This volume grew out of a 2018 conference marking the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Robert Kaster’s monumental Guardians of Language: the Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity (Berkeley 1988). The idea was to celebrate Kaster’s work while also exploring further how Roman grammarians dealt with linguistic diversity within Latin. As so often happens, not all contributors really stuck to the theme proposed, but those that did not have also produced interesting papers, and overall the quality is high.
One contribution that does adhere to the theme is that of the editor. Adam Gitner’s ‘Civic metaphors for lexical borrowing from Seneca to Gellius’ (pp. 169-90) discusses how Romans talked about loanwords. In the early empire (but not before or after that period) they described foreign words borrowed into Latin as having been granted citizenship—or in some cases not full citizenship but only Latin rights. Suetonius famously describes a grammarian telling the emperor Tiberius that he could give citizenship only to people and not to words, but the powers denied to the emperor were not thereby conferred on the grammarians themselves. Foreign words acquired citizenship not from individuals of any profession, but from the Roman people as a whole.
James Zetzel’s ‘Counterfeit and coinage: Gresham’s Law and the grammarian’ (pp. 3-19) starts from Gresham’s law, the economic principle that when coins of varied intrinsic values circulate with the same official value, eventually only those of lower intrinsic value will remain in circulation, since people keep the higher-value ones and spend the lower-value ones. It is uncertain whether this principle can really be applied to language, since unlike coins, words can be kept only when shared. Be that as it may, the analogy further seems to imply that language change is always negative, in other words that whenever two uses are in competition, the one that language’s guardians dislike will drive out the one they like. I am not sure that this is really always the case, for in addition to the many changes that in various languages have indeed prevailed over the determined opposition of those languages’ guardians, there are some cases where the guardians seem to have won. For example, many English speakers today encounter the word ‘ain’t’ mainly or exclusively in the context of older literature in which it is used as an example of stigmatised English; this form has not replaced ‘am not’ or ‘isn’t’ and appears to be less frequent than it once was. Leaving Gresham’s Law aside, however, the chapter makes an important distinction between ‘grammarians’ and ‘Latinists’ such as Pliny the elder, Caper, Romanus, Gellius, or Fronto. The former were responsible for teaching learners (whether children or foreigners) a clear set of rules that if mastered enabled those learners to use language according to the accepted norms; of course, such teachers simplified the complexities that existed in the language as a whole, since simplification is what learners need. Latinists on the other hand loved the complexities, sought out the exceptions, and often appreciated diachronic as well as synchronic variation—hence their tendency to mock grammarians, though in the long run it was the grammarians rather than the Latinists who won the battle for control of Latin.
Rolando Ferri’s ‘Language variation and grammatical theory in Roman legal texts’ (pp. 199-224) examines how legal writers talked about non-standard language using ideas and terminology borrowed from grammatical writers. The discussion is very interesting, but not all examples are fully convincing. For example, ἐν πλάτει ‘broadly’ is cited as an example of an expression ‘conjuring up the language of Greco-Roman scholarship’ on the basis of its use in Sextus Empiricus. Sextus was not a scholar or grammarian but rather someone who opposed those (and other) professions; although he certainly did use the language of the experts whose fields he critiqued, he did not restrict himself to such language, so an expression can hardly be identified as scholarly purely on the basis of his usage.
Tommaso Mari’s ‘The grammarian Consentius on language change and variation’ (pp. 99-114) is devoted to the author of a work De barbarismis et metaplasmis. ‘Barbarisms’ and ‘metaplasms’ were both terms for non-standard words, but with an important difference: a barbarism was an actual error in a word, while a metaplasm was poetic license, in other words a form that would have been a barbarism had it occurred in the prose of an ordinary person rather than in Virgil or another approved poet. This difference, needless to say, could be challenging to police. Asking ‘what language did Consentius aim to guard?’, Mari points out that Consentius’ own style has distinctive Late Latin features, sometimes even ones censured in the rules he gives. At the same time, Consentius objects to some aspects of the way Latin was commonly used in his day, particularly pronunciations that did not conform to Classical principles. So, like many of the authors investigated in this volume, Consentius neither opposed all language change nor accepted it all: he made choices among innovations, whether consciously or unconsciously.
Anna Zago’s ‘Antiquus = squalidus? Pompeius’ attitude toward antiquity’ (pp. 115-30) starts from a passage in which the fifth- or sixth-century grammarian Pompeius says that Julius Caesar squalidas regulas posuit antiquas: what does squalidus mean in that context? The investigation considers the meaning of squalidus in rhetorical and stylistic contexts and the meanings of words with the same root (squalor, squaleo, squalidus/-e) when used in conjunction with words meaning ‘ancient’. Zago concludes that yes, it means what you think it means, and therefore Pompeius does criticise the ancients: ‘our grammarian never hesitates to dismiss antiquity and argue in favor of a more up-to-date doctrine’—perhaps a surprising position for a guardian of language, but one that Zago defends well.
Tim Denecker’s ‘T(w)o be or not t(w)o be: the dualis numerus according to Latin grammarians up to the early middle ages’ (pp. 131-42) examines the bizarre phenomenon of the Latin dual. Grammarians debated whether this existed; on the one hand Latin showed no obvious signs of having a dual number, but on the other hand it should originally have had one, since there was a dual in the Attic variety of Greek (and in Homer, who was a sort of honorary Attic writer). This situation led some grammarians to find Latin dual forms, such as the alternative third person plural perfect ending –ēre; others reacted by arguing that having only two numbers was the original situation, out of which ‘Attic’ had evolved a dual.
Katharina Volk’s ‘Varro the conservative?’ (pp. 23-32) challenges the widespread view that Varro’s views were highly conservative, concluding ‘There is little evidence that he generally thought of his own time as one of decline; that he believed that things were always better in the past; or that he wanted to restore some earlier, better stage of religious or linguistic practice, or even to preserve the present state for future generations. What he wanted is to know about the past, know as much as possible, and pass it on to his fellow Romans.’
Wolfgang de Melo’s ‘Varro and the Sabine language in the De lingua latina’ (pp. 33-46) examines Varro’s references to the Sabine language, a topic he ought to have known about given his origins in Sabine territory. Surprisingly, Varro turns out to say very little about Sabine and does not seem to consider it very relevant for Latin etymologies; the little he does say suggests that Sabine (which is not directly accessible to us today) may have been a dialect of Latin rather than a relative of Oscan or Umbrian.
Bruno Rochette’s ‘The use of Greek in Diomedes’ Ars grammatica’ (pp. 74-98) discusses a Latin grammar composed for the use of Greek speakers. It is written in Latin, following the ancient convention that grammars should always be written in the language they described. But the writer, who Rochette suggests was probably a native Greek speaker, easily quotes in and codeswitches into Greek, making clear that he expected his readers to be familiar with that language; he also makes comparisons with Greek in the course of explaining Latin.
Alessandro Garcea’s and Maria Chiara Scappaticcio’s ‘Anonymous grammatical scholarship: insights from an annotated Juvenal codex from Egypt’ (pp. 143-166) examines the copious notes written (in both Latin and Greek) on a sixth-century fragment of Juvenal, Satires 7.149-98. Three different sets of notes survive, revealing the different interests, languages and skills of different users of this text.
Leofranc Holford-Strevens’ ‘Grammar and grammarians, linguistic and social change from Gellius to Macrobius’ (pp. 191-8) is lively and entertaining, but I cannot claim to have fully understood the argument.
Andreas Zanker’s ‘Varro’s word trees’ (pp. 47-70) discusses how Varro uses the metaphor of a tree in discussing etymology.
There is also an Epilogue by Robert Kaster himself, consisting of a charming explanation of how he came to write Guardians of Language (pp. 225-32) followed by a useful set of addenda to its prosopography (pp. 232-41). The explanation points out that the chances of Guardians’ existence were extremely slim: ‘if we had the godlike ability to replay the sequence [of events leading to the book being written] until it turned out just as it did, we would arrive at this outcome only once every 16,384 tries’. We are all so very fortunate that this outcome did nevertheless occur—maybe the gods exist after all?
The book’s production is not quite at the standard one would hope for from OUP; there are some unfortunate typos (e.g. ‘presence of the article’ for ‘absence of the article’, p. 91) and some text evidently designed to fit around diagrams that have been placed elsewhere (p. 69). But the content is on the whole excellent, making this book a fitting supplement to Guardians of Language.