ABSTRACT
Latium (central Italy) and later, as Rome extended its power, throughout Italy, the Balkans and the western Mediterranean – and still used in the Vatican today. The earliest identifiable Latin is found on a brooch found at Praeneste (modern Palestrina, some 20 miles from Rome), dated to the second half of the seventh century BCE. This is very different from what we call Classical Latin, the written form of the Roman dialect of Latin which was used for official and literary texts, and very different again from the Latin spoken by ordinary people, which we label Vulgar Latin and which we glimpse in graffiti scrawled on walls. This last ultimately developed into the Romance languages, Italian, Romanian, French, Spanish and Portuguese. Like all languages, then, Latin changed through time and according to the place and status of those using it. Yet the Latin studied in our schools and universities is almost always Classical Latin and most of the authors studied date from the first century BCE and the first century CE, despite the fact that people continued to use Classical Latin along with its successor Medieval Latin for centuries. The Italian poet and scholar Petrarch, for instance, wrote pastoral poetry in Latin in the fourteenth century, dramatists in England in the sixteenth century wrote plays in Latin, and as late as the eighteenth century a Jesuit from Guatemala called Landivar wrote a long poem in Latin in the style of the Aeneid.
