Everyday language had already moved on, in the west towards Romance/vulgate Latin and in the east to a simpler Greek vernacular, largely because evolving pronunciation patterns meant that the differences between many of the grammatically ‘correct’ endings could no longer be heard. Mastering these artificial languages, and the narrow literary canons through which they were learned, took five or more years of expensive, private education. But in the Romans’ own understanding, this education, which allowed members of the landowning elite to recognize one another as soon they opened their mouths and provided students with a wealth of shared allusions and in-jokes, was far more than just an elite caste marker. Grammarians – and the rhetors and philosophers at the centres for higher-level studies – not only taught language and literature but used their texts to transmit shared moral values and a common understanding of how their educational wares created undeniably superior human beings. Language and grammar were used to teach an introduction to formal logic – and therefore, so the justificatory ideology went, only the grammarians could create fully rational human beings, who had achieved a level of civilization that was simply unavailable to fellow humans excluded from its benefits.
Peter Heather
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