63 Colloquial and Li.. - Ganino.com

52 anna chahoud
does not work both ways: while we may accept that colloquial usages are
‘unpoetic’, i.e. excluded from the selective world of high-register poetry,
the reverse is certainly not the case, i.e. not all usages which are excluded
from high-register poetry are necessarily conversational. Confusion over
these matters, however, has an ancient scholarly tradition.
2.3.1 Communia verba
In a study of the passage in Suetonius–Donatus’ Life of Virgil in which
one Vipranius objected to Virgil’s use of communia verba resulting in
obscurity, 26 H. D. Jocelyn examined the series of oppositions used in critical
language from antiquity to determine the acceptability of words in
literary texts. The first of such oppositions is between plain words (communia
verba) and poetic words (poetica verba). This distinction was quite
separate in the ancient sources from the one which set ‘distinguished’ words
(honesta) against lowly ones (humilia): ‘Greek teachers warned against
, , , , , ,
, , . Latin teachers similarly denounced verba
humilia, illiberalia, incompta, obscena, plebeia, sordida, trita, turpia, vilia,
vulgaria.’ 27 No word of this kind is obviously found in the works of Virgil,
which were the most authoritative source for good Latin in the book
of all ancient grammarians. Virgil’s communia verba must be explained
otherwise, and Jocelyn, working on the opposition ‘common’/‘special to
a particular art or craft’ (i.e. technical), tentatively proposed to read the
detractor’s charge as a specific reference to Virgil’s avoidance of prosaic agricultural
terms in the Georgics, thus making the didactic poem useless to
anyone seeking precise factual information about farming (Jocelyn 1979:
115–18).
Jocelyn observed that the ancient scholarly definitions of verbum commune
( ) ‘referred to lexical items which could be expected
tooccureitherinaninformalcontextofspeechamongmenofthe
social class to which pupils of the grammarians and rhetoricians belonged
or in a formal literary work; they carried in themselves no pejorative
connotation’. 28 These were words equally distant from Ennianesque poetic
diction and markedly low-register usage.
26 Suetonius, De poetis 2.43.6 M. Vipranius a Maecenate eum suppositum appellabat novae cacozeliae
repertorem, non tumidae ne exilis, sed ex communibus uerbis atque ideo latentis, ‘Marcus Vipranius used
to call him bastard of Maecenas and discoverer of an affected style, not overblown or understated,
but coming from everyday words and therefore hidden’ (trans. Thomas 2000: 406).
27 Jocelyn 1979: 114, with lists of sources at 138 f. (nn. 244–8).
28 Jocelyn 1979: 111, with list of sources at 137 f. (n. 216).