ANCIENT ITALY
and the
PLACES NOTED
in the
HISTORY of its LITERATURE
[See the above map for the various localities mentioned in connection with Roman Literature.]
The Latin Language, in its most ancient form, was probably spoken by the people of Latium at least twelve hundred years before the Christian Era. For many centuries it remained harsh and unpolished, nor did its roughness materially wear away until it came in contact with the Greek, about 250 B.C. Then its vocabulary was enriched, and it gradually acquired elegance and beauty. A knowledge of Greek came to be regarded as indispensable to a polite education, and Roman children were taught this language before their own.
A reaction, however, ultimately set in, and the foisting of foreign words and idioms on the native tongue was condemned as strongly as it had once been favored; a strange expression was now compelled to run the gantlet of merciless criticism before it was admitted as part of the language. Cæsar advised to shun a new term as one would a reef; Augustus frankly acknowledged that, though he was emperor of the world, he could not make a Latin word; and Tiberius was thus pointedly rebuked by a Roman grammarian for a verbal error: “Thou, O Cæsar! canst confer Roman citizenship on men, but not on words.”
When the rest of Italy submitted to the arms of Rome, it accepted the language of the conqueror. Latin also supplanted the Carthaginian tongue in Africa and Spain, Celtic in Gaul and Britain, and finally was spoken in greater or less purity throughout the empire.
In its perfection, which it attained during the first century B.C., Latin was characterized by energy, dignity, and precision, its power and gravity compensating for the lack of “Attic grace.” According to its system of grammar, six cases and two numbers were distinguished; nouns, pronouns, and adjectives, were declined; and verbs were varied in form through the tenses and moods of two voices. Thus the Latin had one more case-form than the Greek, but lacked the dual number and middle voice of Greek and Sanscrit.
The Latin alphabet, consisting originally of twenty-one letters, was borrowed from the Greeks through a Dorian colony at Cumæ. Its resemblance to the Greek may be seen by turning to page 87. The character X. of the Roman system of notation is ascribed to the Etruscans.
Ancient Latin Relics.—During the five centuries that followed the founding of Rome, the literary history of the city is all but a blank. Curious specimens of its antique tongue are preserved in fragments of laws and a few inscriptions; but the songs of the first Latin bards are lost forever. The legends of Romulus, the seizure of the Sabine women, the stories of Lucretia and Virginia, of Coriolanus and Horatius,—these, with many similar traditions, were doubtless the subjects of irregular ballads and heroic poems.
The rough simple verse in which they appeared was called Saturnian;[40] it is supposed to have been adopted from the Etruscan poets, and charmed the ears of the Romans until they listened to the more tuneful measures of the Greeks. The time-honored Saturnian verses were then thrust aside, with the old lays that told the proud conquerors of Italy of their humble origin and early struggles. This ballad-poetry may never have been written; sung from generation to generation, it was kept alive to grace in after-days the epic of Ennius and the pages of the historian Livy.