The Unequal Foundations of a Shared Tradition

The first two centuries of the Common Era witnessed the flourishing of an extraordinary bilingual prose literature written in both Greek and Latin. While the greatest genius of this era, Tacitus, was Roman and his thought patterns resisted Greek expression, these two languages became vehicles for what was essentially a single literary tradition – with Greek playing the demonstrably more significant role.

From their very origins, Greek and Latin occupied unequal positions in this cultural landscape. Native Greek speakers rarely bothered to learn Latin beyond administrative necessities, finding its intricate grammar particularly challenging. The author known as “Longinus” (On the Sublime 12.4) felt compelled to apologize to readers when daring to critique Cicero, while Plutarch (Demosthenes 3) openly admitted his inability to properly assess Latin literature and struggled mightily with the language. This linguistic imbalance created a persistent demand for Greek works about Rome, satisfied by Dionysius of Halicarnassus’s Roman Antiquities, Plutarch’s Roman biographies, and Appian’s Roman History. As increasing numbers of Greek speakers sought roles in imperial administration and politics, such works proliferated. By the late second century, Latin historiography had largely exhausted itself, while authors like Herodian and the more brilliant Cassius Dio demonstrated Greek’s enduring vitality.

The Education of Bilingual Elites

For native Latin speakers aspiring to public office or literary education (which remained closely intertwined), Greek was a childhood acquisition that often supplanted their mother tongue, especially in philosophical and scientific discourse. Emperor Marcus Aurelius composed his Meditations in Greek, while Pliny’s friend Cornelius Rufus used the Greek word “Kekrika” (“I have decided”) to announce his suicide – neither instance surprising in this cultural context. Simultaneously, a significant body of literature emerged to introduce Greek knowledge and philosophy to Latin audiences, attempting to realize Cicero and Augustus’s vision of Latin literature as a comprehensive expression of Greco-Roman culture. Celsus’s encyclopedia, Quintus Curtius’s Alexander, and Pliny’s Natural History exemplify this tradition.

The Art of Prose Composition

Both languages shared a self-conscious literary quality markedly distinct from everyday speech – a difference more pronounced in Greek. From Augustus’s time (and earlier), teachers of Greek grammar and rhetoric encouraged precise imitation of the classical Attic style exemplified by fifth and fourth-century BCE writers like Thucydides, Xenophon, and the orators. This movement peaked in the mid-second century CE when the great “Sophists” won acclaim for their archaizing masterpieces. Latin prose style evolved more variably, only reaching its classic maturity recently. Post-Ciceronian developments represented reactions against his established norms, until Quintilian attempted to reverse this trend. Not until the Antonine period (97-180 CE) did Latin experience its own Atticism, drawing inspiration from poetry and Greek rhetorical techniques rather than contemporary speech – though exceptions like Seneca’s conversational elegance and Petronius’s innovative use of vulgar speech in his comic novel existed.

The Craft of Kunstprosa

Most significant works in both languages followed what scholar Eduard Norden termed Kunstprosa (“artistic prose”) – the product of meticulous training and imitation. This prose style required authors to make deliberate choices about vocabulary (drawn largely from literary predecessors), sentence structure (between elaborate “periodic” sentences and concise forms), and even rhythm. Certain cadences (clausulae in Latin) appeared in classical Greek prose, but Hellenistic and Roman rhetoricians systematized these patterns into second nature for imperial writers. While some historians and philosophers broke these rules, such violations were themselves conscious stylistic choices. Tacitus used Ciceronian periods in his Dialogue on Oratory but abandoned them in his histories, while Quintilian (9.15.8) rationalized that historical narrative’s pace made rhythmic cadences inappropriate.

The Applications of Artful Prose

This carefully cultivated prose art served multiple purposes in imperial literature. Most prominently, it shaped historiography and oratory, though critics like “Longinus” correctly observed that the era no longer offered political rewards for orators. The great forensic battles that allowed Cicero’s generation to reenact Demosthenes’s dramas had passed; imperial “show trials” carried less consequence. By the second century, we have Pliny’s Panegyric (102 CE) and Apuleius’s Apology (157/158 CE) demonstrating how judicial oratory transformed into literary display. Meanwhile in Greek, figures like Dio Chrysostom (“Golden-Mouthed”) delivered moralizing speeches across the eastern empire, while performers like Polemo of Laodicea and Favorinus entertained audiences with historical imagination and wit – a movement often called the “Second Sophistic.”

The Rise of the Personal Essay

Artistic prose also pioneered new territory in personal essays. Seneca, Dio, Lucian and Plutarch produced recognizable (though not yet named) literary essays – short ethical, literary, educational or antiquarian treatises with strong personal voices despite their learned allusions and crafted prose. These drew from multiple traditions: philosophical dialogues (Aristotelian more than Platonic), popular moral diatribes associated with Cynics, and rhetorical techniques. Related was the art of letter-writing, which Seneca perfected in his Moral Epistles – considered his masterpiece. Pliny the Younger’s literary letters provide elegantly written, information-rich sources about contemporary culture, though comparable Greek examples are scarce, most being rhetorical exercises or fictional compositions.

The Birth of the Novel

Finally, artistic prose found expression in pure fiction – a late-developing genre despite classical precursors like Xenophon’s Cyropaedia. The origins and influences of ancient novels remain debated, but they gradually entered more sophisticated circles, sometimes as parody, sometimes as legitimate successors to epic and drama. Greek novels show remarkable plot consistency: lovers enduring travels, dangers and separations before faithful reunion. Chariton, Longus, Achilles Tatius, Xenophon of Ephesus and Heliodorus all followed this framework with varying emphases on love, magic, violence, humor, exoticism and rhetoric. For modern tastes, Longus’s pastoral Daphnis and Chloe stands as the most delightful, while Petronius’s Satyricon and Apuleius’s Metamorphoses (The Golden Ass) appear most bizarre. As escapist literature set in distant pasts or lands, these novels summarized human nature while rarely addressing contemporary society.

Literary Criticism and Rhetoric: Signs of Decline

Such strict literary conventions inevitably produced self-conscious, introspective literature. The era became one of great literary criticism (if not great literary theory), with particular attention to progress and decline – usually the latter. This traditional pessimism, as old as Homer and Hesiod, conveniently served rhetorical purposes while often reflecting genuine belief.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, arriving in Rome shortly after Actium (31 BCE), typified this attitude. In his work on Attic orators, he described a three-stage development: perfect peak (pre-Alexandrian “philosophical rhetoric”), decline (“Asiatic” vulgarity), and revival through classical standards promoted by educated Romans. This pattern – perfection, decline, revival – became standard in Greek art and literary history. Romans initially struggled to apply it until Cicero’s era became recognized as Latin’s Demosthenic peak, with everything after considered decline. Seneca the Elder cited political (loss of republican freedom), moral (youthful decadence) and cosmic (nature’s refusal to let anything remain perfect) reasons for oratory’s decline. His philosopher son took the moralist view: “Where you see corrupt eloquence, you may be sure morals have strayed from the right path” (Letters 114.11). Yet within a generation, Seneca himself was mocked by classicists like Quintilian (c.35-100 CE), who considered his short sentences, indiscriminate diction and lively fluency the antithesis of proper Ciceronian style.

Quintilian and the Educational Ideal

Quintilian’s twelve-volume Institutio Oratoria remains antiquity’s most detailed account of oratorical education, emphasizing morality as rhetoric’s foundation. His lost work on stylistic “corruption” presumably elaborated this system. Tacitus’s Dialogue on Oratory (set in 73 CE though likely written later) presents “conservative” and “modern” views, while “Longinus’s” On the Sublime (particularly its final chapter) offers Greek perspective on literature’s decline from political freedom’s loss – though his solution shifts focus from political revolution to personal ethics. This blending of Greek and Roman perspectives typified the bilingual cultural environment.

The Enduring Legacy

The prose literature of the early imperial period represents a remarkable fusion of two linguistic traditions within a shared cultural framework. While Greek maintained its position as the senior partner in this relationship, Latin developed its own sophisticated literary idiom that both imitated and reacted against Greek models. The strict conventions of Kunstprosa produced works of extraordinary polish and technical mastery, even as they sometimes constrained individual creativity.

What emerges most strikingly from this period is literature’s social function within the empire’s educated elite. Whether composed in Greek or Latin, these texts served as both markers of cultural sophistication and mediums for intellectual exchange across the Mediterranean world. The bilingual nature of imperial literature reflects the complex identity of an empire that was simultaneously Roman in its political structures and profoundly Greek in its cultural imagination.

The legacy of this literary tradition proved immense. Through figures like Plutarch and Seneca, it transmitted classical thought to later ages. Its rhetorical techniques shaped European education for centuries, while its experiments in fiction and personal essay laid foundations for modern literary forms. Perhaps most significantly, it demonstrated how two great linguistic traditions could mutually enrich one another – a lesson in cultural dialogue that remains relevant in our globalized age.