Pergamus, were the first who studied the Greek language critically, that
is to say, who analyzed the language, arranged it under general
categories, distinguished the various parts of speech, invented proper
technical terms for the various functions of words, observed the more or
less correct usage of certain poets, marked the difference between
obsolete and classical forms, and published long and learned treatises on
all these subjects. Their works mark a great era in the history of the
science of language. But there was still a step to be made before we can
expect to meet with a real practical or elementary grammar of the Greek
language. Now the first real Greek grammar was that of _Dionysius Thrax_.
It is still in existence, and though its genuineness has been doubted,
these doubts have been completely disposed of.
But who was Dionysius Thrax? His father, as we learn from his name, was a
Thracian; but Dionysius himself lived at Alexandria, and was a pupil of
the famous critic and editor of Homer, Aristarchus.(69) Dionysius
afterwards went to Rome, where he taught about the time of Pompey. Now
here we see a new feature in the history of mankind. A Greek, a pupil of
Aristarchus, settles at Rome, and writes a practical grammar of the Greek
language—of course, for the benefit of his young Roman pupils. He was not
the inventor of grammatical science. Nearly all the framework of grammar,
as we saw, was supplied to him through the labors of his predecessors from
Plato to Aristarchus. But he was the first who applied the results of
former philosophers and critics to the practical purpose of teaching
Greek; and, what is most important, of teaching Greek not to Greeks, who
knew Greek and only wanted the theory of their language, but to Romans who
had to be taught the declensions and conjugations, regular and irregular.
His work thus became one of the principal channels through which the
grammatical terminology, which had been carried from Athens to Alexandria,
flowed back to Rome, to spread from thence over the whole civilized world.
Dionysius, however, though the author of the first practical grammar, was
by no means the first “_professeur de langue_” who settled at Rome. At his
time Greek was more generally spoken at Rome than French is now spoken in
London. The children of gentlemen learnt Greek before they learnt Latin,
and though Quintilian in his work on education does not approve of a boy
learning nothing but Greek for any length of time, “as is now the
fashion,” he says, “with most people,” yet he too recommends that a boy
should be taught Greek first, and Latin afterwards.(70) This may seem
strange, but the fact is that as long as we know anything of Italy, the
Greek language was as much at home there as Latin. Italy owed almost
everything to Greece, not only in later days when the setting sun of Greek
civilization mingled its rays with the dawn of Roman greatness; but ever
since the first Greek colonists started Westward Ho! in search of new
homes. It was from the Greeks that the Italians received their alphabet
and were taught to read and to write.(71) The names for balance, for
measuring-rod, for engines in general, for coined money,(72) many terms
connected with seafaring,(73) not excepting _nausea_ or sea-sickness, are
all borrowed from Greek, and show the extent to which the Italians were
indebted to the Greeks for the very rudiments of civilization. The
Italians, no doubt, had their own national gods, but they soon became
converts to the mythology of the Greeks. Some of the Greek gods they
identified with their own; others they admitted as new deities. Thus
_Saturnus_, originally an Italian harvest god, was identified with the
Greek _Kronos_, and as _Kronos_ was the son of _Uranos_, a new deity was
invented, and _Saturnus_ was fabled to be the son of _Cœlus_. Thus the
Italian _Herculus_, the god of hurdles, enclosures, and walls, was merged
in the Greek _Heracles_.(74) _Castor_ and _Pollux_, both of purely Greek
origin, were readily believed in as nautical deities by the Italian
sailors, and they were the first Greek gods to whom, after the battle on
the Lake Regillus (485), a temple was erected at Rome.(75) In 431 another
temple was erected at Rome to Apollo, whose oracle at Delphi had been
consulted by Italians ever since Greek colonists had settled on their
soil. The oracles of the famous Sibylla of Cumæ were written in Greek,(76)
and the priests (duoviri sacris faciundis) were allowed to keep two Greek
slaves for the purpose of translating these oracles.(77)
When the Romans, in 454 B. C., wanted to establish a code of laws, the
first thing they did was to send commissioners to Greece to report on the
laws of Solon at Athens and the laws of other Greek towns.(78) As Rome
rose in political power, Greek manners, Greek art, Greek language and
literature found ready admittance.(79) Before the beginning of the Punic
wars, many of the Roman statesmen were able to understand, and even to
speak Greek. Boys were not only taught the Roman letters by their masters,
the _literatores_, but they had to learn at the same time the Greek
alphabet. Those who taught Greek at Rome were then called _grammatici_,
and they were mostly Greek slaves or _liberti_.
Among the young men whom Cato saw growing up at Rome, to know Greek was
the same as to be a gentleman. They read Greek books, they conversed in
Greek, they even wrote in Greek. Tiberius Gracchus, consul in 177, made a
speech in Greek at Rhodes, which he afterwards published.(80) Flaminius,
when addressed by the Greeks in Latin, returned the compliment by writing
Greek verses in honor of their gods. The first history of Rome was written
at Rome in Greek, by Fabius Pictor,(81) about 200 B. C.; and it was
probably in opposition to this work, and to those of Lucius Cincius
Alimentus, and Publius Scipio, that Cato wrote his own history of Rome in
Latin. The example of the higher classes was eagerly followed by the
lowest. The plays of Plautus are the best proof; for the affectation of
using Greek words is as evident in some of his characters as the foolish
display of French in the German writers of the eighteenth century. There
was both loss and gain in the inheritance which Rome received from Greece;
but what would Rome have been without her Greek masters? The very fathers
of Roman literature were Greeks, private teachers, men who made a living
by translating school-books and plays. Livius Andronicus, sent as prisoner
of war from Tarentum (272 B. C.), established himself at Rome as professor
of Greek. His translation of the Odyssey into Latin verse, which marks the
beginning of Roman literature, was evidently written by him for the use of
his private classes. His style, though clumsy and wooden in the extreme,
was looked upon as a model of perfection by the rising poets of the
capital. Nævius and Plautus were his cotemporaries and immediate
successors. All the plays of Plautus were translations and adaptations of
Greek originals; and Plautus was not even allowed to transfer the scene
from Greece to Rome. The Roman public wanted to see Greek life and Greek
depravity; it would have stoned the poet who had ventured to bring on the
stage a Roman patrician or a Roman matron. Greek tragedies, also, were
translated into Latin. Ennius, the cotemporary of Nævius and Plautus,
though somewhat younger (239-169), was the first to translate Euripides.
Ennius, like Andronicus, was an Italian Greek, who settled at Rome as a
teacher of languages and translator of Greek. He was patronized by the
liberal party, by Publius Scipio, Titus Flaminius, and Marcus Fulvius
Nobilior.(82) He became a Roman citizen. But Ennius was more than a poet,
more than a teacher of languages. He has been called a neologian, and to a
certain extent he deserved that name. Two works written in the most
hostile spirit against the religion of Greece, and against the very
existence of the Greek gods, were translated by him into Latin.(83) One
was the philosophy of _Epicharmus_ (470 B. C., in Megara), who taught that
Zeus was nothing but the air, and other gods but names of the powers of
nature; the other the work of _Euhemerus_, of Messene (300 B. C.), who
proved, in the form of a novel, that the Greek gods had never existed, and
that those who were believed in as gods had been men. These two works were
not translated without a purpose; and though themselves shallow in the
extreme, they proved destructive to the still shallower systems of Roman
theology. Greek became synonymous with infidel; and Ennius would hardly
have escaped the punishment inflicted on Nævius for his political satires,
had he not enjoyed the patronage and esteem of the most influential
statesmen at Rome. Even Cato, the stubborn enemy of Greek philosophy(84)
and rhetoric, was a friend of the dangerous Ennius; and such was the
growing influence of Greek at Rome, that Cato himself had to learn it in
his old age, in order to teach his boy what he considered, if not useful,
at least harmless in Greek literature. It has been the custom to laugh at
Cato for his dogged opposition to everything Greek; but there was much
truth in his denunciations. We have heard much of young Bengál—young
Hindus who read Byron and Voltaire, play at billiards, drive tandems,
laugh at their priests, patronize missionaries, and believe nothing. The
description which Cato gives of the young idlers at Rome reminds us very
much of young Bengál.
When Rome took the torch of knowledge from the dying hands of Greece, that
torch was not burning with its brightest light. Plato and Aristotle had
been succeeded by Chrysippus and Carneades; Euripides and Menander had
taken the place of Æschylus and Sophocles. In becoming the guardian of the
Promethean spark first lighted in Greece, and intended hereafter to
illuminate not only Italy, but every country of Europe, Rome lost much of
that native virtue to which she owed her greatness. Roman frugality and
gravity, Roman citizenship and patriotism, Roman purity and piety, were
driven away by Greek luxury and levity, Greek intriguing and self-seeking,
Greek vice and infidelity. Restrictions and anathemas were of no avail;
and Greek ideas were never so attractive as when they had been reprobated
by Cato and his friends. Every new generation became more and more
impregnated with Greek. In 131(85) we hear of a consul (Publius Crassus)
who, like another Mezzofanti, was able to converse in the various dialects
of Greek. Sulla allowed foreign ambassadors to speak Greek before the
Roman senate.(86) The Stoic philosopher Panætius(87) lived in the house of
the Scipios, which was for a long time the rendezvous of all the literary
celebrities at Rome. Here the Greek historian Polybius, and the
philosopher Cleitomachus, Lucilius the satirist, Terence the African poet
(196-159), and the improvisatore Archias (102 B. C.), were welcome
guests.(88) In this select circle the master-works of Greek literature
were read and criticised; the problems of Greek philosophy were discussed;
and the highest interests of human life became the subject of thoughtful
conversation. Though no poet of original genius arose from this society,
it exercised a most powerful influence on the progress of Roman
literature. It formed a tribunal of good taste; and much of the
correctness, simplicity, and manliness of the classical Latin is due to
that “Cosmopolitan Club,” which met under the hospitable roof of the
Scipios.
The religious life of Roman society at the close of the Punic wars was
more Greek than Roman. All who had learnt to think seriously on religious
questions were either Stoics or followers of Epicurus; or they embraced
the doctrines of the New Academy, denying the possibility of any knowledge
of the Infinite, and putting opinion in the place of truth.(89) Though the
doctrines of Epicurus and the New Academy were always considered dangerous
and heretical, the philosophy of the Stoics was tolerated, and a kind of
compromise effected between philosophy and religion. There was a
state-philosophy as well as a state-religion. The Roman priesthood, though
they had succeeded, in 161, in getting all Greek rhetors and philosophers
expelled from Rome, perceived that a compromise was necessary. It was
openly avowed that in the enlightened classes(90) philosophy must take the
place of religion, but that a belief in miracles and oracles was necessary
for keeping the large masses in order. Even Cato,(91) the leader of the
orthodox, national, and conservative party, expressed his surprise that a
haruspex, when meeting a colleague, did not burst out laughing. Men like
Scipio Æmilianus and Lælius professed to believe in the popular gods; but
with them Jupiter was the soul of the universe, the statues of the gods
mere works of art.(92) Their gods, as the people complained, had neither
body, parts, nor passions. Peace, however, was preserved between the Stoic
philosopher and the orthodox priest. Both parties professed to believe in
the same gods, but they claimed the liberty to believe in them in their
own way.
I have dwelt at some length on the changes in the intellectual atmosphere
of Rome at the end of the Punic wars, and I have endeavored to show how
completely it was impregnated with Greek ideas in order to explain, what
otherwise would seem almost inexplicable, the zeal and earnestness with
which the study of Greek grammar was taken up at Rome, not only by a few
scholars and philosophers, but by the leading statesmen of the time. To
our minds, discussions on nouns and verbs, on cases and gender, on regular
and irregular conjugation, retain always something of the tedious
character which these subjects had at school, and we can hardly understand
how at Rome, grammar—pure and simple grammar—should have formed a subject
of general interest, and a topic of fashionable conversation. When one of
the first grammarians of the day, Crates of Pergamus, was sent to Rome as
ambassador of King Attalus, he was received with the greatest distinction
by all the literary statesmen of the capital. It so happened that when
walking one day on the Palatian hill, Crates caught his foot in the
grating of a sewer, fell and broke his leg. Being thereby detained at Rome
longer than he intended, he was persuaded to give some public lectures, or
_akroaseis_, on grammar; and from these lectures, says Suetonius, dates
the study of grammar at Rome. This took place about 159 B. C., between the
second and third Punic wars, shortly after the death of Ennius, and two
years after the famous expulsion of the Greek rhetors and philosophers
(161). Four years later Carneades, likewise sent to Rome as ambassador,
was prohibited from lecturing by Cato. After these lectures of Crates,
grammatical and philological studies became extremely popular at Rome. We
hear of Lucius Ælius Stilo,(93) who lectured on Latin as Crates had
lectured on Greek. Among his pupils were Varro, Lucilius, and Cicero.
Varro composed twenty-four books on the Latin language, four of which were
dedicated to Cicero. Cicero, himself, is quoted as an authority on
grammatical questions, though we know of no special work of his on
grammar. Lucilius devoted the ninth book of his satires to the reform of
spelling.(94) But nothing shows more clearly the wide interest which
grammatical studies had then excited in the foremost ranks of Roman
society than Cæsar’s work on Latin grammar. It was composed by him during
the Gallic war, and dedicated to Cicero, who might well be proud of the
compliment thus paid him by the great general and statesman. Most of these
works are lost to us, and we can judge of them only by means of casual
quotations. Thus we learn from a fragment of Cæsar’s work, _De analogia_,
that he was the inventor of the term _ablative_ in Latin. The word never
occurs before, and, of course, could not be borrowed, like the names of
the other cases, from Greek grammarians, as they admitted no ablative in
Greek. To think of Cæsar fighting the barbarians of Gaul and Germany, and
watching from a distance the political complications at Rome, ready to
grasp the sceptre of the world, and at the same time carrying on his
philological and grammatical studies together with his secretary, the
Greek Didymus,(95) gives us a new view both of that extraordinary man, and
of the time in which he lived. After Cæsar had triumphed, one of his
favorite plans was to found a Greek and Latin library at Rome, and he
offered the librarianship to the best scholar of the day, to Varro, though
Varro had fought against him on the side of Pompey.(96)
We have thus arrived at the time when, as we saw in an earlier part of
this lecture, Dionysius Thrax published the first elementary grammar of
Greek at Rome. Empirical grammar had thus been transplanted to Rome, the
Greek grammatical terminology was translated into Latin, and in this new
Latin garb it has travelled now for nearly two thousand years over the
whole civilized world. Even in India, where a different terminology had
grown up in the grammatical schools of the Brahmans, a terminology in some
respects more perfect than that of Alexandria and Rome, we may now hear
such words as _case_, and _gender_, and _active_ and _passive_, explained
by European teachers to their native pupils. The fates of words are
curious indeed, and when I looked the other day at some of the examination
papers of the government schools in India, such questions as—“Write the
genitive case of Siva,” seemed to reduce whole volumes of history into a
single sentence. How did these words, genitive case, come to India? They
came from England, they had come to England from Rome, to Rome from
Alexandria, to Alexandria from Athens. At Athens, the term _case_, or
_ptōsis_, had a philosophical meaning; at Rome, _casus_ was merely a
literal translation; the original meaning of _fall_ was lost, and the word
dwindled down to a mere technical term. At Athens, the philosophy of
language was a counterpart of the philosophy of the mind. The terminology
of formal logic and formal grammar was the same. The logic of the Stoics
was divided into two parts,(97) called _rhetoric_ and _dialectic_, and the
latter treated, first, “On that which signifies, or language;” secondly,
“On that which is signified, or things.” In their philosophical language
_ptōsis_, which the Romans translated by _casus_, really meant fall; that
is to say, the inclination or relation of one idea to another, the falling
or resting of one word on another. Long and angry discussions were carried
on as to whether the name of _ptōsis_, or fall, was applicable to the
nominative; and every true Stoic would have scouted the expression of
_casus rectus_, because the subject or the nominative, as they argued, did
not fall or rest on anything else, but stood erect, the other words of a
sentence leaning or depending on it. All this is lost to us when we speak
of cases.
And how are the dark scholars in the government schools of India to guess
the meaning of _genitive_? The Latin _genitivus_ is a mere blunder, for
the Greek word _genikē_ could never mean _genitivus_. _Genitivus_, if it
is meant to express the case of origin or birth, would in Greek have been
called _gennētikē_, not _genikē_. Nor does the genitive express the
relation of son to father. For though we may say, “the son of the father,”
we may likewise say, “the father of the son.” _Genikē_, in Greek, had a
much wider, a much more philosophical meaning.(98) It meant _casus
generalis_, the general case, or rather the case which expresses the
gentus or kind. This is the real power of the genitive. If I say, “a bird
of the water,” “of the water” defines the genus to which a certain bird
belongs; it refers it to the genus of water-birds. “Man of the mountains,”
means a mountaineer. In phrases such as “son of the father,” or “father of
the son,” the genitives have the same effect. They predicate something of
the son or of the father; and if we distinguished between the sons of the
father, and the sons of the mother, the genitives would mark the class or
genus to which the sons respectively belonged. They would answer the same
purpose as the adjectives, paternal and maternal. It can be proved
etymologically that the termination of the genitive is, in most cases,
identical with those derivative suffixes by which substantives are changed
into adjectives.(99)
It is hardly necessary to trace the history of what I call the empirical
study, or the grammatical analysis of language, beyond Rome. With
Dionysius Thrax the framework of grammar was finished. Later writers have
improved and completed it, but they have added nothing really new and
original. We can follow the stream of grammatical science from Dionysius
Thrax to our own time in an almost uninterrupted chain of Greek and Roman
writers. We find Quintilian in the first century; Scaurus, Apollonius
Dyscolus, and his son, Herodianus, in the second; Probus and Donatus in
the fourth. After Constantine had moved the seat of government from Rome,
grammatical science received a new home in the academy of Constantinople.
There were no less than twenty Greek and Latin grammarians who held
professorships at Constantinople. Under Justinian, in the sixth century,
the name of Priscianus gave a new lustre to grammatical studies, and his
work remained an authority during the Middle Ages to nearly our own times.
We ourselves have been taught grammar according to the plan which was
followed by Dionysius at Rome, by Priscianus at Constantinople, by Alcuin
at York; and whatever may be said of the improvements introduced into our
system of education, the Greek and Latin grammars used at our public
schools are mainly founded on the first empirical analysis of language,
prepared by the philosophers of Athens, applied by the scholars of
Alexandria, and transferred to the practical purpose of teaching a foreign
tongue by the Greek professors at Rome.
LECTURE IV. THE CLASSIFICATORY STAGE.
We traced, in our last lecture, the origin and progress of the empirical
study of languages from the time of Plato and Aristotle to our own
school-boy days. We saw at what time, and under what circumstances, the
first grammatical analysis of language took place; how its component
parts, the parts of speech, were named, and how, with the aid of a
terminology, half philosophical and half empirical, a system of teaching
languages was established, which, whatever we may think of its intrinsic
value, has certainly answered that purpose for which it was chiefly
intended.