Another great advantage inherent in the Latin language from the beginning was that quantities were carefully observed by it and were in fact the determining factor in its rhythm; and since time rather than stress is the guiding principle of music in human song, as in the flute and organ, Roman speech was to an unusual degree suited to modulated utterance. To be sure, in the century before Plautus, stress had threatened for a while to gain dominance in vulgar speech—enough in fact to question the rights of measured verse—, nevertheless the timely spread of the conservative, aristocratic pronunciation through political and forensic oratory, as it was heard almost daily in the open forum during the second century, gradually checked the process and standardized a precise observance of longs and shorts.
The emphatic dominance of quantity over speech went so far in controlling word-accent that about two centuries before Cicero it had drawn the accent to the penultimate vowel if that was long. Hence, in the sentence endings which so often consisted of weighty words, word-accent to a remarkable degree coincided with a natural quantitative utterance. Latin, therefore, lent itself to a rhythmical close of sentences, often combining word-stress and length of utterance in a way that Greek prose rhythm did not. Cicero had studied Greek and had observed that various writers advocated the use of iambs, dactyls, and paeans[33] for clause-endings, and he labored somewhat confusedly to justify those rhythms since Greek theory seemed to demand them, but modern analysis has proved that his ear had shaped a truer Latin rhythm than his scholarship or his logic. His favorite clausulae, though he was not fully aware of it, were cretics and trochaics, producing a rhythm that adapted itself excellently to the dominance of longs, to the penultimate law, and to a strong close. As usual, a true appreciation of the genius of the Latin language saved the art from the effect of rules that were made for another medium. Here again Latin shows its independence.
But this is not all. Cicero’s books of rhetoric emphasize periodic sentence structure with careful attention to a mobile arrangement of clauses within the period. The Greek orators had of course practiced this art, and the teachers had drawn up the rules of the game afterwards. Cicero, for instance, often patterns his clauses with care in order to reach a periodic climax. In the Orator[34] he quotes an example from a speech of his own in which he follows two pairs of balanced phrases and a pair of clauses with a tranquil dignified close.
Domus tibi deerat? At habebas; pecunia superabat? At egebas;
incurristi amens in columnas; in alienos insanus insanisti:
depressam caecam jacentem domum pluris quam te et quam fortunas tuas aestimasti.
In such studied prose as in much of our free verse, the modulation depends not only upon the measured clausulae but also upon the parallelisms of phrase.[35] It is the two-fold rhythm that we so often find in the Authorized Version, in Hooker and in Browne, before English writers knew very much about the classical theories of prose rhythm. Now the point that needs to be emphasized is that Cicero would probably have written thus had he never known rules, had he only used with his infallible ear the prose that came to him shaped by a hundred great speakers. For, in the first place, the periodic structure was native to Latin, as we have seen, from the time of the earliest inscriptions. That structure is natural in highly inflected languages where the verb can be deferred in order to make room early for the important words and concepts, while unimportant phrases can be appropriately subordinated because their inflectional forms keep them tethered in thought to their owners even though separated by space. All this invites the service of taste to provide the contrast and balance, to give light and shade, to lift and to subdue, and then to bind the whole between introductory subject and concluding verb. No speaker of taste, given leisure and rich diction, could resist the temptation of thus elaborating such a language as Latin. The sentence of the untutored Cato, quoted above, though lacking in modulation, reveals a structural form not unlike the sentence of Cicero just cited.
Cicero repeatedly calls attention to what he designates as the adornment of good prose, adornments associated in Greek learning with the name of Gorgias. These are the tropes, i.e., the figures of speech, and the schemata, i.e., the patterned expressions of sentences. But he also tells us, fortunately, that there were none of these adornments which could not be found in the works of untutored old Cato,[36] and that even unschooled rustics employed metaphor. We have already remarked how modern scholars have sought to explain their presence. Explanations are of course not necessary. Men used metaphor and simile in the caves of the Dordogne 20,000 years ago; language began in metaphor when the primitive savage first called a dog “bowwow.” Half the words of any language are still metaphorical. When a Roman tried to find some expression for thinking, whether he used puto or intelligo or concipio or cogito or arbitror or existimo or opinor or censeo, or sentio, he had to use a figure of speech. Men like Cato, Scipio, Gracchus, Cicero became powerful because they had imagination, saw visions, and put their visions into their words.