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56 anna chahoud
etc.; extra-literary evidence such as Romance developments; and usage in
literature.
3.1.1 Non-literary evidence
Recent work on non-literary Latin has been invaluable in adjusting whatever
monolithic picture of the language one might have derived from
élite literature and grammarians’ pronouncements on standards of correctness.
The evidence suggests a much greater diversification of usages,
which one would be tempted to call conversational. Nevertheless, the survival
of non-literary written records from the Latin-speaking world in antiquityismostlyaccidental,andassuchresultsinalimitedcorpus:private
communications, epitaphs, curses, advertisements and documents written
on papyrus, ostraka, tablets, walls or stones are often isolated expressions
of an individual or a community locally and/or chronologically situated,
such as, for example, the correspondence of Claudius Terentianus from
early second-century ad Egypt, 36 the soldiers’ letters from Vindolanda, or
curse tablets from Bath and other parts of Roman Britain from the same
period. 37 Evidence from the Republican period is scanty, and the existence
of ancient comments identifying ‘vulgar’ and archaic usages can make this
early evidence even more difficult to evaluate, as with Gellius’ comment on
the alleged correctness of the verb sermonari ‘to have a conversation’, which
he read in compound form in Quadrigarius, but also survives in an imprecatio
from first-century bc Rome. 38 Inscriptions and graffiti are formulaic,
or short, or both, rarely allowing for substantial enough evidence about
particular usages (cf. Adams 1977a: 1). Finally, most of these texts exhibit
a medium to low degree of literacy and a number of interferences. These
varieties – described as substandard or sub-élite Latin (see Clackson and
Horrocks 2007: 229–62) – cast little light on the conversational practices
of the upper classes of the classical period, and therefore on the colloquial
nature of the texts that supposedly represent them.
The very relation between literary and spoken language is defined in
different ways. Clackson and Horrocks speak of ‘homogeneity of spoken
Latin’, on the grounds that most sub-élite documentary records appear
to be ‘striving to be as close to the standards of Virgil and Cicero as
possible’ (2007: 235), whereas Herman views substandard (‘vulgar’) Latin
as a continuum defined by its opposition with a practically non-influential
36 Adams 1977a, 2003a: 593–7; Clackson and Horrocks 2007: 249–51.
37 See, most recently, Adams 2007: 579–623.
38 Gel. 17.2.17;cf.CIL i 2 . 818.3, 6. On Quadrigarius as a main source for Gellius’ ‘Republicanisms’ see
Holford-Strevens 2003: 50–1 with n. 24,andindexs.v.