This chapter explores the intersections between work by literary scholars with that done in synchronic and diachronic Latin linguistics. As an example of the different approaches and different toolkits employed by the linguist and the literary scholar, I discuss the way linguists have explained the phrase Veneres Cupidinesque in Catullus 3.1, contrasted with interpretations given in commentaries on Catullus and in Latin dictionaries. In the linguists’ account, the phrase is an archaism which continues an earlier Indo-European pattern used to refer to pairs, finding its closest parallels in Sanskrit texts. I then compare literary Latin to other registers and dialects, and discuss the difficulties involved in the term ‘Vulgar Latin’. The chapter also examines other areas in which linguistic scholarship might be usefully consulted by readers of Latin literature: word accent, vowel-length and metre; etymology, semantics and the lexicography; grammars and monographs on morphology, syntax and discourse analysis, including in particular recent approaches using sociolinguistics. Passages from Catullus are discussed throughout.

Legal texts from the early period contain a number of peculiarities that are not common in classical and post-classical Latin. The chapter discusses some of them: relative clauses introduced by a relative phrase, subjunctive mood, restrictive quod and subordinators introducing impediment argument clauses (quo minus and quo setius). Legalisms represent a subtype of early Latin phenomena in that they need not be features of every text found in that period; they are restricted to legal documents as a specific text type. Some of them are true legal archaisms (siremps, quo setius) – and they can be easily identified as such – that continue to be used in the same text type after the pre-classical period or appear in other text types in a legal context. As for the remaining ones: autonomous relative clauses introduced by a relative phrase and those containing a subjunctive for factual content as well as restrictive quod clauses can be at least considered as characteristic of legal Latin.

A calculated use of language for deliberate stylistic effects, intended to distinguish epic diction from contemporary speech, characterised formal Latin poetry from the very beginning. This review of early epic language aims to explore the main sources, mechanisms and effects of these first experiments in the creation of a Latin epic style. It is a fact that the epic poets’ record of achievement is obscured by its survival in merely fragmentary form, by the close congruence of epic and tragic styles, and by our own uncertainty about the relative popularity of those two genres and their contemporary influence. Consequently, this study deals less with specifics of epic language than with the process that generated it, as poets experimented with archaisms, calques and neologisms, built upon the practice of their Greek models, and responded to the example of their Latin compatriots. In striving to develop a style worthy of epic, they brought to the task the same confident, competitive spirit that typified all their endeavours, building consciously on the achievement of their predecessors, and in the process leaving something of great value to a wide range of successors.

This chapter analyses the corpus of epigraphic evidence from the period 400-200 BC (c. 480 inscriptions). The inscriptions present a multifaceted and sometimes mixed situation in relation to graphemic and phonological features, with notable fluctuation between the preservation of fossilised, old-fashioned and innovative traits, sometimes occurring together in the same type of text. Fluctuations between archaic and innovative traits characterise a differentiated level of literacy in the documents from Rome and from the neighbouring towns and districts of old Latium, such as Praeneste, Tusculum, and Ardea. The chapter examines text classes, tendencies, quantitative data and distribution of the inscriptions on the territory (altars, objects,pocola deorum, tabulae triumphales, graffiti on pottery, jars); graphemic innovations/reforms (e.g. rhotacism, gemination of consonants and vowels, diphthongs; omission of final -s); social aspects such as features of urban vs rustic features. The emerging picture is that of a complex situation, the analysis of which is further complicated by the lack of a central Roman control and the persistence of epichoric linguistic and graphic practices.

This chapters examines the motivation and method of reuse of early Latin in the translations from Greek poetry of Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609), the scholar to whom the study of fragmentary Republican Latin owes more than to anyone else in classical scholarship. The analysis focusses on the translations of Sophocles’ Ajax and of Lycophron’s Alexandra, which the young Scaliger produced a decade before his memorable edition of Festus’ De significatu uerborum (1576). The ancient lexicon was the main source of the obscure vocabulary that characterises Scaliger’s archaic Latin, the artificial construct of a style aimed at achieving a high register in the translation of Greek poetry. Recourse to the diction of the early Roman dramatists as a means of elevating the style had an authoritative precedent in Cicero. To latinise Lycophron’s exoteric diction Scaliger drew extensively on Festus’ glosses for rare usages and recondite synonyms. Other early-modern scholars who were engaged in the study of fragmentary Latin texts and their sources also used that variety of Latin for the purpose of translation of the Greek classics, and even for creative versification. ‘Early Latin’ is a style.

The interest in early Latin developed mainly outside the field of normative grammar, particularly in authors who belonged to the tradition of scholarly or antiquarian writing. Varro’s encyclopaedic works testify to a unique effort to save uestigia of the cultural and historical past by means of linguistic operations. His approach soon lost its institutional character and was replaced by curiosity for rare minutiae, as in Pliny’s Dubius Sermo. Grammarians like Probus and Caper, whose orientation was philological rather than didactic, considered that the auctoritas of literary models made divergences from the norm or contemporary usage acceptable, and viewed uetustas as the area of experimental variation, both lexical and morphological, with respect to the usage of Republican writers. The inclusion of an immense corpus of literary quotations in comprehensive works (artes grammaticae) facilitated the adoption of an overall perspective that embraced the evolution of the linguistic system at all levels, and kept alive an awareness of the diachronic dimension of the language, which became increasingly profound in scholars like Priscian who read Terence in sixth-century Constantinople.

This chapter examines the language of Lucilius’ hexametrical satires, discussing aspects of vocabulary, morphology, syntax and versification. The varied typology of Lucilius’ supposedly early lexicon (obsolete words; words tied to genre, whether high-style or comic; evidence of seemingly spoken usage in various registers) demonstrates that whatever characteristics of earlier diction Lucilius retains are largely motivated by literary purposes, and often innovated upon. Morphological and syntactical features which Classical Latin will discard are also few and coexisting with diachronic or diastratic variants. Pronounced alliteration, synonymic pairs, and persistent reduction of final -s place firmly Lucilius in pre-neoteric poetic diction - but this too is stylised, marked language. The answer to the question ‘How early Latin is Lucilius?’ is, not very much, if we are looking for evidence of a superseded variety of Latin rather than deliberate literary choices for the sake of register, style or genre.

This chapter discusses Chaucer’s language, the difficulties it posed for early modern readers, and the competing claims of superior accuracy and comprehensibility made by contemporary prints. Representing various texts in the Chaucer canon, the manuscripts discussed in this chapter have in common a unique aspect of their provenance – their words have all been corrected, glossed, or emended by different early modern annotators. Through analysis of hundreds of annotations in their manuscript context, the chapter argues that early modern readers sought to perfect the outmoded, error-prone, and sometimes illegible Chaucerian manuscript text, often on the basis of printed editions. These readerly interventions reveal contemporary anxieties about linguistic archaism and textual corruption, and strive to resolve them by recourse to glosses and readings contained in new books.

Chapter 3 analyses the carpe diem motif in Horace from an innovative angle. It argues that we gain a better understanding of the motif if we read it against the background of Horace’s literary criticism in the Ars Poetica. In the Ars Poetica, Horace compares a language’s lexical development to leaves falling from a tree: while some words disappear, old ones return. Both the image of leaves and the understanding of time as cyclical are also part of Horace’s poetry of carpe diem. The chapter shows that the poems as well as the individual words of which they consist evoke present enjoyment. The chapter combines innovative work on Horace’s literary criticism with new interpretations of some of Horace’s most famous Odes, including the ode to Leuconoe, C. 1.11. The chapter reveals the importance of Horace’s choice of words for his poetics of presence.

The prevailing paradigm of modern art in Brazil still revolves around the Modern Art Week of 1922, in São Paulo, and the self-professed avant-gardes that derived from that event. What came immediately before it is usually relegated to a limbo status, as neither modern nor non-modern. The introduction casts doubt upon the widely accepted category pre-modernism, questioning its validity as a historical construct. Evidence demonstrates that alternate modernisms existed in the Brazilian context prior to 1922. Chief among these is a variant of modernism linked to the rising urban culture of music, dance, theatre, humour, graphics and cinema in Rio de Janeiro. The relative lack of scholarly interest in mass culture has led to a tendency to overstate the impact of erudite expressions in literature, fine art and architecture. Other arenas of cultural production have been systematically overlooked, including ones to which Afro-Brazilian artists made important contributions. This skewed perspective subtly elides how elite practitioners often appropriated subaltern identities to reinforce their own claims to modernity, vis-à-vis their European counterparts. The book proposes to examine the conflicts between primitivism and nationalism, modernism and archaism. Rethinking these tensions in the Brazilian context helps make sense of divergent models of modernism elsewhere.

Chapter Three studies ‘the word’ by merging two fields of association: first, the agglomeration of human labours, social practices, cultural values, and codified grammatical systems that made possible and supported the acquisition of Latin; second, the inhuman order of the ‘verbum Dei’. Each of these fields of association has, as its ultimate aim, the transformation of individual lives. It is under the rubric of this shared objective that I bring them together here. The first half of the chapter explores aspects of the medieval Latin grammatical tradition and its early modern afterlives. My goal is to make some seventh-century wranglings on the subject of the Latin case system serve as a point of entry into later fashions of prose style, and into the pedagogical disciplines of systematic imitation that were developed to teach Ciceronian Latin to schoolboys. The second half of the chapter explores a range of texts associated with St Paul, St Augustine, and Martin Luther in order to characterize the linguistic and spiritual stakes of medieval and early modern Britain’s absorption into Rome.

This brief paper begins by asking whether examples of hexameter rhythm in Sallust and Livy, two of Tacitus’ principal models, are allusions to, or even quotations from, Ennius’ Annals. After a brief survey of the rhythmical sequences in Tacitus’ Annals, the main focus of the paper is his obituary of Piso the Pontifex (Ann. 6.10.3), which, it is argued, constitutes an allusion to one of Ennius’ most famous fragments, the so-called “good companion” passage. I failed to mention Ennius in my recent commentary on Book 6, but the case for Ennian influence seems stronger than the parallels adduced by Skutsch and has interesting implications for the workings of allusion.

This chapter is an overview of the typical features of the language of the Homeric poems, prosodic, dialectal, syntactic, and semantic. It argues that the archaic and dialectal elements in Homeric diction are due to deliberate choice on the part of the poets in the tradition to a greater extent than is commonly supposed in the wake of Milman Parry’s theory of oral-formulaic composition.