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The Gauls need not have changed their own language for Latin; the change was not the result of a physical necessity, but of a number of acts of the will on the part of this and that Gaul. Moral causes directed their choice, and determined that Gaul should become a Latin-speaking land.
For awhile these conceptions sustained a united and to a large extent organized empire over very much of this space. But at its stablest time, this union was no more than a political union, the spreading of a thin layer of Latin-speaking officials, of a thin network of roads and a very thin veneer indeed of customs and refinements, over the scarcely touched national masses.
This composition of farces must have reached down to the time at which the Greeks in and around Neapolis formed a circle enclosed within the Latin-speaking Campania; for one of these writers of farces, Blaesus of Capreae, bears even a Roman name and wrote a farce "Saturnus." It was probably merry enough in this form. In the -Phoenissae- of Novius, for instance, there was the line:
But when the separation of East and West became wider, and the Latin-speaking Western Empire began to live with an intellectual life of its own, its deference to the East was all at once exchanged for the agitation of a number of questions entirely foreign to Eastern speculation.
In Western Europe true national ideas only emerged to their present hectic vigour after the shock of the Reformation had liberated men from the great tradition of a Latin-speaking Christendom, a tradition the Roman Catholic Church has sustained as its modification of the old Latin-speaking Imperialism in the rule of the pontifex maximus.
This Bulgarian state included a large 'Vlach' element descended from those Latin-speaking provincials whom the Slavs had pushed before them in their original migration; while the main body of the 'Rumans', whom the same thrust of invasion had driven leftwards across the Danube, had established itself in the mountains of Transylvania, and was just beginning to push down into the Wallachian and Moldavian plains.
The Latin-speaking peoples, the Mediterranean nations, on the other hand, have proved to be the most successful assimilators of other races that mankind has ever known. Alexandre Dumas is not the least of the glories of France. In a hundred years' time black Africa, west of Tripoli, from Oran to Rhodesia, will, I believe, talk French.
He did for the Empire and the Middle Ages what Lucretius, with his far greater philosophic genius, totally failed to do created forms of thought in which the life of philosophy grew, and a body of expression which alone made its growth in the Latin-speaking world possible; and to that world he presented a political ideal which profoundly influenced the whole course of European history even up to the French Revolution.
Rebuffed by the sea-board, the Slavonic migration was next deflected east, and filtered through the Bosnian mountains, scattering the Latin-speaking provincials before it to left and right, until it debouched upon the broad basin of the river Morava.
But there was another reason more intimate and inherent; a literature formed so completely on that of Greece paid the penalty in a certain loss of independent vitality. The gap between the literary Latin and the actual speech of the mass of Latin-speaking people became too great to bridge over.
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