Ideas

by Peter Watson

  We may say that Roman law culminated in the code of Justinian (AD 527–565), which in turn largely shaped European law as it is exists today, both in Europe itself and in many of those countries colonised by later European powers. This code consists of the following entities: the Institutes, elementary principles; the Digest, a collection of juristic writings; the Code, a collection of imperial Enactments and the Novels, Justinian’s own legislative innovations. The layout of Justinian’s work identified the evolution of ideas and names those responsible, so it is especially useful in showing the way legal thought developed and matured in Rome. Its most well-known and influential element is the Corpus iuris civilis, effectively statute law affecting civil administration and the reach of ecclesiastical power and privilege. During the Middle Ages, the code of Justinian was more influential in the eastern part of the empire (Byzantium) but it was one of those classical elements that was rediscovered in western Europe in the twelfth century.

  Law, as we have seen, was an important part of the education of schoolboys in Cicero’s day. Education in Rome, the whole paraphernalia of learning, was much more organised there than it had ever been before anywhere else. There were schools in Babylon and academies in ancient Greece, and libraries with scholars in Alexandria and Pergamum. In Rome, however, besides a more widespread system of schools, with a standardised curriculum, there were far more public libraries–twenty-nine that we know about–a thriving book trade, the first publishing businesses that we have records of, many new developments in literary criticism, an art trade where art exhibitions were common, interior decoration (mosaics in particular), larger theatres–built with the help of concrete, from the ground up, in the centre of cities–and a new literary form, satire. The life of the mind, the world of ideas, was more widespread, and more organised, than ever before.

  A standard or ‘core’ curriculum was taught to all the sons of the elite, who wanted their boys to enter government. This core, this shared element, probably accounts for the spread of Roman culture in the West.25 The first thing the boys were taught, between the ages of seven and eleven, was Latin. For the better part of two thousand years, Latin occupied a particular place in the history of the West. The success of the Roman empire meant that Latin became the one tongue spread over a wide area. It was then adapted by the early Christian church, with the result that it subsequently became the lingua franca, first of ecclesiastical matters, then of diplomacy and learning. At the same time, since ancient Greece and Rome were thought of as the origin of all that was civilised about the West, familiarity with the language came to be seen as the mark of a civilised individual. Latin, it was said, ‘taught mental agility, it taught a proper aesthetic sense, and the hard work involved taught generations of boys the value of “grind” and showed them how to develop their powers of concentration’.26 ‘Latinity’, the culture of Latin, was held to represent ‘order, clarity, neatness, precision and succinctness, whereas the “vernacular” languages were disordered, incoherent, unsophisticated and coarse’.27 Latin was important, if not quite in this way. As we shall see, in later chapters, it played a very important role, in the Church, in scholarly life, and in the emergence of modern Europe. Before all that, however, we need to consider its position in Rome.

  Chapter 2, above, covered the state of the world’s languages at the point where the peoples of the New World separated from those of the Old. The birth of Latin conveniently helps to update the story. The true historical importance of Latin has only been understood since 1786, when an English judge, serving in India, made an extraordinary intellectual breakthrough. Sir William Jones had trained as an Oriental scholar before reading law (meaning, in those days, that he was taught Latin). When he got to Calcutta, in 1785, he started to study Sanskrit, the language in which the scriptures of India had been composed. After months of research and reflection, he gave a talk to the Asiatic Society of Bengal and the idea he broached there may be seen as the starting point for the whole study of historical linguistics. Jones’ breakthrough was to see that Sanskrit, both in the roots of the verbs and in the forms of grammar, was very similar to both Greek and Latin. They were so similar, he said, that they must have sprung from a common source. The judge’s argument was so convincing that, since his time, thousands of studies have been made of languages–both living and dead–right across the Eurasian continent. The broad conclusion of these studies is that there was indeed once a ‘mother tongue’, referred to as Indo-European, which was originally spoken by the people who invented farming and that, as farming spread, the language radiated with it, providing a common linguistic base for all, or most, languages right across the Eurasian landmass.28 This is discussed in more detail in Chapters 2 and 29.

  The Italic languages (Latin, Oscan, Umbrian) are so similar to the Celtic (Irish, Gaelic, Welsh, Cornish, Breton) that some scholars feel that speakers of a common Italo-Celtic group must have appeared somewhere on the central Danube no earlier than 1800 BC. Then, for some reason, the Italic-speaking group moved south, first into the Balkans, and then around or across the Adriatic into Italy. Meanwhile, the Celtic-speaking group migrated west into Gaul (France), from where they spread into Spain, northern Italy and the British Isles. As compared to Greek, Latin grammar and syntax are more archaic, closer to the original Indo-European. This is seen particularly in the process of inflection. Inflectional languages reveal the relation among words by adding endings to a stem. In addition, Latin also reveals relationship by adding prefixes.29

  The Indo-European-Italic-speaking newcomers seem to have reached Italy in three waves during the second millennium BC. The first to arrive were the speakers of proto-Latin, who soon after were forced west by later arrivals: their language survived only in the lower Tiber valley, spoken by the Latini tribe, and as other dialects spoken around Falerii and in Sicily. The second wave settled in central Italy, in the mountains, and their dialect became Umbrian in north central Italy, and Oscan further south, named after the Osci, a tribe near Naples (the Romans called them Samnites and their principal tribe was the Sabines).30 Finally, between 1000 and 700 BC, the Adriatic coast of Italy was overrun a third time, by immigrants whose tongue included Venetic in the north.

  The first evidence for written Latin has been found, according to Mason Hammond, on the protecting catch of a gold safety pin or fibula, dated by some scholars to 600 BC. The inscription is written in Greek letters reading from right to left, the opposite of later usage. Converted into Roman letters it reads: Manios med fhefheked Numasioi. In later Latin this would be Manius me fecit Numasio = ‘Manius made me for Numasius’.31 There are very few inscriptions from before the third century BC, which makes one think that the Romans wrote very little, or did so on perishable substances. At the same time, the language spread piecemeal, to the Oscan area by 200 BC, and to Apulia, in the far south, by the first century BC.32 Yet there were many areas of Italy where Oscan was spoken long after Latin was common in Spain. We do hear of documents in Latin as early as the treaty made by the Roman consul Spurius Cassius with the Latini tribe in 493 BC, and the Twelve Tables already referred to (451–450 BC). But literacy must have been limited at this stage; otherwise more inscriptions would surely have survived.

  The earliest literary survivals, in general, preserve the pattern and rhythms of oral speech. That is to say, they are repetitive, whether rhyming or rhythmical. This obviously makes sense: it was easier to remember stories if those narratives were rhythmical and rhyming.33 Verse, as we call it, comes from a noun in Latin, uersus, literally, ‘a turning’, from the verb uerto, ‘I turn’. It was a term originally applied to a furrow, because the plough both turned up the soil and turned back and forth in ploughing a field. From there the word was used for a line of plants laid out in a furrow and eventually it was used for any line, including a line of poetry. In English, verse and poetry mean the same thing, but verse, properly, applies only to the form, whereas poetry, from a Greek verb meaning ‘I make’, covers both form and content.34 We no
wadays contrast both verse and poetry with ‘prose’. This word derives from prosa, a corruption of the Latin adjective prorsus, ‘straightforward, right on’. Prosa oratio was ‘speech that goes straight on’, didn’t turn, like verse did.

  The vocabulary of Latin was poorer than that of Greek, and many words had been imported from elsewhere (for example, Latin borrowed twice as many words from Greek as did Greek from languages further east).35 Some of the deficiencies were pretty basic–Greek, for example, had far more words for colours than did Latin.36 In addition, compared to Latin Greek had an extra voice, number, mood and tense and twice as many particles.37 On the other hand, the Romans had more words to do with family matters, distinguishing for instance between maternal and paternal relatives. And since the favourite food in Rome was pork we find they had many more words for swine than anyone else. There were many legal and military metaphors, but large parts of the empire were still agricultural and this influenced the language. The English word ‘delirious’, for example, comes from delirare, which literally means ‘to go out of the furrow’, and then to act like a madman.38 By the same token, ‘calamity’ was originally calamitas, a plague, destructive to crops. The Romans themselves did not feel that Latin had the grace of Greek. They thought it was more suited to rhetoric than to lyricism, and to some extent this reflected their view that virility and dignity were the personal qualities that counted most. In Latin, ‘There is hardly any trace of affectation or literary refinement,’ says Oscar Weise, in his Language and Character of the Roman People. Latin on the lips of Romans was a disciplined language, with many subordinate clauses dependent on a single governing verb, ‘which might be seen as a military arrangement of words, with all regimented clauses looking to the verb, as soldiers look to their commanding officer.’ Latin was a concrete, specific language, avoiding abstractions. Classical Latin, says Joseph Farrell, was a masculine language. ‘We know of many more women writing in Greek than in Latin.’39

  Many English words, of course, come from Latin and their etymology helps illustrate Roman ideas. For example, the tribuni were originally headsmen of the tribes; they came to be magistrates whose job was to protect the people; the raised seat which they used, by virtue of their high office, was called a tribunale–hence our word ‘tribunal’. Candidatus was the word used to describe an applicant for a magisterial post, but its origin lay in the bright white toga (candida) which was worn when soliciting votes.40 Our word ‘culminate’, comes from culmen, reed, with which roofs were made, completing a building. ‘Contemplate’ and ‘temple’ are related: contemplari originally meant to watch the heavens. To begin with, a consecrated building was a fanum and hence all unconsecrated ground which lay before the shrine was pro fanum.41 Despite its shortcomings as a poetic language in comparison with Greek, Latin was an interlocking, internally logical system, which has made it the subject of great fascination down the ages.

  The high point of classical Latin, the so-called ‘golden age’ (there was a ‘silver age’ too), fell at the time of Augustus, with the prose of Cicero and the verse of Virgil. After that, its trajectory or career was far from straightforward, until it became a dead language. After the end of the western Roman empire in the fifth century AD the speech of ordinary people in Europe changed and diversified into the various ‘Romance vernaculars’. But Latin became an international language. As both a spoken and a written tongue, it was used for learning, diplomacy and in the church, certainly as late as the seventeenth century, and in some corners of Europe even later.42 At the same time, the literary language–on the lips of writers trained in rhetoric–grew distant from the ordinary spoken Latin. In spite of Cicero’s elegance, and Virgil’s graceful fluency, a vulgar Latin was in common use among the masses. When Pompeii, a city south of Naples, was overwhelmed by an eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, its everyday life was ‘frozen’ at a specific moment in time. Modern excavation has revealed, among other things, certain scribblings on its walls, called in Italian graffiti, ‘writings’. These preserve the ordinary, everyday Latin of the common people in mid-first century AD. Many of these are ribald curses invoked against their author’s enemies, in language a long way from Cicero and Virgil.43

  Latin also took over in the church. Christianity had originally grown among Greek speakers in the eastern Mediterranean (the first bishops of Rome were all Greek speakers).44 The first Christian missionaries and the authors of the New Testament (the Gospels and Epistles) had used the current Greek of the Hellenistic world, known as ‘common’ (koine) Greek. In Rome, however, the early Christians naturally spoke and wrote the Latin of the ordinary people who were the first converts. Moreover, they avoided the Ciceronian literary style because that was identified with upper-class paganism. But that changed. As the Roman empire declined and fell, and the church took over some of its functions (which are described in the next chapter), Christianity adopted Latin–and the finer elements of Ciceronian and Virgilian Latin at that. This is most clearly seen in the Confessions of St Augustine, in which, just before AD 400, he set out, in an intimate, confessional tone, the course of his conversion to Christianity.45 Arguably even more important for the influence of Latin on the Western church was the translation of the Bible (Biblia), prepared by St Jerome over the years from about AD 380 to 404.46 This, the Vulgate Bible, incorporated many classical traditions–satire, biography–to produce a standard work that endured for centuries.47

  Returning now to the education of the young Roman, the next stage, from twelve to fifteen, was the study of language and literature. The main text studied here was Virgil’s Aeneid. Students read aloud from this and other works and developed their skills of criticism, commenting on grammar, figures of speech, and the writer’s use of mythology. At sixteen, boys moved from literature to rhetoric, which they studied by attending public lectures.

  ‘Rhetoric,’ says Simon Price, ‘generally has a bad name today. We value “sincerity” over “artifice” and our modern preference poses real problems for our appreciation both of Latin and Renaissance literature. As C. S. Lewis also wrote: “Rhetoric is the greatest barrier between us and our ancestors…Nearly all our older poetry was written and read by men to whom the distinction between poetry and rhetoric, in its modern form, would have been meaningless”.’48 Study of rhetoric fell into two: suasoriae and controversiae. Suasoriae were designed to help boys construct arguments. They argued over episodes from the past: for example, should Caesar accept the kingship? In controversiae, the boys were given difficult legal problems. For instance, in one case mentioned by Price a son falls out with his father and is banished from home. While in exile, he studies medicine. At a later date, his father falls ill and when his own doctors fail to cure him the son is summoned. The son prescribes a special medicine, which the father drinks, then dies. Calmly, the son takes his own medicine but does not die. Still, he is charged with parricide. In class, the students must provide a case for both prosecution and defence.49

  The system seems to have worked, in that privileges for teachers became common in Rome, though Michael Grant argues that the authorities should have intervened more to maintain standards. Vespasian, emperor in AD 69–79, founded two salaried chairs for the teaching of Greek and Latin rhetoric. Even outside Rome, teachers were exempt from various civic obligations.50

  The spread of literacy in Rome was piecemeal but all-important. The existence of graffiti, and the fact that more or less average soldiers were able to write letters home, suggests that literacy extended well beyond senators and politicians.51 But we must be careful not to exaggerate–there were no eyeglasses in ancient Rome, no printed advertisements, no timetables, no mass circulation of the Bible.52 One estimate is that not more than 5 per cent of the population in classical Athens was literate in the sense that we use the word today, and not more than 10 per cent in Augustan Rome.53 In any case, to begin with, literacy may not have been seen as conferring the advantages that seem so obvious to us. Many people in antiquity developed prodigious memories
and could faultlessly recall great chunks of material. Others were content to listen to their recitations, and respect for memory was deeply entrenched.54 In effect, then, people could be ‘literate’ (in the sense of ‘knowing books’) in a ‘second-hand’ way.55

  Arguments against the wider spread of literacy include the economic. In classical Rome, a scroll was made from sheets of papyrus, glued together. It was difficult to handle; and a long scroll made writing, with quill and ink, more difficult still, as the manuscript lengthened. Copies were produced, however, Cicero being just one who sent volumes to his friend Atticus, who had slaves standing by to make duplicates. Horace refers to the brothers Sosii, inferring that their bookselling/publishing business was profitable, and both Quintilian and Martial mention Tryphon and Arectus as publishers.56 Yet this seems doubtful. According to one estimate, a sheet of papyrus in the first century AD cost $30–35 (at 1989 prices) in Egypt, where it was produced, and much more abroad. Martial’s first book of epigrams–some seven hundred lines long–was priced at 20 sestertii (= 5 denarii), and his thirteenth (276 lines) at 4 sestertii (= 1 denarius). To give some idea of value, Martial himself says that ‘you could get a chick-pea dinner and a woman for an as each’. Since an as was worth 1/18 of a denarius, then as John Barsby puts it, ‘You could have had forty-five chick-pea dinners plus forty-five nights of love for the price of a copy of Martial’s book of epigrams. It is a wonder he sold any copies at all.’ 57

  Most writing, of course, was not epigrams or philosophy. It was functional, relating to the running of a farm or business, keeping accounts, sending letters and so on. This is what William Harris calls ‘craftsmen’s literacy’. In the Satyricon, the freedman Echion, referring to the ability to read legal matters, remarks: Habet haec res panem–‘This thing has bread in it.’58 As time went by, written contracts gained status and in some cities the filing of contracts became compulsory–to the point where a document withheld from the archive was deemed to be invalid. There was also a growth in use of a new form of document for the borrowing of money–the chirographum, one written in the borrower’s own hand.59 Above all, the late republican Roman needed to inscribe a few letters in order to exercise his voting rights.60