Biondo Flavio, Leonardo Bruni and Leon Battista Alberti on the language spoken by the ancient Romans

Abstract

The article focuses on the early stages of the humanist discussion about which language the ancient Romans spoke, attested by Biondo Flavio’s epistle De verbis romanae locutionis, by Leonardo Bruni’s responsive epistle An vulgus et literati eodem modo per Terentii Tullique tempora Romae locuti sint (1435), and by the various initiatives undertaken by Leon Battista Alberti in the following years, culminating in the Certame coronario of 1441. The article updates the state of knowledge forty years after the publication of all the texts of the dispute in Tavoni 1984. The interpretation of the dispute as “nominalistic”, according to the definition of Schuchardt 1866, is fully confirmed: the disputants affirmed or denied that in ancient Rome there existed a form of “vernacular” not on the basis of facts, but on the basis of their different a priori ideas on the nature of Latin, either as a grammatica, i.e. an artificial language, or as a natural language. New elements further confirm that this linguistic discussion cannot be interpreted in terms of the so-called Florentine “Civic Humanism”.