For about a century and a half before the beginning of our, era and for an equal time after that date the Latin of books remained almost unchanged in sounds and forms; its his tory during this time deals with its growth and change as an instrument of literature. The Classical Period (the Ciceronian and Augustan) saw the culmination of Latin style, first in prose and then in poetry. Cicero was an extraordinary master of style and in his hands the language lost its archaic stiffness of struc ture and became a flexible and a complex means of expression. Better than any other Latin writer he used the periodic form of sentence, not as a mere rhetorical device, but as a suit able expression for a complete thought, with all its subordinations and interdependence, in a unified and harmonious structure. Caesar also represents the simplest narrative prose, free from archaisms and absolutely unaffected and unadorned. In verse Virgil and Horace are types of the artistic use of imaginative speech, in which by a careful felicity of selec tion and combination language is made to con vey poetic suggestion, without either the affec tation of the Alexandrian school or the heavi ness of Ennius or Lucretius.
The change from the Classical Period to the °Silver)) Latin of the early empire is likewise chiefly stylistic and from this point of view it must be regarded as a change for the worse. To a considerable extent pleasure in the mere arts and tricks of expression took the place in Ovid and Martial of true poetic force and poetry became contaminated by rhetoric. In prose, however, the rhetorical and individualistic tendencies were less injurious; Tacitus, though he abandoned the periodic structure of Cicero and introduced into prose many words from the vocabulary of poetry, nevertheless used a style suited to his tempera ment and subject.
It is not worth while to follow in detail the later history of the literary Latin. It was in the main rhetorical and imitative and it lacked that vigor of thought which alone can main tain a vigorous linguistic life. To this general statement there are two exceptions. The Latin of the jurists kept up the tradition of accuracy and clearness, employing a technical vocabulary without rhetorical artifice, and the Christian writers, possessed by the supreme desire to convey a serious message to unlettered readers, continued the spirit, if not the form, of the better Latinity. With these exceptions, how ever, the Latin of literature is, after the 2d or 3d century, no longer in the fullest sense a living language.
Meanwhile the Latin of daily life, the lan guage spoken by the common people of Rome, by slaves and provincials and soldiers, had con tinued to exist under the level of the literary language, from which it was separated about 250 a.c. The evidence for the spoken Latin
during the later republic and the early empire is somewhat scanty, consisting of occasional inscriptions like the wall-writings of Pompeii or passages in authors like Petronius, in which the colloquial Latin is intentionally imitated. But the effect of the accent in the shortening of final syllables is to be seen even in Horace and Virgil and this tendency leads in some in scriptions to the loss of final consonants. After the 3d century of our era we have increasing evidence of in sounds and forms. The vowel e and the diphthongs se, ee were no longer clearly distinguished in sound, and were there fore confused in writing; an became o; b and v were interchanged; the softening of c, t and g before e and s began; initial h was lost or was misplaced (this had begun in the time of Catullus). Still more marked was the loss of the distinction, probably never made with great precision in the ordinary speech, between long and short vowels, and the consequent re appearance of accentual verse. The disappear ance of final consonants, especially m and s, destroyed the distinctive marks of gender and even of case, so that cases, being no longer distinct in form, were not clearly differentiated in usage: In syntax the older paratactic con structions, which are found in Plautus and oc casionally throughout Latin literature, again appear and analytic idioms (habere as an auxiliary verb) began to displace the inflec tional verb-forms; the use of prepositions weakened the force of the cases; conjunctions lost their original meaning quod, for example, driving out other conjunctions. All these are steps toward the passage from Latin to the Romance languages. They went on at differ ent rates in different parts of the empire and under different conditions, but the beginning of many can be traced back to early Latin and they are not to be thought of as accidents by which the Latin language was destroyed, but as entirely normal and natural changes which mark the progress of the language from the inflected stage to the comparatively uninflected condition of the Romance languages. From this point of view the Latin of literature is to be regarded as a deviation, in some sense artificial, from the normal life of the language. See ALPHABET.
Bibliography.— There is a good sketch of the history of the Latin language in the (His torische Grammatik der latinische Sprache) (I, 1) by Stolz, and a longer history and dis cussion by Weise, (Charakteristik der latin ische Sprache.)