poets, both men of considerable genius, Latin literature made a decided advance. A few poor fragments of their works are still extant, sufficient to show that they accepted the current legends and traditions about the origin of Rome.
Side by side with these essays in epic poetry there grew up a dramatic literature, to which Ennius and Nævius also contributed. This arose in the 3d century B.C. out of rude old Italian stage representations connected with popular festivals, and from a growing acquaintance with Greek culture, which by this time was widely diffused throughout Italy. The rough Latin humour, not much better than a sort of horseplay, could not evolve anything that deserved to be called the drama till it had come into contact with Greek art. The first play is said to have been exhibited on a Roman stage under the superintendence of Livius Andronicus, a Greek from Tarentum, whom we may regard as the father of Roman dramatic poetry. From that time the theatre became a recognised institution among the Romans. The plays of Andronicus were adaptations, almost translations, from the Greek; for the most part they seem to have been clumsy, inartistic performances. Still, they were popular and very widely circulated, and gave the Romans a decided taste for theatrical entertainments. Ennius and Nævius improved on them; nor did they confine themselves to a servile imitation of the Greeks, but aspired to build up a truly national drama, taking their subjects from old Roman legends or even from the history of their time. Tragedy as well as comedy, though never equally popular, now took its place at Rome. Through Ennius more especially the rather questionable moral influence of the clever and subtle Euripides, with its cosmopolitan and denationalising tendencies, filtered down into the Roman mind, with the result of somewhat weakening the fibre of Roman character. Of Roman tragedy, however, we know but little; sensational horrors seem to have been peculiarly attractive, fostering perhaps the vile taste which subsequently found its gratification in the gladiatorial combats. Of comedy the chief and to us the best-known representative is Plautus, deservedly a most popular poet with the Roman people, as his twenty extant plays testify, full as they are of original humour, of bright, witty dialogue, and funny, laughable incidents. Plautus, it seems, was exhibiting his plays in the latter part of the 3d and the early years of the 2d century B.C. Terence followed at no distant interval; six of his comedies which have come down to us show that a rather more refined and cultivated taste was coming into fashion. There is something of a modern tone and flavour about Terence. He is a pleasing, graceful writer, without, however, much originality; he in fact did little more than reproduce Greek comedies, especially those of Menander.
There was another branch of literature alongside of the drama, distinctively Roman, so that Quintilian (x. 1, 93) says of it 'it is all our own.' This was satire—'satira,' as the Romans called it—by which they seem to have meant both a sort of rude dramatic medley or miscellany, and a string of reflection, in a poetical form, on mankind and the world in general. Indeed all poetry that could not be classed as epic or dramatic came under the head of satire. There was nothing necessarily satirical in our sense about it. Ennius was a writer of 'satires' in the old meaning of the phrase; but it was Lucilius, in the latter half of the 2d century B.C., who introduced what we understand by 'satires,' and prepared the way for Horace and Juvenal. It was from the poets of the old Greek comedy, from Aristophanes, Eupolis, and Cratinus, that he borrowed the idea of political satire, in which, it seems, he allowed himself the utmost freedom. The public men of the day were the subjects of his attacks, and he lashed them, it is said, with merciless severity. His versification was rough, but he was undoubtedly a man of real wit and genius. We have unfortunately only a few scraps of his poetry.
Prose literature was but poorly represented in the 2d century B.C. by a few inferior historians, or rather annalists, of whom Cicero and Tacitus express a very mean opinion. They seem to have been utterly uncritical chroniclers, ridiculously pretentious, and always straining after rhetorical effect. In the early part of the 1st century was a historian of some merit, Sisenna, who described the social war and the civil wars of Marius and Sulla. Cicero speaks of him with considerable praise (Brutus, 64), and Sallust (Jugurtha, 95) says that in his treatment of the period of Sulla he was a careful and painstaking writer.
In the 1st century B.C. Roman literature made a great advance. A man of prodigious learning and industry, Marcus Terentius Varro, poured forth a multitude of works on every variety of subject, discussing agriculture in a treatise which has come down to us, and philology, grammar, and antiquities in elaborate dissertations which are unhappily lost. Varro, too, was a prolific writer of 'satires,' which in his case seem to have taken the form of moral and philosophical essays, more or less resembling the papers in the Rambler and Spectator, or Cicero's short dialogues on 'friendship' and 'old age.' Varro's heart was with the old life of Rome, and he liked to ridicule the new lights and Greek philosophy, then becoming fashionable. Indeed he was a witty and lively satirist, as we may see from our extant fragments, and he must certainly have been one of the very first of Roman men of letters, a profound student and a clever essayist.
Cicero was ten years junior to Varro. It was the aim of his life to create a perfect prose style, and in this he has generally been regarded as successful. As head of the Roman bar he was accepted as an arbiter of finished composition and of correct taste. His speeches were published after careful revision as political pamphlets. In his numerous philosophical works he dexterously adapted Latin to Greek thought and speculation, achieving with considerable success a difficult work which had hitherto been but very imperfectly accomplished. The general verdict on him is, and as far as we can see will always be, that he was a consummate artist in style, if not a deep or fruitful thinker.
In poetry, in the first half of the 1st century, there was a new departure, a school which formed itself on the model of the Greek fashionable poets. At the head of this movement stands Catullus, the first to naturalise Greek lyric metres at Rome, a man of genuine poetic feeling and with true pathos. There is a more hearty ring about his poetry than in the more elaborate odes of Horace. Catullus had a touch of genius as well as scholarship and culture. His poems—the coarse ones too, it must be feared—accurately reflect the tone of gay Roman fashionable society. A widely different poet was the earnest and philosophical Lucretius, who in his De Rerum Natura puts the doctrines of Epicureanism, acceptable no doubt to many of his contemporaries, into the dress of hexameter verse, in which he considerably improved on Ennius. There is a stateliness if not much grace about the hexameters of Lucretius. The subject-matter of his work is decidedly unpoetic, but the genius of a poet makes itself felt in several passages. In the midst of a dreary wilderness are many beautiful spots and resting-places.
The later part of the 1st century was the great age of Roman poetry, the age of Virgil, Horace, and Ovid, familiar names throughout the whole civilised world. The fact that we happily possess their works entire is a proof of the high estimation in which they were held. Much of what is best in modern poetry is distinctly traceable to their inspiration. It has been the fashion to speak of this period as the Augustan age.
Virgil (70-19 B.C.), said to have been a great admirer of Lucretius, to whom he was evidently indebted, has the special merit of having brought Latin hexameter verse to exquisite perfection. There are no hexameters in the whole range of Latin poetry to compare with those of Virgil. His peculiar charm lies in a nice subtlety and refinement of expression, which makes the work of a translator almost hopeless. Every scholar recognises the great difficulty of Virgil. His Pastorals (Bucolics) and his four Georgics, poems on the various phases of agricultural life, and written, it would seem, to stimulate a healthy taste for rural pleasures, were direct imitations of Greek originals. Along with minute descriptions of farming operations, which he forces into verse with extraordinary ingenuity, are beautiful and highly poetic episodes—as, for instance, when he sings the praises of the farmer's life by way of conclusion to his second Georgic, or tells the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice in the fourth and last of these poems. In his Aeneid he imitates Homer; here he writes with the definite purpose of stirring Roman patriotism, tracing back Rome's origin to Troy and to the gods, while he seeks to please Augustus by suggesting a comparison between him and the Trojan hero Aeneas.
Virgil stood high in the emperor's favour, and rose from the rank of rather a small country squire to a foremost place in the great fashionable world of Rome.
Horace (65-8 B.C.) was a man of very humble origin, the son of a father who had been a slave, but he received a liberal education, which his natural genius enabled him to turn to good account. His Odes are to a great extent imitations of Greek lyric poetry, his metres are borrowed from the Greek; still there is much that is truly original in them, much that is distinctly Roman, and there is an indescribable charm about the exquisite finish of the language. Their peculiar grace and beauty, which to all Latin scholars are most delightful, seem to evaporate even in the most skilful translations. In his satires and epistles, the most popular of his writings, because so full of homely common sense and a pleasant, genial humour, there is a charming lightness of touch, an easy natural style and manner which perhaps have never been equalled. His laugh has no bitterness; of satire in one sense there is next to nothing in these amusing essays. 'The terseness of his language,' it has been well said, 'is that of a proverb, neat because homely.' Like Virgil, whose friend he was, Horace enjoyed the favour of Augustus.
Ovid (43 B.C.-18 A.D.) is the most voluminous of the Roman poets, and his facility in poetic composition seems to have been absolutely boundless. His verse is a marvel of cleverness and ingenuity. His great poem, the Metamorphoses, is a collection of mythological stories, turning on the change of men and women into animals, trees, plants, or flowers. His Fasti or Roman Calendar, a sort of poetical almanac, abounding in well-told stories of old Rome and her heroes, is on the whole pleasant reading. His love poetry, on which he specially prided himself and no doubt took great delight, are very bright and playful, in style and expression almost perfect, but they have not much depth of sentiment, and here and there they are so sensuous as to be positively offensive. One can well understand how it was said of him that he corrupted the morals of the youth. He has been fairly well described as the poet of fashionable society. From some cause unknown to us he was forced to end his days in a sort of Siberian exile on the shores of the Black Sea.
Two poets, writers of elegiac verse, contemporaries of Ovid, deserve a passing mention—Propertius and Tibullus: the first learned, pedantic, and obscure, yet often rising with true poetic fervour into a manly dignity and nobleness of thought; the latter sweet and tender, with a decided tinge of melancholy, the melancholy of a Roman who resigned himself to what he regarded as the fallen fortunes of his country, and who deliberately kept aloof from the imperial court. Tibullus was the friend of Horace and Ovid.
Prose-literature in the 1st century B.C. was represented by Cæsar, Sallust, and Livy. The great Cæsar wrote the history of his campaigns in a style admirably suited to the subject-matter, and recognised by all scholars as a specimen of the best and purest Latinity. Sallust (86-34 B.C.), whom we know through his narratives of the Catiline conspiracy and the war with Jugurtha, modelled himself on Thucydides, and like him aimed at a philosophical treatment of history. As yet Rome had had mere annalists; in Sallust she found a man who really deserved to be called a 'historian.' Of his Histories, a work which is said to have treated of the period immediately following Sulla's death, we have but fragments.
Livy (59 B.C.-19 A.D.) was simply a man of letters, taking no part in politics. His great work, the history of Rome from the beginning down to
9 B.C., the year of the last campaign of Drusus in Germany, and of his death, written during the reign of Augustus, with whom he was on friendly terms, though himself a republican, was comprised in 142 books, of which we possess 35, the last of these bringing us down to 167 B.C., the year of the annexation of Macedonia as a province to Rome. Livy's treatment of his subject evidently became fuller and more detailed as he approached his own time. Hence the loss of his later books is irreparable. As it is, we have not adequate material for a thorough history of Rome in the 1st century B.C. Livy's style is all that can be desired, bright and lively, as picturesque as that of our own Macaulay, but he is not a learned or critical writer; he wrote for the public generally, not for scholars or antiquaries; his aim in fact was to popularise the history of Rome and to magnify her empire, not to sift the legends which had gathered round her origin and early growth.
The last years of Augustus, and indeed most of the 1st century A.D., were, as regards literature, almost a barren desert: no poetry of any account, no forensic oratory, which under the empire had little scope, and no history. With Domitian, the last of the Cæsars (81-96 A.D.), came a revival of letters, the silver age of Latinity, as it has been called, marked by the names of Juvenal, Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, and Quintilian. Under Nero indeed there had been a few minor lights in literature: the satirist Persius, spirited and dramatic, but obscure and affected, reminding one here and there of Browning; Lucan, author of a poem once read in schools and universities, describing under the title Pharsalia the civil war of Cæsar and Pompey; and Seneca, whose numerous essays on morals and philosophy, embodying as they do what was best in Stoicism, have much of a modern, even of a Christian, tone. To these we may add the witty epigrammatist Martial and the learned and laborious Pliny the Elder (23-79 A.D.), in whose Natural History we have a comprehensive work on geography, botany, zoology, medicine, with attempted explanations of every kind of natural phenomena. A compilation rather than an original work, it is very useful as giving us an insight into the physical philosophy of the ancient world.
Juvenal's satires—satires in our sense of the word, bitter and savage—were published in the early part of the 2d century A.D., under Trajan and Hadrian. The man's honest indignation against the vulgar rich and the cringing tribe of parasites and fortune-hunters, with which Rome swarmed, has our hearty sympathy, and it is expressed in pure, vigorous Latin. Johnson has imitated two of his satires in his London and his Vanity of Human Wishes.
The most conspicuous literary figure of the age was the great historian Tacitus, who was not, like Livy, a man of letters and nothing more, but who was practically acquainted with public life, and had distinguished himself at the Roman bar. An undertone of satire runs through his writings, which at many points remind us of Carlyle. He sums up a character with a few trenchant epithets, and throws out reflections which have passed into proverbs. There is perhaps no ancient author who has supplied more material for the modern essayist and historian. His concise and nervous style at once arrests the reader, and again and again demands from him a very considerable mental tension. His life of his father-in-law, Agricola, governor of Britain under Domitian, a masterpiece of biography, was written in 98 A.D.; so too was his Germany, a description of the native population of that country, with a sketch of its geography—a subject which must have been interesting to Romans who knew how little impression their arms had made on those wild regions. In his Annals and Histories, much of which has been unfortunately lost, he describes the period from the accession of Tiberius to that of Nerva (14-98 A.D.). All that remains to us is his history of the reigns of Tiberius, Claudius, Nero in part, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and of the rise of Vespasian. His Histories, as he termed the memoirs of his own time, were evidently written with great fullness of detail, and the loss of the later books is much to be deplored. In these we should have had a minute and trustworthy narrative of the three last Cæsars, and of the better time which began with the brief reign of Nerva. Suetonius, a writer of the same period, the author of biographies of the twelve Cæsars, which have come down to us, supplies but very poorly our deficiency.
With Tacitus we may couple his intimate friend, Pliny the Younger, as he is known in contradistinction to his uncle, whom we have already mentioned. The name is generally familiar as that of the man who as the governor of a Roman province in Asia Minor came into collision with the early Christians, and gave his opinion of them in a letter to the Emperor Trajan. Pliny's letters, dealing as they do with every variety of topic—politics, literature, art, society, with glimpses into his home-life and descriptions of his villas—and written, too, in a pleasing style of good Latinity, rank among the best literary specimens of the period. They are of special interest as illustrating aspects of Roman life which would otherwise be unknown to us.
A work also of great merit has happily come down to us from the pen of an eminent professor of rhetoric, Quintilian, who is said to have numbered Pliny among his pupils. It is a treatise on rhetoric and kindred subjects, written in the reign of Domitian, discussing with deep learning and sound critical taste the whole subject of education, and concluding with a short sketch of Greek and Roman literature in its special connection with oratorical training. Scholars have always admired its diction.
Latin literature is from this time almost a blank, represented only by a few feeble writers whose names are not worth noting in a brief summary. The age of what we call classical Latin was finally over. Petty rhetoricians and epitomisers alone survived. Coming down to the close of the 4th century A.D., the period of the Emperor Theodosius (the first of that name), we light on a writer who has been described as 'the last subject of Rome who composed a profane history in the Latin language,' Ammianus Marcellinus, the historian of the period from 96 to 378 A.D. Rather more than the half of his work is extant; in this we have a full account of the reigns of Julian, Jovian, Valentinian I. and II., and Valens—in all twenty-five years of the history of which he had a personal knowledge. He is a good, useful writer, but hardly a man of letters. The last of the classic poets, Claudianus, flourished about the same time.
In the last years of the 5th and the first half of the 6th century A.D. lived the learned Boethius, whose work on the consolation to be derived from philosophy (De Consolatione) was translated by King Alfred. There is something of a mystery about Boethius: whether he was a Christian or half-heathen philosopher is uncertain; he seems to have hovered on the borderland between the rising and the decadent belief.
Latin was now the language of the Christian church of the West, and the Vulgate the current version of the Scriptures; in Latin, more or less cultured, were written the works of the Latin Fathers, of the theologians and thinkers of the middle ages; sonorous Latin hymnology with rhyming metres grew up; and Latin remains still the language of the services in the Catholic Church.
Learning and literature almost died out for centuries, the period we call the dark ages. Latin in its fusion in the Celtic and Teutonic dialects was quite losing its distinctive character, although it is true that Rome imposed not only her yoke but her language on Spain and Gaul; still, as regards language, her victory was won with heavy loss. The grammar and syntax indeed were to a great extent retained; but, with the introduction of the definite and indefinite articles, of the auxiliary verb, the addition of a number of words from the barbarians, and the utter disregard of quantity in pronunciation, Latin underwent a complete change, and was at last transmuted into its derivatives, the Romance languages. In its corrupted form, however, it was for a long period a living language, but it ceased to be so in the 10th century. With the revival of letters in the 15th and 16th centuries Latin recovered itself; Ciceronianism became the fashion, Erasmus being one of its most eminent representatives. Latin for the time established itself as the recognised medium of communication in the learned world; and almost all books of any importance, theological and scientific treatises, were written in that language. The controversial works of the English and Swiss reformers were written in Latin; so were the works of Bacon, and Newton's Principia—to quote but a few examples. In the universities professors lectured in Latin; candidates for degrees disputed in Latin theses; the grace before and after meals was in Latin—a usage still surviving at Oxford and Cambridge and in the Inns of Court. Notes to editions of the classics, both critical and explanatory, were always in Latin; and Dr Arnold thought it necessary to apologise in the preface to his Thucydides in 1830 for deviating from the universal practice. It was indeed a true instinct which assigned the Latin language a principal place in our schools and universities. Not only is it the key to a most important literature, but it throws infinite light on the history of language in general, as well as on the particular languages of modern Europe. Hence it is an admirable instrument of mental discipline.
See the articles in this work on the several Latin authors referred to; those on ALPHABET, ARYAN RACE, DRAMA, CHURCH HISTORY, FATHERS OF THE CHURCH, GRAFFITI, HYMNS, INSCRIPTIONS, PHILOLOGY, RENAISSANCE, ROME, ROMANCE LANGUAGES; the grammars of Roby, Kennedy, Madvig, Kühner, Stolz and Schmalz; the German works on the history of the language and literature by Bähr (new ed. 1873), Bernhardy (1872), Munk (new ed. 1881), Tenffel (trans. 1873; German 5th ed. 1890); Simcox's History of Latin Literature from Ennius to Boethius (1883); Cruttwell's History of Roman Literature (1879); Browne's History of Roman Classical Literature (new ed. 1884); Sellar's Roman Poets of the Republic (new ed. 1881) and of the Augustan Age (new ed. 1884); Wilkins's Primer; Tyrrell's Latin Poetry (1895); and Mackail's Latin Literature. Mayor's Bibliographic Clue to Latin Literature (1875) is based on Hubner. See also W. M. Lindsay, The Latin Language, a Historical Account of its Sounds, Stems, and Flexions.