Before Diocletian introduced elaborate court ceremonial on the Persian model, Emperors were already
being addressed as abstractions such as 'Your Majesty'. Powerful bureaucrats "would be addressed as
'Your Excellency' or 'Your Eminence'. A tendency to verbal inflation went hand in hand with the
debauch of the currency in the third century. Style became elaborate and formal. It was an indication of
a person's importance if he was addressed in the third person rather than the second (a feature still
apparent in Italian and German and in English etiquette for formal invitations). In the letters of Cyprian
of Carthage, a man of upper-class origin, we see the use of similar courtesies entering ecclesiastical
forms of address-'Your Holiness', or 'Your Beatitude'. By the fifth century the epithet 'venerabilis' is
used for either Popes or Emperors. An Emperor is often 'serenissimus' or 'christianissimus', while a
bishop is 'religiosissimus' and/or 'reverentissimus'. The plural form of self-designation and of address is
adopted by Emperors and by Popes, who speak of themselves as 'we' and of their correspondent as
'you' (plural). Government chancellery formulas speak not of 'him', but of 'the aforesaid' or 'the above-
mentioned', 'suprascriptus', 'memoratus', and so on. Instead of saying 'this', they write 'the present',
'praesens'. These and similar pedantries of formal style, familiar still in the formula books of European
and American administrators, were established in this age.
The barbarian invasions of the fifth century had moments of tense military crisis, especially with the
Vandals crossing the Rhine in 406, and later with the arrival of Attila, but for the most part the
infiltration of the Germanic tribes was fairly gradual. Through service in the army a Vandal, Stilicho,
could attain the summit of effective power. Such men learnt to speak and write fluent Latin; and in the
West Latin remained a principal medium of communication among all well-educated men until the end
of the medieval period, only gradually yielding to the vernacular. It required the zealous advocacy of
Thomas More and William Tyndale (highly educated men who did not otherwise agree about much) to
persuade English people that their language could be a proper medium for discussing serious subjects.
But at the everyday level Latin was by 700 in process of undergoing transformation into Romance. The
travel diary of the pilgrim lady Egeria who in 384 journeyed from Spain to the Holy Land and ascended
Sinai, or the sixth-century Rule of St Benedict, illustrates a colloquial idiom indifferent to the forms and
syntax of Cicero. In the Carolingian renaissance after Alcuin had sent men back to school to learn
formal Latin again, the rough colloquialisms of Benedict seemed vulgar and distressing to monks of
high culture, so that a version of the Rule in correct Latinity had to be provided, saying, for instance,
'ausculta', not 'obsculta', for 'listen'. By Benedict's time plural nouns of the first declension use the
accusative form for the subject of the sentence. Verbal forms have long become largely periphrastic; in
fact, the auxiliary verb 'to be' mainly drops out of use, so that in some writers one meets long sentences
with chains of participles and apparently no main verb. The spoken language in Italy was on the way to
becoming Italian: one Roman inscription of the seventh century has 'essere abetis' for 'eritis'. The French
definite article, in the forms lo, la, Us, is first attested in eighth-century Gaul. A council of bishops at
Tours in 813 ruled that sermons be not in Latin but in 'rustica Romana lingua' so that everyone can
understand. (The rest of the service evidently remained in Latin.) In sixth-century Merovingian Gaul the
Latinity of Gregory of Tours, historian of the Franks, feels like a conscious act of resistance to demotic
speech. Naturally, to admit the rustic Frankish form of pidgin Latin to the pulpit was to make possible a
more rigorous purity of Latin for the educated elite in the government and the Church. From Alcuin on,
a correct Latin was the preserve of this elite. To know it well, to be able to decorate a letter with a tag