- The Arts Of Prose The Early Empire
(By Donald Russell)Two Languages, One Literature
The first two centuries of the Christian era produced an extensive and important prose literature, both in Greek and in Latin. Though the greatest genius, Tacitus, was a
Roman whose ways of thinking seem peculiarly difficult to express in Greek, the two languages were in many respects vehicles of a single literature, and the Greek
contribution is arguably the more significant of the two.
Not that Greek and Latin were at all on an equal footing. Native Greek speakers seldom troubled to learn Latin, except for the purposes of official life, and they seem to
have found its nuances hard to grasp. 'Longinus' (On Sublimity 12.4) wisely asks indulgence for trying to judge Cicero; Plutarch (Demosthenes 3) disclaims the ability to do
so, and clearly had a struggle with his Latin. It was natural that there should be a steady demand for Greek books giving information on Roman subjects: Dionysius of
Halicarnassus' Roman Antiquities, Plutarch's Roman Lives, Appian's Wars of the Romans catered for the need, which increased as the period advanced and more and more
Greek speakers sought positions of influence in imperial administration and politics. Thus by the end of the second century Latin historiography has dried up, but Herodian
and the much more competent Cassius Dio attest the vigour of Greek. Latin speakers, on the other hand, if they were destined for official position or literary education (and
the two were always closely linked), learned Greek from childhood, and often preferred it, especially for philosophical or scientific purposes, to their native tongue. It is in
no way surprising that the Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote To Himself in Greek, nor that Pliny's friend Corellius Rufus announced his resolution to take his own life with
the Greek word Kekrika, 'I have decided'. At the same time, there is an extensive literature conveying Greek learning and philosophy to a Latin public, pursuing the
Ciceronian and Augustan ideal of making Latin literature a complete and self-contained expression of Graeco-Roman culture. Celsus' encyclopedia, Quintus Curtius'
Alexander, Pliny's Natural History are examples of this.
But what was common to the two languages is more important than this difference. Both 'were self-consciously literary languages, diverging considerably from the spoken
tongue. The difference was sharper in Greek. From the Augustan period onwards-indeed earlier-teachers of Greek grammar and rhetoric inculcated an ever closer approach
to the precise linguistic and grammatical forms attested by the Attic classics of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., especially Thucydides, Xenophon, and the orators. This
movement reached a high point in the middle of the second century, when the marvelous archaizing pastiches produced by great 'sophists' won the applause of packed
theatres and the admiring patronage of Emperors. In Latin, the chronological perspectives were different. Latin literature had only recently reached what was quickly
recognized as its classical maturity. Prose style had continued to develop naturally after Cicero, partly in reaction against the norms of sentence structure and decorum which
he had tried to establish. This reaction lasted about a century, until Quintilian tried to reverse it. It was not till the Antonine period (A.D. 97-180) that the trickle of prose
archaizers (antiquarii) became a flood, and something rather like Greek 'Atticism' developed. Before this happened, there had been much enrichment and experimentation;
but the sources of this, it is important to notice, lay much more in poetry and in the devices of older Greek rhetoric than in the resources of everyday Latin speech. These
remained largely untapped, though educated speech is clearly echoed in parts of Seneca, and Petronius (below, pp. 689 ff.) went so far as to make some of the characters in
his comic novel speak the incorrect language of the uneducated: a unique experiment, so far as we know, whether in Latin or in Greek.
The salient point is that almost all the works of significance, in both languages, are written in what Eduard Norden, the scholar who has contributed most to our
understanding of these matters, called Kunstprosa, 'prose of art' or 'formal prose', the product of assiduous teaching and imitation. The main mark of Kunstprosa, both in
Greek and in Latin, is its dependence on deliberate choice made in advance by the writer for the particular task before him. He has to determine what is the appropriate
stylistic level (genus dicendi or-in Greek-charakter) for the job; a common classification distinguished 'grand', 'middle', and 'delicate' styles, but this was by no means the
only categorization that was possible. In any case, there was a choice to be made in vocabulary, and this was very much determined by literary precedent and association;
there was also a choice of sentence-structure, between the long and elaborately organized 'periodic' sentence and a more simple pattern; and, most striking to the modern
reader, there was the choice of rhythm. Some regularity in the quantitative pattern of sentence endings (dausulae in Latin) is to be seen in classical Greek prose; but it seems
to have been the Hellenistic rhetors and their Roman pupils who systematized and enforced practices which had become second nature to writers of our period. Most Roman
historians and some Greek sophists do, it is true, break all known rules; but this is itself an act of choice, dictated by the genre. Tacitus has regular Ciceronian 'clausulation'
in his Dialogue, but not in his historical works. Quintilian (9. 15. 18) rationalizes this traditional preference-probably based on observation of Thucydides-by alleging that