Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

CICERO
language be governed by rules ('analogy') or by usage ('anomaly')? The
Alexandrian scholars had sought to identify underlying rules, whereas the
Stoics, champions of Nature, accepted what was produced by evolution. At
Rome the encyclopaedic scholar Varro (116—27 B.C.) in his partly extant De
lingua Latina, while leaning towards analogy, made ample concessions to
usage. A stricter analogist was Caesar, whose efficient and systematic mind
wished to correct the language just as he corrected the calendar. His treatise
De analogia was a scholarly work, dedicated, like most of the De lingua Latina,
to Cicero.
Strict analogy was associated with the Atticists, and as such it comes under
attack in the Orator. Cicero's position was a sensible compromise. Thus he did
not wish to alter phrases hallowed by tradition, nor to suppress exceptional
forms which Nature had introduced for the sake of euphony. Though aware
that it is incorrect to introduce an h into certain words such as pulcer and
Cartago, ' after a while — a long while — I allowed correctness to be forced out
of me by what was dinned into my ears'. There were even fifty-four instances
in his writings (half of them in letters) of the indicative mood in indirect
question, which Caesar shunned and every modern schoolboy is taught to shun.
Nevertheless he repeatedly enjoined correctness in his rhetorical works; he
taunted Mark Antony in the senate with using the superlative form piissimus,
'a word which does not exist in Latin'; and he took both his son and his
secretary to task in letters for solecisms.
As to vocabulary, the purists sought to establish a 'proper' word for every
thing or idea. In public speeches it was obviously important to make your
meaning clear and not to give your hearers a sense of ignorance or inferiority.
It may have been in this context that Caesar gave his famous warning,' Avoid
like a reef the unfamiliar or unusual word', but his taste was certainly fastidious.
He held that selection of words was the beginning of eloquence, and in the
Brutus Cicero makes Atticus say that Caesar 'speaks purer Latin than almost
any orator'. 1 That 'almost' leaves room for Cicero himself. In his speeches
Cicero was careful to use only good, established words still in general use. But
he also insisted that they should be select words with some body and sonority.
We find no instance of anything that looks like a new coinage, and only three
instances of Greek words (all in the Verrines, about Sicily, and all carefully
explained). Even naturalized Greek words occur only in one speech, In Pisonem,
and there with ironical nuance. Aper in Tacitus' Dialogus singles Cicero out as
one who applied selection to language, and Tulliana puritas is a phrase of St
Jerome.
Languages do need some defence, and Latin was particularly vulnerable in
the conditions of the late Republic. Cicero remarked to Brutus, ' When you
1
252. Gell. 1.10.4.
242
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008