Cicero is well known to provide information about early Roman drama through his frequent references to performances, biographical details and characteristics of playwrights, motifs in dramas, language and style. Most of these comments are integrated into a specific context and therefore reflect Cicero’s argumentative aim. Yet, at the same time, they reveal insights into the nature of Roman Republican drama and its assessment in Cicero’s time. This chapter explores Cicero’s comments on the language, style and rhythm of early Republican dramas as well as his taking up of linguistic features of these plays. By looking at a selection of representative passages, this contribution examines what Cicero says about the language and idioms of early Roman playwrights and analyses whether Cicero takes up any of the linguistic features highlighted or instead opts for alternative versions. Such a study enables a better understanding of the Romans’ own view of the language of their early dramas as well as of any differences and developments between the various playwrights and dramatic genres.

The interest in early Latin developed mainly outside the field of normative grammar, particularly in authors who belonged to the tradition of scholarly or antiquarian writing. Varro’s encyclopaedic works testify to a unique effort to save uestigia of the cultural and historical past by means of linguistic operations. His approach soon lost its institutional character and was replaced by curiosity for rare minutiae, as in Pliny’s Dubius Sermo. Grammarians like Probus and Caper, whose orientation was philological rather than didactic, considered that the auctoritas of literary models made divergences from the norm or contemporary usage acceptable, and viewed uetustas as the area of experimental variation, both lexical and morphological, with respect to the usage of Republican writers. The inclusion of an immense corpus of literary quotations in comprehensive works (artes grammaticae) facilitated the adoption of an overall perspective that embraced the evolution of the linguistic system at all levels, and kept alive an awareness of the diachronic dimension of the language, which became increasingly profound in scholars like Priscian who read Terence in sixth-century Constantinople.

Chapter Three studies ‘the word’ by merging two fields of association: first, the agglomeration of human labours, social practices, cultural values, and codified grammatical systems that made possible and supported the acquisition of Latin; second, the inhuman order of the ‘verbum Dei’. Each of these fields of association has, as its ultimate aim, the transformation of individual lives. It is under the rubric of this shared objective that I bring them together here. The first half of the chapter explores aspects of the medieval Latin grammatical tradition and its early modern afterlives. My goal is to make some seventh-century wranglings on the subject of the Latin case system serve as a point of entry into later fashions of prose style, and into the pedagogical disciplines of systematic imitation that were developed to teach Ciceronian Latin to schoolboys. The second half of the chapter explores a range of texts associated with St Paul, St Augustine, and Martin Luther in order to characterize the linguistic and spiritual stakes of medieval and early modern Britain’s absorption into Rome.