Once upon a time

Beyond Greek: The Beginnings of Latin Literature. By Denis Feeney. Harvard University Press; 377 pages; $35 and £25.

IN RECENT years there has been a revival of interest in the classics. Still, things are not what they were. In the 1930s Latin might consume almost half of a 12-year-old boy’s lessons at a British private school. Today, university classics courses accept students with little Latin and no Greek.

It takes “a good classics undergraduate” to tell you what every child used to know, that the Minotaur was “the half-brother of Ariadne, and that he was killed by Theseus”. With over 120 pages of notes and references, Denis Feeney’s study of the beginnings of Latin literature is not designed to attract more first-year students. It is written by the professor of Latin at Princeton University for other academics. However, his bold theme and vigorous writing render “Beyond Greek” of interest to anyone intrigued by the history and literature of the classical world.

With hindsight—since the Romans followed the Greeks, as even today’s schoolchildren know—it can seem obvious that the Latin works of Cicero, Virgil and Horace would succeed those of Homer, Sophocles and Aeschylus. Not so, says Mr Feeney. It was “one of the strangest…events in Mediterranean history” that the Romans began producing Greek-style tragedies, comedies and epics before developing a fresh vernacular literature of their own. After all, other powers such as Persia and Egypt, also in contact and conflict with Greece, did nothing of the sort.

It probably started in 240BC when the Ludi Romani, the great annual festival, allowed a Greek play to be staged in Latin translation. The Romans were no strangers to other cultures. With their defeat of Carthage and emergence as the dominant power, they were confident and suffered no “cultural cringe”. But it was the translations, in a Latin metre, of Homer and Attic drama by Livius Andronicus, “not a natural or inevitable thing to happen”, that paved the way for later literature. They were helped by Greeks accommodating the rising power. Whereas translators today mostly convert texts into their first language, Livius was a Greek, a native speaker of the source language, and Naevius, who followed him, though born in Italy, had Greek as a childhood language. Only later did it become the norm for a Roman such as Cicero to translate into Latin.

A colonising power tends to impose its language on a subject land. However, for several generations, the relative status of Greek and Latin was in flux: to Romans, “Greek” was both the vernacular of slaves and the classical Attic standard of revered literature. But by the time Ennius, considered the father of Latin poetry, died in 169BC, Latin literature “had achieved escape velocity”. Self-assured Roman elites had become happily bilingual and biliterate, and in time this helped them rule a widespread and polyglot empire.

Mr Feeney contrasts the Romans with the Etruscans and the Carthaginians, neither of whom appear to have possessed a literature; and he provides interesting comparisons, for example with Japan’s borrowing of Chinese characters, first to write in Chinese and only later adapted to write Japanese. What was astonishing about Ennius’s “Annales” is that he superimposed Roman history upon that of the Greeks, “in a Homeric epic written in a language that was not Homer’s”. By now the growth of Latin literature was as certain as the expansion of Roman power.