Read an Excerpt
Lucretius and the Transpadanes
By Louise Adams Holland PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1979 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06401-7
CHAPTER 1
Regional Differences in Speech
In the absence of tape recordings from antiquity we are woefully ignorant of how classical Latin prose or verse sounded as it was rendered orally. To read verbal descriptions of sounds is a far cry from hearing them, and Quintilian's best efforts sometimes leave us more confused than enlightened. However, we have enough evidence to be sure that the spoken word varied greatly from place to place, no matter how much uniformity the written language maintained.
The Urbs Roma, head and heart of the Roman world in law, politics, religion, and warfare, also claimed the cultural leadership, though it produced no city-born writer of distinction except possibly Julius Caesar. We know that for Cicero's generation and its Augustan successors Rome unquestionably set the standard of cultivated speech.
In modern countries, for all the ease and completeness of communication, popular language retains to a surprising degree its local peculiarities. The French of Paris is distinct from that of Bordeaux or Toulouse. The south Italian tendency to drop final vowels balances the inability of some northern Italians to end a word with a consonant. The common expression piano piano shortens to plan piano or piano pian according to latitude.
As for the United States of America, the cultural geographers tell us that radio and television, "though eroding the basic American dialects to some extent," have so far left them essentially unchanged: "The regional dialects will become less sharply distinguished — but we'll never have uniform speech." Such is the normal variation in countries that claim one national tongue.
Ancient Italy had some special characteristics that tended to emphasize and perpetuate regional traits. Ethnic differences worked with the geographical pockets into which the peninsula naturally divided to set clear lines of separation. One of the many virtues of Salmon's book on the Samnites is the sense it gives of the diversity of the Italian peoples, "with the haphazard timing of their separate migrations, their unequal degree of exposure to foreign influences, the divisive effect of their mountain abodes, and the heterogeneity of the aboriginal populations among whom they settled and whose habits they absorbed."
Though the boundaries between the districts are by no means insurmountable, towns that on a small-scale map look like the closest of neighbors might, for no stronger reason than a stream gulley or a steep little hill, turn their backs on each other and reach out in opposite directions for markets and cult centers. There is a solid geographical reason for the linguistic difference between Ovid's Paelignian forebears and the near-by Frentani, but much less obvious barriers seem equally effective elsewhere.
In every area the artifacts of course change with time, but the regionalism persists and the boundaries remain surprisingly stable. In central Italy, for instance (at least until the imported petrol tin supplanted the native water jar at the town fountain), the one-time domain of the Villanovan urn used a copper pot with high shoulders and neat, brass-collared neck, while the ovoid urn of Latium gave place to a bronze jar with flattened biconical body and flaring rim. The modern forms are in no way derivatives of their ancient predecessors, but those used in one area still differ from those in the next, and the old lines of division endure.
Some of the most important habits that the Latin speakers absorbed from the older inhabitants in various parts of Italy were in their speech, and those not only in words but in accent, intonation, and tempo, which eventually modify words. The racial mixtures we find everywhere in the peninsula are not in themselves important for the history of literature, but the speech differences are reflected at times in the written word, especially in verse structure. We get the impression from Cicero that in his day there were almost as many ways of speaking Latin as there were towns. In the Brutus (17of.) he discusses the speech not only of orators but of ordinary citizens from various Italian localities, with their divergence from the true urbani of Rome. We learn elsewhere that the Praenestini long maintained their individuality. In Horace's Venusia, one of the largest Latin colonies on record was planted in the midst of Messapians, Oscan-speaking Samnites, and descendants of old Greek settlers to say nothing of a nameless primitive substratum. Those "sons of great centurions" (Sat. 1.6, 72f.) who would have continued to be Horace's schoolmates had he remained there, certainly spoke Latin but a Latin that would sound alien to Roman ears.
To take Cicero's native Arpinum as another example, the town was originally Volscian, overlaid with a fresh touch of Oscan when the Samnites absorbed it for a while in the fourth century. Then it was annexed by Rome, at first "sine suffragio," but finally with full citizenship in 188 B.C. The official language had been Latin for a long time before Cicero was born, but the manner of speaking it could hardly fail to reflect other strains. The Latin of such a place, however correct, might declare its origin to Roman purists wherever they heard it. One might wonder if a hint of Arpinum came out occasionally in Cicero's own inflection, though he would be the last to realize it. In the Pro Sulla 6.24, when he reproaches Manlius Torquatus for branding his consulship the rule of an alien, there is no mention of language, but the true Roman ear of a Torquatus might have caught something to play upon at the trial, something such as showed the old market woman that Theophrastus was no Athenian born. On the possible exploitation in the courtroom of personal peculiarities, Cicero himself says (De Orat. 11.243) "— imitatione brevi iniecta, in aliquo insigni ad irridendum vitio reperiantur."
It was possibly to insure his sons against provincialism that Cicero's father began while Marcus and Quintus were still children to transfer his household to Rome for at least part of the year. Even there, however, the boys were under the unbroken influence of the family and the family servants in their house on the Carinae, though they had ampler advantages than Arpinum could offer in schools and in the tutelage of such cosmopolitan teachers as Archias (Pro Archia 1).
The common custom of going to Rome to study missed some of its potential leveling effect because of a natural inclination to consort with one's own kind. When Horace's father removed him from Venusia to Rome, he chose for his teacher Orbilius of Beneventum, who was hardly one to spoil his southern accent but who may have helped to establish in Horace's mind a rooted dislike for the Cisalpines (Horace, Ep. 11.1.70; Sat. 1.10.36ff., 47; 11.5.41). Similarly, while Virgil was studying with Siro near Naples, he lived with a group of northerners like himself.
Naturally the speech of provincials outside of Italy showed even more conspicuous peculiarities. Cicero characterizes the language of Corduba in Spain as pingue and peregrinum (Pro Archia 261), a comment in line with Messala's acid remark (Seneca, Cont. 11.12) about Porcius Latro, a distinguished son of that province: "Sua lingua disertus est." Cicero was of course aware of the large numbers of Italians who had settled in Spain during the two centuries before his time, but he was spared the knowledge of that great backwash of Spaniards over the Roman world of letters in the first century of the Empire. One of their number was the famous Quintilian, whose dicta about sound and accent, except for what he drew directly from Cicero, we might well beware of accepting too uncritically. It may be, as is generally assumed, that he spent an interval of his boyhood in Rome under Roman instruction, but, if so, nobody knows when or for how long. His contacts with well-known teachers and orators in Rome belong to a later stage of his education. He had certainly lived in Spain and was well known there for some time before A.D. 68, when Galba assigned him to a post as a professor of rhetoric in Rome. He thus followed in the steps of his fellow Spaniard, Porcius Latro, as a teacher in the capital. It would be a miracle if Quintilian's own Latin had no foreign color that such critics as Pollio and Messala would have observed instantly, and if his ear was perfectly attuned to judge of what he heard in Italy. He himself says (1.1.5): "Et natura tenacissimi sumus eorum quae rudibus annis percepimus; ut sapor, quo nova imbuas, durat, nec lanarum colores quibus simplex ille candor mutatus est, elui possunt. Et haec ipsa magis pertinaciter haerent, quo deteriora sunt. — Non assuescat ergo, ne dum infans quidem est, sermoni qui dediscendus sit."c Quintilian has expanded this passage from a single sentence in Cicero (Brutus 210): "Sed. magni interest quos quisque audiat cotidie domi, quibuscum loquatur a puero, quem ad modum patres, paedagogi, matres etiam loquantur."
It is possible that Quintilian was not sensitive to the degree in which the Latin of other towns might differ in sound from that of Rome. He brushes aside rather impatiently the regional peculiarities that had been commonly observed (1.5.56): "Taceo de Tuscis et Sabinis et Praenestinis quoque: nam ut eorum sermone utentem Vettium Lucilius insectatur, quemadmodum Pollio deprehendit in Livio Patavinitatem, licet omnia Italica pro Romanis habeam." His interest is in the ideas conveyed by words rather than in their sound, or even in the supplementary meanings their sounds may suggest. When he re-used Cicero's anecdote about Theophrastus (Brutus 172) he spoiled the point by making the old market woman notice the strangeness of a single word ("annotata unius affectatione verbi"), rather than the total color and tone of the man's speech, as in Cicero's version. "Sic, ut opinor, in nostris est quidam urbanorum sicut illic Atticorum sonus."
A passage in the Institutes (x1.3. 30) is often cited to show Quintilian's interest in sound: "— urbanum, id est in quo nulla neque rusticitas neque peregrinitas resonet." This is an echo of Cicero and uses his language, though urbanus had surely lost much of its Republican meaning before Quintilian's time, and Cicero would use rusticus and peregrinus rather than those awkward abstracts. Resono is Cicero's term in discussing the "ring" or "intonation" of the speaker's voice (e.g. Brutus 171; Orator 150, 161).
Quintilian condemns onomatopeia (1.5.72) in a way that indicates a general dislike of imitative sounds in language. This is natural in one who is not vividly aware, as the north Italian poets were, of the sounds of words with all their rich possibilities of suggestion. To a Quintilian, onomatopeia and other sound effects might well seem an irrelevance that interfered with his direct reception of the idea to be communicated. His insensitivity to sound effects adequately explains his casual treatment of Catullus, whom, though he refers to him several times, he does not consider important in the lyric; and even of Lucretius (x.1.87) for all his effective borrowing of the honey on the rim (111.1.4). It also accounts for his unqualified enthusiasm for Horace, whose appeal is directly to the mind through the meaning and arrangement of words with little dependence on sound and rhythm." Quintilian's fine comment on Horace's gifts (x.1.96) is familiar: "At Lyricorum idem Horatius fere solus Iegi dignus. Nam et insurgit aliquando et plenus est iucunditatis et gratiae et variis figuris et verbis felicissime audax."
Almost as completely detached as Spain from Cicero's usual associations was the wide valley of the Po and its sub-Alpine reaches, the tenth Roman province, Gallia Cisalpina. Those lands, acquired from a mixed population of Gauls, Ligurians, and other tribes, including even a few Etruscans, had been available for Latin colonies and for distribution viritivi to Italians disturbed by Hannibal's destructive passing and by all the changes and troubles of the following century. The soil was fertile, the water supply abundant. The settlers prospered. Substantial towns developed, connected by navigable rivers and by a network of roads. They were too far from Roman markets to send them much in the early days except the acorn-fed swine Polybius mentions (II.15). These, like herds of stringy turkeys one meets nowadays on the Greek roads, could travel on their own power, and they helped to feed the capital and the Roman armies. By Strabo's time, however, trade with Rome in manufactured articles was flourishing. Well-to-do, if not wealthy, families developed a class with time to devote to the life of the mind. They were far enough removed to escape most of those disorders that afflicted the peninsula during the Social and Civil Wars. What we have left of Suetonius gives us a tantalizing glimpse of schools and scholars in Gallia. Apparently, ambitious parents need not hurry their sons off to Rome for education when so much was available nearer home. Virgil found his schooling first at Cremona and later at Mediolanum.
Nobody can fail to be impressed by the number of writers that Gallia produced. Some of the poets and critics known to us from repeated citations are Valerius Cato, Quintilius Varus, Helvius Cinna, Alfenus Varus, Furius Bibaculus, and Varro of Atax, while in the field of prose Livy is a host in himself. Catullus refers to the older members of the group, and the unwilling testimony of Horace (cf. Sat. 1.10) gives evidence of their continued importance in the following generation. Most of the Transpadani would be little more than names to us if Catullus had not survived in a single manuscript to tell us both by his own poems and by what he says of his contemporaries something of the themes they treated and even of their style.
The pioneers had brought with them to the north, along with their archaic Latin, a strong element of Oscan. In the Po Valley they lived among barbarian languages and dialects. Frank notes that half a dozen languages were spoken in the Verona of Catullus's youth. The displacement of the earlier populations throughout the province may not have been as sweeping as has usually been assumed. Strabo (v.1.6) calls Mediolanum the metropolis of the Insubrians. Though the defeat and expulsion of the Boii has been thought complete, remnants probably survived along the Via Aemilia. Latin speakers borrowed some words outright from the Gauls, notably terms for horses and horse-drawn vehicles. From their motley background the dwellers in the valley apparently became a people of nimble tongues with a special facility in handling open vowel junctions, and making literary capital of the little rippling breaks they made in verse without destroying the metrical form, as a vagrant breeze may stir thousands of tiny ripples on the surface of ocean swells without in the least affecting the motion of the great rollers beneath. This is one feature that made it possible for Catullus to use the simplest of schemes to express a surprising variety of mood and feeling.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Lucretius and the Transpadanes by Louise Adams Holland. Copyright © 1979 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
