GRICE E VARRONE

In passing from Greece to Rome we enter a very different world. 

One rightly speaks of the Greco-Roman era as a period of unified civilization around the Mediterranean area, but the respective roles of Greece and Rome were dissimilar, if complementary. 

Without the other, the contribution of either to later civilization would have been less significant and less productive. 

The Romans had for long enjoyed contact with Hellenic material culture and intellectual ideas, through the Greek settlements in the south of Italy: Sicily and Magna Grecia.

They had learned writing from the western Greeks. 

But the Greek world fell progressively within the control of Rome, by now the mistress of the whole of Italy. 

The expansion of Roman rule became complete, and the Roman Empire, as it now was, had achieved a relatively permanent position, which, with fairly small-scale changes in Britain and on the northern and eastern frontiers, remained free of serious wars for two hundred years. 

The second half of this period earned Gibbon's well-known encomium: 

'If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.'

In taking over the Hellenistic world, the Romans brought within their sway whatever they found on the way.

The.intellectual background of Greece and the polical unity and freedom of intercourse provided by Roman stability were the conditions in which the Roman Empire shone.

To the Romans, Europe and much of the entire modern world owe the origins of their intellectual, moral, political and religious civilization. 

From their earliest contacts the Romans cheerfully acknowledged the superior pompousness of the Greeks. 

Linguistically, this was reflected in the different common languages of the eastern and the western provinces. 

In the western half of the Roman empire, where no contact had been made with a recognized civilization, the Latin language -- which subsists in French, Italian, and Spanish -- became the language of administration, business, law, learning, and social advancement. 

Ultimately, Latin displaced the former languages of most of the western provinces, and became in the course of linguistic evolution the modern Romance, or Neo-Latin, languages of contemporary Europe, notably French.

In the east, however, already largely under Greek administration since the Hellenistic period, Greek retained the position it had already reached.

Roman officials often had to learn and use Greek in the course of their duties, and Greek literature and philosophy were highly respected. 

Ultimately this linguistic division was politically recognized in the splitting of the Roman Empire into the Western and the Eastern Empires, with the new eastern capital at Constantinople (Byzantium) enduring as the head of the Byzantine dominions through much trial and tribulation up to the beginning of the western Renaissance. 

The accepted view of the relation between Roman rule and Greek civilization was probably well represented in Vergil's famous summary of Rome's place and duty: 

let others (i.e. the Greeks) excel if they will in the arts, while Rome keeps the peace of the world.

During the years in which Rome ruled the western civilized world, there must have been contacts between speakers of Latin and speakers of other languages at all levels and in all places. 

Interpreters must have been in great demand, and the teaching and learning of Latin (and, in the eastern provinces, of Greek) must have been a concern for all manner of persons both in private households and in organized schools. 

Translations were numerous. 

Greek literature was systematically translated into Latin. 

So much did the prestige of Greek writing prevail, that Latin poetry abandoned its native metres and was composed during the classical period and after in metres learned from the Greek poets. 

This adaptation to Latin of Greek metres found its culmination in the magnificent hexameters of Vergil and the perfected elegiacs of Ovid.

It is surprising that we know so little of the details of all this linguistic activity, and that so little writing on the various aspects of linguistic contacts is either preserved for us or known to have existed. 

The Romans were aware of multilingualism as an achievement.

Aulus Gellius tells of the remarkable king Mithridates of Pontus who was able to converse with any of his subjects, who fell into more than twenty different speech communities.

In linguistic science, the Roman experience was no exception to the general condition of their relations with Greek intellectual work. 

Roman linguistics was largely the application of Greek thought, Greek controversies, and Greek categories to the Latin language. 

The relatively similar basic structures of the two languages, together with the unity of civilization achieved in the Greco-Roman world, facilitated this metalinguistic transfer. 

The introduction of linguistic studies into Rome is credited to one of those picturesque anecdotes that lighten the historian's narrative. 

Crates, a Stoic philosopher and grammarian, came to Rome on a political delegation, and while sightseeing, fell on an open drain and was detained in bed with a broken leg. 

He passed the time while recovering in giving lectures on literary themes to an appreciative audience. 

It is probable that Crates as a Stoic introduced mainly Stoic doctrine in his teaching; but Greek thinkers and Greek learning entered the Roman world increasingly in this period, and by the time of Varro, both Alexandrian and Stoic opinions on language were known and discussed. 

Varro is the first serious Latin writer on linguistic questions of whom we have any records. 

He was a polymath, ranging in his interests through agriculture, senatorial procedure, and Roman antiquities. 

The number of his writings was celebrated by his contemporaries, and his "De lingua Latina", wherein he expounded his linguistic opinions, comprised twenty-five volumes, of which books 5 and 6 and some fragments of the others survive. 

One major feature of Varro's linguistic work is his lengthy exposition and formalization of the opposing views in the analogy-anomaly controversy, and a good deal of his description and analysis of Latin appears in his treatment of this problem. 

He is, in fact, one of the main sources for its details, and it has been claimed that he misrepresented it as a matter of permanent academic attack and counter-attack, rather than as the more probable co-existence of opposite tendencies or attitudes. 

Varro's style has been criticized as unattractive, but on linguistic questions he was probably the most original of all the Latin scholars. 

He was much influenced by Stoic thought, including that of his own teacher Stilo.

But he was equally familiar with Alexandrian doctrine, and a fragment purporting to preserve his definition of grammar, 'the systematic knowledge of the usage of the majority of poets, historians, and orators' looks very much like a direct copy of Thrax's definition.

On the other hand, Varro appears to have used his Greek predecessors and contemporaries rather than merely to have applied them with the minimum of change to Latin, and his statements and conclusions are supported by argument and exposition, and by the independent investigation of earlier stages of the Latin language. 

Varro was much admired and quoted by later philosophers, though in the main stream of linguistic theory his treatment of Latin grammar did not bring to bear the influence on the successors to antiquity that more derivative scholars such as Priscian did, who set themselves to describe Latin within the framework already fixed for Greek by Thrax's Techne and the syntactic works of Apollonius. 

In the evaluation of Varro's work on language we are hampered by the fact that only six of the twenty-five books of the De lingua Latina survive. 

We have his threefold division of linguistic studies, into etymology, morphology, and syntax, and the material to judge the first and second.

Varro envisaged language developing from an original set of primal words, imposed on things so as to refer to them, and acting productively as the source of large numbers of other words through subsequent changes in letters, or in phonetic form (the two modes of description came to the same thing for him). 

These letter changes take place in the course of years, and earlier forms, such as "duellum" for classical "bellum", are cited as instances. 

At the same time, a *meaning* may change, as, for example, the meaning of hostis, once 'stranger', but in Varro's time, 'enemy.'

These etymologico-semantic statements are supported by scholarship.

But a great deal of his etymology suffers from the same weakness and lack of comprehension that characterized Greek work in this field.

"Anas", from "nare", to swim, vitis, vine; from vis, strength, and cilra, care, from cor iirere, to burn the heart, are sadly typical both of his work and of Latin etymological studies in general. 

A fundamental ignorance of linguistic history is seen in Varro's references to Greek. 

Similarities in word forms bearing comparable meanings in Latin and Greek are obvious. Take the first personal pronoun: 'ego.'

Some were the produ.ct of historical loans at various periods once the two communities had made indirect and then direct contacts.

Others were the joint descendants of earlier Indo-european forms whose existence can be inferred and whose shapes can to some extent be 'reconstructed' by the methods of comparative and historical linguistics. 

But of this, Varro, like the rest of antiquity, had no conception. 

All such words were jointly regarded by him as direct loans from Greek, whose place in the immediate history of Latin was misrepresented and exaggerated as a result of the Romans's consciousness of their cultural debt to Greece and mythological associations of Greek heroes -- and their enemies, like Aeneas! -- in the story of the founding of Rome. 

In his conception of vocabulary growing from alterations made to the forms of primal words, Varro unites two separate considerations, historical etymology and the synchronic formation of derivations and inflexions.

 Certain canonical members of paradigmatically associated word series are said to be primal -- all the others resulting from declension (declinatio), formal processes of change.

Derivational prefixes are given particular attention in book 6, chapter 38. 

One must regret Varro's failure to distinguish these two dimensions of linguistic study, because, as with other linguists in antiquity, his synchronic descriptive observations were much more informative and perceptive than his attempts at historical etymology. 

As an example of an apparent awareness of the distinction, one may note his statement that, within Latin, "equitiittis" and "eques" (stem "equit-"), can be associated with and descriptively referred back to "equus".

But that no further explanation on the same lines is possible for "equus".

Within Latin it is primal, and any explanation of its form and its meaning involve diachronic research into earlier stages of the Indo-European family and cognate forms in languages other than Latin. 

In the field of word form variations from a single root, both derivational and inflexional, Varro rehearses the arguments for and against analogy and anomaly, citing Latin examples of regularity and of irregularity. 

Sensibly enough, Varro concludes that both the principle of analogy and the principle of anomaly must be recognized and accepted in the word formations of a language and in the meanings associated with them. 

In discussing the limits of strict regularity in the formation of words he noticed the pragmatic nature of language, with its vocabulary more differentiated in culturally important areas than in others. 

Thus "equus" and "equa" have separate forms for the male and female animal because the sex difference is important to the Romans.

But "corvus" does not, because in them the difference is not important to Roman.

Once this was true of "columba" formerly all designated by the feminine noun.

But since "columbae" were domesticated, a separate, analogical, masculine form "columbus" was created.

Varro further recognized the possibilities open to the individual, particularly in poetic diction, of variations or anomalies beyond those sanctioned by majority usage or 'ordinary language', a conception not remote from the Saussurean interpretation of langue and parole. 

One of Varro's most penetrating observations in this context is the distinction between derivational and inflexional formation, a distinction not commonly made in antiquity. 

One of the characteristic features of inflexions is their very great generality.

Inflexional paradigms contain few omissions and are mostly the same for all speakers of a single dialect or of an acknowledged standard language. 

This part of morphology Varro called 'natural word form variation' (declinatio naturalis), because, given a word and its inflexional class, we can infer all its other forms.

By contrast, synchronic derivations vary in use and acceptability from person to person and from one word root to another.

From "ovis" and "sus" are formed "ovfle" and "sufle"

But "bovfle" is *not* acceptable to Varro from "bas" -- although rustic Cato is said to have used the form as opposed to the more standard "bilbfle" 

The facultative and less ordered state of this part of morphology, which gives a language much of its flexibility, is distinguished by Varro in his use of the term 'spontaneous word form variation' (declinatio voluntaria). 

Varro showed himself likewise original in his proposed morphological classification of Latin words. 

His use in this of the morphological categories shows how he understood and made use of his Greek sources without deliberately copying their conclusions. 

Varro recognises, as the Greeks had done, case and tense as the primary distinguishing categories of inflected words in the classical languages, and set up a quadripartite system of four inflexionally contrasting classes: 

Those with case inflexion, 

those with tense inflexion, 

those with case and tense inflexion, 

those with neither, nouns (including adjectives); verbs, participles, adverbs. 

These four classes were further categorized as forms which, respectively, named, made statements, joined (i.e. shared in the syntax of nouns and verbs), and supported (constructed with verbs as their subordinate members).

In the passages dealing with these classes, the adverbial examples are all morphologically derived forms like "docte" and "lecte".

His definition would apply equally well to the underived and monomorphemic adverbs of Latin, like "mox" and "eras"

But these are referred to elsewhere among the uninflected, invariable or 'barren' (sterile) words. 

A full classification of the invariable words of Latin would require the distinction of syntactically defined subclasses such as Thrax used for Greek and the later Latin grammarians took over for Latin.

But from his examples it seems clear that what was of prime interest to Varro was the range of grammatically different words that could be formed on a single common root -- e.g. "lego", "lector", "legens" and "lecte".

In his treatment of the verbal category of tense, Varro displays his sympathy with Stoic doctrine, in which two semantic functions were distinguished within the forms of the tense paradigms, time reference and aspect.

In his analysis of the six indicative tenses, active and passive, the aspectual division, incomplete-complete, was the more fundamental for him, as each aspect regularly shared the same stem form, and in the passive voice the completive aspect tenses consisted of two words, though Varro claims that erroneously most people only considered the time reference dimension: 

IS Active Time past present future Aspect incomplete 

discibam I was 

disco I learn 

discam I shall learning learn complete 

didiceram I had 

didici I have 

didicerii I shall learned learned have learned Passive incomplete 

amtibar I was amor I am 

amtibor I shall be loved loved loved complete 

amtitus I had amtitus I have 

amiitus I shall eram been sum been era have been loved loved loved

The Latin future perfect was in more common use than the corresponding Greek (Attic) future perfect.

Varro put the Latin perfect tense forms didici, etc., in the present completive place, corresponding to the place of the Greek perfect tense forms.

In what we have or know of his writings, he does not appear to have allowed for one of the major differences between the Greek and Latin tense paradigms, viz. that in the Latin perfect tense there was a syncretism of simple past meaning ('I did'), and perfect meaning ('I have done'), corresponding to the Greek aorist and perfect respectively. 

The Latin perfect tense forms belong in both aspectual categories, a point clearly made later by Priscian in his exposition of a similar analysis of the Latin verbal tenses. 

If the difference in use and meaning between the Greek and Latin perfect tense forms seems to have escaped Varro's attention, the more obvious contrast between the five term case system of Greek and the six term system of Latin forced itself on him, as it did on anyone else who learned both languages. 

Latin formally distinguished an ablative case.

'By whom an action is performed' is the gloss given by Varro.

It shared a number of the meanings and syntactic functions of the Greek genitive and dative case forms. 

For this reason the ablative was called the 'Latin case' or the 'sixth case'. 

Varro took the nominative forms as the canonical word forms, from which the oblique cases were developed, and, like his Greek predecessors, he contented himself with fixing on one typical meaning or relationship as definitive for each case.

He mistranslates aitiiitik€ pt8sis 'by casus accusativus.

Varro. was probably the most independent and original writer on linguistic topics among the Romans.

After him we can follow discussions of existing questions by several authors with no great claim on our attention. 

Among others Julius Caesar is reported to have turned his mind to the analogy-anomaly debate while crossing the Alps on a campaign.

Thereafter the controversy gradually faded away. 

Priscian used analogia to mean the regular inflexion of inflected words, without mentioning anomalia; the term anomalia (whence English anomalous= irregular, as a technical term sometimes used in grammar) appeared occasionally among the late grammarians.

Varro's ideas on the classification of Latin words have been noticed; but the word class system that was established in the Latin tradition enshrined in the works of Priscian and the late Latin grammarians was much closer to. the one given in Thrax's Techne. 

The number of classes remained at eight, with one change. 

A class of words corresponding to the Greek (definite) article ho, he, t6, the, did not exist in classical Latin.

The definite articles of the Romance languages developed later from weakened forms of the demonstrative pronoun ille, illa, illud, that. 

The Greek relative pronoun was morphologically similar to the article and classed with it by Thrax and Apollonius. 

In Latin the relative pronoun, qui, quae, quod, who, which, was morphologically akin to the interrogative pronoun quis, quid, who?, which?, and both were classed together either with the noun or the pronoun class. 

In place of the article the Latin grammarians recognized the interjection as a separate word class, instead of treating it as a subclass of adverbs as Thrax and Apollonius had done.

Priscian regarded its separate status as common practice among Latin scholars, but the first writer who is known to have dealt with it in this way was Remmius Palaemon, a grammatical and literary scholar who defined it as having no statable meaning but indicating emotion. 

Priscian laid more stress on its syntactic independence in sentence structure. 

Quintilian was Palaemon's pupil; he wrote extensively on education, and in his Institutio aratoria, wherein he expounded his opinions, he dealt briefly with grammar, regarding it as a propaedeutic to the full and proper appreciation of literature in a liberal education, in terms very similar to those used by Thrax at the beginning of the Techne.

In a matter of detail, Quintilian discussed the analysis of the Latin case system,. a topic always prominent in the minds of Latin scholars who had studied Greek. 

Quinitilian suggested isolating the instrumental use of the ablative ("gladiii") as a seventh case, since it has nothing in common semantically with the other meanings of the ablative.

Separate instrumental case forms are found in Sanskrit, and may be inferred for unitary Indo-european, though the Greeks and Romans knew nothing of this. 

It was (and is) common practice to name the cases by reference to one of their meanings (dative 'giving', ablative 'taking away', etc.), but their formal identity as members of a six term paradigm rested on their meaning, or more generally, their meanings, and their syntactic functions being associated with a morphologically distinct form in at least some of the members of the case inflected word classes. 

Priscian saw this, and in view of the absence of any morphological feature distinguishing the instrumental use of the ablative case forms from their other uses, he reproved such an addition to the descriptive grammar of Latin as redundant (supervacuum).

The work of Varro, Quintilian, and others during the classical age of Rome shows the process of absorption of Greek linguistic theory, controversies, and categories, in their application to the Latin language. 

But Latin linguistic scholarship is best known for the formalization of descriptive Latin grammar, to become the basis of all education in later antiquity and the traditional schooling of the modern world. 

The Latin grammars of the present day are the direct descendants of the compilations of the later Latin grammarians, as the most cursory examination of Priscian's Institutiones grammaticae will show. 

Priscian's grammar, comprising eighteen books and running to nearly a thousand pages as published today may be taken as representative of their work. 

Quite a number of writers of Latin grammars, working in different parts of the Roman Empire, are known to us from-the first century A.D. onward.JI 

Of them Donatus and Priscian are the best known. 

Though they differ on several points of detail, on the whole all these grammarians set out and follow the same basic system of grammatical description. 

For the most part they show little originality, doing their best to apply the terminology and categories of the Greek grammarians to the Latin language. 

The Greek technical terms were given fixed translations with the nearest available Latin word: 6noma, nomen, antonymiii, pronomen, syndesmos, coniunctio, etc. 

In this procedure they had been encouraged by Didymus, a voluminous Alexandrian scholar of the second half of the first century B.c., \vho stated tha:t every feature ·of Greek grammar could be found in Latin. 32 He followed the $toic word class system which included the article and the personal pronouns in one class (p: ·28, above J, so that the absence of a word form corresponding to the Greek article did not upset his classification.JJ 

Among the Latin grammarians, Macrobius gave an account of the 'differences and likenesses' of the Greek and the Latin verb, but it amounted to little more than a parallel listing of the forms, without any penetrating investigation of the verbal systems of the two languages.

 The succession of Latin grammarians through whom the accepted grammatical description of the language was brought to completion and handed on to the Middle Ages spanned the first five centuries of the Christian era. This period covered the pax Romana and the unitary Greco-Roman civilization of the Mediterranean that lasted during the first two centuries, the breaking of the imperial peace in the third century, and the final shattering of the. western provinces, including Italy, by invasion from beyond the earlier frontiers of the empire. 

Historically these centuries witnessed two events of permanent signifiI l L 1ROME 55 cance in the life of the civilized world. In the first place, Christianity, which, from a secular standpoint, started as the religion of a small deviant sect of Jewish zealots, spread and extended its influence through the length and breadth of the empire, until, in the fourth century, after surviving repeated persecutions and attempts at its suppression, it was recognized as the official religion of the state. Its subsequent dominance of European thought and of all branches of learning for the next thousand years was now assured, and neither doctrinal schisms nor heresies, nor the lapse of an emperor into apostasy could seri~usly check or halt its progress. & Christianity gained the upper hand and attracted to itself men of learning, the scholarship of the period shows the struggle between the old declining pagan standards of classical antiquity and the rising generations of Christian apologists, philosophers, and historians, interpreting and adapting the heritage of the past in the light of their own conceptions and requirements. The second event was a less gradual one, the splitting of the Roman world into two halves, east and west. After a century of civil turmoil and barbarian pressure, Rome ceased under Diocletian (284-305) to be the administrative capital of the empire, and his later successor Constantine transferred his government to a new city, built on the old Byzantium and named Constantinople after him. By the end of the fourth century the empire was formally _divided into an eastern and a western realm, each governed by its own emperor;. the division roughly · corresponded to the separation of the old Hellenized area conquered by Rome but remaining Greek in culture and language, and the provinces raised from barbarism by Roman influence and Roman letters. Constantinople, assailed from the west and from the east, continued for a thousand years as the head of the Eastern (Byzantine) Empire, until it fell to the Turks in 1453. During and after the break-up of the Western Empire, Rome endured as the capital city of the Roman Church, while Christianity in the east gradually evolved in other directions to become the Eastern Orthodox Church. · Culturally one sees as the years pass on from the so-called 'Silver Age' (late first century A.D.) a decline in liberal attitudes, a gradual exhaustion of older themes, and a loss of vigour in developing new ones. Save only in the rising Christian communities, scholarship was backward-looking, taking the form of erudition devoted to the ackoowledged standards of the past. This was an era of commentaries, epitomes, and dictionaries. The Latin grammarians, whose oudook was similar to that of the Alexandrian Greek scholars, like them directed their attention • ---~-----··------·-·--------- s6 CHAPTER THREE to the language of classical literature, for the study of which grammar served as the introduction and foundation. The changes taking place in the spoken and the non-literary written Latin around them aroused little interest; their works are liberally exemplified with texts, all drawn from the prose and verse writers of classical Latin and their anteclassical predecessors Plautus and Terence. How different accepted written Latin was becoming can be seen by comparing the grammar and style of St. Jerome's fourth century translation of the Bible (the Vulgate), wherein several grammatical features of the Romance languages are anticipated, with the Latin preserved and described by the grammarians, one of whom, Donatus, second only to Priscian in reputation, was in fact St. Jerome's teacher. The nature and the achievement of the late Latin grammarians can best be appreciated through a consideration of the work of their greatest representative, Priscian, who taught Latin grammar in Constantinople in the second half of the fifth· century. Though he drew much from his Latin predecessors, his aim, like. theirs, was to transfer as far as he could the grammatical system of Thrax's Techne and of . Apollonius's writi~gs to Latin. His admiration for Greek linguistic scholarship and his dependence on Apollonius and his son Herodian, in particular, 'the greatest authorities on grammar', are made clear in his introductory paragraphs and throughout his grammar." - Priscian worked systematically through his subject, the description of the language of classical Latin literature. Pronunciation and syllable structure are covered by a description of .the letters (litterae), defined as the smallest parts of articulate speech, of which the properties are nomen, the name of the letter, figiira, its written shape, and potestiis, its phonetic value.' 6 All this had already been set out for Greek (p. 24, above), and the phonetic descriptions of the letters as pronounced segments and of the syllable structures carry little of linguistic interest except for their partial evidence of the pronunciation of the Latin language. From phonetics Priscian passes to morphology, defining the word (dictio) and the sentence (oriitio) in the same terms that Thrax had used, as the minimum unit of sentence structure and the expression of a complete thought, respectively.37 As with the rest of western antiquity, Priscian's grammatical model is word and paradigm, and he expressly denied any linguistic significance to divisions, in what ·would now be called morphemic analysis, below the word. 38 On one of his rare entries into this field he misrepresented the morphemic composition of lROME 57 words containing the negative !'refix in- (indoctus, m1taught, etc.), by identifying it with the preposition in, in, into. 39 These two morphemes, in-, negative, and in-, the prefixal use of the preposition, are in contrast in the two words invisus, unseen, and invisus, hated (literally, looked (askance) at). Mter a brief review of earlier theories of Greek linguists, Priscian set out the classical system of eight word classes laid down by Thrax and Apollonius, with the omission of the article and the separate recognition of the interjection, already mentioned. Each class of words is defined, and described by reference to its relevant formal categories (accidents (accidentia), whence the later accidence for the morphology of a language), and all are copiously illustrated v·ith examples from classical texts. All this takes up sixteen of the eighteen books, the last two being devoted to syntax. Priscian seems to have addressed himself to readers already knowing Greek, as Greek examples are widely used and comparisons with Greek are drawn at various points, and the last hundred pages (r8.zo.r57 ff.) are wholly taken up with the comparison of different constructions in the two languages. Though Constantinople was a Greek-speaking city in a Greek-speaking area, Latin was declared the official language when the new city was founded as the capital of the Eastern Empire; great numbers of speakers of Greek as a first language must have needed Latin teaching from then on. _ · The eight parts of speech (word classes) in Priscian's grammar may be compared with those in Dionysius Thrax's Techne. Reference toextant definitions in Apollonius and Priscian's expressed reliance on him allow us to infer that Priscian's definitions are substantially those of Apollonius, as is his statement that each separate class is known by its semantic content. •• nomen {noun, including words now classed as adjectives): the property of the noun is to indicate a substance and a quality, and it assigns a common or a particular quality to every body or thing. 4' verbum (verb): the property of a verb is to indicate an action or a being acted on; it has tense and mood forms, but is not case inflected. •• participium {participle): a class of words always derivationally referable to verbs, sharing the categories of verbs and nouns (tenses and cases), and therefore distinct from both.• 3• This definition is in line with the Greek treatment of these words {p. 34, above). pronomen {pronoun): the property of the pronoun is its substitutability for proper nouns and its specifiability as to person (first, 58 CHAPTER THREE second, or third). 44 The limitation to proper nouns, at least as far as third person pronouns are concerned, contradicts the facts of Latin. Elsewhere Priscian repeats Apollonius's statement that a specific property of the pronoun is to indicate substance without quality, 4S a way of interpreting the lack of lexical restriction on the nouns which may be referred to anaphorically by pronouns. adverbium (adverb): the property of the adverb is to be used in construction with a verb, to which it is syntactically and semantically subordinate. 46 praepositiiJ (preposition): the property of the preposition is to be used as a separate word before case inflected words and in composition before both case-inflected and non-case-inflected words. 47 Priscian, like Thrax, identified the first part of words like proconsul, proconsul, and intercurrere, to mingle with, as prepositions. interiectiiJ (interjection): a class of words syntactically independent of verbs, and indicating a feeling or a state .of mind.<S. coniunctiiJ (conjunction): the property of conjunctions is to join syntactically two or more members of any· other word class,. indicating a relationship between them. •• In reviewing Priscian' s work as a whole, one notices that in the context in which he was writing and in the form in which he cast his description of Latin, no definition of grammar itself was found necessary. Where ·other late Latin grammarians defined the term, they did no more than abbreviate the .definition given at the beginning of Thrax's Techne. It is clear that the place of grammar, and of linguistic studies in general, in education was the same as had been precisely and deliberately set out by Thrax and summarily repeated by Quintilian. Priscian's omission is an indication of the long continuity of the conditions and objectives taken for granted during these centuries. · Priscian organized the morphological description of the forms of nouns .and verbs, and of the other inflected words, by setting up canonical or basic forms, in nouns the nominative singular and in verbs the first person singular present indicative active; from these he proceeded to the other forms by a series of letter changes, the letter being for him, as for the rest of western antiquity, both the minimal graphic unit and the minimal phonological unit. The steps involved in these changes bear no relation to morphemic analysis, and are of the type that found no favour at all in recent descriptive linguistics, though under the influence of the generative grammarians somewhat similar process terminologies are now being suggested. so L ' LROME 59 The accidents or categories in which Priscian classed the formally different word shapes of the inflected or variable words included both derivational and inflexional sets, Priscian following the practice of the Greeks in not distinguishing between them. Varro's important insight was disregarded. But Priscian was clearly informed on the theory of the establishment of categories and of the use of semantic labels to identify them. Verbs were defined by reference to action or being acted on, but he pointed out that on a deeper consideration (' si quis altius consideret ') such a definition would require considerable qualification; and case names were taken, for the most part, from just one relatively frequent use among a number of uses applicable to the particular case named." This is probably more prudent, if less exciting, than the insistent search for a common or basic meaning uniting all the semantic functions associated with each single set of morphologically identified case forms. The status of the six cases of Latin nouns is shown to rest, not on the actually different case forms of any one noun or one declension of nouns, ·but on semantic and syntactic functions systematically correlated with differences in morphological shape at some point in the declensional paradigms of the noun class as a whole; the many-one relations found in Latin (as in other languages) between forms and uses and between uses and forms are properly allowed for in the analysis. sz . In describing the morphology of the Latin verb, Priscian adopted the system set out by Thrax for the Greek verb (p. 35, above), distinguishing pres~nt, past, and future, with ·a fourfold semantiC division . of the past into imperfect, perfect, plain past (aorist), and pluperfect, and recognizing the syncretism of perfect and aorist meanings in the Latin perfect tense forms. sa Except for the recognition of the full grammatical status of the Latin perfect tense forms, Priscian's analysis, based on that given in the Techne, is manifestly inferior to the one set out by Varro under Stoic influence. The distinction between incomplete and complete aspect, correlating with differences in stem form, on which Varro laid great stress, is concealed, although Priscian recognized the morphological difference between the two stem forms unde.rlying the six tenses, 54 Strangely, Priscian seems to have misunderstood the use and meaning of the Latin future perfect, calling it the future subjunctive, though the first person singular form by which he cited it (e.g. scripsero, I shall have written) is precisely the form which differentiates its paradigm from the perfect subjunctive paradigm (scripserim, I wrote) and, indeed, from any subjunctive verb form, none of which 6o CHAPTER THREE show a first person termination in -15. This seems all the more surprising because the corresponding forms in Greek, e.g. tetypsomai (TETV\jJO!lat), I shall have been beaten, are correctly identified.ss Possibly his reason was that his Greek predecessors had excluded the future perfect from their schematization of the tenses, in that this tense was not much used in Greek, and was felt to be an Atticism (p. 30, above). A like dependence on the Greek categorial framework probably led him to recognize both a subjunctive mood (subordinating) and an optative mood (independent, expressing a wish) in the Latin verb, although Latin, unlike Greek, nowhere distinguishes these two mood forms morphologically, as Priscian in fact admits, thus confounding his earlier explicit recognition of the status of a formal grammatical category (p. 59, above).s6 Despite such apparent misrepresentations, due primarily to an excessive trust in a point for point applicability of Thrax's and Apollonius's systematization of Greek to the Latin language, Priscian's morphology is detailed, orderly, and in most places definitive. His treatment of syntax in the last two books is much less so, and a number of the organizing features that we find in modern grammars of Latin are lacking in his account; they were added by mediaeval and postmediaeval scholars on to the foundation of Priscianic morphology. Confidence in Priscian's syntactic theory is hardly increased by reading his assertion that the word order, most common in Latin, nominative case noun or pronoun (subject) followed hi verb is the natural ·one, because the substance is prior to the action it performs 57; such are the dangers of philosophizing on rui inadequate basis of empirical fact. In the syntactic description of Latin, Priscian classified verbs on the . same lines as had been worked ·out for Greek by the Greek grammarians, into active (transitive), passive, and neutral (intransitive), with due notice of the deponent verbs, passive in morphological form but active or intransitive in meaning and syntax and without corresponding passive tenses.• 8 Transitive verbs are those colligating with an oblique case (laudo te, I praise you, noce/5 tibi, I injure you, ege/5 miserantis, I need someone to pity me); and the absence of concord between oblique case forms and finite verbs is noted.•• But the terms subject and object were not in use in Priscian's time as grammatical terms, though the use of subiectum to designate the logical subject of a proposition was common~ Priscian made mention of the ablative absolute construction, though the actual name of this construction is a later invention; he gave an account and examples of exactly this use of the ablative case: me vidente puerum cecidisti, while I saw it you beat the boy, and Augusto ROME 61 imperiitiire Alexandria provincia facta est, when Augustus was emperor Alexandria was made a province. 6o Of the systematic analysis of Latin syntactic structures Priscian had little to say. The relation of subordination was recognized as the primary syntactic function of the relative pronoun, qui, quae, quod, and of similar words used to downgrade or relate a. verb or a whole clause to another, main, verb or clause. 6 1• The concept of subordination was employed in distinguishing nouns (and pronouns used in their place) and verbs from all other words, in that these latter were generally used only in syntactically subordinate relations to nouns or verbs, these two classes of word being able by themselves to constitute complete sentences of the favourite, productive, type in Latin. 6z But in the subclassification of the Latin conjunctions, the primary grammatical distinction between subordinating and coordinating conjunctions was.left unmentioned, the coordinating tamen, however, being classed with the subordinating quamquam and quamsi, although. 63 Once again it must be said that it is all too easy to exercise hindsight and to point out the errors and omissions of one's predecessors. It is both more fair and more profitable to realize the extent of Priscian's achievement in compiling his extensive, detailed, and comprehensive description of the Latin language of the classical authors, which was to serve as the basis of grammatical theory for eight centuries and as the foundation of Latin teaching up to the present day. Such additions and corrections, particularly in the field of syntax, as later generations needed to make could lie incorporated in the frame of ~efe:rence that Priscian had employed and expounded. Any division of linguistics (or of any other science) into sharply differentiated periods is a misrepresentation of the gradual passage of discoveries, theories, and attitudes that characterizes the greater part of man's intellectual history. But it is reasonable to close an account of Roman linguistic scholarship with Priscian. In his detailed (if in places misguided) fitting of Greek theory and analysis to the Latin language he represents the culmination of the expressed intentions of most Roman scholars once Greek linguistic work had come to their notice. And this was wholly consonant with the general Roman attitude in intellectual and artistic fields towards 'captive Greece' who 'made captive her uncivilized captor an<;! taught rustic Latium the finer arts,. 64 Priscian's work is more than the end of an era; it is also the bridge between antiquity and the Middle Ages in linguistic scholarship. By • 62 CHAPTER THREE far the most widely used grammar, Priscian's Institutiones grammaticae ran to no fewer than one thousand manuscripts, and formed the basis of mediaeval Latin grammar and the foundation of mediaeval linguistic philosophy, which must be considered in the next chapter. Priscian's grammar was the fruit of a long period of Greco-Roman unity. This unity had already been broken by the time he wrote, and in the centuries following, the Latin west was to be shattered beyond recognition. In the confusion of these times, the grammarians, their studies and their teaching, have been identified as one of the main defences of the classical heritage in the darkness of the Dark Ages. 6s FOR FURTHER CONSULTATION H. ARENS, Sprachwissenschaft: der Gang ihrer Entwicklung von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, Freiburg/Munich, I955, 28-9. R. R. BOLGAR, The classical heritage and its beneficiaries, Cambridge, I954- J. COLLART, Varron grammairien latin, Paris, I954· D. FEHLING, 'Varro und die grammatische Lehre von der Analogie und der Flexion', Glotta 35 (I956), 2I4--70, 36 (I958), 48-roo. L. LERSCH, Die Sprachphilosophie der Alten, Bonn, I838-4r. H. NETTLESHIP, 'The study of grammar among the Romans in the first century A.D.', :Journal of philology IS (I886), I89-2I4. R. H. ROBINS, Anci~nt and mediaeval grammatical theory in Europe, London, I95I, :chapter 2·. · J. E. SANDYS, History of classicql scholarship (third edition), Cambridge, 1.921, volux:ne I. · H. STEINTHAL, Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft bei den Griechen und Rllmern (second edition), Berlin, 1890. NOTES · r. E. GIBBON, The decline and fall of the Roman Empire (ed. J. B. BURY), London, I909, volume I, 85-6. 2. VERGIL, Aeneid 6, Ssi-3: Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento (hae tibi erunt artes), pacisque imponere morem, parcere subiectis et debellare superbos. 3· Noctes Atticae I7.I7.2; H. s. GEHMAN, The interpreters of foreign languages among the ancients, Lancaster, Pa., I9I4· 4· FEHLING, I9 56-58. 5. H. FUNAIOLI, Grammaticorum Romanorum fragmenta, Leipzig, 1907, 265: Ars grammatica scientia est eorum quae a poetis historicis oratoribusque dicuntur ex parte maiore. I I L 6. De lingua Latina 8.x. 7· ibid. s.s. 8. ibid. 5·3· 5·13· 9· ibid. 5·37. 5·78, 6.46. IO. ibid. 6.37-8, 8.3. II. ibid. 7 -4· I2. ibid. 9·3> I0.74• I 3. ibid. 9.56. I4· ibid. 8.2I-2, 9·35, IO.I.6. ROME 63 I 5. ibid. 8.54; CHARisrus, Ars grammaticae I (KEIL, Grammatici I, Leipzig, I857, Io4). I6. VARRO, op. cit., 6.36, 8.44, IO.I7. I7· ibid. 8.9-Io. I8. ibid. 9.96-7, I0."48. I9· PRISCIAN 8.I0.54· 20. VARRO, op. cit., 8.I6. 21. ibid. I0.62. 22. On Varro's linguistic theory in relation to modern linguistics, cp. D. T. LANGENDOEN, 'A note on the linguistic "theory of M. Terentius Varro', Foundations of language 2 (I966), 33-6. 23. SUETONIUS, Caesar, 56; GELLIUS, Noctes Atticae I.I0.4· 24. PRISCIAN, Institutio de nomine pronomine et verbo 38, Institutiones grammaticae 5.7.38; PROBUS, Instituta artium (H. KEIL, Grammatici Latini, Leipzig, r864, volume 4), 48. 25 .. DIONYSIUS-THRAX, Techne, § 20 (I, BEKKER, Anecdota Graeca 2, Berlin, r8r6, 64o); APOLLONIUS DYSCOLUS, Syntax 1.43.· 26. As noun, PRISCIAN 2.4.18, 2.6.30, IJ.J.II; as pronoun,- PR~BUS, Instituta (KEIL, Grammatici 4), I33· 27. APOLLONIUS, De adverbio, BEKKER, Anecdota Graeca 2, 531. 28. CHARISIUS, Ars grammaticae 2.r6 (KEIL, Grammatici I (r857), 238): Nihil docibile habent, significant tamen adfectum animi. 29. QUINTILIAN, Institutio aratoria 1.4.26. 30. PRISCIAN 5·14·79· 3 I. Their works are published in the eight volumes of H. KEIL, Grammatici Latini, Leipzig, r855-1923. 32. PRISCIAN 8.17.96; Defiguris numerorum 9· 33· PRISCIAN II.I.I. 34· De differentiis et societatibus Graeci Latinique verbi, KEIL, Grammatici 5, Leipzig, 1923, 595-655. 35· 'Artis grammaticae maximi auctores', dedicatory preface r-2, 6.x.r, II.I.I. 36. 1.2.3, 1.3·7-8. 37· 2.3.14: Dictio est pars minima orationis constructae; 2.4.15: Oratio est ordinatio dictionum congrua, sententiam perfectam demonstrans. 64 CHAPTER THREE 38. 2.3.14· 39· I7.I6.I04• 40. 2.4.17. 41. 2.4.18: Proprium est nominis substantiam et qualitatem significare; 2.5.22; Nomen est pars orationis, quae unicuique subiectorum corporum seu rerum communem vel propriam qualitatem distribuit. 42. 2.4.18: Proprium est verbi actionem sive passionem ... significate; 8.1.1.: Verbum est pars orationis cum temporibus et modis, sine casu, agendi vel patiendi significativum. 43. 2.4. I 8: Participium iure separatur a verbo, quod et casus habet, quibus caret verbum, et genera ad similitudinem nominum, nee modos habet, quos continet verbum; I 1.2.8: Participium est pars orationis, quae pro verba accipitur, ex quo et derivatur naturaliter, genus et casum habens ad similitudinem nominis et accidentia verba absque discretione personarum et modorum. The problems arising from the peculiar position of the participle among the word classes, under the classification system prevailing in antiquity, are discussed in II.I.I-II.2.8. 44· 2.4. I 8: Proprium est pronominis pro ali quo nomine proprio poni et certas significare personas; 12.1.1: Pronomen est pars orationis, quae pro nomine proprio uniuscuiusque accipitur personasque finitas recipit. 45· 13.6.29: Substantiam significat sine aliqua certa qualitate (cp. I3.6·3I). 46. 2.4.20: Proprium est adverbii cum verbo poni nee s·ine eo perfectam significationem posse habere; IS.I.I: Adverbium est pars orationis indeclinabilis, cuius.significatio verbis adicitur. 47· 2.4.20: Praepositionis proprium est separatim quidem per appositionem casualibus praeponi ... coniun~tim vero per compositionem tam cum hahentibus casus quam cum non habentibus; I4.I.I: Est praepositio pars orationis indeclinabilis, quae praeponitur aliis parti ... bus vel appositione vel compositione. 48. IS-7·40: Videtur affectum habere in se Yerbi et plenam motus animi significationem, etiamsi non addatur verbum, demonstrare. 49· 2.4.2I: Proprium est coniunctionis diversa nomina vel quascumque dictiones casuales vel diversa verba vel adverbia coniungere; I6.I.I: Coniunctio est pars orationis indeclinabilis, coniunctiva aliarum partium orationis, quibus consignificat, vim vel ordinationem demons trans. so. cp. P. H: MATTHEWS, 'The inflectional component of a word-andparadigm grammar', :Journal of linguistics I (I965), 139-71. SI. 8.2.7; 5-I3·73· 52. I7.25.I82-6. 53· 8.8.38; 8.xo.sx-8. I t ----------------------------·-----·; l54· 8.1o.55· 55· 8.8.J8. 56. 18.8.76; I8.10.79; I8.Io.82. 57• I7.I6.I05-6. 58. 8.2.7-8; 8.J.I4• 59· I7.15.93; I7.2I.153-4· 6o. I 8.2.JO. 61. I7·5·JO. 62. I7.2.I2-IJ. 63. I6.I.I; t6.2.IO. 64. HORACE, Epistles 2.1.156-7: Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes Intulit agresti Latio. . ROME 6s. F. LOT, La fin du monde antique et le debut du moyen age, Paris, I95I 189.