Coming soon - Get a detailed view of why an account is flagged as spam!
view details

This post has been de-listed

It is no longer included in search results and normal feeds (front page, hot posts, subreddit posts, etc). It remains visible only via the author's post history.

84
I'm fascinated by the Hellenization of the empire
Post Body

So, one common thing that's very observable is how much more Hellenized Latin becomes.

We have the 'golden age' of Latin literature and here the examples are Cicero, Vergil, Caesar, Catullus, Horace, and Titus Livius.

When we look at somebody like Seneca, for example, we still see a strong Latin presence but one that is much more 'hellenized' and Seneca indeed was an enormous admirer of the Attic writers.

Way into the Antonine and Severan era, the Latin language is very much a sort of quasi-Greek language. Examples of such Latin literature with heavy Greek borrowing is the Attic Nights by Gellius.

Finally, we see way into the later centuries writers like Lactantius and Firmicus Maternus who write in a Latin that is not only very Hellenized in neologisms but in style and tone as well, sometimes even borrowing directly from Plato, Aristotle, Homer, Xenophon, among others.

Now, what's not often talked about is how this changed the customs and manners of Rome, the overall culture. How names change, how rhetoric changes, together with just regular way of thinking.

One philhellene that people often miss is old Marcus Tullius Cicero who explodes in popularity in the late empire. You can see how many of the later Latin writers like Jerome, Augustine, Paulinus, Orosius, etc... all very much have a sort of 'Ciceronian' philosophy, but with a Christian sense. That's to say they cherry-pick what they like about Cicero and use it in their own day.

Cicero, of course, we know essentially bridged the Greek philosophic tradition, the Hellenistic schools of thought, into the Roman world. His works like Officis, De Republica, Finibus Bonum et Malum, De Divinatione, etc ... are really only understandable if you can grasp all the references he makes to the Greeks.

Author
Account Strength
70%
Account Age
3 months
Verified Email
Yes
Verified Flair
No
Total Karma
5,779
Link Karma
5,315
Comment Karma
464
Profile updated: 1 hour ago
Posts updated: 1 month ago

Subreddit

Post Details

We try to extract some basic information from the post title. This is not always successful or accurate, please use your best judgement and compare these values to the post title and body for confirmation.
Posted
2 months ago