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allows Socrates, who has on his own admission not seen the Forms, to remain the model philosopher, one who continues to seek answers rather than settling in to contemplate eternal verities to which only a god can have access. For Rowe, Platos own status as a know-nothing explains, in part, why he chose to write in dialogue form. Yet Rowe is adamantly opposed to the popular view that Plato chose this form as a way of avoiding the appearance of dictating to his readers (32). Rather Platos enterprise is, from beginning to end, the advocacy of positive ideas (33). As a proponent of the view he is critiquing here, however, I would not call it a way of avoiding the appearance of dictating to his readers but a way of avoiding dictating to his readers. On Rowes account, too, Plato is no dictator, and neither is his Socrates. Both of them are, rather, midwives (36), who leave the reader to reconstruct and read between the (oral or written) lines, and reach the right Platonic conclusions through her own hard work by engaging in dialogue, or with the dialogues. Yet Rowe also argues that both Plato and Socrates, despite their lack of knowledge, possess a body of strongly held convictions, which give them considerable insights (25) and provide an indispensable starting point for philosophizing. Why, then, do they not at least convey these to the interlocutor and/or reader in a more direct fashion? Because, Rowe says, the ideas in question are just too weird to be spelled out to ordinary people like ourselves (2223). Plato wants to nudge us in the right direction without obliging us to confront his true bizarreness, from which he therefore protects us through the evasions of dramatic form. If this is Platos goal, however, he has not been entirely successful. It is in no small part due to their weirdness that he and his Socrates continue to exercise such a peculiar fascination. RuBY BLONDELL
UNIVERSITY OF WASHINgTON, SEATTLE e-mail: blondell@u.washington.edu

J. N. ADAmS. The Regional Diversication of Latin: 200 BCAD 600. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. xix + 828 pp. 17 maps. Cloth, $220. The book is a monumental event in scope, in depth, and in the perspectives it closes and opens. It peers through the ornamental brocade of literary Latin to uncover the language as it was spoken and as it evolved in various regions of Italy and throughout the Empire. To employ the distinction of Ferdinand de Saussure (whom Adams does not invoke), we descend from language to speech, from homo scribens to homo loquens. But homo scribens also comes up in many varietieshigh, low, and specializedon parchment, papyrus, and stone. At one end there stands archaic Latin; at the other, an array of Romance idioms. It is an exciting journey, fraught with surmises, and only a scholar who had explored all and sundry nooks and crannies of Latin could dare to undertake it. Adams entered

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upon the path toward Diversication with two remarkable studies of vulgar (an unfortunate but entrenched denomination) Latin texts: The Text and Language of a Vulgar Latin Chronicle (Anonymus Valesianus II) (London, 1976) and The Vulgar Latin of the Letters of Claudius Terentianus (P. Mich. VIII, 46772) (Manchester, 1977). In due course he produced three treasures of information, instruction, and linguistic enjoyment: The Latin Sexual Vocabulary (London, 1982); Pelagonius and Latin Veterinary Terminology in the Roman Empire (Leiden, 1995) (see the glowing review by David R. Langslow in BMCR 97.4.1); and, particularly dear to the heart of this writer, Bilingualism and the Latin Language (Cambridge, 2003). Then there is a plethora of articles, among them some personal favorites: the pieces on The Uses of Neco (Glotta 58 [1990]: 23055 and 59 [1991]: 94123); and on Words for Prostitute in Latin (RhM 126 [1983]: 32158) (cf. Jerzy Linderski, Roman Questions II [Stuttgart, 2007], 19798, 27880, 33235). The architecture of the book is easy to describe but its content arduous to digest. Its eleven parts, subdivided into some 220 sections and subsections, many of which can be read as separate articles, bear upon us crammed with an astonishing mass of detail. Lexicography, phonology, orthography, and geography are all there, and the seemingly unfathomable well of sources: inscribed stones surrounded by erudite vignettes; a long line of literary, grammatical, medical, agricultural, and subliterary texts, with names like Consentius, Marcellus, Polemius Silvius, Anthimus, or Cassius Felix more prominent than Sallust or Virgil. Parts 2 to 10 present the material. They fall into two symmetrical blocks: part 2 (37113) is devoted to Republican inscriptions and corresponds to part 10 (62483), devoted to imperial inscriptions; parts 3 and 4 deal with Explicit Evidence for Regional Variation in the Republican period (11487) and under the Empire (188275), and offer a linguistic tour of Italy, Spain, Gaul, and Africa. Parts 5 to 10 (276623) treat of Regionalisms in Provincial Texts and take us again on a new tour but this time also to Britain. The guides in the rst tour are the Romans themselves who comment on the spoken Latin as they heard it around them; the guides in the second tour are modern philologists and linguists who strove to uncover local peculiarities in written texts. The rst impression of the reader, who would open the book here and there and read a few pages, might be an image of an immense collection of linguistic shards strewn over a vast area and over the centuries. How the vase of the classical Latin was broken and reassembled into Romance vessels is the question. Here we have to turn to the introduction (part 1, 136), which sets up a theoretical framework for such an investigation, and the conclusion (part 11, 684732), which assesses the results. The high literary Latin is of no help. The rst sentence of the book (in the preface) pointedly delineates the problem: No reader of Cicero or Martial, however attentive and learned, could possibly tell from their Latin that the one came from Arpinum in the Volscian territory and the other from Spain (xv). Not that Latin has not changed over time: this again is visible to any attentive reader; rather at each stage from the classical to silver to late Latin we are confronted

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with a literary koine without any obvious regional variation. This circumstance gave rise to an almost theological split among the linguists, pitting the unitarians against the believers in the deep, old, and abiding diversication of the idiom. If the unity of Latin persisted until the threshold of the Romance period nally emerged in 842 in the Oath of Strasbourg as not yet French but with Latin husk already shed (Pro Deo amur et pro christian poblo et nostro commun salvament, dist di in avant, in quant Deus savir et podir me dunat), and in a notary act (Carta Capuana) in 960 as almost Italian (Sao ko kelle terre per kelle ni que ki contene, trenta anni le possette parte Sancti Benedicti), we may ask what had caused that sudden Kafkaesque metamorphosis. Henri Franois Muller (A Chronology of Vulgar Latin [Halle, 1929]) put it so: in the fourth quarter of the eighth century, . . . a rather sudden shifting of linguistic forces takes place: the new speech is born (viii). The mass of evidence collected and sifted by Adams overwhelmingly disproves this disturbingly metaphysical theory (nonsense, 684). Adams is a gradualist through and through: under the uniform veil of texts there existed a vibrant world of spoken Latin varieties. Here it is important to distinguish between accent or the differences in the pronunciation of a standard literary Latin and systemic divergences. The local varieties, separated by distances, through the process of accumulation of phonological, phonetic, morphological, and syntactic changes, and through contacts with foreign idioms, evolved into the new universe of Romance languages. These languages came into being not as a result of a sudden historical event, but when some regional varieties were codied in writing and particularly when certain of them acquired the status of standard languages (684). It might be instructive to observe that this debate, and its attempted resolution by Adams, mirrors disputes at the birth of modern geology and paleontology (although no linguist seems to have commented on that arresting similarity). Georges Cuvier (17691832) explained the faunal succession visible in the paleontological record by a series of catastrophic events that caused mass extinctions, and he resolutely opposed any idea of gradual change. But it was the Darwinian idea of gradual phyletic change, and of natural selection, that prevailed. Yet the slowly creeping gradualism is difcult to espy in the fossil record. Then in a famous and still hotly contested paper, Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould modied Darwins insight (Punctuated Equilibria: An Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism. In Models in Paleobiology, ed. T.J.M. Schopf [San Francisco, 1972], 82115). The evolution is not always constant or continuous: after periods of little change, we have swift events of branching speciation. This would normally occur in small isolated groups where variations can spread fast (whereas they are diluted in the general population). A new species emerges at the intersection of changed environment and accumulated (favorable) variations. But it is important to realize that changes are always incremental; sudden is only their appearance in our geological record. This must be true also of language change, and this is what Adams seems to be showing though not saying. From the classical period to late antiquity, of-

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cial Latin persisted in a remarkable equilibrium. Various phonetic and syntactic changes were slowly spreading through the language, but despite local peculiarities it was still the same species (cf. 1415). But no biological species and no language exists in isolation. Their evolution is the outcome of the unavoidable imperfections in the copying of the genetic and linguistic material from one generation to the other, of mutations, and of external, extra-linguistic and extra-biological pressure. There are no languages better or worse, or dialects more or less t to become a full-edged language. The standard Latin developed from a variety spoken in the city of Rome not because it was a superior idiom but because its carriers became the masters of Italy and the Mediterranean world. It spread because it was advantageous to individuals and whole populations to learn it; but it acquired its remarkable staying power not just through the sheer force of arms but also through the greater force of the pen. It was promoted by generals and jurists, but it also absorbed the cultural tradition of the Greek, became a repository of culture and knowledge, and was sustained by writers and schoolmasters; it had its own priests of correctness, the grammarians (cf. Robert A. Kaster, Guardians of Language: The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity [Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988]). There is no linguistic reason why standard Latin could not continue with little change for centuries. A catastrophe has come (cf. Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization [Oxford, 2005] for a thorough demolition of the pious or naive belief in the peaceful coexistence of nations and faiths at the end of the ancient world), the collapse of the Roman empire in the west, and the transformation of the eastern part into an empire that still called itself Roman but was becoming thoroughly Greek. The Digest and the Code of Justinian were still composed in exquisite juristic Latin (though marred by baroque prefaces), but already the contemporary imperial bureaucrat John the Lydian (himself writing his treatises in Greek) bitterly complained that Latin was being removed as the operative language of the chancery (Mag. 2.12; 3.42 and 68). In the West, Latin continued for a millennium as a semi-dead language of chanceries, the literati, and the church, but with the caput mundi gone, it existed side by side with the varieties of the volgare, unable to stie them. In Italy many dialects competed (cf. 697) but, as once the Latin of Rome, now the volgare of Florence, thanks to the fortuitous conuence of political power, wealth, and cultural brilliance, emerged victorious (in grammar though not in phonetics), with Dante, Petrarca, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, and Guicciardini as its supreme standard bearers; in 1582, Accademia della Crusca (with the telling emblem of the sieve) was founded as the guardian of the new correctness. If we need a comparison, we have to travel to a remote island. Britain suffered two violent upheavals: the Germanic invasions that wiped out Latin as a living language and much of its Roman heritage, and the imposition of the Norman French after the battle of Hastings (1066). This propelled the Anglo-Saxon, stable over the centuries, into a period of tumultous change, and toward the emergence of a new species, a hybrid, the middle and modern English (cf. Giacomo Devoto,

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Scritti Minori I [Firenze, 1958], 199213; surprisingly none of Devotos numerous contributions to linguistic philology found its way to Adamss thirty-eight page bibliography). Without William the Conqueror, the Anglo-Saxon might still (in some form) be spoken, and Latin too, if Rome had endured. It is collapse that clears ground for new growth. For despite syntactic innovations, late Latin was still Latin. A well-known feature of late Latin (a feeble beginning of which can be traced back to the Republican period) is the employment of habere + innitive to express obligation/necessity and, ultimately, the future. But it is a long jump from cantare habeo (even with habere already functioning as an auxiliary verb) to canter, a form which never appears in any Latin text (72729, and see especially Adams article, Some Neglected Evidence for Latin habeo + Innitive: The Order of the Constituents, TPS 89 [1991]: 13196). A profound phonological change had to occur embracing the phonemes [h], [b], and [w]. Indeed, the confusion in inscriptions between the graphemes B and V has been much studied and has often been employed to chart regional differences, but Adams is sceptical of the results: The degree of the error (expressed as a percentage) is at least as likely to reect the educational level of writers as it is the state of the spoken language in a region (62436 at 630). Thus the bulk of the book deals with the vocabulary, and here regional peculiarities abound, but they are mostly situated on the fringes of the language: local terms for animals, plants, minerals, clothing, crafts, or topographical features. Perusing the linguistic landscape, one is struck by the steamrolling effect Latin had on the languages of Italy and the western Mediterranean. Apart from the relics of the Celtic and the isolated Basque, almost all new linguistic growth arose from the roots of Latin. Direct evidence for the inuence of any pre-Latin substrate on the Romance is meager. By design, Adams limited his research to the western part of the empire: there are few texts in Latin from the East (works of Victorinus, Auxentius, Nicetas, Marcellinus, and Iordanes), and conclusions derived from the inscriptional evidence are again not to be trusted (66872). He notes, however, a strange syntactic occurrence (67576). The possessive dative is a common Latin construction, but in the Balkan area it appears in odd applications, particularly with reference to arca, cofn, e.g., CIL III.9537: arca Saturnino militi; 9552: arca Stephano presbytero (both texts from Salona). Adams does not pursue this topic further, perhaps rightly, for it might lead to the linguistically treacherous ground of Balkan Sprachbund, the phenomenon of a remarkable morpho-syntactic convergence of several languages belonging to different Indo-European branches: Modern Greek, Albanian, the Romance Romanian, Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, the Slavic Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian, and even a Gypsy dialect. One of those features is precisely the loss of the genitive and its incorporation into the dative; the other, the formation of the future tense with verbs denoting intention (cf. Romanian voi cnta, I will sing, going back to volo cantare); also the development in some idioms, including the Romanian, of postpositive articles. Have these constructs developed under the inuence of late Latin, late Greek, or a pre-Roman substrate, be it Illyrian

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or Daco-Thracian? This is the question (cf. Georg R. Solta, Einfhrung in die Balkanlinguistik mit besonderer Bercksichtigung des Substrats und des Balkanlateinischen [Darmstadt, 1980], and more recently Olga Mieska Tomic;, Balkan Sprachbund. Morpho-Syntactic Features [Dordrecht, 2006]). Cautious assessment is the hallmark of the book. It appeals to reason but dampens excitement. To this reader, in the years long past, Walther von Wartburgs Die Ausgliederung der romanischen Sprachrume (Bern, 1950) was a linguistic Song of Roland, and Einar Lfstedts Syntactica I (2d ed.) and II (Lund, 1942 and 1933 [rpt. 1956]) read like the Romance of the Rosethe romance of cases and tenses. Reading Diversication, we enter Platos cave: shades of Latin varieties stroll through time and space, but Adams dispels any hope that we shall ever know their full form. JERZY LINDERSKI
UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA, CHAPEL HILL e-mail: jlinders@email.unc.edu