once for all fixed; e. g. of the genitive and dative
forms hitherto current side by side in the so-called fourth declension
(-senatuis- and -senatus-, -senatui-, and -senatu-) Caesar recognized
exclusively as valid the contracted forms (-us and -u).
In orthography various changes were made, to bring the written
more fully into correspondence with the spoken language;
thus the -u in the middle of words like -maxumus- was replaced
after Caesar's precedent by -i; and of the two letters
which had become superfluous, -k and -q, the removal of the first
was effected, and that of the second was at least proposed.
The language was, if not yet stereotyped, in the course of becoming so;
it was not yet indeed unthinkingly dominated by rule, but it had already
become conscious of it. That this action in the department
of Latin grammar derived generally its spirit and method
from the Greek, and not only so, but that the Latin language was also
directly rectified in accordance with Greek precedent, is shown,
for example, by the treatment of the final -s, which till
towards the close of this epoch had at pleasure passed sometimes
as a consonant, sometimes not as one, but was treated by the new-
fashioned poets throughout, as in Greek, as a consonantal
termination. This regulation of language is the proper domain
of Roman classicism; in the most various ways, and for that very reason
all the more significantly, the rule is inculcated and the offence
against it rebuked by the coryphaei of classicism, by Cicero,
by Caesar, even in the poems of Catullus; whereas the older generation
expresses itself with natural keenness of feeling respecting
the revolution which had affected the field of language
as remorselessly as the field of politics.(5) But while the new
classicism--that is to say, the standard Latin governed by rule
and as far as possible placed on a parity with the standard Greek--
which arose out of a conscious reaction against the vulgarism
intruding into higher society and even into literature,
acquired literary fixity and systematic shape, the latter by no means
evacuated the field. Not only do we find it naively employed
in the works of secondary personages who have drifted into the ranks
of authors merely by accident, as in the account of Caesar's second
Spanish war, but we shall meet it also with an impress more or less
distinct in literature proper, in the mime, in the semi-romance,
in the aesthetic writings of Varro;