Overview

"The mother tongue of the Roman Empire and the lingua franca of the West for centuries after Rome's fall, Latin survives today primarily in classrooms and texts. Yet this ""dead language"" is unique in the influence it has exerted across centuries and continents. Jürgen Leonhardt has written a full history of Latin from antiquity to the present, uncovering how this once parochial dialect developed into a vehicle of global communication that remained vital long after its spoken form was supplanted by modern languages. Latin originated in the Italian region of Latium, around Rome, and became widespread as that city's imperial might grew. By the first century BCE, Latin was already transitioning from a living vernacular, as writers and grammarians like Cicero and Varro fixed Latin's status as a ""classical"" language with a codified rhetoric and rules. As Romance languages spun off from their Latin origins following the empire's collapse-shedding cases and genders along the way-the ancient language retained its currency as a world language in ways that anticipated English and Spanish, but it ceased to evolve. Leonhardt charts the vicissitudes of Latin in the post-Roman world: its ninth-century revival under Charlemagne and its flourishing among Renaissance writers who, more than their medieval predecessors, were interested in questions of literary style and expression. Ultimately, the rise of historicism in the eighteenth century turned Latin from a practical tongue to an academic subject. Nevertheless, of all the traces left by the Romans, their language remains the most ubiquitous artifact of a once peerless empire."

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[A] must-read for anyone interested either in the status of Latin or in what Latinity has signified throughout any previous epoch of its existence.--Ben Lee And Branden Kosch Bryn Mawr Classical Review (10/04/2010)

Long, nay, longer live the dead! Latin as a literary language became fixed as early as the first century BCE, only to thrive and flourish for almost two more millennia. Leonhardt has written a delightfully illuminating life of this supposedly dead world language.--Christopher B. Krebs, Author Of a Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus's Germania From The Roman Empire To The Third Reich

One of the many achievements of <b>Leonhardt</b> s book is to give readers, for the first time, a sense of what Latin has meant, and what it has been most useful for, in every period of Western history Leonhardt s informative and useful book ends with a plea to teach Latin as a living language, but the bulk of his work is historical: a lucid, erudite account of the history of Latin, from its origins as a literary language in the third century BCE up to the present Leonhardt s comparative approach illuminates the entire book Leonhardt has dethroned Latin from its traditional position as a marmoreal, static sidekick to Greek and taught us to understand the history not only of Latin, but of language and literature, in a new way. His approach seems natural in a time of intellectual globalization, but it is the fruit of hard thinking, and adds to our sense of the complex ways in which language and power intersect.--Anthony Grafton London Review of Books (01/08/2015)

Author Information

Jürgen Leonhardt is Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Tübingen.

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