Chapter 20 - ‘Early Latin’ and the Fragments of Atellane Comedy

Summary

The chapter examines what features of ‘early Latin’ may be identified in the scripts that belong to the literary phase of a type of theatrical entertainment conventionally known as fabula Atellana. Despite being contemporaries of Caesar, Cicero and Varro, the major playwrights of Atellane comedy were linguistically closer to Plautus than to any of them, exhibiting linguistic features – morphology, syntax and lexicon – of third- and second-century BC authors. Much rarer are the occasions in which linguistic phenomena that were obsolescent or old-fashioned in chronologically ‘early’ Latin authors feature in the Atellane playwrights, and even then there are considerations of genre and register to take into account. The overall artistic effect must have been rich, carefully crafted and varied: ‘early’ words and constructions do not seem to be mechanically included in the scripts. The playwrights were conscious that their works formed part of an established comic tradition, and the ‘unclassical’ linguistic features were employed by them not to stress the long-standing history of Campanian/Oscan drama but to give variety to the register of a scene and enhance the comic moment.