INTRODUCTION

Roman tragedy has not received the same amount of careful examination as Greek tragedy – not even the tragic œuvre of Seneca and those few other tragedies that happened to survive in full. Partly the fragmentary nature of the textual corpus is to blame, but also, and this is perhaps even more important, the fact that Roman tragedy never managed to leave behind its smell of being secondary, of being derivative, and of being inferior to the Greek models. Nevertheless, some aspects of Roman tragedy, even early Roman tragedy, are reasonably well understood.

Performances of literary and subliterary tragic plays were an integral part of Roman dramatic festivals and were very much appreciated by all strata of Roman society. Leading Roman intellectuals felt that Roman tragedians and tragedies were roughly equal to their Greek counterparts (or even better still). And, in fact, one of the most important reasons why Romans felt so strongly about their tragedies and tragedians was the art and nature of the tragic language.

From a linguist's point of view, the language of Roman tragedy (and, in more general terms, of Roman drama) is a fascinating, artistic and artificial construction – but it could nevertheless have included colloquial features; the principal aim of this paper is to determine whether it did, but we shall also examine the nature of tragic language in a broader sense.

The present volume is to honour a man for outstanding contributions to scholarship, and to thank a friend for support and inspiration. Jim Adams is one of the very best and most important students of the Latin language who have ever lived. I attempt to sketch some of his achievements below, but first let me say this: I know that I can speak for the editors and many others besides (not only the contributors to the present volume, but generations of linguists, historians and classicists – not only Latinists – from many different countries), when I say that we are grateful to Jim not only for being the pre-eminent scholar that he is, for opening up and showing the way on numerous new or neglected aspects of Latin, and for publishing his findings so quickly, with such clarity and in such abundance, but also for inspiring us, pointing us in the right direction, and helping us to be better scholars. In my experience – and again I know that I speak for many – Jim has for decades been generous and unfailing in his readiness to share his learning, experience and approach, in answering questions, and in reading and discussing, and commenting and advising on, plans in germ and work in manuscript. For a linguist with work in draft, there are few things so beneficial as having it read by Jim, because he sees straight through the problems and tells you what the solutions are, and where to look to find the evidence to prove it.

GREETING AND FAREWELL EXPRESSIONS AS INDIVIDUAL ACTS AND SOCIAL PERFORMANCE

Greetings and farewells are among the most conspicuous aspects of interpersonal interaction in many different cultures and thus are a constant subject of anthropological, ethnological and sociological interest. From a linguistic perspective such expressions belong to colloquial language in its broadest sense, as they are inextricably connected to conversation and dialogue. Greetings and farewells are founded on a system of verbal interaction between individuals that varies according to cultural conventions, context, and the status and relationship of the interlocutors. To a much greater extent than most linguistic features, they require an interlocutor – though the interlocutor may not be actually present. Greetings and farewells also tend to come in clusters: the first interlocutor to utter one expects a reply or other reaction adequate or commensurate to it. Consequently these expressions are individual acts that belong to ritual performance governed by social conventions, meaning that speakers have a relatively limited freedom of linguistic choice (cf. Letessier 2000).

Indeed in modern western societies a speaker greeting or taking leave of a given person in a given context has a rather restricted set of options, such as ‘hello’, ‘hi’, ‘good morning’, and ‘goodbye’. These formulae often cannot be literally translated between languages because their meaning comes not from their lexical significance but from conventions that are strictly language-specific (cf. Cardona 1976: 205).

INTRODUCTION

Bede died in 735, at the twin monastery of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow near the modern Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where he had been a monk since his childhood. He was an Anglo-Saxon, living in an Anglo-Saxon kingdom, and will have spoken the local dialect of Old English. Shortly before his death, he completed his best-known work, the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, by far the most important source for the early history of Christian Britain. Like the rest of his extensive oeuvre, it was in Latin. Bede's mastery of the language owed everything to the use he made of the astonishing library built up by the founder of his monastery, Benedict Biscop, during repeated visits to the Continent. What most influenced him were not classical texts, with the exception of Virgil, but the Latin Fathers and, it need hardly be said, the Bible.

Bede's narrative manner in the Ecclesiastical History is consistently grave and measured. But he follows his models, hagiographic as well as historiographic, in allowing direct speech to play a significant part. I propose in this contribution to make some observations on the style of passages where two of his characters are represented as conversing, usually in private but occasionally in public.

Such a topic seemed appropriate in a volume devoted to colloquial Latin. But in an author like Bede, the question of colloquialism is more than usually fraught. What could Bede know of conversational Latin? He had not (perhaps) read Terence, let alone Plautus or the letters of Cicero or Petronius.

INTRODUCTION

‘Hyperbaton’ is the name given, originally by rhetoricians, to the phenomenon in both Latin and Greek word order whereby words that are or seem to be syntactically connected (e.g. a noun and an adjective which agrees with it) occur some distance apart, separated by other words that are in grammatical terms less closely connected. A convenient example is given at Rhetorica ad Herennium 4.44: instabilis in istum plurimum fortuna valuit: omnes invidiose eripuit bene vivendi casus facultates, ‘Unstable Fortune has exercised her greatest power on this creature. All the means of living well Chance has jealously taken from him’ (trans. H. Caplan). Rhet. Her. defines the feature as quae verborum perturbat ordinem ‘[the figure] which disturbs the order of words’; its name, which the Romans translated by transgressio or traiectio, means ‘stepping over’, implying that it is a dislocation of some more usual order in which one would not need to step over anything. Standard grammars usually present it as a departure from ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ order, although (as it is unnecessary to point out in the distinguished company of the contributors to this volume and especially of its honorand) any such definition begs a large question about what is to count as normal or natural. Furthermore, the listing of hyperbaton among the ‘figures of speech’ (which has been conventional from ancient times to Kennedy's Latin Primer and beyond) tends to carry at least for a modern reader the implication that it is an artificial rhetorical feature, belonging perhaps to a formalised literary register at some distance from ordinary speech.

The engagement of the Satires of Horace with everyday Latin has generally been a given. After all, the poet himself programmatically referred to them as sermo merus, straight conversation (Sat. 1.4.48), not to be compared to the high-register language of an Ennius, for example (1.4.60–1). But it does not take much to see that this position is disingenuous, as studiedly disingenuous as Catullus' praise of Cornelius Nepos and diminution of his own work as ‘trifling’, or as selectively true as Cicero's distinction:

INTRODUCTION

Linguistic register has been characterised as the result of a speaker's choice in a given situation (see Müller 2001: 282–3). It is, nevertheless, impossible to draw a hard-and-fast dividing line between linguistic variables always used by certain speakers and those about which a speaker might choose (so Müller 2001: 283; cf. Coseriu 1980: 111–12). Moreover, speakers and writers do not choose between a finite number of discrete linguistic varieties but modify their language in a continuous way according to the situation. The question what register is, and how it is divided from sociolect, is discussed in Chapter 2. Here we address a simpler question: how did Roman authors conceive of Latin as including options between which speakers and writers had to choose? This question encompasses several more specific ones. What awareness do authors show of a gap between formal and less formal varieties of their language – for example written and oral or official and familiar? What, if any, legitimacy or correctness did they assign to the different varieties, especially the informal ones? What do we learn from the metalanguage of scholars describing linguistic varieties?

We thus leave aside in the first instance passages in which Romans divide Latin into different varieties used by different groups of speakers, since such distinctions reveal concepts of geographical or social variation rather than of register.

INTRODUCTION

Most of the poems in the Silvae have a personal addressee, usually a senator or an equestrian; sometimes the emperor. Depending upon the status of the recipient and the relative gravity of the topic, Statius may adopt a more – or less – jocular tone. Short parenthetical remarks that are characteristic of colloquial language usually lend an air of informality when they are employed in literary works. Hence we would expect to find them in a poem such as Statius' hendecasyllables to Plotius Grypus, complaining about the unsuitable present that Statius received from him for the Saturnalia; indeed, the climax of the long list of items that Statius would have preferred to Grypus' gift contains two colloquial parentheses within a sentence of four lines (4.9.42–5):

Parenthetic formulae of request (rogo, 42) are characteristic of colloquial speech, which favours parataxis over hypotaxis (H–S 472; Hofmann 1951: 129–30, 199).

Although (or because?) it is a truism that Lucretius admits colloquial features in his De rerum natura, there are surprisingly few studies explicitly devoted to the language and style of this author, and certainly no book-length treatment exists as we have for a number of Latin poets. Commentators tend to note what they regard as colloquial usages, but are usually not free to pause and justify their assessment. The most substantial single publication on colloquialism in Lucretius to date remains that of Diels (1922), which is concerned primarily with morphological and lexical colloquialism and promises another study on syntactic colloquialism (Diels 1922: 59). Diels did not live to complete it.

Diels's general view was that the instances of colloquialism in Lucretius reflect the language of the farmers around whom the poet supposedly grew up and lived. At the time, scholars disagreed about the extent of the colloquial element in Lucretius' language (see Heinze 1924: 47; Ernout 1923: 155), whereas modern scholars are also likely to question the general explanatory rationale which underlies it. Moreover, it is fair to say that a certain disconnect has become the norm between scholars who are interested in details of Lucretius' language, at least when considered within the context of Latin usage in general and poetic usage in particular, and those who work on Lucretius as a literary or philosophical text and on what one might call his ideological position, whether it is within the didactic tradition, within the intellectual landscape of the Hellenistic period, or narrowly within the Epicurean tradition.

Aulus Gellius' theoretical attitude to current spoken usage is clear-cut (Wolanin 1999): it is a degenerate aberration from the pure Latin spoken before Augustan times (13.6.4), corrupted by the ignorant (15.5.1) and to be rejected even when not confined to the common herd (1.22.2). In this judgement there is no ambiguity; it remains only to see how far theory is supported by practice.

However unwilling Gellius may be to speak like the masses of his own day, he has no objection to speaking like the masses of long ago. In Noctes Atticae 17.8 the philosopher L. Calvenus Taurus, having invited his students in Athens to dinner, sends for oil to pour into the pot of Egyptian lentils and diced gourd on which the feast is based; a pert slave-boy accidentally brings an empty jar and, amidst much shaking and grimacing, claims perquam Attice that the oil is frozen: §7 μὴ γελᾶτε, inquit, ἔνι τοὔλαιον· ἀλλ᾽ οὐκ ἴστε οἵα φρίκη περὶ τὸν ὄρθρον γέγονε τήμερον; κεκρυστάλλωται. Taurus laughingly bids him in Latin to run and fetch some: §8 Verbero, inquit ridens Taurus, nonne is curriculo atque oleum petis?

That the exchange is of Gellius' own concoction is clear enough from the confusion between φρίκη and frigus (Holford-Strevens 2003: 232); we need therefore not worry about the kind of Latin Taurus used, or whether on such an occasion he would have spoken Latin at all. It is far more important to notice the echoes of early drama, in particular comedy.

INTRODUCTION

Epigram is and was regarded as well down the rankings in the literary hierarchy, and was so regarded by Martial himself: in one of the final pieces of his final book he runs down the literary scale, from epic and tragedy via lyric to satire and elegy, and asks quid minus esse potest?, ‘What can be lower?’; the answer of course is epigram (12.94.9). It is low literature and as such one might expect its linguistic register to be weighted towards the colloquial, as opposed to the literary, end of the spectrum.

Many epigrams, especially those of a satiric or scoptic nature, with which I will be chiefly concerned in this paper, do indeed have evident colloquial characteristics in that they are either framed as dialogues in direct speech, or as one-sided conversations between the author and an addressee (who can be real or fictional, named or not, or simply Martial's public addressed as reader or listener). Hominem pagina nostra sapit ‘my pages smack of mankind’, says Martial (10.4.10), and his poems often describe the situations, interactions and general paraphernalia of contemporary everyday life in vivid and immediate settings. This suggests that the language he uses will be in accord, and will be colloquial in the sense that it is what would have been generally and widely heard in Martial's first-century Latin-speaking world.

INTRODUCTION

This contribution looks at some of the divine scenes in the Aeneid and the language used by gods in speeches, considering them as a special case of the presence and transformation of colloquial language in a high literary context. The language of the Aeneid is generally acknowledged to be a Kunstsprache, an artificial construction, and the language of these scenes is likely to be especially stylised given that they feature the most elevated category of characters in the most elevated of poetic genres. Nevertheless, here I try to show how the artificial language of epic in these scenes of divine conversation echoes typical features of colloquial speech, characteristically combining such traces of familiar discourse with high poetic elements. I also suggest that stylistic choice in these scenes is more often determined by the dramatic and literary requirements of plot, scene or characterisation than by any consistent theory of the language of the gods in general.

‘COLLOQUIALISM’ IN THE AENEID

First, we face the issue of defining ‘colloquial’ features in literary texts. Anna Chahoud's analysis in Chapter 4 of this volume (section 3.2) provides a useful list of colloquial features of language in Latin, and I will here try the experiment of applying it as a template for analysing Virgil's text.

INTRODUCTION

C. Iulius Caesar is not a name that readily springs to mind in the context of an inquiry into the relationship between ‘colloquial’ and literary Latin; for ‘Caesar is incomparably the most “correct” of classical authors, if by “correct” we mean that he observes the “rules” of Latin orthography, grammar and word-order that would later become standardised by Palaemon and others’ (Hall 1998: 18). Caesar's linguistic self-discipline, which famously restricts the vocabulary of the Bellum Gallicum to less than 1,300 lexemes, is so thorough that it even affects and excludes forms, words and constructions which can hardly be called ‘colloquial’ if this term is taken as the opposite of ‘literary’. However, if we admit that colloquial Latin can also be taken to refer to ‘the Latin used conversationally by the upper … classes during the Republic’ (Dickey, this volume p. 66), in other words be equated roughly with what ancient theoreticians referred to by terms such as cottidianus sermo (Rhet. Her. 4.14; cf. Ferri and Probert, this volume pp. 14, 39), then Caesar might even be called the most colloquial of Latin authors: there is little in his writings which could not also have been said, without much stylistic effect, in a standard upper-class conversation of his time. All the more, though, the inclusion of a chapter on Caesar in this collection might seem pointless: for whether we call nothing or everything ‘colloquial’, the lack of substantial diastratic differentiation in the primary material provides little scope for illuminating comments.