ABSTRACT
One of these monuments falls into a category that today would be called linguistics and philology: the Prose della volgar lingua, which the author, Pietro Bembo, presented to Pope Clement v i i in 1524.2 Bembo (1470-1547) was a Venetian patrician who, after a rather unsuccessful career in the papal diplomatic service, settled down in his country house at Villabozza on the Brenta near Padua to enjoy his newly won reputation as the linguistic arbiter of Italy. He had already solved one of the ‘language questions’ that had been debated ever since the advent of humanism: which of the various forms of Latin revealed in the many newly discovered or edited texts of antiquity should take the place of the medieval Latin that the humanists all agreed on rejecting. He began by posing an axiom: that all great literature is engendered by one of those few languages that, after a long development, reaches a stage of ‘perfection’. According to the Romans themselves, the greatest Latin prose was written by Cicero and the greatest Latin verse by Virgil. Whoever, then, in modern times wants to write good Latin should adhere strictly to the
vocabulary, style and syntax found in Cicero’s and Virgil’s surviving works. He should borrow from later Latin writers — including Quintilian, the schoolmaster of the mid-fifteenth century as well as the second century a d — only those words that those writers in turn may have borrowed from now lost works of the great age.
