Capitolo 42
talked to each other. We can clearly see that enough from the
conversations in Plautus and Terence. In fact the Latin period is a
artificial product, brought to perfection by a lot of generations of literary
workers and the nearest we reach the Latin of the common people the more
natural the order and style it seems to the English-speaking person. The
discourse of the freedmen without education in the novel of Petronius is
interesting in this connection. They doesn't not only succeed in using the period, but
they rarely subordinates the one idea to another. Instead of saying "I saw him/it
when he was an aedile", it is probable that they says "I saw him/it; he was an aedile
then."
When we was analyzing Latin preliterary, we noticed that the
co-ordination of the ideas was one of its characteristics, so that this line of the face
it evidently persisted in literary popular, while Latin discourse it became more
logical and complex.
In the preceding pages we have tried to discover out the principal characteristics of
the popular Latin. In to do so we have continually thought about the literary Latin
as the foil or standard of comparison. Now, oddly enough, anybody sooner
if the literary mean of expression had slowly dissociated and painfully
it from the language of the common people that the influences that it
you/he/she could not withstand to brings down again it to the level of his humbler
brother. Its integrity clearly depended on the acceptance of certain
recognized standard. But when flourishing schools of the literature jumped on
in Spain, in Africa and in Gaul, the eminent authority in Rome and the
common standard for the Latin world that she had put was lost. When some
men tried to imitate Cicero and Quintilian and others, Seneca, there
stopped being a model common of excellence. Likewise an accurate distinction
between the diction of prose and verse you/he/she was gradually obliterated. There
it was a loss of interest in literature, and professional writers gave less
attention to their diction and style. The aspect of the Christianity, also,