which Cicero considered the best oration of the time. No small part of the urbanitas consisted in a correct urban pronunciation; and the standard of this was found in the language of the women of the upper classes, such as Laelia and Cornelia.
In the earliest continuous prose work which remains to us the four books De Rhetorica ad Herennium, we find the language already almost indistinguishable from that of Cicero. There has been much discussion as to the authorship of this work, now commonly, without very convincing reasons, ascribed to Q. Cornificius; but, among the numerous arguments which prove that it cannot have been the work of Cicero, none has been adduced of any importance drawn from the character of the language. It is worth while noticing that not only is the style in itself perfectly finished, but the treatment of the subject of style, elocutio (iv. 12. 17), shows the pains which had already been given to the question. The writer lays down three chief requisites—(1) elegantia, (2) compositio and (3) dignitas. Under the first come Latinitas, a due avoidance of solecisms and barbarisms, and explanatio, clearness, the employment of familiar and appropriate expressions. The second demands a proper arrangement; hiatus, alliteration, rhyme, the repetition or displacement of words, and too long sentences are all to be eschewed. Dignity depends upon the selection of language and of sentiments.
52. Characteristics of Latin Prose.—Hence we see that by the time of Cicero Latin prose was fully developed. We may, therefore, pause here to notice the characteristic qualities of the language at its most perfect stage. The Latin critics were themselves fully conscious of the broad distinction in character between their own language and the Greek. Seneca dwells upon the stately and dignified movement of the Latin period, and uses for Cicero the happy epithet of gradarius. He allows to the Greeks gratia, but claims potentia for his own countrymen. Quintilian (xii. 10. 27 seq.) concedes to Greek more euphony and variety both of vocalization and of accent; he admits that Latin words are harsher in sound, and often less happily adapted to the expression of varying shades of meaning. But he too claims “power” as the distinguishing mark of his own language. Feeble thought may be carried off by the exquisite harmony and subtleness of Greek diction; his countrymen must aim at fulness and weight of ideas if they are not to be beaten off the field. The Greek authors are like lightly moving skiffs; the Romans spread wider sails and are wafted by stronger breezes; hence the deeper waters suit them. It is not that the Latin language fails to respond to the calls made upon it. Lucretius and Cicero concur, it is true, in complaints of the poverty of their native language; but this was only because they had had no predecessors in the task of adapting it to philosophic utterance; and the long life of Latin technical terms like qualitas, species, genus, ratio, shows how well the need was met when it arose. H. A. J. Munro has said admirably of this very period:—
“The living Latin for all the higher forms of composition, both prose and verse, was a far nobler language than the living Greek. During the long period of Grecian pre-eminence and literary glory, from Homer to Demosthenes, all the manifold forms of poetry and prose which were invented one after the other were brought to such exquisite perfection that their beauty of form and grace of language were never afterwards rivalled by Latin or any other people. But hardly had Demosthenes and Aristotle ceased to live when that Attic which had been gradually formed into such a noble instrument of thought in the hands of Aristophanes, Euripides, Plato and the orators, and had superseded for general use all the other dialects, became at the same time the language of the civilized world and was stricken with a mortal decay.... Epicurus, who was born in the same year as Menander, writes a harsh jargon that does not deserve to be called a style; and others of whose writings anything is left entire or in fragments, historians and philosophers alike, Polybius, Chrysippus, Philodemus, are little if any better. When Cicero deigns to translate any of their sentences, see what grace and life he instils into their clumsily expressed thoughts, how satisfying to the ear and taste are the periods of Livy when he is putting into Latin the heavy and uncouth clauses of Polybius! This may explain what Cicero means when at one time he gives to Greek the preference over Latin, at another to Latin over Greek; in reading Sophocles or Plato he could acknowledge their unrivalled excellence; in translating Panaetius or Philodemus he would feel his own immeasurable superiority.”
The greater number of long syllables, combined with the paucity of diphthongs and the consequent monotony of vocalization, and the uniformity of the accent, lent a weight and dignity of movement to the language which well suited the national gravitas. The precision of grammatical rules and the entire absence of dialectic forms from the written literature contributed to maintain the character of unity which marked the Roman republic as compared with the multiplicity of Greek states. It was remarked by Francis Bacon that artistic and imaginative nations indulge freely in verbal compounds, practical nations in simple concrete terms. In this respect, too, Latin contrasts with Greek. The attempts made by some of the earlier poets to indulge in novel compounds was felt to be out of harmony with the genius of the language. Composition, though necessarily employed, was kept within narrow limits, and the words thus produced have a sharply defined meaning, wholly unlike the poetical vagueness of some of the Greek compounds. The vocabulary of the language, though receiving accessions from time to time in accordance with practical needs, was rarely enriched by the products of a spontaneous creativeness. In literature the taste of the educated town circles gave the law; and these, trained in the study of the Greek masters of style, required something which should reproduce for them the harmony of the Greek period. Happily the orators who gave form to Latin prose were able to meet the demand without departing from the spirit of their own language.[1]
53. Cicero and Caesar.—To Cicero especially the Romans owed the realization of what was possible to their language in the way of artistic finish of style. He represents a protest at one and the same time against the inroads of the plebeius sermo, vulgarized by the constant influx of non-Italian provincials into Rome, and the “jargon of spurious and partial culture” in vogue among the Roman pupils of the Asiatic rhetoricians. His essential service was to have caught the tone and style of the true Roman urbanitas, and to have fixed it in extensive and widely read speeches and treatises as the final model of classical prose. The influence of Caesar was wholly in the same direction. His cardinal principle was that every new-fangled and affected expression, from whatever quarter it might come, should be avoided by the writer, as rocks by the mariner. His own style for straightforward simplicity and purity has never been surpassed; and it is not without full reason that Cicero and Caesar are regarded as the models of classical prose. But, while they fixed the type of the best Latin, they did not and could not alter its essential character. In subtlety, in suggestiveness, in many-sided grace and versatility, it remained far inferior to the Greek. But for dignity and force, for cadence and rhythm, for clearness and precision, the best Latin prose remains unrivalled.
It is needless to dwell upon the grammar or vocabulary of Cicero. His language is universally taken as the normal type of Latin; and, as hitherto the history of the language has been traced by marking differences from his usage, so the same method may be followed for what remains.
54. Varro, “the most learned of the ancients,” a friend and contemporary of Cicero, seems to have rejected the periodic rhythmical style of Cicero, and to have fallen back upon a more archaic structure. Mommsen says of one passage “the clauses of the sentence are arranged on the thread of the relative like dead thrushes on a string.” But, in spite (some would say, because) of his old-fashioned tendencies, his language shows great vigour and spirit. In his Menippean satires he intentionally made free use of plebeian expressions, while rising at times to a real grace and showing often fresh humour. His treatise De Re Rustica, in the form of a dialogue, is the most agreeable of his works, and where the nature of his subject allows it there is
- ↑ The study of the rhythm of the Clausulae, i.e. of the last dozen (or half-dozen) syllables of a period in different Latin authors, has been remarkably developed in the last three years, and is of the highest importance for the criticism of Latin prose. It is only possible to refer to Th. Zielinski’s Das Clauselgesetz in Cicero’s Reden (St. Petersburg, 1904), reviewed by A. C. Clark in Classical Review, 1905, p. 164, and to F. Skutsch’s important comments in Vollmöller’s Jahresberichten über die Fortschritte der romanischen Philologie (1905) and Glotta (i. 1908, esp. p. 413), also to A. C. Clark’s Fontes Prosae Numerosae (Oxford, 1909), The Cursus in Mediaeval and Vulgar Latin (ibid. 1910), and article Cicero.
