century BC.
Latin had been literate, then, but not literary: scribes will have noted down important utterances, but few will have consulted those records after the immediate need for which they had been made. One ancient historian recounted that important laws were stored on bronze pillars in the temple of Diana on Rome’s Aventine Hill,3 and at least one ancient inscribed stone has been found in the Roman Forum.4 There was a tradition at Rome that the law was set down publicly on Twelve Tables in 450, but the fragments that survive, quoted in later literature, are all in suspiciously classical-looking Latin.5 It seems unlikely that there was any canon of texts playing a part in Roman education in this early period.* Famously, the important written texts, such as the Sibylline Books, consulted at times of crisis by the Roman government, were not in Latin but in Greek. The absence of a literary tradition in Latin until the second century seems to have allowed speakers to lose touch with their own language’s past, in a way that would have been unthinkable, say, for Greeks in the same period.
The Duenos ceramic, a tripartite vase of uncertain, but perhaps erotic, use. It holds the earliest substantial inscription in Latin (sixth to fifth centuries BC).
In fact, about three generations after Naevius, the historian Polybius managed to locate the text of a treaty that had been struck between Rome and Carthage, explicitly dating it to the first year of the Roman Republic, 508 BC (“under Lucius Junius Brutus and Marcus Horatius, the first consuls after the expulsion of the kings, twenty-eight years before Xerxes crossed into Greece”). He commented, “We have transcribed this, interpreting it to the limits of accuracy possible. But such a great difference in dialect has arisen between modern and ancient that the most expert Romans can barely elucidate parts of it, even after careful study.”6
He then quoted it in full, but tantalizingly only in Greek translation. However, one of the few inscribed survivals from earlier Latin may offer a hint at the kind of difficulties those Roman experts were encountering. Latin grammar had moved on quite smartly in those two hundred years; and many old inscriptions remain enduringly obscure, even though we now can approach them with a comparative knowledge of other Indo-European languages inconceivable to contemporaries.
Consider for example the oldest substantial example, on the famous DVENOS ceramic, a tripartite, interconnecting vase rather reminiscent of a Wankel engine. Found in Rome in 1880, it is dated to the sixth or early fifth century BC, the same period as that early treaty.
The inscription is in three lines, which may be transcribed as
IOVESATDEIVOSQOIMEDMITATNEITEDENDOCOSMISVIRCOSIED
ASTEDNOISIOPETOITESIAIPAKARIVOIS
DVENOSMEDFECEDENMANOMEINOMDUENOINEMEDMALOSTATOD
and which are conjectured to mean
He who uses me to soften, swears by the gods.
In case a maiden should not be kind in your case,
but you wish her placated with delicacies for her favours.
A good man made me for a happy outcome.
Let no ill from me befall a good man.7
This is unlikely to be fully correct—some of the vocabulary may simply be beyond our ken because the words died out—but even if it is, it presupposes that the words here must have changed massively over three centuries to become part of a language that Naevius would have recognized. Here is a reconstruction into classical Latin, with the necessary changes underlined:
iurat diuos qui per me mitigat.ni in te_comis virgo sietast [cibis] [fututioni] ei pacari vis.bonus me fecit in manum munus. bono_ne e me_malum stato
Virtually every word had changed its form, pronunciation, or at least its spelling between the sixth and the third centuries BC. This shows what rapid change for Latin occurred in these three centuries, comparable to what happened to English between the eleventh and the fourteenth centuries AD, when Anglo-Saxon (typified by the Beowulf poem), totally unintelligible to modern speakers, gave way to Middle English (typified by Chaucer’s writings), on the threshold of the modern language.
The inscription that circles the Duenos ceramic. Written in a highly archaic form of Latin, it appears to offer a love potion.
Yet (again like English), as reading and writing became more widespread, the pace of change in the language was to slow dramatically. Naevius’ poetry of the third century remained comprehensible to Cicero in the first, and indeed Plautus’ comedies, written in the early second century BC, were still being performed in the first century AD. Those plays are in fact written in a Latin close to the classical standard, canonized by Cicero and the Golden Age literature that followed him, a literary language that was simply not allowed to change after the first century BC, since every subsequent generation was taught not only to read it but to imitate it.
But why did this language, which only came to a painful self-awareness in the third century BC, go on to supplant not only all the other languages of Italy but almost all the other languages of western Europe as well? In the sixth century BC, a neutral observer could only have assumed that if Italy was destined to be unified, it would be under the Etruscans; and in the third century BC, Latin was still far less widely spoken than Oscan. Where did it all go right for Latin, and for Rome?
Sub rosa—Latin’s Etruscan Stepmother
thesan tins, thesan eiseras seus, unus mlakh nunthen thesviti favitic fasei, cishum thesane ushlanec mlakhe luri zeric, zec athelis sacnicla cilthl spural methlumesc
Dawn of the Day-god, Dawn of All the Gods, you in your goodness I invoke in the east and in the west with a libation, and three times, at dawn, at high noon, and by the serene brightness (of the stars), as written by the ancestors, for the citizens of the tribe, the city, and the nation.
Etruscan prayer1
THE ETRUSCANS ARE FAMOUS for their attendant mystery. The puzzle of their origins goes back three thousand years; but when we first have evidence of which named people lived where in Italy, the Etruscans were already firmly ensconced in the northwest, richer and more powerful than any of the other residents. The identity of their language is at the heart of the mystery, since it was clearly unrelated to all the Indo-European languages, most of them Italic languages, that surrounded it on every side. Unlike them, it was an agglutinative language—which means that it was structurally more like Central Asian Turkish or Peruvian Quechua than Latin or Gaulish, or indeed other neighbouring languages such as Greek (in Sicily) or Punic (in Sardinia). Any words that it shared with its neighbours are seen as individual cultural borrowings; they are not the kind
