Volume II Part 14 (1/2)
Such was the state of the controversy, as it stood between Tunstall and Middleton. In 1745, the year after Middleton had published his translation of the epistles, Markland engaged in this literary contest, and came forward in opposition to the authenticity of the letters, by publis.h.i.+ng his ”Remarks on the Epistles of Cicero to Brutus, and of Brutus to Cicero, in a Letter to a Friend.” The arguments of Tunstall had chiefly turned on historical inconsistencies-those of Markland princ.i.p.ally hinge on phrases to be found in the letters, which are not Ciceronian, or even of pure Latinity.
I must here close this long account of the writings of Cicero-of Cicero, distinguished as the Consul of the republic-as the father and saviour of his country-but not less distinguished as the orator, philosopher, and moralist of Rome.-”Salve primus omnium Parens Patriae appellate,-primus in toga triumphum linguaeque lauream merite, et facundiae, Latiarumque Literarum parens: atque (ut Dictator Caesar, hostis quondam tuus, de te scripsit,) omnium triumphorum lauream adopte majorem; quanto plus est, ingenii Romani terminos in tantum promovisse, quam imperii(491).”
In the former volume of this work, I had traced the progress of the language of the Romans, and treated of the different poets by whom it was adorned till the era of Augustus. I had chiefly occasion, in the course of that part of my inquiry, to compare the poetical productions of Rome with those of Greece, and to show that the Latin poetry of this early age, being modelled on that of Athens or Alexandria, had acquired an air of preparation and authors.h.i.+p, and appeared to have been written to obtain the cold approbation of the public, or smiles of a Patrician patron, while the native lines of the Grecian bards seem to be poured fourth like the Delphic oracles, because the G.o.d which inspired them was too great to be contained within the bosom. In the prose compositions of the Romans, which have been considered in the present volume, though the _exemplaria Graeca_ were still the models of style, we have not observed the same servility of imitation. The agricultural writers of Latium treated of a subject in a great measure foreign to the maritime feelings and commercial occupations of the Greeks; while, in the Latin historians, orators, and philosophers, we listen to a tone of practical utility, derived from the familiar acquaintance which their authors exercised with the affairs of life. The old Latin historians were for the most part themselves engaged in the affairs they related, and almost every oration of Cicero was actually delivered in the Senate or Forum. Among the Romans, philosophy was not, as it had been with many of the Greeks, an academic dream or speculation, which was subst.i.tuted for the realities of life. In Rome, philosophic inquiries were chiefly prosecuted as supplying arguments and ill.u.s.trations to the patron for his conflicts in the Forum, and as guiding the citizen in the discharge of his duties to the commonwealth. Those studies, in short, alone were valued, which, as it is beautifully expressed by Cicero, in the person of Laelius-”Efficiant ut usui civitati simus: id enim esse praeclarissimum sapientiae munus, maximumque virtutis doc.u.mentum puto.”
APPENDIX.
”Some felt the silent stroke of mouldering age, Some hostile fury, some religious rage: Barbarian blindness, Christian zeal conspire, And Papal piety, and Gothic fire.”
POPE'S _Epistle to Addison_.
APPENDIX.
In order to be satisfied as to the authenticity of the works commonly called Cla.s.sical, it is important to ascertain in what manner they were given to the public by their respective authors-to trace how they were preserved during the long night of the dark ages-and to point out by whom their peris.h.i.+ng remains were first discovered at the return of light. Nor will it be uninteresting to follow up this sketch by an enumeration of the princ.i.p.al Editions of the Cla.s.sics mentioned in the preceding pages, and of the best Translations of them which, from time to time, have appeared in the Italian, French, and English languages.
The ma.n.u.scripts of the Latin Cla.s.sics, during the existence of the Roman republic and empire, may be divided into what have been called _notata_ and _perscripta_. The former were those written by the author himself, or his learned slaves, in contractions or signs which stood for syllables and words; the latter, those which were fully transcribed in the ordinary characters by the _librarius_, who was employed by the _bibliopolae_, or booksellers, to prepare the productions of an author for public sale.
The books written in the hand of the authors were probably not very legible, at least if we may judge of others by Cicero. His brother Quintus had complained that he could not read his letters, and Cicero says in reply: ”Scribis te meas literas superiores vix legere potuisse; hoc facio semper ut quic.u.mque calamus in ma.n.u.s meas venerit, eo sic utar tamquam bono(492).”
But the works,-at least the prose works,-of the Romans were seldom written out in the hand of the author, and were generally dictated by him to some slave or freedman instructed in penmans.h.i.+p. It is well known that many of the orations of Cicero, Cato, and their great rhetorical contemporaries, were taken down by short-hand writers stationed in the Senate or Forum.
But even the works most carefully prepared in the closet were _notata_, in a similar manner, by slaves and freedmen. There was no part of his learned compositions on which Cicero took more pains, or about which his thoughts were more occupied(493), than the dedication of the _Academica_ to Varro, and even this he _dictated_ to his slave Spintharus, though he did so slowly, word by word, and not in whole sentences to Tiro, as was his practice in his other productions. ”Male mihi sit,” says he in a letter to Atticus, ”si umquam quidquam tam enitar. Ergo ne Tironi quidem dictavi, qui totas _periochas_ persequi solet, sed Spintharo syllabatim(494).”
This practice of authors dictating their works created a necessity, or at least a conveniency, of writing with rapidity, and of employing contractions, or conventional marks, in almost every word.
Accordingly, from the earliest periods of Roman literature, words were contracted, or were signified by notes, which sometimes stood for more than one letter, sometimes for syllables, and at other times for whole words. Funccius, who maintains that Adam was the first short-hand writer(495), has a.s.serted, with more truth, that the Romans contracted their words from the remotest ages of the republic, and to a greater degree than any other ancient nation. Sometimes the abbreviations consisted merely in writing the initial letter instead of the whole word.
Thus P. C. stood for Patres Conscripti; C. R., for Civis Roma.n.u.s; S. N.
L., for Socii Nominis Latini. This sort of contraction being employed in words frequently recurring, and which in one sense might be termed public, and being also universally recognized, would rarely produce any misapprehension or mistake. But frequently the abbreviations were much more complex, and the leading letters of words in less common use being _notata_, the contractions became of much more difficult and dubious interpretation. For example, _Meit._ expressed meminit; _Acus._, Acerbus; _Quit._, quaerit; _Ror._, Rhetor.
For the sake, however, of yet greater expedition in writing, and perhaps, in some few instances for the purpose of secrecy, signs or marks, which could be currently made with one dash or scratch with the _stylus_, and without lifting or turning it, came to be employed, instead of those letters which were themselves the abbreviations of words. Some writers have supposed that these signs were entirely arbitrary(496), whilst others have, with more probability, maintained that their forms can be resolved or a.n.a.lysed into the figures, or parts of the figures, of the letters themselves which they were intended to represent, though they have often departed far from the shape of the original characters(497). Ennius is said to have invented 1100 of these signs(498), which he no doubt employed in his multifarious compositions. Others came into gradual use in the manual operation of writing with rapidity to dictation. Tiro, the favourite freedman of Cicero, greatly increased the number, and brought this sort of tachygraphy to its greatest perfection among the Romans. In consequence of this fas.h.i.+on of authors dictating their works, expedition came to be considered of the utmost importance; it was regarded as the chief accomplishment of an amanuensis; and he alone was considered as perfect in his art, whose pen could equal the rapidity of utterance:
Hic et scriptor erit felix, cui litera verb.u.m est, Quique notis linguam superet, cursumque loquentis, Excipiens longas per nova compendia voces(499).
These lines were written by a poet of the age of Augustus, and it appears from Martial(500), Ausonius(501), and Prudentius, that this system of dictation by the author, and rapid notation by his amanuensis, continued in practice during the later ages of the empire.
Such was the mode in which most of the writings of the ancients came originally from their authors, and were delivered to those friends who were desirous to possess copies, or to the booksellers to be _perscripta_, or transcribed, for publication.
There exists sufficient proof of the high estimation in which accurate transcriptions of the works of their own writers were held by the Romans.
The correctness of printing, however, could not be expected. In the original notation, some mistakes might probably be made from carelessness of p.r.o.nunciation in the author who dictated, and haste in his amanuensis; but the great source of errors in MSS. was the blunders made by the _librarius_ in copying out from the noted exemplar. There was the greatest ambiguity and doubt in the interpretation, both of words contracted in the ordinary character and in the artificial signs. Sometimes the same word was expressed by different letters; thus MR. MT. MTR. all expressed _Mater_. Sometimes, on the other hand, the same set of letters expressed different words; for instance, ACT. signified _Actor_, _Auctoritas_, and _Hactenus_. The collocation of the letters was often inverted from the order in which they stood in the word when fully expressed; and frequently one letter had not merely its own power, but that of several others. Thus AMO. signified _animo_, because M had there not only its own force, but, as its shape in some measure announces, the power of _ni_ also. Matters were still worse, when not only abbreviations, but signs had been resorted to. These were variously employed by different writers, and were also differently interpreted by transcribers. Some of these signs were extremely similar in form: it was scarcely possible to discriminate the sign which denoted the syllable _ab_ from that which expressed the syllable _um_; and the signs of the syllables _is_ and _it_ were nearly undistinguishable; while _ad_ and _at_ were precisely the same. The mark which expressed the word _talis_, being a little more sloped or inclined, expressed _qualis_; and the difference in the Tironian signs which stood for the complete words _Ager_ and _Amicus_, was scarcely perceptible(502).
The ancient Latin writers also employed a number of marks to denote the accents of words, and the quant.i.ties of syllables. The oldest writers, as Livius Andronicus and Naevius, always placed two vowels when a syllable was to be p.r.o.nounced long(503). Attius, the great tragic author, was the first to relinquish this usage; and after his time, in conformity to the new practice which he had adopted, a certain mark was placed over the long vowels. When this custom also (which is stigmatised by Quintilian as _ineptissimus_(504)) fell into disuse, the mark was frequently misunderstood, and Funccius has given several examples of corruptions and false readings from the mistake of transcribers, who supposed that it was intended to express an _m_, an _n_, or other letters(505).
In addition to all this, little attention was paid to the separation of words and sentences, and the art of punctuation was but imperfectly understood.
Finally, and above all, the orthography of Latin was extremely fluctuating and uncertain. We have seen, in an early part of this work, how it varied in the time of the republic, and it, in fact, never became fixed. Mai talks repeatedly, in his preface, of the strange inconsistencies of spelling in the Codex, which contained Cicero's work _De Republica_; and Ca.s.siodorus, who of all his contemporaries chiefly cultivated literature during the reign of the barbarians in Italy, often regrets that the ancient Romans had left their orthography enc.u.mbered with the utmost difficulties. ”Orthographia,” says he, ”apud Graecos plerumque sine ambiguitate probatur expressa; inter Latinos vero sub ardua difficultate relicta monstratur; unde etiam modo studium magnum lectoris inquiret.”