Chapter 1: The Nature of Latin Culture

At the end of Vergil�s Aeneid there occurs an episode in which the 
goddess Juno finally agrees to stop fighting. Her position, 
however, is far from abject. Speaking to Jupiter and sounding more 
like a conquering general than the patron of a defeated people, 
she dictates the conditions under which she will stop opposing the 
Trojan effort to settle in Italy: The native Latins must not 
change their ancient name, or become Trojans, or be called 
Teucrians, or alter their speech or dress. Their country should 
keep the name of Latium and be ruled by Alban kings forever. Their 
Roman offspring should be strong in their Italian courage. Troy, 
having fallen, should remain fallen, even to the memory of its 
name. Jupiter readily accepts these terms, assuring Juno that �The 
people of Ausonia will keep their ancestral speech and culture, 
their name be as it was. Sharing bloodlines only, the Teucrians 
will subside�� (12.823�36).
	The stories we tell about latinity and the ways we tell them�
with what emphasis and in what proprtion�determine in large 
measure our approach to and our understanding of the material we 
study, our self-conception as professional (or amateur) latinists. 
This Vergilian episode embodies two of the central myths that 
inform our thinking about the Latin language and Latin culture: 
namely, the power of both to extend their sway over non-Latins 
and, in the process, to occlude or replace whatever other 
languages and cultures they may encounter. In this essay we shall 
explore these myths and discuss them in the light of others. The 
emphasis will be on new or neglected stories and on the capacity 
of such stories to change the way we think. The purpose of the 
essay, then, is frankly revisionist. It begins here with two of 
the oldest and most familiar stories that we know. Where it leads, 
however, is to the surprising and paradoxical, but upon 
reflection, self-evident observation, that these stories, taken 
together, contradict one another and, taken separately, contradict 
themselves.
The Universality of Latin Culture
The Aeneid is a foundational text. It tells about the beginning of 
Latin culture. When Juno stipulates what character this culture is 
to have, she speaks�leaving aside the soon to be extinct Alban 
kings�not at all of Roman governmental forms or religious 
institutions, but of the most ordinary, and yet enduring aspects 
of daily life: what people wear, what they call themselves, and, 
most important for our purposes, what language they speak. Despite 
or because of this focus on the quotidien, Vergil�s Juno 
represents Latin as almost monstrously potent, capable even in 
defeat of absorbing and occluding other cultures�here, especially, 
that of Troy. Just as Ascanius must change his name and become 
Iulus, founder of the Julian clan, so must Aeneas� followers put 
aside their Trojan language and customs so that their descendants, 
if not they themselves, may become fully Latin.
 	This is how we tend to think Vergil and his contemporaries 
regarded Latin culture, and it is therefore how we regard it. 
Latin culture imagines itself as an all-powerful civilizing force 
that surpasses other cultures and replaces them in its imperialist 
mission of, in Vergil�s words again, sparing the conquered, 
warring down the proud. From a modern perspective, the example of 
Latin as the imperial culture par excellence is widespread, and 
constantly linked to the civilizing agency of the language itself. 
This idea receives eloquent expression from the hand of the 
historian Edward Gibbon, who wrote,
So sensible were the Romans of the influence of language 
over national manners, that it was their most serious 
care to extend, with the progress of their arms, the use 
of the Latin tongue. The ancient dialects of Italy, the 
Sabine, the Etruscan, and the Venetian, sunk into 
oblivion�. The western countries were civilized by the 
same hands which subdued them. As soon as the barbarians 
were reconciled to obedience, their minds were opened to 
any new impressions of knowledge and politeness. The 
language of Virgil and Cicero, though with some 
inevitable mixture of corruption, was so universally 
adopted in Africa, Spain, Gaul, Britain, and Pannonia, 
that the faint traces of the Punic or Celtic idioms were 
preserved only in the mountains, or among the peasants.

In our ancient sources as well employment of the Latin language by 
the Roman government specifically as an instrument of imperial 
control is well attested. Foreign ambassadors were required to 
address the senate in Latin and no other tongue�not even Greek, 
the usual diplomatic language of the Hellenistic world. Roman 
officials who used any language but Latin in their dealings with 
alien peoples exposed themselves to official censure. Even in the 
east, the second capital, Constantinople, used Latin, and the 
Byzantine Greeks came to pride themselves on their status as 
Romans. Clearly the idea of Latin that I have been discussing is 
no mere poetic flourish, but a serious ideological position and a 
major cultural force in ancient times. 
	In classical literature, the capacity of Latin to overpower 
and replace other cultures, along with its universal dimensions, 
is a commonplace. Catullus expects to find monuments to Julius 
Caesar even among the shaggy Britons (11.9�12); Ovid predicts that 
his masterpiece, the Metamorphoses, will live forever, �wherever 
Roman power extends over conquered lands� (15.877); and Martial, 
in celebrating the emperor Titus� dedication of the Colosseum, 
speaks of the immense arena as encompassing the entire world: 	
Quae tam seposita est, quae gens tam barbara, Caesar,
	ex qua spectator non sit in urbe tua?

What race is so remote, so barbarous, Caesar,
	that no spectator from it is present in your city?
 Spect. 3.1-2 
The poet catalogues those in atttendance in a way that describes 
the geographical limits of the empire: Sicambrians and Thracians 
from the north; Sarmatians, Cilicians, Arabs, and Sabaeans from 
north to south in the east, Egyptians and Ethiopians to the south; 
and the dwellers along the shores of Ocean in the west (3-10). All 
of these peoples are distinguished by their respective customs or 
by the exotic products of the lands they inhabit as well as by 
their diversity of language. But this diversity falls silent as in 
awe before the one true speech as foreign tongues train themselves 
to a uniform latinity:
Vox diversa sonat populorum, tum tamen una est,
	cum verus patriae diceris esse pater.
These peoples speak in different voices, then with one,
	when you are called true father of your country.
 Spect. 11-12
Barbarian speech, to the Latin ear inarticulate and confused, is 
thus acknowledged, but only to be explicitly represented as 
yielding to imperial prerogative when Titus is hailed in Latin by 
that characteristically Roman and nationalistic title pater 
patriae. 
	The effects of Roman linguistic imperialism, as I have said, 
were not merely symbolic. On the other hand, the ideology of 
universality that we reflexively associate with Latin culture 
demands a vigorous interrogation that it seldom receives. The 
basis of this interrogation lies ready to hand, but represents a 
story less often told than those rehearsed above. We know for 
instance that Latin culture took firm root in the west; but 
Gibbon, in the passage I have cited, goes on to observe what 
everyone knows, that failure to establish Latin in the eastern 
provinces was an important factor that led to the eventual 
disintegration of the empire. What he does not say and we do not 
often admit is that this failure indicates the element of wishful 
thinking in the imperialist claims of Latin culture generally, as 
well as the basic fictiveness of these claims. 
	The case of Ovid is instructive. His popularity, despite the 
Metamorphoses� closing boast, is attested more securely by the few 
surviving translations of his poetry into Greek than by any 
assumptions we might make about the universality of Latin. And 
indeed, when official displeasure relegated Ovid to the very limit 
of the empire, he got the opportunity to reflect on his earlier 
boast. Writing in his exile poetry about conditions at Getic Tomi, 
he returns over and over to the absurdity of composing or even 
thinking in Latin so far from Rome, suggesting that removal from 
the native seat of Latin culture has actually weakened his grasp 
on the language. 
	We need not take this claim seriously to believe in the 
anxiety on which it depends. Indeed, the cultural frontier marked 
by correct latinity was often drawn much closer to and, at times, 
even within the capital. There is general agreement that after 
substantial cultural heterogeneity in the early republican period, 
the Social War of 90 B.C. inaugurated the final stage of 
latinization and that this stage was substantially complete by the 
end of Augustus� regime. At the same time, historians, 
epigraphers, archeologists, and linguists are well aware that the 
linguistic and cultural diversity of Italy during the period from 
Plautus to Ovid is much greater than most students of literature, 
who concern themselves mainly with a relatively small number of 
texts that they read in modern editions with normalized 
orthography, commonly assume. It is also clear that the linguistic 
evidence available even from epigraphic sources disproportionately 
represents those segments of the culture that had the most reason 
to latinize. Though even the major languages such as Etruscan, 
Gaulish, Venetic, Messapic, Oscan, Umbrian, Faliscan, Paelignian, 
Auruncan, Aequian, Volscian, and Ligurian all eventually died out, 
inscriptions have been found in some of these languages dating to 
the early imperial period; and in two different areas of southern 
Italy a form of Greek continues to be spoken even today. When we 
realize these facts, we see that we are in no position to accept 
the universalist claims made by the latinized elite at face value. 
	Even among this elite we find constant criticism of one 
another�s pronunciation, diction, and usage. Catullus� poem on 
Arrius (84), perhaps the best known example, citicizes an 
unfortunate acquaintance for putting h�s where they don�t belong, 
a fault that was the subject of a learned treatise by Catullus� 
and Arrius� contemporary Nigidius Figulus. Even the greatest 
authors were not exempt from scorn if their language struck 
someone as odd�as it often did. Pollio famously derided Livy�s 
�patavinitas�. Vergil�s detractors parodied his experiments with 
dialect, and Agrippa deplored his habit of straining the language 
in a quest for novel effect. 
	Nor is Cicero himself above reproach. The idea that 
Ciceronian Latin is or should be accepted as a universal norm is 
familiar and widespread. Cicero certainly did what he could to 
encourage this view, going so far as to construct his own history 
of Latin oratory in the dialogue dedicated to and named for his 
friend Brutus, by setting himself up as the arbiter of all his 
predcessors� faults, including sins against pure latinity, in such 
a way as to argue that only he employed a perfect Latin style. His 
self-serving ideas were endorsed by Quintilian, the first real 
professor of latinity, and eventually by Poggio Bracciolini, 
Lorenzo Valla (an admirer of Quintilian even more than of Cicero), 
J. C. Scaliger, and Pietro Bembo�despite committed oppositon from 
such distinguished contemporary authorities as Angelo Poliziano, 
Desiderius Erasmus, and Justus Lipsius. Thus all modern grammars 
of Latin are based primarily on a Ciceronian canon of grammar, 
syntax, sentence structure, vocabulary, and taste. On the other 
hand, we know that Cicero was not without stylistic quirks of his 
own, such as a fondness for certain archaic and even �plebeian� 
usages that were widely avoided even in his own day. His ascent to 
the position of universal authority was far from assured: between 
his death and the time when Quintilian took up the cause, his 
influence was not great, and some of the greatest stylists of 
imperial times felt free to depart even quite radically from the 
Ciceronian �norm�.
	Thus the uniformity and stability of the language that for us 
best represents Latin culture is far less than the the myths that 
surround it tend to suggest. It may be that we should pay more 
attention to other myths, which in fact are available in plenty. 
Ovid was not the first to test the spatial limits of Latin 
culture. But his removal to Tomi, his perseverence in producing 
under alien and artificial circumstances a substantial body of 
work�along with the general reluctance of later times to allot 
this work more than a marginal place in the classical canon�tells 
a very different and neglected, but powerful story about Latin 
culture. Against the Vergilian model of universal extension and 
absolute potency we can set an Ovidian model of an outpost culture 
barely maintaining a degree of integrity against a much more 
powerful and numerous barbarian Other. This, in fact, is the story 
that was told more often and more openly as the political power of 
Latin culture waned and the language itself assumed greater 
importance as the chief embodiment of the culture that survived, 
eventually becoming virtually coterminous with it.
	Ovid�s excursion to the spatial limits of empire anticipates 
what was to develop along the axis of time. With political change 
came cultural developments that are reflected with substantial 
clarity in the mirror of language. By late antiquity, Christian 
policy makers were vigorously debating whether to observe 
classical pagan usage or to cultivate a distinctively pietistic 
latinity. Centuries later the English courtier Alcuin considered 
the Latin spoken and written in Charlemagne�s realm so corrupt 
that he instituted a thoroughgoing reform of orthography and 
pronunciation, and thus played a role, possibly a decisive one, in 
distinguishing Latin from the Romance languages. We have already 
mentioned the Ciceronian controversies of the Renaissance. 
Examples could be mutiplied, but the point is clear. Latin culture 
likes to imagine itself and its language as universal and powerful 
beyond all competitors. While the facts tell us otherwise, we 
latinists seem to find the story so appealing that we often behave 
as if it were true, even if we know it is not. We have made this 
myth an important part of how we think about the language�possibly 
even the basis of our love for it. And yet, when we reflect on 
other stories that we could tell, we are reminded that Latin is 
and always was at once less influential and less uniform than the 
myths that surround it wishfully suggest.
Latin Culture in the Modern World
The Aeneid is, of course, famously untranslatable. The episode 
cited above in which Juno delivers her terms of �surrender�, lacks 
when read in English or indeed any language other than Latin, much 
of its basic effect�but for a reason that, in this case at least, 
has nothing to do with Vergil�s celebrated mastery of Latin as an 
aesthetic medium. Reading the passage in translation, we miss none 
of the basic semantic content. We understand that a deal has been 
cut, we understand its terms and its consequences. It is the 
impact of the narrative event rather than any prosodic virtuosity 
that most impresses the reader. But if we do read the episode in 
Latin, a whole range of additional responses comes into play. 
	First, perhaps, we are conscious of employing a skill that we 
have acquired at some personal cost. For most of us, a part of 
this cost is years of effort and submission to a pedagogical 
system in which the student must try every day to construe 
specimens of Latin under the watchful eye of a teacher who will 
respond by pointing out and discussing at length and in meticulous 
detail each and every one of the student�s mistakes. This is a 
type of education that teaches humility as well as Latin and that 
equates humility with ignorance of Latin, pride with knowing it 
well. Understandably few willingly put themselves through this 
process for long. Some of us, however, persist until we arrive at 
the end of the Aeneid. Possibly we are reading this passage, even 
if it is for the first time, some years after our first encounter 
with Vergil; but the sense of youthful accomplishment that might 
well attend any reader who approaches the end of the epic in Latin 
for the first time is understandable, almost inevitable. Indeed, 
it can be expected to recall earlier sensations�those that some of 
us were encouraged to feel when we were advised not to abandon 
Latin after the tedium of Caesar and Cicero, because after all 
that hard work we were poised to reap the rewards offered by 
Vergil. Some who took this advice may have wondered about a reward 
that meant spending a semester or a year slogging through a few 
thousand lines of poetry parcelled out in snippets that were truly 
minuscule compared to what we could handle in our own, or even in 
other foreign languages. But to those who stuck it out, the 
accomplishment seemed all the greater. Simply reaching the end of 
the poem, having endured the tedium, the labor, and the seemingly 
endless deferral of gratification that this process entailed�for 
to the novice, the task seems truly heroic-even these apparently 
extraneous elements of the experience helped put us in touch with 
the emotions Aeneas himself must have felt in his hour of glory.
	Viewed from this perspective, the text of the Aeneid becomes 
not merely a narrative, but a kind of script for the establishment 
of Latin culture, a script that might support a limitless series 
of performances, each with its own variations, but all sharing 
certain crucial features. The series begins on the mythic level 
with the labors of the founder, Aeneas. It includes the political 
level and the establishment of stable government by the princeps, 
Augustus. And, I suggest, it extends to the education of the 
neophyte who by acquiring the skills necessary to read the 
national epic gains full membership in Latin culture.
	But what is the culture into which the young modern reader of 
the Aeneid is received? Early in the poem, Jupiter discloses that 
he has granted to Latin culture �empire without end�, extending 
indefinitely in space and time. We have spoken already about the 
spatial and chronological barriers that must limit our conception 
of Latin�s universality. But the professional rhetoric of the 
modern grammaticus likes to suggest that Jupiter�s grant is still 
in force, if in a greatly attenuated form. This rhetoric speaks of 
something called �the classical tradition� and figures scholars 
and others interested in the ancient world as �guardians� of a 
�legacy� that must be �preserved� and �handed on� to future 
generations; the materialist imagery of these sentiments is both 
obtrusive and misleading. In particular it grossly misrepresents 
the character of Latin culture in the modern world. For the modern 
latinist, a professional identity fashioned on a cultural model is 
vastly preferable to objectivist ideas about �the classical 
tradition�. Our business is not to contemplate an object, but to 
participate in a conversation. Just as social anthropologists have 
come to appreciate the unavailability of an objective vantage 
point on the contemporary, we latinists realize that our studies 
do not involve a disinterested perspective on a culture that is 
wholly other. Indeed, our implication in the �material� we study 
is much tighter than the anthropologist�s or the ethnographer�s. 
Visiting another culture, an investigator cannot but have some 
impact on it, and frequently will attempt to assimilate it to the 
greatest extent possible, but always with the understanding that 
the process takes place across cultures that are, ultimately, 
strangers. This method is not available to the latinist, who 
cannot work by traveling to a foreign land. We are students of a 
culture that no longer exists, except in our own work. More than 
any anthropologist can be, we, too, are natives here.
	To illustrate what I mean, let us consider another script for 
the performance of Latin culture, the teaching of Latin prose 
composition. For many years translation from the vernacular rather 
than free composition in Latin has been the more common practice; 
and an important feature of this exercise is that it involves an 
element of cultural as well as linguistic translation. The 
practice of doing �versions� in fact presents the challenge of 
reimagining one�s own culture along Roman models, just as the 
founder of Latin literature, Livius Andronicus, reconceived the 
Greek Muses of his native culture as Latin Camenae. What is 
fascinating is how often this form of cultural patterning involves 
explicitly imperialist themes, as in the following examples: 
122. After the destruction of his stonghold, Kunwar 
Singh pursued his career as a freebooter far away from 
the land of his birth. In the spring, however, he saw an 
opportunity of proving his claim to rank amongst the 
heroes of his race. He knew that the British garrison in 
the province of Oudh had been seriously weakened by the 
necessity of concentrating troops elsewhere: now was the 
time for him to strike a crushing blow at the 
government.�

123. When Lord Dalhousie proclaimed that the state of 
Jhansi had now become a possession of the British, the 
widow of the late ruler protested against his action. 
She might in time have learned to reconcile herself to a 
not uncommon fate, if the Government had not called upon 
her to pay debts which her husband had left.�

These passages are taken from a textbook of Latin prose 
composition originally published in England in over 150 years ago. 
It has been revised many times and is still in print. I was taught 
from it myself, not as a British public-schoolboy who would one 
day go on to a distinguished career in governing the colonies, but 
as an American graduate student looking forward to a bleak 
academic job market at the height of the Cold War�a vantage point 
from which an appreciation of the the irony involved in finding 
classical Latin equivalents for jingoistic episodes in British 
history was by far the most obvious lesson. For its intended 
audience, however�younger, more impressionable, and with no reason 
at all to question their country�s imperialist project�the 
exercise takes on a very different aspect, and the study of Latin 
implies a continuity of cultural ideology that today seems but an 
astonishing dream. And yet I cannot help but feel that my own 
students�some of them, at least; for an act of will is clearly 
involved as well�when they finish the Aeneid or triangulate their 
own love of Latin with respect to Vergil�s Juno or the British 
schoolboy�s Lord Dalhousie, do not in some significant measure 
share that dream, and find it beautiful.
	But how can this be? How can anyone seriously maintain that 
Latin culture is not something confined to a distant antiquity? 
And in what significant sense can the contemporary latinist claim 
membership in this culture? To put the matter in perspective, one 
may reply with a different question: if Latin culture did indeed 
meet its end, when did it happen? The answer, I believe, is far 
from clear.
	Professional Latinists generally train as classicists. As 
such, their area of expertise, as fixed by such documents as 
graduate school reading lists and histories of literature, 
extends, if we are speaking of authors, little farther in time 
than Juvenal (�127?) or at any rate than Apuleius (�170?), Fronto 
(�175?), and Aulus Gellius (fl. 170)�or, if we prefer to speak of 
more definite landmarks in political history, than the death of 
Marcus Aurelius (180). This is a particularly useful landmark 
because on July 17th of the same year there occurred at Carthage a 
hearing followed by the trial and execution of several people from 
the town of Scillum who refused to swear their loyalty by the 
Genius of the Emperor and offer sacrifice for his health on the 
grounds that they were Christians; and the text that informs us 
about this event, the Acts of the Martyrs of Scillum, is the 
earliest Christian text in Latin that we possess. The oldest Latin 
translations of the Bible are thought to date from this time as 
well. Other important texts quickly follow, including the works of 
Tertullian, who is credited with a large role in creating a 
distinctively Christian latinity; and this literature begins in 
the third century to assume an authority that eventually overtakes 
that of classical paganism. It is from this point, of course, that 
Gibbon dates the �decline� that led inevitably to the �fall� of 
the Roman empire, and the cause he alleges as well is the eclipse 
of pagan culture by an irrational �Oriental� mysticism. So perhaps 
this is as good a point as any to mark the end of Latin culture.
	Of course it is difficult to see this point as a definitive 
end. It was a long time before pagan culture lost its ascendency 
to the new religion, and we are speaking in any case of a process 
rather than an event. If our proposed landmark seems too early and 
arbitrary, perhaps we should look for a more decisive occurrence, 
for an event more firmly linked to the history of the language 
itself rather than to the varying but overlapping ideological 
perspectives of those who used it. The third century is one of 
almost continuous upheaval and cultural change and may thus be 
taken as a kind of watershed. If an emblematic moment is needed, 
perhaps what we are seeking is in fact a non-event, an actual rift 
in the fabric of Latin culture. Such a seemingly objective point 
falls during this very century: between the years 254 and 284, no 
Latin literature that we know of was produced, of any kind. This 
is a remarkable, possibly unparalleled occurrence in the history 
of literature. The language continued to be spoken, of course; but 
the character of that Latin is open to question, and the 
conditions that made possible such a complete lapse in the 
production of �literature� of any sort bespeak a profound cultural 
breakdown. After this disastrous period, new imperial 
administrative structures were created by new Augusti and a new 
senatorial aristocracy came on the scene to cultivate classical 
literature and to sponsor a classicizing literature of their own, 
while grammarians codified the language along classical models. 
But all of this activity could be motivated by nostalgia, even 
perhaps denial: by a desperate longing to resuscitate what was, in 
fact, a dead body. Perhaps the cultural breakdown of the third 
century marks the end of Latin culture by fixing the point at 
which Latin became a �dead� language. After all, doesn�t the 
character of the literature produced after this breakdown support 
such a conclusion? Had not a requisite degree of discontinuity and 
artificiality been reached that something could be said to have 
died?
	These points on the timeline have an undeniable appeal, but 
it is difficult to trust them implicitly. In any case, there are 
certainly pagan authors on the modern side of this rupture whom 
most classical latinists read, or at least consult, and frequently 
at that�Servius and Macrobius, for example. Many of us are 
probably at least passingly familiar as well with authors like the 
court poets Ausonius, nominally a Christian, and Claudian, a 
nominal pagan, both of whom seem to move freely in both pagan and 
Christian circles. Even among committed Christian authors there 
are those, like Lactantius and Prudentius, whom we recognize as 
classicizers; and still others who are simply so important in the 
scheme of �world literature� that it would be a willful 
cultivation of ignorance not to read them: Augustine is the 
preeminent example. But although these authors write in Latin, we 
hardly think of them as breathing the same air as Cicero or 
Vergil. Rome was no longer the seat of power. There was 
increasingly no senatorial aristocracy to speak of. Serious 
claimants to the title �Augustus� gradually ceased to exist. In 
the west, the most powerful person came to be the king of the 
Franks, a people who coexisted in the same territories with the 
more Romanized Gauls. These Gauls cherished the idea that they 
were the true inheritors of Latin culture, and modern historians 
often dignify them with the name �Gallo-Roman�. The Franks, or at 
least the Frankish court, aspired to this condition as well. Both 
groups were obsessed with a form of identity politics that has 
become all too familiar nowadays, and both coveted validation of 
their right to call themselves Roman, to see themselves as members 
of a living Latin culture. 
	Classical poets were in short supply in those days, but 
anyone someone could function as such could make a good career for 
himself. Venantius Fortunatus, a young man born and raised in the 
Veneto, arrived in this milieu not too long after the mid-sixth 
century. In the preface to his collected poems, he announces 
himself, however playfully, as a second Orpheus, singing in the 
wilderness to barbarians. It is worth bearing this passage in mind 
when we read his praises of patrons such as the kings Charibert 
and Chilperic or the duke Lupus. These Frankish noblemen offered 
the poet patronage and preferment, and the man who arrived at the 
Burgundian court a wandering poet died Bishop of Poitiers. The 
native tongue of these noble patrons was Germanic: if Fortunatus 
was a second Orpheus, they were authentic barbarians. But they 
aspired to membership in Latin culture, which by this time had 
become so much a matter of language that to a wandering poet fell 
the power to confer it upon them by writing conventional Latin 
panegyrics in their honor.
	The forms taken by Fortunatus� praise are instructive. 
Descending from a long tradition of regal pangyric in prose and 
verse, they adapt tradition to current realities in telling ways. 
We have seen Martial praising Titus as singular ruler of the 
entire world by celebrating the occlusion of plural, inarticulate 
barbarian languages by a universal latinity. Fortunatus invokes a 
similar motif in his encomium of Charibert, but with an important 
difference:
Hinc cui Barbaries, illinc Romania plaudit:
	diversis linguis laus sonat una viri.

On this side barbary acclaims him, Rome on that:
	in different tongues sounds the man�s unique praise.
Carm. 6.2.7�8
Here Latin does not occlude barbarian speech, but is forced to 
share the stage. Indeed, Latin voices explicitly take second 
place, as in a later passage that comments on the king�s bilingual 
eloquence:
Cum sis progenitus clara de gente Sigamber,
	floret in eloquio lingua Latina tuo;
qualis es in proprio docto sermone loquella,
	qui nos Romanos vincis in eloquio?
Though born a Sicambrian (of famous lineage),
	it is in your eloquence the Latin tongue flourishes;
what a speaker must you be in your own learned language,
	you who better us Romans in eloquence?
Carm. 6.2.97�100
Not only does Charibert outshine professional Latin rhetoricians 
like Fortunatus, but he beats them at their own game, outdoing 
them in Latin, leaving the poet�evidently not bilingual like his 
subject�to wonder what a spellbinder the king must be in his 
native Germanic, itself praised here as a learned tongue. In a 
related move, Fortunatus combines these two motifs in his encomium 
of Chilperic, Charibert�s half-brother and dynastic rival:   
Quid? quoscumque etiam regni dicione gubernas,
	doctior ingenio vincis et ore loquax,
discernens varias sub nullo interprete voces:	
	et generum linguas unica lingua refert

Why, whomever you govern under the sway of your kingship
	you surpass, well-schooled of mind, eloquent of tongue,
understanding various languages with no interpreter:
	your tongue alone answers the tongues of nations.
Carm. 9.1.91�94
And, in the same poem, the motif of the interpreter appears again 
to provide a learned gloss on the king�s name: 
Chilperice potens, si interpres barbarus extet,
	�adiutor fortis,� hoc quoque nomen habes:
non fuit in vacuum sic te vocitare parentes:	
	praesagum hoc totum laudis et omen erat.

Mighty �Chilperic��or, had we a barbarian interpreter,
	�Strong Advocate� (for this is your name as well)�
not in vain did your parents call you thus:
	all this was a presage and an omen of your fame.
Carm. 9.1.27�30
Once again the poet disavows personal knowledge of barbarian 
speech, displacing authority for the learned bilingual etymology 
onto the absent figure of the Frankish translator, skilled in 
Latin as well as Germanic.
	Granting these diplomas of linguistic skill was not 
Fortunatus� most lasting or, perhaps, his proudest achievement. 
Not long after the poet�s arrival in Burgundy he looked elsewhere, 
seeking the patronage of Radegund, former queen of Lothar I but 
since 544 the leader of a religious community at Poitiers. 
Radegund was at the time of Fortunatus� arrival in Gaul involved 
in a diplomatic effort to obtain a relic of the True Cross from 
the Byzantine emperor Justin II and the emperess Sophia. To this 
end she enlisted the services of Fortunatus, who composed a trio 
of learned Latin poems to help make her case. The effort was 
successful and the relic installed in 569; a fourth poem, a 
gratiarum actio, also survives. These along with the rest of 
Fortunatus� oeuvre are, rightly or wrongly, not much read or 
esteemed nowadays by those who consider themselves latinists. But 
two of his works, Vexilla regis prodeunt (2.6) and the exquisite 
Pange lingua gloriosi (2.2), both written to celebrate the 
installation of the relic at Poitiers, are still sung by 
thousands, perhaps millions, in their monodic settings as part of 
Holy Week observances of the Roman Catholic Church. They have been 
fairly widely recorded as well; several performances of them could 
be purchased today in any reasonably well-stocked record store. 
There would seem to be few artifacts of ancient culture of which 
anything like this can be said; and yet there are few that we 
consider less representative of Latin culture than these Christian 
hymns composed for a female patron of Germanic extraction living 
in a convent in Gaul. The fact that these hymns still have a place 
in the modern world, both in liturgical practice and in an 
aesthetic realm indifferent to their religious content, would seem 
to be further tokens of the anticlassical status that we latinists 
impute to them when we establish the pomerium of our professional 
responsibility.    
	Fortunatus� self-fashioning as an Orpheus among barbarians 
may remind us of attitudes expressed by earlier writers like 
Dracontius and Sidonius Apollinaris, and even those of Ovid in his 
exilic poetry, but it also conceals his status as a skilled 
specialist in an artificial medium not much practiced if highly 
prized. That his work should survive today in the form that it 
does, rather than enjoying a place in the canon of classical 
poetry, is perhaps understandable. How vital was the language in 
which he wrote or the culture that he conferred on his barbarian 
and Christian patrons? We are forced to infer from the strategies 
of praise that he follows and from the successful trajectory of 
his career that Fortunatus� patrons wanted to be praised in Latin 
for their accomplishments in Latin, even as the poet repeatedly 
defers to Frankish cultural superiority. Nevertheless, the desire 
of the Frankish nobility for praise of this type is rather 
difficult to understand. Isn�t such poetry in itself compelling 
evidence that Latin culture was already not merely dead, but a 
fossil?
Grammatical and Vulgar Speech
This commonly-held position remains in fact surprisingly hard to 
establish. By the sixth century, the Latin language and Latin 
culture had been through wrenching changes, and had reached a 
point at which modern scholars stop looking for the end of Latin 
and begin searching for the beginning of Romance. If we knew more 
about archaic Italy, the beginnings of Latin culture might seem 
equally elusive (and when we look only at the material record, we 
find that this is in fact the case). At any rate, it seems that 
the more we learn about medieval Europe, the more difficult it is 
to discern the moment when Latin language and culture die and when 
Romance languages and cultures are born.
	To begin with, we do not know when the Franks, who began to 
occupy the Roman provinces of Europe from the fourth century on, 
adopted Latin and abandoned Germanic as their �native� language. 
Indeed, we do not know to what extent this is even an accurate 
model of what happened. Did they, in fact, abandon Germanic, or 
did the Franks consider both languages their own? Are we speaking 
of the nobility only, or did the phenomenon transcend distinctions 
of class? When did Latin begin to evolve into Romance, and how 
long did this process take? Did Latin survive as a written 
language long after the spoken language had ceased to be 
recognizable as such? Where it used to be assumed that the process 
whereby Latin became Romance took place at the latest during the 
seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries, it is now thought that two 
different languages cannot be clearly distinguished until two or 
more centuries later, and not finally distinguished even then. 
	On one view, the distinction between the two languages was 
the artificial creation of Alcuin�s previously mentioned attempt 
under Charlemagne to reform the orthography and pronunciation of 
Latin on (what he thought was) a classical model. This argument 
rests partly on the notion that Alcuin, an Englishman, would have 
come to Charlemagne�s court speaking an English Latin: that is to 
say, his native language would have been so different from Latin 
as to obviate the danger of corruption, which on the continent 
would have been inevitable. In his attempt to enforce a uniform 
standard of spelling and pronunciation, then, one based on insular 
practice, Alcuin is argued not to have restored classical Latin, 
which was his goal, but to have �invented� medieval Latin as an 
artifical and mainly literary entity distinct from spoken Romance, 
which then developed into French, Spanish, Italian, and so forth.
	It�s a good story. It may even be, in some sense, true. But 
true or not, it is a spectacular vehicle for thematic analysis. At 
issue in this as in other stories of Latin�s demise is a strong 
element of teleology that appears to work like this: We �know� 
that Latin is now a �dead� language, the exclusive preserve of 
academic specialists, unsupported by a living culture. Our task is 
to discover when this situation first came about. We feel sure 
that this is in fact what happened, just as the Roman Empire 
�fell�, but we are hard put to say just when. Alcuin�s reforms are 
as good an event as any on which to blame Latin�s demise�which is 
to say, not very good at all. Long after Charlemagne scholars, 
clerics, and diplomats throughout Europe continued to write and 
converse fluently in Latin, many of them perhaps exclusively or 
nearly so. That this can be said only of a cultural elite is true 
enough. But the same view can be taken of the rise of any official 
modern vernacular, such as Italian, which in its �official� form 
was spoken by only a tiny fraction of the total population of 
Italy until late in the last century. It is further striking that 
we find in the story of Alcuin the pre-echo of a characteristic 
still operative in modern Latin culture. First, his classicizing 
objectives awaken the sympathies of the modern latinist, who sees 
in the presiding intelligence of the Carolingian �renascence� a 
kindred spirit. Second, though he did not �restore� latinity to 
its classical glory, by providing us with a boundary between 
classical and medieval Latin on the one hand, and between Latin 
and the vernacular on the other, he performs a service of great 
importance by ratifying linguistic and cultural categories that we 
hold so dear. Third and last, it is significant that the 
individual credited with performing this service is figured as an 
interloper, the product of a culture in which Latin was not in 
daily use, but was instead already cultivated solely as a learned 
language so different from the vernacular as to be immune from 
contamination or confusion with it. The linguistic situation in 
Francia we imagine as much more fluid, so much so that we cannot 
draw a line between Latin and Romance. In Britain, we imagine that 
Latin survived in something closer to its ancient condition; and 
it is therefore, paradoxically, the British arriviste who, 
appalled at the condition to which the language has descended 
among native speakers, sets things straight. What makes this story 
so intriguing is its resemblance to situations both in the ancient 
world, as when it fell to Greek slaves to organize and operate a 
system of education and a national literature for native speakers 
of Latin, and in the modern world, in which scholars raised 
speaking languages that are not descended from Latin have in their 
own minds, at least, assumed over speakers of the Romance 
languages a certain hegemony with respect to Latin studies. It is 
as if we believed that the status of the linguistic foreigner is 
actually an essential qualification for full membership in Latin 
culture. 
	However this may be, what always is, or should be, clear is 
that Latin has never been anything but an �other� language. It is 
hardly possible to point to a single specimen of Latin written at 
any time or place that can stand as a witness to the existence of 
a sincere, nativist Latin culture. The same might well be said of 
any language or culture, of course; but with respect to the Latin 
language and its cultures, it is an especially important point. In 
each period and every form through which Latin speaks to us, it 
has demonstrably internalized its status as an �other� language. 
	The most influential statement on this aspect of Latin is 
Dante Alighieri�s essay On Eloquence in the Vernacular. In book 1 
of this work, Dante divides all the world�s languages into two 
categories: the natural, which are the original and more noble 
sort, and the artificial, which are later human constructs. In the 
former category he places the vernacular speech used every day in 
different forms in different places; in the latter such languages 
as, preeminently, Latin. (Greek, too, he regards as an artificial 
language; but, not knowing Greek, he has little to say about it.) 
His argument is remarkable in that Latin was in the late middle 
ages a language of great prestige as compared with the vernacular. 
Dante acknowledges this fact by referring to Latin�s enormous 
utility as a grammatical language, one based on a rational system 
rather than on natural usage and thus impervious to change across 
time, national boundaries, or any similar factor. Latin for Dante 
is Latin, one and the same, always and everywhere. The vernacular, 
on the other hand, is capable of extensive and confusing variation 
over time and from place to place. Typically, he explains this 
property of natural language with reference to a judeochristian 
view of history, tracing the mutability of natural language to 
God�s punishment of humankind for constructing the Tower of Babel. 
The pristine state of the original human speech�probably some form 
of Hebrew�gave way to a degraded condition in a way that mirrors 
precisely the contrast between the edenic and postlapsarian 
conditions lived by the original humans Adam and Eve. Artificial 
language based on grammar is thus but synthetic expedient, like 
clothing, a cutural institution that enables humankind to cope 
with the degraded life that is the result of sin. But natural 
language, according to Dante, retains its inherent superiority and 
greater �nobility�, despite its mutability and the confusion to 
which this gives rise, as a matter of ontology. If one were to 
plot their places on a Platonic line of authenticity, Latin would 
be found to be a mere representation of vernacular speech; and 
Dante is clearly working with some such notion in mind.
	An important element of Dante�s position is the remarkable 
argument that Latin and the vernacular are more or less entirely 
unrelated. In particular, it follows from the fact that he regards 
the vernacular as the more ancient language that it cannot be 
descended from Latin. If anything, the opposite would on Dante�s 
account be true, Latin being a stable form of the vernacular 
constructed along grammatical principles. It was over a century 
after Dante�s essay before humanist scholars reached a consensus 
that ancient culture was not bilingual, writing the Latin that 
survived in classical literature while speaking a vernacular of 
which no record survived, but that it rather spoke and wrote a 
plural Latin that, far from being impervious to change, underwent 
many changes over time and in different places, emerging as the 
various forms of the vernacular spoken in contemporary Italy, 
Provence, France, Spain, and Romania. This conclusion anticipated 
the findings of later comparative philologists, which are the 
basis of modern historical linguistics. But neither Dante�s 
position nor the terms of the humanist debate have failed to leave 
their mark on the Latin and vernacular cultures of today. 
	Like the Aeneid, Dante�s Eloquence in the Vernacular is a 
foundational text. His argument for the greater nobility of the 
vernacular, though based on historically untenable ideas, is none 
the less revered as one of the originary charters of modern 
European consciousness. Significantly, this consciousness defines 
itself against the image of an older one that it takes to be its 
opposite. That this image is a constructed one endowed with 
properties tailored to the discursive requirements of Dante�s 
argument is of course equally significant. Like the myth according 
to which Dante begins to write the Divine Comedy in Latin, but 
then switches to Tuscan, this effort to articulate the intrinsic 
worth of vernacular speech, which in reality was not intrinsic or 
based on that language�s great antiquity as compared to Latin, but 
was due rather to the rise during the late middle ages of a 
prosperous merchant class that conducted its affairs in the 
vernacular instead of Latin, is taken to mark an important 
historical and cultural shift. Though his linguistic explanations 
are nowadays universally rejected, Dante�s status as revered 
spokesman for the new vernacular culture is thus assured.
	Humanist scholarship ultimately rejected the Dantean view 
that classical culture was bilingual, that Latin was a scribal 
language only and that the ancient Romans spoke a form of the 
vernacular. Before doing so, however, the humanists considered 
seriously several forms that an ancient bilingual culture might 
have taken. What is of interest here is that some of the versions 
that they proposed recur in various modern forms. 
	Professional linguists and philologists are much more aware 
than literary scholars of the many forms that the Latin language 
has taken in different places and at different times. On balance, 
however, they have tended to go too far in this direction and to 
regard the different varieties of Latin not merely as distinct 
dialects or stylistic levels, but almost as discrete languages. 
This practice has unfortunately colored the study of literature as 
well, artificially reinforcing the idea that the Latin of 
classical literature was effectively walled off from the spoken 
language, from regional variation, and other such forces. Indeed, 
it is not unususal to find historians of literature questioning 
whether ordinary speakers of Latin could even have understood what 
what was being said at a public literary performance during the 
early empire, as if the performer were speaking one language and 
the man in the street a quite different one�almost the situation 
Dante describes through his hypothesis of an ancient spoken 
vernacular that coexisted with an exclusively literary Latin. 
	The resulting modern construction, however, is artificial in 
a way that goes well beyond what Dante meant when he called Latin 
an artificial language. The analysis of Latin linguistic culture 
has become freighted with an abundance of technical terms used to 
designate a variety of dialects, argots, generic protocols, and 
other forms of speech observed in ancient usage. Employing Latin 
in its common modern role as a technical language, scholars employ 
terms such as sermo cotidianus or sermo plebeius to designate what 
a speaker of English would call �everyday speech� and then devise 
rules to characterize the spoken language in contrast with the 
written one. This procedure leads to arguments that treat an 
adjective like harenosus �sandy� when it occurs in serious poetry 
as a �borrowing� from the vulgar tongue almost in the same way as 
if it were a loan-word from Greek or Persian, and not a perfectly 
normal Latin word. The point of course is that, while the method 
makes it possible to distinguish usefully between the ways in 
which Latin was used under varying circumstances, the conclusions 
drawn perpetuate, no doubt unwittingly, something very like 
Dante�s idea that the written Latin we still read was a very 
different thing from what the Romans actually spoke. There is, so 
far as I know, nothing to suggest that Dante�s views on this 
matter have actually influenced later philologists. On the other 
hand, it is difficult not to recognize in Dante, in the humanist 
theorists of language, and in the work of modern philologists a 
deep conviction that that Latin we know from the written record is 
a strange and unusual thing, a language so artificial that it 
cannot well represent the everyday speech of the Roman people�that 
it is an artificial language, and not a natural one.
The Nature of Grammar
A more ancient view on the nature of Latin is equally 
illuminating. Two late antique grammarians, Charisius and 
Diomedes, cite the Republican-era polymath M. Terrentius Varro for 
the view that �correct latinity can be established by one of four 
principles: nature, analogy, convention, and authority.� These 
four �Varronian� categories are in fact used by later grammarians 
as the grounds on which specific usages can be justified. The 
terms are more or less self-explanatory, but is worth inquiring 
what is actually meant here by �nature�. 
	The first named, nature is also the preferred criterion, 
while the others occur in descending order of importance: to be 
able to cite the nature of the language as authorizing a 
particular usage was felt to constitute a stronger position than, 
say, the argument from authority, which would admit that the usage 
was irregular but justify it on the grounds that it could be 
paralleled at least once in a standard author. Nature enjoys this 
privileged position because the ancient grammarians felt that it 
was the basis of Latin grammar as a whole. Such a notion would 
seem to be drastically at odds with Dante�s position, were it not 
for the fact that the conception of nature held by the ancient 
grammarians is unstable and full of contradictions. Charisius for 
instance is capable of so categorical and seemingly unambiguous 
statement as this: 
Latinus vero sermo cum ipso homine civitatis suae natus 
significandis intellegundisque quae diceret praestitit.

The Latin language that is born along with an individual 
of Latin citizenship offered a means of expression and 
comprehension through speech. 

p. 50.16�17K/62.2�4B 
And accordingly, he glosses �nature� as a thing that is 
�unchanging and has passed on to us nothing more or less than it 
received [from the past]�: 
Natura verborum nominumque immutabilis est nec quicquam 
aut plus aut minus tradidit nobis quam quod accepit.

 pp.50.26�51.1K/62.15�17B 
So Charisius� appeal to nature, like Dante�s appeal to grammar, is 
meant to establish the fixity and immutability of the language.
	A paradox? Apparently; but if we inspect more closely the 
grammarian�s conception of nature, the paradox can be resolved. 
When an ancient grammarian appeals directly to nature or invokes 
the concept of nature as a grammatical category, it is clear that 
he is employing a constructed and indeed a highly regulated 
cultural marker. Furthermore, and contrary to what Charisius 
asserts in the passage quoted above, �nature� is not even in this 
sense an immutable category. The oldest and most basic view of 
language as a natural phenomenon concerns diction and posits that 
the names of things originally had a natural connection with the 
things themselves; but over time words became corrupt in various 
ways, losing their natural connection with the things they named. 
It would follow from this position that the older a usage, the 
closer to nature and hence more correct it ought to be. But while 
the grammarians do equate the ideas of �natural� and �correct� 
speech, they also frequently note that a particular word or 
construction is �archaic��i.e. inappropriate for contemporary 
usage except as a deliberate archaism. This implies that the 
nature of a language changes over time in such a way that the more 
ancient usage is not at all the most natural: what had been 
natural in Vergil�s time was no longer natural for Servius� 
students. Thus Charisius� assertion that the nature of Latin never 
changes is not only false, but false on the evidence of his own 
practice.
	The grammarians were not unaware of the difficulty they faced 
in resolving the contradictions inherent in their professional 
ideology concerning the natural and artificial qualities of Latin. 
One response to this problem was simply to do away with nature 
altogether. Indeed, those who concerned themselves less with 
systematic grammar as a whole than with the specific idea of 
latinity itself�writers like Pansa, Quintilian, the elder Pliny, 
and Flavius Caper�mention the four familiar Varronian criteria of 
correct latinity, but with an important exception. Where Varro 
speaks of �nature, regularity, usage, and authority� (natura 
analogia consuetudo auctoritas), these authorities cite 
�regularity, usage, authority, and antiquity� (ratio consuetudo 
auctoritas vetustas). That analogia and ratio are the same 
principle is clear enough (their synonymy is explicit in Diomedes, 
p. 439.15�30K), and two other terms are identical in both lists. 
�Nature� however has disappeared as an explicit term, while a new 
criterion, �antiquity�, has been added, if only in last place. 
This change seems closer to the theory of natural language and 
etymology discussed above, but it avoids the contradiction between 
the naturalist ideology and the artificial praxis that most 
grammarians employed.
	In the context of ancient grammatical theory, however, this 
reasonable solution to the problem of natural language is very 
eccentric. Indeed, the grammarians� insistence that nature is the 
basis of their art forms an essential feature of their 
professional ideology, one that was both consistent and long-
lived. More commonly the grammarians attempted to resolve the 
conflicting claims of nature and artifice. After commenting on the 
Latin language as an innate condition of Latin citizenship, 
Charisius goes on to qualify his statement as follows:
Sed postquam plane supervenientibus saeculis accepit 
artifices et sollertiae nostrae observationibus captus 
est, paucis admodum partibus orationis normae suae 
dissentientibus, regendum se regulae tradidit et illam 
loquendi licentiam servituti rationis addixit. Quae 
ratio adeo cum ipsa loquella generata est ut hodie nihil 
de suo analogia inferat. Ea enim quae ad explicandam 
elocutionem iam apud sensus nostos educata sunt a 
confusione universitatis disseminavit et a disparibus 
paria coaluit. Adprobatur autem defectionis regula 
argumento similium. 

But when with the passage of time [the language] 
recognized  artificers [i.e. us grammarians] and was 
taken over by our analytical observations, so that only 
a very few elements of speech deviated from the norm 
that we had established, it surrendered itself to 
regular rule and committed its characteristic freedom of 
speech to the servitude of reason. This reason has come 
to be innate in the language itself to such an extent 
that today the continuing contribution made by analogy 
per se is nil. For analogy generalizes the rules of 
linguistic analysis that we have deduced from 
[linguistic practice in its] confused entirety, and 
makes regularity out of irregularity, and the rule of 
differentiation is proved by the evidence of similar 
cases.

 p. 50.17�25K/62.4�8B 
Here the relationship between nature and grammar is exactly 
opposite to the one on which the idea of etymology as a quest for 
the �true names� of things is based. With the passage of time the 
nature of the language changes in such a way as to internalize the 
artificial system than we know as grammar; and by a rather extreme 
form of logical slippage based on ideological conviction, the 
grammarians maintained that the nature of Latin was identical with 
its regularized status as a grammatical, and hence artificial, 
language. 
	Thus were most grammarians able to claim nature as the most 
important standard of correct latinity while insisting that in 
practice the �nature� of the language is something that must be 
established by a particular method of applied study, a ratio, 
which enables the grammarian to articulate the rules that comprise 
his art. �Nature,� in other words, is here a grammatical, and so 
an artificial category. The grammarians� Latin thus resembles 
Dante�s vernacular in that it is subject to the forces of 
linguistic indeterminacy that assault its systemic coherence and 
produces change over time. But conversely, the ideology of the 
grammarians supports Dante�s notion that it is only the status of 
Latin as a grammatical language that preserves its coherence, its 
resistance to change, and its capacity to rise above the unstable 
flux of the vernacular. 
	Thus when the ancient grammarians speak of the �nature� of 
Latin, it is clear that they refer to nature as a constructed 
category, almost as a figure for the cultural authority that they 
arrogate to themselves. For them as well as for Dante, Latin is 
not a natural language in any simple sense. Its nature is 
constructed by the forces of culture. This paradox appears most 
clearly, perhaps, in a passage that reveals the gap between the 
meanings of which the word natura is capable as a grammatical 
terminus technicus  and in more exoteric usage. Charisius, as we 
have seen, accepts the idea that nature is the basis of ancient 
grammatical theory. But he betrays a somewhat different view in 
the dedicatory epistle of his magnum opus:
Amore Latini sermonis obligare te cupiens, fili 
karissime, artem grammaticam sollertia doctissimorum 
virorum politam et a me digestam in libris quinque dono 
tibi misi. Qua penitus inspecta cognosces quatenus 
Latinae facundiae licentia regatur aut natura aut 
analogia aut ratione curiosae observationis aut 
consuetudine, quae multorum consensione convaluit, aut 
certe auctoritate, quae prudentissimorum opinione 
recepta est. Erit iam tuae diligentiae frequenti 
recitatione studia mea ex variis artibus inrigata 
memoriae tuisque sensibus mandare, ut quod originalis 
patriae natura denegavit virtute animi adfectasse 
videaris. Valeas floreas vigeas aevo quam longissimo, 
fili patri tuo karissime.

Desiring to confirm you in your love of Latin, my dear 
son, I have sent to you as a gift this art of grammar, 
which has been brought to perfection by the diligent 
effort of the most learned gentlemen and disposed by me 
into five books. After you have looked deep into it you 
will understand the degree to which the reckless abandon 
of Latin eloquence is checked either by nature or by 
analogy�that is, by a system of careful observation�or 
by usage, which prevails by the consensus of many, or in 
the last instance by authority, which is accepted as the 
recommendation of the most wise. Now your task will be 
diligently to commit these studies of mine, the 
distillation of many different sourcebooks, to your 
memory and intelligence by frequent recitation, so that 
you may seem to have acquired by intellectual excellence 
what the nature of your original fatherland has denied. 
Farewell, flourish, and be strong so long as you live, 
son most dear to your father.
pp. xxK/59B
 
It is extremely telling that in this most conspicuous passage of 
the entire work Charisius should invoke the idea of nature in such 
contradictory ways. In the first instance it appears as we have 
seen it above, as a grammatical category and, specifically, as the 
most important of the four criteria that establish correct 
latinity. But in the second instance, nature is set against the 
entire enterprise of grammar: it is something deficient, something 
that must be corrected by grammar, a condition of birth�something, 
in fact, that looks remarkably like Dante�s notion of vernacular 
speech in a postlapsarian world.
	Charisius� five-book treatise belongs to the technical genre 
of the ars grammatica; but it must also be seen as part of a more 
diverse and prolific genre in which a father dispenses instruction 
to his son. The instruction concerns some topic or topics about 
which a gentleman ought to know, usually topics of great 
importance to any member of Latin culture. Like the modern student 
who reads the Aeneid, Charisius� son will grow familiar the canons 
of his language and so will be initiated into Latin culture. In 
this context, Charisius� closing wish is extremely touching: he 
hopes that his son will acquire through the application of 
intellectual effort, an effort that matches the father�s mastery 
of the subject demonstrated by the composition of this very work, 
�that which the nature of his original homeland has denied him.� 
This failure of nature or of birth is made good by the power of 
intellect as father and son come together in their mutual love of 
Latin.
Nature in Latin Culture
The inner conflict with respect to nature that we find in Dante 
and the grammarians is not merely a theme that recurs throughout 
discussions of latinity from age to age; it is in all ages a 
defining characteristic of Latin culture. The conflict appears 
with great clarity and significance in Cicero�s dialogue on Laws, 
where the grammarians� claim that their art is based on nature 
finds its parallel in the idea that Roman law�or, for the purposes 
of the dialogue, human law�is based on natural law. In Charisius� 
dedication, the grammatical concept of nature occasions a 
revealing remark about the linguistic faults to which the 
grammarian�s son was born in his originalis patria, his �original 
fatherland�. In Cicero�s dialogue, the idea of natural law gives 
rise to a discussion that glosses Charisius� apparently (but only 
apparently) redundant phrase by defining just what constitutes a 
Roman�s fatherland. 
	The dialogue on Laws, uniquely, is set at Cicero�s ancestral 
villa in Arpinum; the participants are Cicero himself, his brother 
Quintus, and their friend Atticus. Near the beginning of Book 2, 
Atticus waxes enthusiastic about the setting: �Nature is supreme 
in matters that concern spiritual repose and diversion,� he says, 
�just as you were saying before with regard to law and justice.� 
He then launches into a spirited encomium of the place�s natural 
beauty. Cicero replies that he comes whenever possible, since the 
place is dear to him not only for the natural beauty that Atticus 
fully appreciates, but for a personal reason as well: because it 
is his patria, his �fatherland�. His family has lived here for 
generations; it is still the seat of their ancestral religion. His 
father spent almost his whole life in a house that still stands, 
and the place is full of family memories. He compares his paternal 
homestead to that of the ancient Sabine, Manius Curius Dentatus, 
and his desire to return to it to that of Odysseus, who preferred 
his homecoming to Calypso�s offer of immortality (2.3).
	It is here that the discussion takes an especially 
interesting turn. Atticus happily admits his complete empathy with 
Cicero�s nostalgia for Arpinum: he too now loves Arpinum, knowing 
that it is the birthplace of his friend, just as he loves Athens 
not so much for its cultural riches (�stately and exquisite works 
of ancient art�) as for the great men who lived there (2.4). Note 
how Atticus appears to miss the point entirely. The expected reply 
to Cicero�s encomium of his birthplace would be, �Yes, I feel just 
the same way about my own birthplace.� Instead, Atticus inscribes 
himself within a triangular erotic relationship: Cicero�s love for 
Arpinum produces in Atticus, who loves Cicero, a similar love for 
Arpinum. Similar, but different, in that Cicero loves Arpinum 
�naturally�, because it is his birthplace; Atticus� love is 
predicated on a prior social relationship. His comparison of the 
love he feels for Arpinum to the love he feels for Athens confirms 
this point. Atticus actually takes pains to deny that he loves 
Athens as a center of culture, but rather insists that he loves it 
because, like Arpinum, it was loved by men he loves. The 
parallelism that Atticus sees between Cicero and himself is false, 
because the love that Cicero feels for his birthplace is natural, 
whereas the love felt by Atticus is an acculturated love, 
something learned�the kind of attachment that an individual might 
feel to a place with which he has no natural connection at all.
	This position makes Atticus a convincing spokesman for the 
idea that follows. �What did you really mean by the statement you 
made a while ago, that this place, by which I understand you to 
refer to Arpinum, is your fatherland?� The reader might be 
forgiven for wondering, has Atticus been listening? Arpinum is 
Cicero�s birthplace: what other fatherland could he have? Atticus 
turns out to be thinking much the same thing, but from a different 
perspective: �Have you, then, two fatherlands? Or is our common 
fatherland the only one? Perhaps you think that wise old Cato�s 
fatherland was not Rome but Tusculum?� This is of course just what 
any modern reader would think. Cato was born in Tusculum. He moved 
to Rome and made his career there, but Tusculum remained his 
fatherland. Or didn�t it?
	In what follows, Cicero enunciates the doctrine of the two 
fatherlands. According to this doctrine Cicero, Cato, and all 
natives of Italian towns have two fatherlands, one by nature or 
birth and one by citizenship or law�unam naturae alteram 
civitatis��just as the people of your beloved Attica, before 
Theseus commanded them all to leave the country and move into the 
city (or astu, as they call it) were at the same time citizens of 
their own towns and of Attica, so we consider both the place where 
we were born our fatherland, and also the city into which we have 
been adopted.� Cicero�s comparison is telling. Taking his cue from 
Atticus� well-known love of Athens, which Atticus himself had just 
made the vehicle of a similar comparison (and which is the source, 
after all, of his cognomen), Cicero explains the condition of 
modern Italy by appealing to that of ancient Attica. That is to 
say, the modern custom is justified not by an appeal to nature, as 
the idea that the legal order is based on the natral order might 
suggest, but by a paradigm drawn from another culture. Further, 
the culture to which Cicero appeals is distant, the particular 
usage that interests him no longer in force. After Theseus� 
organization of Attica, everyone became a citizen of Athens alone, 
and presumably lost any tie to a second fatherland. This is not 
the usage that Cicero has described as obtaining in modern Italy: 
�so we consider both the place into which we have been born our 
fatherland, and also the city into which we have been adopted.� 
But Cicero then in a sense validates his previous comparison 
between Rome and Athens and shows that his conception of 
�fatherland� is in fact much closer to Atticus� than to ours. �But 
that fatherland must stand first in our esteem in which the name 
of republic signifies the common citizenship of us all. For this 
fatherland it is our duty to die, to give of ourselves entirely, 
to stake and, as it were, to consecrate everything we have. But 
the fatherland that begot us is not much less sweet than the one 
that adopted us. Thus I shall never deny that my fatherland is 
here, though my other fatherland is greater and includes this one 
within it� (2.5). Atticus finds these arguments completely 
convincing and admits as much in what he must not have intended 
as, but to us can hardly seem other than, a jarring paradox: �I 
think I have been brought around to the view that this town that 
gave you birth is also your fatherland� (3.6).
	What is most striking here is the way in which the entire 
conversation, despite the interlocutors� occasional protests to 
the contrary, systematically privileges the claims of culture over 
those of nature. Atticus cannot really understand the natural 
affection that Cicero feels for his birthplace. Furthermore, 
Cicero, whose attitude seems much closer to ours, understands 
Atticus� confusion, and seems almost to acknowledge that the 
natural affection he feels for Arpinum requires some explanation.
	But the dichotomy represented here between nature and 
culture, while clear, is obviously complicated by Cicero�s claim 
throughout the dialogue that the basis of human law and culture 
lies in nature. This is the same situation that we observed in 
Charisius� Grammar. Both expositions take place under an 
ideological assumption that the cultural institution being 
discussed is grounded in nature, while the specific terms in which 
each discussion is framed relegate nature to a clearly inferior 
position vis a vis the cultural forces of grammar and law 
respectively. 
	In Cicero the need to contain and redeem nature and turn it 
to the purposes of culture is reflected in all the interlocutors� 
praise of the natural beauty that surrounds them. As noted above, 
Book 2 of the Laws begins with Atticus expressing his enthusiasm 
for the setting in which he finds himself. It is easy for a modern 
reader to share in his enthusiasm; but Atticus is no Thoreau. He 
is in fact closer to the Oscar Wilde�s Duchess of Berwick in Lady 
Windermere�s Fan who blandly observes, �After all, there is 
nothing like nature, is there?� When he compares the natural 
beauty of Cicero�s villa to the grandiose piles of other 
rusticating aristocrats, he heaps scorn on their penchant for 
marble floor tiles, paneled ceilings, and aqueducts built to feed 
artificial �Niles� and �Euripuses�, so called. Having once thought 
that the entire district of Arpinum was merely an uncultivated 
wilderness, Atticus is now surprised to find how much he enjoys 
it, and even expresses wonder that Cicero ever cares to go 
elsewhere��when you are not at Rome� (2.2). It would seem that the 
main fault of those other estates is that they use cultural means 
to counterfeit nature, whereas at Arpinum nature has been improved 
by culture. Naturalizing culture, counterfeiting nature by 
sophisticated technical means, it would seem, is bad; but 
acculturating nature, turning an unspoiled environment to 
cultivated ends, is good.
	This bias comes out in many details. For instance, when 
Atticus suggests that the threesome continue their conversation on 
a small island in the Fibrenus, Cicero heartily approves, but not 
because he wants to enjoy the natural setting per se: rather 
because it is an excellent venue for various cultural activities�
or, as Cicero puts it, �that island is a favorite haunt of mine 
for meditation, writing, and reading� (2.1.1)�and thus for 
conducting a philosophical dialogue on law. Later, when they 
arrive on the island, Atticus indulges in a brief ecphrasis:
Ah, here we are on the island! What could be more 
pleasant? The Fibrenus is split by this beak, as it 
were, and then, divided equally in two, washes over 
these sides, flows quickly past, speedily comes back 
together, and so embraces just enough space for a small 
wrestling floor. This done, as if its raison dՐtre were 
to provide us with a place for our discussion, it 
plunges immediately into the Liris and, as if it were 
being adopted into a patrician family, loses its less 
famous name and chills considerably those waters; for I 
have travelled and never felt a colder stream than this: 
I could hardly dip my foot into it, as Socrates does in 
Plato�s Phaedrus.

The ecphrasis in Latin literature is never a simple thing, but it 
is remarkable that Atticus is unable to manage this brief 
description of a very small island without employing three 
distinctly different similes. Merely describing the physical shape 
of the place does not satisfy him. Instead, he finds it necessary 
to load the island with a variety of overdetermined cultural 
markers. But this needn�t surprise us. School children are still 
taught that among the other remarkable features of the famous 
first simile in the Aeneid is the fact that it illustrates a 
natural phenomenon, a storm at sea, by employing a vehicle from 
the cultural realm, namely, a political riot�thus reversing the 
usual Homeric procedure whereby a warrior fights like a lion, 
weapons fall like hail, and so forth. Atticus� similes are like 
Vergil�s in this respect. The point of the island that splits 
Fibrenus stream he calls a �beak� (rostrum). The word does of 
course mean a bird�s beak, but in this aquatic locus it seems 
rather to denote the metaphorical �beak� or prow of a ship: thus 
the island, a natural formation, is assimilated to the condition 
of a boat, a product of human technology�and, it may be worth 
noting, a potent symbol in primitivist, �golden age� thought of 
nature violated, of life in an age when humankind could no longer 
live in deep harmony with the natural world, but chose or was 
forced to use technology to make its living: to live in a 
cultural, and not a natural world. At any rate, given the context 
and the dramatis personae, it is difficult to believe that the 
word rostrum does not also look to those famous prows erected in 
the Roman Forum as a monument to a naval victory over the people 
of Antium won by the consul C. Maenius in 338 BC. In the context 
of Atticus� ecphrasis, the meaning of these rostra lies not in 
their historical significance, but in the fact that they had come 
to be used as the main speaker�s platform in the Forum, a place 
from which Cicero had addressed the public on many occasions, 
including several on which he proposed new laws to the people. So, 
in as much as Cicero in the dialogue is about to promulgate an 
entire law code in the style of those venerable documents of Roman 
law, the Twelve Tables, perhaps it is appropriate that Atticus 
should depict this humble island in terms that recall the very 
center of Roman civic culture.
	But he does not stop at this. Soon he describes the way in 
which the Fibrenus, as if it existed only to create this island, 
feeds into the much larger Liris and then disappears, just as a 
man adopted into a patrician family loses the name to which he was 
born and assumes that of his adoptive father. Again culture 
illustrates nature, and the parallel contrasts between on the one 
hand natural and adoptive fatherlands earlier in the discussion 
(Italian and Roman respectively), and on the other hand natural 
and adoptive families (plebeian and patrician respectively), can 
hardly be missed.
	Like the Fibrenus feeding the Liris, this simile quickly 
inspires another. But it is worth turning back to see how the 
transition soon to take place is anticipated. The very same 
sentence in which Atticus figures the island as the Roman Forum 
goes on to call the little plot of ground that rises from the 
stream a �wrestling floor� or palaestra that looks almost as if it 
were designed to provide the three friends with a place for their 
discussion. The metaphor by which dialectic is figured as an 
athletic contest is common, but we should not for that reason 
overlook its specificity here. In the first place, palaestra  is a 
loan word from the Greek. Latin is full of Greek borrowings; but a 
sentence in which an unnamed place of no special significance, a 
place so small that it hardly exists except as a setting for the 
imaginary dialogue that is the only document even suggesting that 
the  place ever did exist�a sentence in which such a place is 
figured first as the center of Roman culture and then as a 
palaestra, one among many centers of Greek culture, deserves to be 
taken seriously. And in fact, the same movement from Rome to 
Greece occurs earlier, when Cicero compares his paternal homestead 
to that of the ancient Sabine, Manius Curius Dentatus, and his 
desire to return to it to that of Odysseus, who preferred his 
homecoming to Calypso�s offer of immortality (2.2.3). 
	The same movement from Roman to Greek is repeated within the 
ecphrasis when Atticus comments on the chill waters of the 
Fibrenus.  First, he says, they are so cold that they cool the 
larger stream of the Liris, into which they flow and then lose 
their name, like a man of humble birth who is adopted into a 
patrician family. Then, he says, they are so cold that he could 
hardly stand to test them with his foot, as Socrates tests the 
waters of the Ilissus in the Platonic dialogue Phaedrus (230b5�8). 
Of the many observations that could be made about this remarkable 
transition, I note only that the shift from patrician (and thus a 
fortiori Roman) to Greek, and to the Phaedrus in particular, 
brings the entire movement of this extraordinary passage to a 
close: for Cicero has of course been thinking of Plato all along. 
In a general sense, his entire project of writing philosophical 
dialogues is inspired by Plato�s example; more specifically, his 
earlier dialogue on The Republic and this one on Laws are 
explicitly modeled on the Platonic dialogues of the same names. In 
particular, the idea that nature is the source of human law is an 
important theme in Plato�s Laws (especially in book 10), even if 
Cicero has other sources in mind as well. And finally, the 
prominent thematic role allotted to nature in Cicero�s proem is 
inspired by Plato�s Phaedrus, which informs the entire passage 
under discussion, as Cicero at last discloses by having Atticus 
cite as his own model the behavior of the Platonic Socrates in 
that very dialogue.
	In all the examples I have discussed, the claims of culture 
are clearly privileged over those of nature. This much should by 
now be obvious. But the line of interpretation I have been 
following leads to a further conclusion as inescapable as it is 
surprising. In all these examples, the appeal to nature conceals a 
much stronger discursive move, a form of self-fashioning that is 
practiced by one�namely, Latin�culture taking as its model 
another�namely, Greek�culture. Cicero�s natural law is a Greek 
concept that in fact has little to do with the law code that he 
eventually promulgates. Similarly, the appeal to nature in Latin 
grammar, along with the very idea of systematic grammar and most 
of its actual details, is borrowed from the Greeks. And Aeneas 
finally succeeds in losing his Trojan identity and becoming proto-
Roman by taking on more exactly than ever the characteristic 
traits of the greatest Greek cultural paradigm, the hero Achilles. 
Again and again, when Latin culture confronts itself and inquires 
into its nature, it sees Greek.
	Indeed, these ingredients�a nativist or naturalist impulse, 
manifested either as the worship of Aeneas of Troy as Pater 
Indiges, as praise of a Frankish king for his command of Latin, or 
as a father�s express intent to correct by a grammatically 
constructed nature the lingusitic faults bequeathed to his son as 
a condition of birth; a coming together through triangular desire, 
whether in conflict over Lavinia, or in mutual affection for the 
Latin language, or for a particular landscape; a scene of 
initiation, by which Aeneas� last words to Ascanius and Charisius� 
invitation to his son provide the script for countless iterations 
played out across the centuries by thousands of readers, students 
of Vergil and students of grammar; these ingredients may be said 
to define the master narrative by which Latin culture continues to 
write itself.
	To conclude, let me draw attention to one further feature 
shared by Atticus and Cicero, by Aeneas and Charisius, by the 
spectators at Titus� games, by Fortunatus� Frankish patrons, by 
Dante, and by ourselves. It is worth remembering that someone like 
Atticus is that rarest of creatures in Latin culture: a native 
Roman, Roman by birth, or, as the phrase goes, �a Roman of Rome.� 
None of Atticus� own literary works survives. If one were to 
appear, Cicero�s friend would join Julius Caesar in a very select 
group, doubling the number of native Roman authors whose works 
still exist; for Atticus, as his biographer Cornelius Nepos tells 
us, was from a very old Roman family. His confusion in the 
dialogue I have been discussing is thus the more readily 
understandable. Atticus did not have two fatherlands, one natural 
and the other cultural. His only patria was Rome. It is therefore 
at least intelligible that he should be unfamiliar with the idea 
that most Romans have two fatherlands. But in other respects, 
Atticus� position remains strange and allows further interesting 
observations.
	First I would note that Atticus does not have the affective 
relationship for Rome, his natural fatherland, that Cicero has for 
Arpinum. Rather, he has the very feelings towards Rome that he 
expects Cicero to have, and that Cicero in fact insists he does 
have: feelings of duty, responsibility, and so forth. But in 
neither case are these really feelings of affection, such as 
Cicero (and Atticus following Cicero) expresses for Arpinum. But 
Atticus does have an affective relationship for his adoptive 
fatherland, Athens. His situation is thus the inverse of Cicero�s: 
a sense of duty rather than affection towards his birthplace, and 
a sense of affection for adoptive homes deriving from his love for 
various non-Romans, friends and cultural exemplars, whom he 
admires.
	It is also worth noting that Atticus, a native Roman, 
requires Cicero, an arriviste, to interpret his own position for 
him. As a Roman he has no sense of a natural fatherland as 
distinct from an adoptive one, and he regards his natural 
fatherland almost as if it were not his birthplace at all. 
Cicero�s position is fraught with complementary ironies: a 
consular, he was also a new man, reaching the highest annual 
office in the government but unable to penetate the inner circle 
of the ancient aristocracy. He was not a native Roman,  but 
became, if anyone, the exemplar of latinity for future 
generations. As such he is heir to a long line of foreigners who 
won their places in the pantheon of Latin culture, a group that 
includes the Greek Livius Andronicus, the Campanian Gnaeus 
Naevius, the Messapian Quintus Ennius, and many others; and he is 
the progenitor of an even longer line that includes the Iberians 
Quintilian and Martial, the Africans Charisius, Augustine, and 
Apuleius, the Britons Alcuin and Arnold.� The list could be 
infinitely extended.
	Finally, I would note that there is an interesting 
ambivalence in Atticus� position, one that is not, however, made 
explicit in the dialogue. Atticus was a member of an old Roman 
family, the Pomponii; but the name Pomponius is not Latin. If it 
were, it would be Quintilius (an older form, Quinctilius, is also 
attested). Pomponius is a Sabellian form of the same name, rather 
like such variants of the same name as Anderson and Anderssen. 
Many other ancient Roman families bore Sabellian names as well. 
Indeed, tradition even records that the first king, Romulus, 
murdered his twin brother Remus rather than suffer diminution of 
his kingly prerogative, and yet accepted as coregent for a time 
the Sabellian Titus Tatius. The biological twin is removed only to 
be replaced by a cutural one who is, moreover, foreign. So 
Sabellian and Latin culture existed side by side in archaic Rome, 
as Germanic and Latin cuture did in medieval Francia, and became 
in many ways indistinguishable. Officially the oldest Latin family 
in Rome was that of the Julii; but to claim this distinction even 
the Julii, with several other families, had to claim Trojan 
ancestry. The point is, there are no native Romans, no national 
myth of an autochthonous people. All members of Latin culture must 
journey to Rome, each in his or her own way; the modern Latinist 
is in this respect no different from any other member of Roman 
culture at any time, in any place.