ital principle. Not a single radical element was newly created for
the formation of Italian. Italian is Latin in a new form. Italian is
modern Latin, or Latin ancient Italian. The names _mother_ and _daughter_
only mark different periods in the growth of a language substantially the
same. To speak of Latin dying in giving birth to her offspring is again
pure mythology, and it would be easy to prove that Latin was a living
language long after Italian had learnt to run alone. Only let us clearly
see what we mean by Latin. The classical Latin is one out of many dialects
spoken by the Aryan inhabitants of Italy. It was the dialect of Latium, in
Latium the dialect of Rome, at Rome the dialect of the patricians. It was
fixed by Livius Andronicus, Ennius, Naevius, Cato, and Lucretius, polished
by the Scipios, Hortensius, and Cicero. It was the language of a
restricted class, of a political party, of a literary set. Before their
time, the language of Rome must have changed and fluctuated considerably.
Polybius tells us (iii. 22), that the best-informed Romans could not make
out without difficulty the language of the ancient treaties between Rome
and Carthage. Horace admits (Ep. ii. 1, 86), that he could not understand
the old Salian poems, and he hints that no one else could. Quintilian (i.
6, 40) says that the Salian priests could hardly understand their sacred
hymns. If the plebeians had obtained the upperhand over the patricians,
Latin would have been very different from what it is in Cicero, and we
know that even Cicero, having been brought up at Arpinum, had to give up
some of his provincial peculiarities, such as the dropping of the final
_s_, when he began to mix in fashionable society, and had to write for his
new patrician friends.(49) After having been established as the language
of legislation, religion, literature, and general civilization, the
classical Latin dialect became stationary and stagnant. It could not grow,
because it was not allowed to change or to deviate from its classical
correctness. It was haunted by its own ghost. Literary dialects, or what
are commonly called classical languages, pay for their temporary greatness
by inevitable decay. They are like stagnant lakes at the side of great
rivers. They form reservoirs of what was once living and running speech,
but they are no longer carried on by the main current. At times it may
seem as if the whole stream of language was absorbed by these lakes, and
we c