I think I understood that the Romans within the elite circles preferred to speak Greek to each other rather than Latin (a bit like what French was 100 years ago in Flanders), and also in the literate circles outside Rome Greek had a preference, so would the first Bibles were written in Greek (?) .
How is it that when the Renaissance looked back to Roman times, and the various art forms went back to Roman times, they went back to Latin as a language, and not to ancient Greek, which is the language anyway? was one of the examples that were reverted to?
Answer
The Renaissance harked back to antiquity, not just to Roman antiquity. Erasmus, for example, founded (together with others) the Collegium Trilingue in Leuven, which provided education in Latin, Ancient Greek and Hebrew – he himself had already had many Church Latin as a child in a typical medieval education. The idea behind the emphasis on knowledge of all those ancient languages ​​was to make it easier to access all kinds of sources from Antiquity – the so-called ‘Folk Latin’ or medieval Latin was not enough. Although: some scholastics had a good knowledge of ancient Latin, but humanists like to highlight the difference with their predecessors.
In Ancient Rome, Greek was indeed spoken by an elite, mainly because the best education was given by Greek home teachers (by the way, teachers were often depicted with curly hair and a beard!). Julius Caesar, for example, fully mastered Greek. Hence, some sources even claim that just before his death he uttered the Greek words “και συ τεκνον” (kai su, teknon), and not the Latin words “tu quoque Brute” (also you Brutus). After the conquest and annexation of the area we now call Greece by the Romans, Greek remained the language in the eastern part of the Roman Empire. In addition, Greek was the usual language in international contacts.
The Septuagint (lit. ‘the translation work of 70 men’) was the first translation into Ancient Greek of some books of the Old Testament, which, however, already existed in Hebrew as Tanakh. The merit of the Septuagint was the spread of the ideas in a much larger language area. The first collections of New Testament books did, however, first appear in Ancient Greek.
To summarize: knowledge of Latin was already widely spread in the Middle Ages, what the Renaissance added was a better knowledge of ancient Latin and of other ancient languages. And your comment about the language used in Ancient Rome is quite right.
Answered by
dr. Karl Catteeuw
History of Upbringing and Education, Romanian, Music
Old Market 13 3000 Leuven
https://www.kuleuven.be/
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