Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

The second important factor which affects the spoken language is a difference in culture and training. The speech of the gentleman differs from that of the rustic. The conversational language of Terence, for instance, is on a higher plane than that of Plautus, while the characters in Plautus use better Latin than the freedmen in Petronius. The illiterate freedmen in Petronius speak very differently from the freemen in his story. Sometimes a particular occupation materially affects the speech of those who pursue it. All of us know something of the linguistic eccentricities of the London cabman, the Parisian thief, or the American hobo. This particular influence cannot be estimated so well for Latin because we lack sufficient material, but some progress has been made in detecting the peculiarities of Latin of the nursery, the camp, and the sea.

Of course a spoken language is never uniform throughout a given area. Dialectal differences are sure to develop. A man from Indiana and another from Maine will be sure to notice each other's peculiarities. Even the railway, the newspaper, and the public school will never entirely obliterate the old differences or prevent new ones from springing up. Without these agencies which do so much to promote uniformity to-day, Italy and the rest of the Empire must have shown greater dialectal differences than we observe in American English or in British English even.

For the sake of bringing out clearly some of the points of difference between vulgar and formal Latin we have used certain illustrations, like _caballus_, where the two forms of speech were radically opposed to each other, but of course they did not constitute two different languages, and that which they had in common was far greater than the element peculiar to each, or, to put it in another way, they in large measure overlapped each other. Perhaps we are in a position now to characterize colloquial Latin and to define it as the language which was used in conversation throughout the Empire with the innumerable variations which time and place gave it, which in its most highly refined form, as spoken in literary circles at Rome in the classical period, approached indefinitely near its ideal, literary Latin, which in its most unconventional phase was the rude speech of the rabble, or the "sermo inconditus" of the ancients. The facts which have just been mentioned may be illustrated by the accompanying diagrams.

In Fig. I the heavy-lined ellipse represents the formal diction of Cicero, the dotted line ellipse his conversational vocabulary. They overlap each other through a great part of their extent, but there are certain literary locutions which would rarely be used by him in conversation, and certain colloquial words and phrases which he would not use in formal writing. Therefore the two ellipses would not be coterminous. In Fig. II the heavy ellipse has the same meaning as in Fig. I, while the space enclosed by the dotted line represents the vocabulary of an uneducated Roman, which would be much smaller than that of Cicero and would show a greater degree of difference from the literary vocabulary than Cicero's conversational stock of words does. The relation of the uncultivated Roman's conversational vocabulary to that of Cicero is illustrated in Fig. III, while Fig. IV shows how the Latin of the average man in Rome would compare, for instance, with that of a resident of Lugudunum, in Gaul.

This naturally brings us to consider the historical relations of literary and colloquial Latin. In explaining them it has often been assumed that colloquial Latin is a degenerate form of literary Latin, or that the latter is a refined type of the former. Both these theories are equally false. Neither is derived from the other. The true state of the case has never been better put than by Schuchardt, who says: "Vulgar Latin stands with reference to formal Latin in no derivative relation, in no paternal relation, but they stand side by side. It is true that vulgar Latin came from a Latin with fuller and freer forms, but it did not come from formal Latin. It is true that formal Latin came from a Latin of a more popular and a cruder character, but it did not come from vulgar Latin. In the original speech of the people, preliterary Latin (the prisca Latinitas), is to be found the origin of both; they were twin brothers."

Of this preliterary Latin we have no record. The best we can do is to infer what its characteristics were from the earliest fragments of the language which have come down to us, from the laws of the Twelve Tables, for instance, from the religious and legal formulæ preserved to us by Varro, Cicero, Livy, and others, from proverbs and popular sayings. It would take us too far afield to analyze these documents here, but it may be observed that we notice in them, among other characteristics, an indifference to strict grammatical structure, not that subordination of clauses to a main clause which comes only from an appreciation of the logical relation of ideas to one another, but a co-ordination of clauses, the heaping up of synonymous words, a tendency to use the analytical rather than the synthetical form of expression, and a lack of fixity in the forms of words and in inflectional endings. To illustrate some of these traits in a single example, an early law reads "if [he] shall have committed a theft by night, if [he] shall have killed him, let him be regarded as put to death legally" (si nox furtum faxsit, si im occisit, iure caesus esto).[19] We pass without warning from one subject, the thief, in the first clause to another, the householder, in the second, and back to the thief again in the third. Cato in his book on Agriculture writes of the cattle: "let them feed; it will be better" (pascantur; satius erit), instead of saying: "it will be better for them to feed" (or "that they feed"). In an early law one reads: "on the tablet, on the white surface" (in tabula, in albo), instead of "on the white tablet" (in alba tabula). Perhaps we may sum up the general characteristics of this preliterary Latin out of which both the spoken and written language developed by saying that it showed a tendency to analysis rather than synthesis, a loose and variable grammatical structure, and a lack of logic in expression.

Livius Andronicus, Nævius, and Plautus in the third century before our era show the language as first used for literary purposes, and with them the breach between the spoken and written tongues begins. So far as Livius Andronicus, the Father of Latin literature, is concerned, allowance should be made without doubt for his lack of poetic inspiration and skill, and for the fact that his principal work was a translation, but even making this allowance the crude character of his Latin is apparent, and it is very clear that literary Latin underwent a complete transformation between his time and that of Horace and Virgil. Now, the significant thing in this connection is the fact that this transformation was largely brought about under an external influence, which affected the Latin of the common people only indirectly and in small measure. Perhaps the circumstances in which literary Latin was placed have never been repeated in history. At the very outset it was brought under the sway of a highly developed literary tongue, and all the writers who subsequently used it earnestly strove to model it after Greek. Livius Andronicus, Ennius, Accius, and Pacuvius were all of Greek origin and familiar with Greek. They, as well as Plautus and Terence, translated and adapted Greek epics, tragedies, and comedies. Several of the early writers, like Accius and Lucilius, interested themselves in grammatical subjects, and did their best to introduce system and regularity into their literary medium. Now, Greek was a highly inflected, synthetical, regular, and logical medium of literary expression, and it was inevitable that these qualities should be introduced into Latin. But this influence affected the spoken language very little, as we have already noticed. Its effect upon the speech of the common people would be slight, because of the absence of the common school which does so much to-day to hold together the spoken and written languages.

The development then of preliterary Latin under the influence of this systematizing, synthetical influence gave rise to literary Latin, while its independent growth more nearly in accordance with its original genius produced colloquial Latin. Consequently, we are not surprised to find that the people's speech retained in a larger measure than literary Latin did those qualities which we noticed in preliterary Latin. Those characteristics are, in fact, to be expected in conversation. When a man sets down his thoughts on paper he expresses himself with care and with a certain reserve in his statements, and he usually has in mind exactly what he wants to say. But in speaking he is not under this constraint. He is likely to express himself in a tautological, careless, or even illogical fashion. He rarely thinks out to the end what he has in mind, but loosely adds clauses or sentences, as new ideas occur to him.

We have just been thinking mainly about the relation of words to one another in a sentence. In the treatment of individual words, written and spoken Latin developed along different lines. In English we make little distinction between the quantity of vowels, but in Latin of course a given vowel was either long or short, and literary tradition became so fixed in this matter that the professional poets of the Augustan age do not tolerate any deviation from it. There are indications, however, that the common people did not observe the rules of quantity in their integrity. We can readily understand why that may have been the case. The comparative carelessness, which is characteristic of conversation, affects our pronunciation of words. When there is a stress accent, as there was in Latin, this is especially liable to be the case. We know in English how much the unaccented syllables suffer in a long word like "laboratory." In Latin the long unaccented vowels and the final syllable, which was never protected by the accent, were peculiarly likely to lose their full value. As a result, in conversational Latin certain final consonants tended to drop away, and probably the long vowel following a short one was regularly shortened when the accent fell on the short syllable, or on the syllable which followed the long one. Some scholars go so far as to maintain that in course of time all distinction in quantity in the unaccented vowels was lost in popular Latin. Sometimes the influence of the accent led to the excision of the vowel in the syllable which followed it. Probus, a grammarian of the fourth century of our era, in what we might call a "Guide to Good Usage"[20] or "One Hundred Words Mispronounced," warns his readers against masclus and anglus for masculus and angulus. This is the same popular tendency which we see illustrated in "lab'ratory."

The quality of vowels as well as their quantity changed. The obscuring of certain vowel sounds in ordinary or careless conversation in this country in such words as "Latun" and "Amurican" is a phenomenon which is familiar enough. In fact a large number of our vowel sounds seem to have degenerated into a grunt. Latin was affected in a somewhat similar way, although not to the same extent as present-day English. Both the ancient grammarians in their warnings and the Romance languages bear evidence to this effect.

We noticed above that the final consonant was exposed to danger by the fact that the syllable containing it was never protected by the accent. It is also true that there was a tendency to do away with any difficult combination of consonants. We recall in English the current pronunciations, "February," and "Calwell" for Caldwell. The average Roman in the same way was inclined to follow the line of least resistance. Sometimes, as in the two English examples just given, he avoided a difficult combination of consonants by dropping one of them. This method he followed in saying santus for sanctus, and scriserunt for scripserunt, just as in vulgar English one now and then hears "slep" and "kep" for the more difficult "slept" and "kept." Sometimes he lightened the pronunciation by metathesis, as he did when he pronounced interpretor as interpertor. A third device was to insert a vowel, as illiterate English-speaking people do in the pronunciations "ellum" and "Henery." In this way, for instance, the Roman avoided the difficult combinations -mn- and -chn- by saying mina and techina for the historically correct mna and techna. Another method of surmounting the difficulty was to assimilate one of the two consonants to the other. This is a favorite practice of the shop-girl, over which the newspapers make merry in their phonetical reproductions of supposed conversations heard from behind the counter. Adopting the same easy way of speaking, the uneducated Roman sometimes said isse for ipse, and scritus for scriptus. To pass to another point of difference, the laws determining the incidence of the accent were very firmly established in literary Latin. The accent must fall on the penult, if it was long, otherwise on the antepenult of the word. But in popular Latin there were certain classes of words in whose case these principles were not observed.

The very nature of the accent probably differed in the two forms of speech. In preliterary Latin the stress was undoubtedly a marked feature of the accent, and this continued to be the case in the popular speech throughout the entire history of the language, but, as I have tried to prove in another paper,[21] in formal Latin the stress became very slight, and the pitch grew to be the characteristic feature of the accent. Consequently, when Virgil read a passage of the _Æneid_ to Augustus and Livia the effect on the ear of the comparatively unstressed language, with the rhythmical rise and fall of the pitch, would have been very different from that made by the conversation of the average man, with the accented syllables more clearly marked by a stress.

In this brief chapter we cannot attempt to go into details, and in speaking of the morphology of vulgar Latin we must content ourselves with sketching its general characteristics and tendencies, as we have done in the case of its phonology. In English our inflectional forms have been reduced to a minimum, and consequently there is little scope for differences in this respect between the written and spoken languages. From the analogy of other forms the illiterate man occasionally says: "I swum," or, "I clumb," or "he don't," but there is little chance of making a mistake. However, with three genders, five declensions for nouns, a fixed method of comparison for adjectives and adverbs, an elaborate system of pronouns, with active and deponent, regular and irregular verbs, four conjugations, and a complex synthetical method of forming the moods and tenses, the pitfalls for the unwary Roman were without number, as the present-day student of Latin can testify to his sorrow. That the man in the street, who had no newspaper to standardize his Latin, and little chance to learn it in school, did not make more mistakes is surprising. In a way many of the errors which he did make were historically not errors at all. This fact will readily appear from an illustration or two. In our survey of preliterary Latin we had occasion to notice that one of its characteristics was a lack of fixity in the use of forms or constructions. In the third century before our era, a Roman could say audibo or audiam, contemplor or contemplo, senatus consultum or senati consultum. Thanks to the efforts of the scientific grammarian, and to the systematizing influence which Greek exerted upon literary Latin, most verbs were made deponent or active once for all, a given noun was permanently assigned to a particular declension, a verb to one conjugation, and the slight tendency which the language had to the analytical method of forming the moods and tenses was summarily checked. Of course the common people tried to imitate their betters in all these matters, but the old variable usages persisted to some extent, and the average man failed to grasp the niceties of the new grammar at many points. His failures were especially noticeable where the accepted literary form did not seem to follow the principles of analogy. When these principles are involved, the common people are sticklers for consistency. The educated man conjugates: "I don't," "you don't," "he doesn't," "we don't," "they don't"; but the anomalous form "he doesn't" has to give way in the speech of the average man to "he don't." To take only one illustration in Latin of the effect of the same influence, the present infinitive active of almost all verbs ends in -re, e.g., amare, monere, and regere. Consequently the irregular infinitive of the verb "to be able," posse, could not stand its ground, and ultimately became potere in vulgar Latin. In one respect in the inflectional forms of the verb, the purist was unexpectedly successful. In comedy of the third and second centuries B.C., we find sporadic evidence of a tendency to use auxiliary verbs in forming certain tenses, as we do in English when we say: "I will go," "I have gone," or "I had gone." This movement was thoroughly stamped out for the time, and does not reappear until comparatively late.

In Latin there are three genders, and the grammatical gender of a noun is not necessarily identical with its natural gender. For inanimate objects it is often determined simply by the form of the noun. Sella, seat, of the first declension, is feminine, because almost all nouns ending in -a are feminine; hortus, garden, is masculine, because nouns in -us of its declension are mostly masculine, and so on. From such a system as this two results are reasonably sure to follow. Where the gender of a noun in literary Latin did not conform to these rules, in popular Latin it would be brought into harmony with others of its class. Thus stigma, one of the few neuter nouns in -a, and consequently assigned to the third declension, was brought in popular speech into line with sella and the long list of similar words in -a, was made feminine, and put in the first declension. In the case of another class of words, analogy was supplemented by a mechanical influence. We have noticed already that the tendency of the stressed syllable in a word to absorb effort and attention led to the obscuration of certain final consonants, because the final syllable was never protected by the accent. Thus hortus in some parts of the Empire became hortu in ordinary pronunciation, and the neuter caelum, heaven, became caelu. The consequent identity in the ending led to a confusion in the gender, and to the ultimate treatment of the word for "heaven" as a masculine. These influences and others caused many changes in the gender of nouns in popular speech, and in course of time brought about the elimination of the neuter gender from the neo-Latin languages.

Something has been said already of the vocabulary of the common people. It was naturally much smaller than that of cultivated people. Its poverty made their style monotonous when they had occasion to express themselves in writing, as one can see in reading St. Ætheria's account of her journey to the Holy Land, and of course this impression of monotony is heightened by such a writer's inability to vary the form of expression. Even within its small range it differs from the vocabulary of formal Latin in three or four important respects. It has no occasion, or little occasion, to use certain words which a formal writer employs, or it uses substitutes for them. So testa was used in part for caput, and bucca for os. On the other hand, it employs certain words and phrases, for instance vulgar words and expletives, which are not admitted into literature.

In its choice of words it shows a marked preference for certain suffixes and prefixes. It would furnish an interesting excursion into folk psychology to speculate on the reasons for this preference in one case and another. Sometimes it is possible to make out the influence at work. In reading a piece of popular Latin one is very likely to be impressed with the large number of diminutives which are used, sometimes in the strict sense of the primitive word. The frequency of this usage reminds one in turn of the fact that not infrequently in the Romance languages the corresponding words are diminutive forms in their origin, so that evidently the diminutive in these cases crowded out the primitive word in popular use, and has continued to our own day. The reason why the diminutive ending was favored does not seem far to seek. That suffix properly indicates that the object in question is smaller than the average of its kind. Smallness in a child stimulates our affection, in a dwarf, pity or aversion. Now we give expression to our emotion more readily in the intercourse of every-day life than we do in writing, and the emotions of the masses are perhaps nearer the surface and more readily stirred than are those of the classes, and many things excite them which would leave unruffled the feelings of those who are more conventional. The stirring of these emotions finds expression in the use of the diminutive ending, which indirectly, as we have seen, suggests sympathy, affection, pity, or contempt. The ending -osus for adjectives was favored because of its sonorous character. Certain prefixes, like de-, dis-, and ex-, were freely used with verbs, because they strengthened the meaning of the verb, and popular speech is inclined to emphasize its ideas unduly.

To speak further of derivation, in the matter of compounds and crystallized word groups there are usually differences between a spoken and written language. The written language is apt to establish certain canons which the people do not observe. For instance, we avoid hybrid compounds of Greek and Latin elements in the serious writing of English. In formal Latin we notice the same objection to Greco-Latin words, and yet in Plautus, and in other colloquial writers, such compounds are freely used for comic effect. In a somewhat similar category belong the combinations of two adverbs or prepositions, which one finds in the later popular Latin, some of which have survived in the Romance languages. A case in point is ab ante, which has come down to us in the Italian avanti and the French avant. Such word-groups are of course debarred from formal speech.

In examining the vocabulary of colloquial Latin, we have noticed its comparative poverty, its need of certain words which are not required in formal Latin, its preference for certain prefixes and suffixes, and its willingness to violate certain rules, in forming compounds and word-groups, which the written language scrupulously observes. It remains for us to consider a third, and perhaps the most important, element of difference between the vocabularies of the two forms of speech. I mean the use of a word in vulgar Latin with another meaning from that which it has in formal Latin. We are familiar enough with the different senses which a word often has in conversational and in literary English. "Funny," for instance, means "amusing" in formal English, but it is often the synonym of "strange" in conversation. The sense of a word may be extended, or be restricted, or there may be a transfer of meaning. In the colloquial use of "funny" we have an extension of its literary sense. The same is true of "splendid," "jolly," "lovely," and "awfully," and of such Latin words as "lepidus," "probe," and "pulchre." When we speak of "a splendid sun," we are using splendid in its proper sense of shining or bright, but when we say, "a splendid fellow," the adjective is used as a general epithet expressing admiration. On the other hand, when a man of a certain class refers to his "woman," he is employing the word in the restricted sense of "wife." Perhaps we should put in a third category that very large colloquial use of words in a transferred or figurative sense, which is illustrated by "to touch" or "to strike" when applied to success in getting money from a person. Our current slang is characterized by the free use of words in this figurative way.

Under the head of syntax we must content ourselves with speaking of only two changes, but these were far-reaching. We have already noticed the analytical tendency of preliterary Latin. This tendency was held in check, as we have just observed, so far as verb forms were concerned, but in the comparison of adjectives and in the use of the cases it steadily made headway, and ultimately triumphed over the synthetical principle. The method adopted by literary Latin of indicating the comparative and the superlative degrees of an adjective, by adding the endings -ior and -issimus respectively, succumbed in the end to the practice of prefixing plus or magis and maxime to the positive form. To take another illustration of the same characteristic of popular Latin, as early as the time of Plautus, we see a tendency to adopt our modern method of indicating the relation which a substantive bears to some other word in the sentence by means of a preposition rather than by simply using a case form. The careless Roman was inclined to say, for instance, magna pars de exercitu, rather than to use the genitive case of the word for army, magna pars exercitus. Perhaps it seemed to him to bring out the relation a little more clearly or forcibly.

The use of a preposition to show the relation became almost a necessity when certain final consonants became silent, because with their disappearance, and the reduction of the vowels to a uniform quantity, it was often difficult to distinguish between the cases. Since final -m was lost in pronunciation, _Asia_ might be nominative, accusative, or ablative. If you wished to say that something happened in Asia, it would not suffice to use the simple ablative, because that form would have the same pronunciation as the nominative or the accusative, Asia(m), but the preposition must be prefixed, _in Asia_. Another factor cooperated with those which have already been mentioned in bringing about the confusion of the cases. Certain prepositions were used with the accusative to indicate one relation, and with the ablative to suggest another. _In Asia_, for instance, meant "in Asia," _in Asiam_, "into Asia." When the two case forms became identical in pronunciation, the meaning of the phrase would be determined by the verb in the sentence, so that with a verb of going the preposition would mean "into," while with a verb of rest it would mean "in." In other words the idea of motion or rest is disassociated from the case forms. From the analogy of _in_ it was very easy to pass to other prepositions like _per_, which in literary Latin took the accusative only, and to use these prepositions also with cases which, historically speaking, were ablatives.

In his heart of hearts the school-boy regards the periodic sentences which Cicero hurled at Catiline, and which Livy used in telling the story of Rome as unnatural and perverse. All the specious arguments which his teacher urges upon him, to prove that the periodic form of expression was just as natural to the Roman as the direct method is to us, fail to convince him that he is not right in his feeling--and he _is_ right. Of course in English, as a rule, the subject must precede the verb, the object must follow it, and the adverb and attribute adjective must stand before the words to which they belong. In the sentence: "Octavianus wished Cicero to be saved," not a single change may be made in the order without changing the sense, but in a language like Latin, where relations are largely expressed by inflectional forms, almost any order is possible, so that a writer may vary his arrangement and grouping of words to suit the thought which he wishes to convey. But this is a different matter from the construction of a period with its main subject at the beginning, its main verb at the end, and all sorts of subordinate and modifying clauses locked in by these two words. This was not the way in which the Romans talked with one another. We can see that plainly enough from the conversations in Plautus and Terence. In fact the Latin period is an artificial product, brought to perfection by many generations of literary workers, and the nearer we get to the Latin of the common people the more natural the order and style seem to the English-speaking person. The speech of the uneducated freedmen in the romance of Petronius is interesting in this connection. They not only fail to use the period, but they rarely subordinate one idea to another. Instead of saying "I saw him when he was an ædile," they are likely to say "I saw him; he was an ædile then."

When we were analyzing preliterary Latin, we noticed that the co-ordination of ideas was one of its characteristics, so that this trait evidently persisted in popular speech, while literary Latin became more logical and complex.

In the preceding pages we have tried to find out the main features of popular Latin. In doing so we have constantly thought of literary Latin as the foil or standard of comparison. Now, strangely enough, no sooner had the literary medium of expression slowly and painfully disassociated itself from the language of the common people than influences which it could not resist brought it down again to the level of its humbler brother. Its integrity depended of course upon the acceptance of certain recognized standards. But when flourishing schools of literature sprang up in Spain, in Africa, and in Gaul, the paramount authority of Rome and the common standard for the Latin world which she had set were lost. When some men tried to imitate Cicero and Quintilian, and others, Seneca, there ceased to be a common model of excellence. Similarly a careful distinction between the diction of prose and verse was gradually obliterated. There was a loss of interest in literature, and professional writers gave less attention to their diction and style. The appearance of Christianity, too, exercised a profound influence on literary Latin. Christian writers and preachers made their appeal to the common people rather than to the literary world. They, therefore, expressed themselves in language which would be readily understood by the average man, as St. Jerome frankly tells us his purpose was. The result of these influences, and of others, acting on literary Latin, was to destroy its unity and its carefully developed scientific system, and to bring it nearer and nearer in its genius to popular Latin, or, to put it in another way, the literary medium comes to show many of the characteristics of the spoken language. Gregory of Tours, writing in the sixth century, laments the fact that he is unfamiliar with grammatical principles, and with this century literary Latin may be said to disappear.

As for popular Latin, it has never ceased to exist. It is the language of France, Spain, Italy, Roumania, and all the Romance countries to-day. Its history has been unbroken from the founding of Rome to the present time. Various scholars have tried to determine the date before which we shall call the popular speech vulgar Latin, and after which it may better be styled French or Spanish or Italian, as the case may be. Some would fix the dividing line in the early part of the eighth century A.D., when phonetic changes common to all parts of the Roman world would cease to occur. Others would fix it at different periods between the middle of the sixth to the middle of the seventh century, according as each section of the old Roman world passed definitely under the control of its Germanic invaders. The historical relations of literary and colloquial Latin would be roughly indicated by the accompanying diagram, in which preliterary Latin divides, on the appearance of literature in the third century B.C., into popular Latin and literary Latin. These two forms of speech develop along independent lines until, in the sixth century, literary Latin is merged in popular Latin and disappears. The unity for the Latin tongue thus secured was short lived, because within a century the differentiation begins which gives rise to the present-day Romance languages.

It may interest some of the readers of this chapter to look over a few specimens of vulgar Latin from the various periods of its history.

(a) The first one is an extract from the Laws of the Twelve Tables. The original document goes back to the middle of the fifth century B.C., and shows us some of the characteristics of preliterary Latin. The non-periodic form, the omission of pronouns, and the change of subject without warning are especially noticeable.

"Si in ius vocat, ito. Ni it, antestamino, igitur em (=eum) capito. Si calvitur pedemve struit, manum endo iacito (=inicito). Si morbus aevitasve (=aetasve) vitium escit, iumentum dato: si nolet, arceram ne sternito."

1 Preliterary Latin. 2 Vulgar Latin 3 Literary Latin 4-8 The Romance languages.

]

(b) This passage from one of Cicero's letters to his brother (_ad Q. fr._ 2, 3, 2) may illustrate the familiar conversational style of a gentleman in the first century B.C. It describes an harangue made by the politician Clodius to his partisans.

"Ille furens et exsanguis interrogabat suos in clamore ipso quis esset qui plebem fame necaret. Respondebant operae: 'Pompeius.' Quem ire vellent. Respondebant: 'Crassum.' Is aderat tum Miloni animo non amico. Hora fere nona quasi signo dato Clodiani nostros consputare coeperunt. Exarsit dolor. Vrgere illi ut loco nos moverent."

(c) In the following passage, Petronius, 57, one of the freedmen at Trimalchio's dinner flames out in anger at a fellow-guest whose bearing seems to him supercilious. It shows a great many of the characteristics of vulgar Latin which have been mentioned in this paper. The similarity of its style to that of the preliterary specimen is worth observing. The great number of proverbs and bits of popular wisdom are also noticeable.

"Et nunc spero me sic vivere, ut nemini iocus sim. Homo inter homines sum, capite aperto ambulo; assem aerarium nemini debeo; constitutum habui nunquam; nemo mihi in foro dixit 'redde, quod debes.' Glebulas emi, lamelullas paravi; viginti ventres pasco et canem; contubernalem meam redemi, ne quis in sinu illius manus tergeret; mille denarios pro capite solvi; sevir gratis factus sum; spero, sic moriar, ut mortuus non erubescam."

(d) This short inscription from Pompeii shows some of the peculiarities of popular pronunciation. In ortu we see the same difficulty in knowing when to sound the aspirate which the cockney Englishman has. The silence of the final -m, and the reduction of ae to e are also interesting. Presta mi sinceru (=sincerum): si te amet que (=quae) custodit ortu (=hortum) Venus.

(e) Here follow some of the vulgar forms against which a grammarian, probably of the fourth century, warns his readers. We notice that the popular "mistakes" to which he calls attention are in (1) syncopation and assimilation, in (2) the use of the diminutive for the primitive, and pronouncing au as o, in (3) the same reduction of ct to t (or tt) which we find in such Romance forms as Ottobre, in (4) the aspirate falsely added, in (5) syncopation and the confusion of v and b, and in (6) the silence of final -m.

(1) frigida non fricda
(2) auris non oricla
(3) auctoritas non autoritas
(4) ostiae non hostiae
(5) vapulo non baplo
(6) passim non passi

(f) The following passages are taken from Brunot's "Histoire de la langue Fraçaise," p. 144. In the third column the opening sentence of the famous Oath of Strasburg of 842 A.D. is given. In the other columns the form which it would have taken at different periods is set down. These passages bring out clearly the unbroken line of descent from Latin to modern French.

The Oath of Strasburg of 842

Classic Latin

Per Dei amorem et
per christiani
populi et nostram
communem
salutem,
ab hac die, quantum
Deus scire
et posse mini
dat, servabo
hunc meum fratrem
Carolum

Spoken Latin, Seventh Cent.

For deo amore et
por chrestyano
pob(o)lo et nostro
comune salvamento
de esto
die en avante
en quanto Deos
sabere et podere
me donat, sic
salvarayo eo
eccesto meon
fradre Karlo

Actual Text

Pro deo amur et
pro christian
poblo et nostro
commun salvament,
d'ist di
en avant, in
quant Deus
savir et podir
me dunat, si
salvarai eo cist
meon fradre
Karlo

French, Eleventh Cent.

Por dieu amor et
por del crestüen
poeple et nostre
comun salvement,
de cest
jorn en avant,
quant que Dieus
saveir et podeir
me donet, si
salverai jo cest
mien fredre
Charlon

French, Fifteenth Cent.

Pour l'amour
Dieu et pour le
sauvement du
chrestien peuple
et le nostre commun,
de cest
jour en avant,
quant que Dieu
savoir et pouvoir
me done,
si sauverai je
cest mien frere
Charle

Modern French

Pour l'amour de
Dieu et pour le
salut commun
du peuple chrétien
et le nôtre,
à partir de ce
jour, autant
que Dieu m'en
donne le savoir
et le pouvoir,
je soutiendrai
mon frère Charles

The Poetry of the Common People of Rome

I. Their Metrical Epitaphs

The old village churchyard on a summer afternoon is a favorite spot with many of us. The absence of movement, contrasted with the life just outside its walls, the drowsy humming of the bees in the flowers which grow at will, the restful gray of the stones and the green of the moss give one a feeling of peace and quiet, while the ancient dates and quaint lettering in the inscriptions carry us far from the hurry and bustle and trivial interests of present-day life. No sense of sadness touches us. The stories which the stones tell are so far removed from us in point of time that even those who grieved at the loss of the departed have long since followed their friends, and when we read the bits of life history on the crumbling monuments, we feel only that pleasurable emotion which, as Cicero says in one of his letters, comes from our reading in history of the little tragedies of men of the past. But the epitaph deals with the common people, whom history is apt to forget, and gives us a glimpse of their character, their doings, their beliefs, and their views of life and death. They furnish us a simple and direct record of the life and the aspirations of the average man, the record of a life not interpreted for us by the biographer, historian, or novelist, but set down in all its simplicity by one of the common people themselves.

These facts lend to the ancient Roman epitaphs their peculiar interest and charm. They give us a glimpse into the every-day life of the people which a Cicero, or a Virgil, or even a Horace cannot offer us. They must have exerted an influence, too, on Roman character, which we with our changed conditions can scarcely appreciate. We shall understand this fact if we call to mind the differences between the ancient practices in the matter of burial and our own. The village churchyard is with us a thing of the past. Whether on sanitary grounds, or for the sake of quiet and seclusion, in the interest of economy, or not to obtrude the thought of death upon us, the modern cemetery is put outside of our towns, and the memorials in it are rarely read by any of us. Our fathers did otherwise. The churchyard of old England and of New England was in the middle of the village, and "short cuts" from one part of the village to another led through its enclosure. Perhaps it was this fact which tempted our ancestors to set forth their life histories more fully than we do, who know that few, if any, will come to read them. Or is the world getting more reserved and sophisticated? Are we coming to put a greater restraint upon the expression of our emotions? Do we hesitate more than our fathers did to talk about ourselves? The ancient Romans were like our fathers in their willingness or desire to tell us of themselves. Perhaps the differences in their burial practices, which were mentioned above, tempted them to be communicative, and sometimes even garrulous. They put their tombstones in a spot still more frequented than the churchyard. They placed them by the side of the highways, just outside the city walls, where people were coming or going constantly. Along the Street of Tombs, as one goes out of Pompeii, or along the great Appian Way, which runs from Rome to Capua, Southern Italy and Brundisium, the port of departure for Greece and the Orient, they stand on both sides of the roadway and make their mute appeals for our attention. We know their like in the enclosure about old Trinity in New York, in the burial ground in New Haven, or in the churchyards across the water. They tell us not merely the date of birth and death of the deceased, but they let us know enough of his life to invest it with a certain individuality, and to give it a flavor of its own.

Some 40,000 of them have come down to us, and nearly 2,000 of the inscriptions upon them are metrical. This particular group is of special interest to us, because the use of verse seems to tempt the engraver to go beyond a bare statement of facts and to philosophize a bit about the present and the future. Those who lie beneath the stones still claim some recognition from the living, for they often call upon the passer-by to halt and read their epitaphs, and as the Roman walked along the Appian Way two thousand years ago, or as we stroll along the same highway to-day, it is in silent converse with the dead. Sometimes the stone itself addresses us, as does that of Olus Granius:[22] "This mute stone begs thee to stop, stranger, until it has disclosed its mission and told thee whose shade it covers. Here lie the bones of a man, modest, honest, and trusty--the crier, Olus Granius. That is all. It wanted thee not to be unaware of this. Fare thee well." This craving for the attention of the passer-by leads the composer of one epitaph to use somewhat the same device which our advertisers employ in the street-cars when they say: "Do not look at this spot," for he writes: "Turn not your eyes this way and wish not to learn our fate," but two lines later, relenting, he adds: "Now stop, traveller...within this narrow resting-place,"[23] and then we get the whole story. Sometimes a dramatic, lifelike touch is given by putting the inscription into the form of a dialogue between the dead and those who are left behind. Upon a stone found near Rome runs the inscription:[24] "Hail, name dear to us, Stephanus,...thy Moschis and thy Diodorus salute thee." To which the dead man replies: "Hail chaste wife, hail Diodorus, my friend, my brother." The dead man often begs for a pleasant word from the passer-by. The Romans, for instance, who left Ostia by the highway, read upon a stone the sentiment:[25] "May it go well with you who lie within and, as for you who go your way and read these lines, 'the earth rest lightly on thee' say." This pious salutation loses some of the flavor of spontaneity in our eyes when we find that it had become so much of a convention as to be indicated by the initial letters of the several words: S(it) t(ibi) t(erra) l(evis). The traveller and the departed exchange good wishes on a stone found near Velitræ:[26]

"May it go well with you who read and you who pass this way,
The like to mine and me who on this spot my tomb have built."

One class of passers-by was dreaded by the dweller beneath the stone--the man with a paint-brush who was looking for a conspicuous spot on which to paint the name of his favorite political candidate. To such an one the hope is expressed "that his ambition may be realized, provided he instructs his slave not to paint this stone."[27]

These wayside epitaphs must have left an impress on the mind and character of the Roman which we can scarcely appreciate. The peasant read them as he trudged homeward on market days, the gentleman, as he drove to his villa on the countryside, and the traveller who came from the South, the East, or the North. In them the history of his country was set forth in the achievements of her great men, her prætors and consuls, her generals who had conquered and her governors who had ruled Gaul, Spain, Africa, and Asia. In them the public services, and the deeds of charity of the rich and powerful were recorded and the homely virtues and self-sacrifices of the humbler man and woman found expression there. Check by jowl with the tomb of some great leader upon whom the people or the emperor had showered all the titles and honors in their power might stand the stone of the poor physician, Dionysius,[28] of whom it is said "to all the sick who came to him he gave his services free of charge; he set forth in his deeds what he taught in his precepts."

But perhaps more of the inscriptions in verse, and with them we are here concerned, are in praise of women than of men. They make clear to us the place which women held in Roman life, the state of society, and the feminine qualities which were held in most esteem. The world which they portray is quite another from that of Ovid and Juvenal. The common people still hold to the old standards of morality and duty. The degeneracy of smart society has made little progress here. The marriage tie is held sacred; the wife and husband, the parent and child are held close to each other in bonds of affection. The virtues of women are those which Martinianus records on the stone of his wife Sofroniola:[29]

"Purity, loyalty, affection, a sense of duty, a yielding nature, and whatever qualities God has implanted in women."

(Castitas fides earitas pietas obsequium Et quaecumque deus faemenis
inesse praecepit.)

Upon a stone near Turin,[30] Valerius wrote in memory of his wife the simple line:

"Pure in heart, modest, of seemly bearing, discreet, noble-minded, and held in high esteem."

(Casta pudica decens sapiens Generosa probata.)

Only one discordant note is struck in this chorus of praise. This fierce invective stands upon an altar at Rome:[31] "Here for all time has been set down in writing the shameful record of the freedwoman Acte, of poisoned mind, and treacherous, cunning, and hard-hearted. Oh! for a nail, and a hempen rope to choke her, and flaming pitch to burn up her wicked heart."

A double tribute is paid to a certain Statilia in this naïve inscription:[32] "Thou who wert beautiful beyond measure and true to thy husbands, didst twice enter the bonds of wedlock...and he who came first, had he been able to withstand the fates, would have set up this stone to thee, while I, alas! who have been blessed by thy pure heart and love for thee for sixteen years, lo! now I have lost thee." Still greater sticklers for the truth at the expense of convention are two fond husbands who borrowed a pretty couplet composed in memory of some woman "of tender age," and then substituted upon the monuments of their wives the more truthful phrase "of middle age,"[33] and another man warns women, from the fate of his wife, to shun the excessive use of jewels.[34]

It was only natural that when men came to the end of life they should ask themselves its meaning, should speculate upon the state after death, and should turn their thoughts to the powers which controlled their destiny. We have been accustomed to form our conceptions of the religion of the Romans from what their philosophers and moralists and poets have written about it. But a great chasm lies between the teachings of these men and the beliefs of the common people. Only from a study of the epitaphs do we know what the average Roman thought and felt on this subject. A few years ago Professor Harkness, in an admirable article on "The Scepticism and Fatalism of the Common People of Rome," showed that "the common people placed no faith in the gods who occupy so prominent a place in Roman literature, and that their nearest approach to belief in a divinity was their recognition of fate," which "seldom appears as a fixed law of nature...but rather as a blind necessity, depending on chance and not on law." The gods are mentioned by name in the poetic epitaphs only, and for poetic purposes, and even here only one in fifty of the metrical inscriptions contains a direct reference to any supernatural power. For none of these deities, save for Mother Earth, does the writer of an epitaph show any affection. This feeling one may see in the couplet which reads:[35] "Mother Earth, to thee have we committed the bones of Fortunata, to thee who dost come near to thy children as a mother," and Professor Harkness thoughtfully remarks in this connection that "the love of nature and appreciation of its beauties, which form a distinguishing characteristic of Roman literature in contrast to all the other literatures of antiquity, are the outgrowth of this feeling of kinship which the Italians entertained for mother earth."

It is a little surprising, to us on first thought, that the Roman did not interpose some concrete personalities between himself and this vague conception of fate, some personal agencies, at least, to carry out the decrees of destiny. But it will not seem so strange after all when we recall the fact that the deities of the early Italians were without form or substance. The anthropomorphic teachings of Greek literature, art, and religion found an echo in the Jupiter and Juno, the Hercules and Pan of Virgil and Horace, but made no impress on the faith of the common people, who, with that regard for tradition which characterized the Romans, followed the fathers in their way of thinking.

A disbelief in personal gods hardly accords with faith in a life after death, but most of the Romans believed in an existence of some sort in the world beyond. A Dutch scholar has lately established this fact beyond reasonable doubt, by a careful study of the epitaphs in verse.[36] One tombstone reads:[37]

"Into nothing from nothing how quickly we go,"

and another:[38]

"Once we were not, now we are as we were,"

and the sentiment, "I was not, I was, I am not, I care not" (non fui, fui, non sum, non euro) was so freely used that it is indicated now and then merely by the initial letters N.f.f.n.s.n.c., but compared with the great number of inscriptions in which belief in a life after death finds expression such utterances are few. But how and where that life was to be passed the Romans were in doubt. We have noticed above how little the common people accepted the belief of the poets in Jupiter and Pluto and the other gods, or rather how little their theology had been influenced by Greek art and literature. In their conception of the place of abode after death, it is otherwise. Many of them believe with Virgil that it lies below the earth. As one of them says in his epitaph:[39]

"No sorrow to the world below I bring."

Or with other poets the departed are thought of as dwelling in the Elysian fields or the Isles of the Blessed. As one stone cries out to the passer-by:[40] "May you live who shall have said. 'She lives in Elysium,'" and of a little girl it is said:[41] "May thy shade flower in fields Elysian." Sometimes the soul goes to the sky or the stars: "Here lies the body of the bard Laberius, for his spirit has gone to the place from which it came;"[42] "The tomb holds my limbs, my soul shall pass to the stars of heaven."[43] But more frequently the departed dwell in the tomb. As one of them expresses it: "This is my eternal home; here have I been placed; here shall I be for aye." This belief that the shade hovers about the tomb accounts for the salutations addressed to it which we have noticed above, and for the food and flowers which are brought to satisfy its appetites and tastes. These tributes to the dead do not seem to accord with the current Roman belief that the body was dissolved to dust, and that the soul was clothed with some incorporeal form, but the Romans were no more consistent in their eschatology than many of us are.