MORGAN. — ON THE LANGUAGE OP VITRDVIUS. 489 



Ussing next passes to Hellenisms : ' The most ancient Roman authors 

 not unfrequently borrowed words from Greek to express ideas or to name 

 objects for which their own language lacked words, but they did not 

 borrow forms or constructions. The age of Cicero and Augustus tried 

 to remove the Greek words and to keep the language pure, but these 

 attempts did not entirely succeed, and in the Silver age we find repeat- 

 edly that where it became necessary to use Greek words, the authors 

 liked to show their knowledge in retaining the Greek flexions, as os 

 in the nominative instead of us, u in the genitive, etc. In the course of 

 time such Hellenisms increased, and the great number of them which 

 occur in Vitruvius also help to indicate the period when he lived.' — 

 Here the confession of Ussing, that the attempts of Cicero and Augustus 

 to remove Greek words and to keep the language pure ' did not entirely 

 succeed ' is fatal to his argument. We must remember that we are 

 dealing with an author who stands alone iu his kind. It is true that 

 E iin his, Plautus, and Terence, when they used Greek words, generally 

 Latinized them in form, but we know that Accius preferred to retain the 

 Greek terminations (Varro, L. L. 5, 21 ; cf. 10, 70), and we see that 

 Lucilius, Catullus, and Varro as well as the Augustan poets employed 

 many Greek forms, while the number of Greek words in Bell. Afr., 

 Bell. Hisp., Celsus, Pliny the Elder, and Petronius shows that we have 

 not to wait until late Latinity for the appearance of this tendency. I 

 need say nothing of Cicero's letters, which in spite of his own dictum in 

 the Tusculans (1, 15), scis me Graece loqui in Latino sermone nonplus 

 solere quam in Graeco Latine, prove that ' Greek words and phrases 

 were the argot of literary Rome.' 23 If Cicero uses Greek as 'part of 

 the terminology of rhetoric and politics, not merely calling it in to sup- 

 ply a deficiency in the Latin language but dropping into it when he 

 might as easily have used Latin,' we ought not to be surpi-ised at find- 

 ing Vitruvius doing the same in treating a subject on which not many 

 Romans had written before him. When we find Greek terminations 

 in Vitruvius, we must remember that Cicero wrote tyrannida in Att. 14, 

 11, 2, though tyrannidem iu Off. 3, 90, and that this Greek ending is 

 not confined to letters to Atticus but is found in hebdomada in Fam. 16, 

 9, 3. And in Or. 191 we have paeana, though paeanem stands in D. O. 

 1, 251. Neither should it be thought that Vitruvius uses only Greek 

 terminations for Greek words. For example : Nohl's Index to Vitruvius 

 gives under the letters a, b, and c, 973 words (excluding proper nouns 



23 Tyrrell, Correspondence of Cicero, I, p. 66. 



