192 LATIN LANGUAGE 



to the present day. It is obvious that I cannot present even a hun- 

 dredth part of this. I must, however, necessarily run briefly over 

 the centuries that preceded the one covered by the title of my 

 paper. 



The first recorded thinking about the syntax of any language of 

 our family took place among the Greeks. The moods received names. 

 In the best Greek writing on the subject, that of Apollonius the Cross 

 (an unhappy epithet for one engaged in so charming a work) , Greek 

 mood-syntax reached its culmination. Apollonius defined the moods 

 as expressing a Si<0e<m 1/^x1*07, which I like to translate by the 

 phrase, " an attitude of mind." We have not got beyond this yet, nor 

 ever shall. We have strayed far from it in the last century, and to it 

 we must return. 



Apollonius uses for the moods the names inherited from his pre- 

 decessors. They are: opto-Tucy, the Mood of Indicating or Defining, 

 the Latin Indicativus; irpna-raKTi.^, the Mood of Commanding, the 

 Latin Imperativus; evKTiKrj, the Mood of Wishing, the Latin Opta- 

 tivus; and vTroraKTiKrj, the Subjoined Mood, the Latin Subiunctivus. 

 In giving the first three names, the Greeks were unconsciously 

 thinking of the moods as Apollonius did in his definition. They were 

 recognizing the attitudes of mind conveyed by them, the represent- 

 ation respectively of a fact, of a command, of a wish. The list of 

 forces is imperfect, but it is sound so far as it goes. Examples in 

 which the three moods convey precisely the attitudes of mind de- 

 scribed by the names occur in abundance. 



In hitting upon the last name, the Subjoined Mood, the Greeks 

 committed a great error. They had named the other moods from 

 their forces; this mood, on the other hand, they named simply from 

 its relation, in subordinate clauses, to other parts of the sentence. It 

 was to them simply the mood of attachment. The mischief accom- 

 plished by this purely superficial treatment is not yet undone. 



We have already seen, then, two entirely different ways of looking 

 at uses of the moods. For the second I know no apposite name, 

 unless it be " mechanical." For the first, the conception which looks 

 upon moods as expressing attitudes of mind, the proper name is 

 "psychological." We mean more to-day by the word psychological 

 than Apollonius meant by his definition. But, so far as Apollo- 

 nius went, we mean the same thing. 



The Roman grammarians accepted the Greek conceptions of the 

 moods, and translated the names, as above. Naturally, then, they ap- 

 plied the names Subjunctive and Optative to the same set of forms 

 used under different circumstances. The mood in utinam amarer 

 they called the Optative. The mood in the second verb of prodest 

 ut eas they called the Subjunctive. 



The scholastic grammarians did not interest themselves in the 



