Response to Jurgen Leonhardt, “Philology in the 19th century: Ideals, traditions, methods”
(2017) The Bible and Antiquity in the 19th Century: Philology in the 19th century: Ideals, traditions, methods — Location: Cambridge, UK
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- Abstract
- A wonderful and early page from Professor Jurgen Leonhardt’s book on Latin: Story of a World Language, draws a page directly from Cicero: “All of the writings that have come down to us from ancient Rome,” he writes, “including all inscriptions, constitute at most 0.01 percent of the total output. Of this miniscule percentage, Christian texts from late antiquity represent approximately 80. What is genereally known as the literature of the Romans, as it is taught in school, the works of authors like Plautus, Cicero, and Tacitus, forms little more than an infinitesimal point in the universe that is Latin, albeit one that shines brightly.” His book, by giving us a view of Latin sub specie aeternitatis, calls us to explore the vast expanses of Latinity that lay beyond the resplendent punctum of pagan Rome. But even this relativizing cannot resist giving this one point more light than all the others, and cannot resist, in a larger sense, drawing on the point with the help of the famous Ciceronian topos itself. For certain purposes of historical interpretation, of course, this poses no problem, and in fact is quite to the point: for most of the history of recorded Latin, Cicero’s Latin did shine more brightly than all the others, and, in a larger sense, all post-ancient Latins leaned heavily on the Latin of antiquity. But no doubt there are crucial literary debates that will have to happen as we wonder whether relativizing the place of ancient Latin in our own appreciation of Latin will require us to remove it as the necessary vanishing point of Latinity as well.
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Trinity Cambridge
Citations
Kachuck, A. (2017). Response to Jurgen Leonhardt, “Philology in the 19th century: Ideals, traditions, methods”. The Bible and Antiquity in the 19th Century: Philology in the 19th century: Ideals, traditions, methods, Cambridge, UK. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/101064