63 Colloquial and Li.. - Ganino.com

chapter 22
Late sparsa collegimus: the influence of sources
on the language of Jordanes
Giovanbattista Galdi
1 introduction
Unlike some other authors of the sixth century ad, such as Cassiodorus,
the historian Jordanes has received very little attention in modern
scholarship. 1 Besides, the evaluation of his language and style has been
since Mommsen an unfavourable one, for two reasons. The first is that,
since both his works are epitomes, Jordanes often employs large sections
of previous authors – from the second to the sixth century ad – sometimes
copying them word for word (Bergmüller 1903: 3 defines him a ‘Kompilator
ersten Ranges’); the other reason is that his texts contain, at least in
Mommsen’s (1882) edition, several late and substandard features as compared
to the ‘good’ classical Latin, that is ‘the standard language in the
late Republic and early Empire’. 2 The aim of this paper is to connect, in
some way, these two aspects: on the one hand, I shall show how crucial an
exact knowledge of the sources is to a precise understanding of Jordanes’
language; on the other, I shall discuss some morphological and syntactic
peculiarities of his works. Special attention will be given here to a few
substandard usages that can be considered ‘colloquialisms’, that is to those
features which are normally excluded from literary sources of the (post-)
classical period and, on the ground of several parallels in authors of the
same period and, especially, in non-literary and extra-literary sources, 3 are
likely to have been widespread in the spoken varieties of late Latin. I shall
thus not regard as colloquial all substandard (that is not-classical) features
in Jordanes, but only those which at the time when he composed his works
1 The author wishes to express his deep gratitude to Anna Chahoud for her corrections and very useful
suggestions.
2 Adams 2007: 17. As is well known, linguistic anomalies occurring in late Latin sources are often seen,
especially in nineteenth-century/early twentieth-century scholarship, as a mark of ‘wrong’ and bad
Latin, with an implied judgement of value. See Chahoud, this volume p. 54.
3 On the difference between non-literary and extra-literary evidence see Chahoud, this volume
pp. 56–7.
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