it became a tendency to say nothing as elaborately as possible. Literary allusions could provide a kind of
esoteric code in letters between cultivated friends conscious of living in an increasingly unappreciative
world. The Latinity of the pagan Martianus Capella, writing in Vandal Carthage about 470, or Ennodius,
bishop of Pavia (d. 521), is not intended to communicate in the most direct terms with the ordinary
reader. In Capella the technique is used as a mask for his essentially pagan sympathies. This mannerist
style long continued. In the seventh century the Italian Jonas, educated in the Irish monastery at Bobbio,
composed a Life of his hero St Columban. His Latin style is full of poetic reminiscences and neologisms
of the most outré kind, extravagant etymologies in which he takes special pleasure, and an impressive
sprinkling of Greek words. All this is mingled with richly demotic usages-pluriores for plures, present
participles used with passive force, confusions between similar-sounding words, and malapropisms such
as limes for limen.
Nevertheless Jonas shows that classical literature was still being taught in schools. Augustine shows that
the level of culture varied very much from place to place. At Carthage there were those who had read the
Aeneid and could pick up an allusion. At Hippo no one except the bishop had read Virgil. His Hippo
congregation knew the story of Dido, or ('a specially popular theme') the Judgement of Paris, from
attending the local theatre, not from reading any books.
In the writing of Latin prose an awareness of the old rhythmic cursus was not lost. Schools continued to
teach the rules. In Monte Cassino during the eleventh century proper prose rhythm even became
something of an obsession. The replacement of quantity by accent, first seen coming in the third century,
had decisive consequences for the writing of verse. Monastic and Episcopal schools transmitted Latin
through the most precarious age of the barbarian kingdoms, until they in turn gave ground to the newly
founded universities. Medieval universities were directed towards vocational training in theology, law,
medicine, and the artes. In them the study of classical Latin did not necessarily prosper better than it had
done in the older Episcopal schools. Until the twelfth century what was known in the Latin West about
Plato came indirectly through Apuleius, Calcidius, Macrobius, Martianus Capella, and Boethius, who
had also provided translations of Aristotle's Organon (only his versions of the Categories and
Interpretation, and of Porphyry's Isagoge being generally known). The schoolmen's fascination with
logic, stimulated further by contact with Muslim writers such as Avicenna and Averroes, also led them
to coin neologisms of a repellent kind to meet their needs when negotiating a hesitant way over the pons
asinorum.
The Renaissance reacted against the Schoolmen and their continual moulding of Latin to contemporary
needs. Lorenzo Valla treats Boethius with a patronizing mixture of admiration and distaste-the last man
to write decent Latin, but sadly tolerant of barbarisms. The Renaissance enthusiastically demanded
classical Latin in its purity and beauty. Thereby, paradoxically, it reduced Latin to the status of a dead
language. Once the churches of the Reformation required the vernacular, there was a further
dethronement of the language from any ordinary employment. In the twentieth century even the Roman
Catholic Church capitulated, and the Latin mass went the way of the steam engine.
The Greek language did not have so many problems to contend with, but underwent nevertheless a
comparable development. The conquests of Alexander the Great might have made koine Greek the