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Updated: June 6, 2025
Likewise, when in answer to the question as to what I should consider the most desirable discovery of the coming year in my department, I answered the discovery of the Sermo Verus of Celsus; this, too, appeared to be a work so little known, that the editors considered it necessary to add that Celsus was a renowned philosopher of the second century, who first subjected the ever spreading system of Christianity to a thorough criticism in a work entitled Sermo Verus.
At the end of his book he speaks of him as if he had been a contemporary, and asserts that a second book by him against the Christians, which has either not yet been completed or has not yet reached him, shall be as completely refuted as the Sermo Verus. Such language is only used of a contemporary.
But why should the “True History” of Celsus, the λόγος ἀληθής, or Sermo Verus, excite our curiosity? The reason is quite plain. We know practically nothing of the history of the teaching of Christ in the first, second, and even third centuries, except what has been transmitted to us by Christian writers.
He marks the highest point which the enlarged and enriched prose of the Augustan age reached just before it began to fall into decadence. It is no longer the famous urbanus sermo of the later Republic, the pure and somewhat austere language of a governing class.
They soar far above the vulgar failing of the Sermo humi obrepens their most ordinary speech is never short of an hyperbole, splendid, imposing, vague, incomprehensible, magniloquent, a cento of sounding common-places.
Sermo datur cunctis, animi sapientia paucis. Gl. ff. de alien. jud. mut. caus. fa. lib.2. This administered unto the tavern-keepers, wine-drawers, and vintners of Semerve an occasion to say, that under him they had not in the space of a whole year so much reconciliation-wine, for so were they pleased to call the good wine of Leguge, as under his father they had done in one half-hour's time.
If you will be pleased to give me a good Word in your paper, you shall be every Night a Spectator at my Show for nothing. I am, &c. That's his sign. And here's now mystery and hieroglyphic. 'Face'. Abel, thou art made. No. 29. Tuesday, April 3, 1711 Addison ... Sermo lingua concinnus utraque Suavior: ut Chio nota si commista Falerni est. Hor.
It is scarcely likely that Cicero was ignorant of the Greek origin of the custom of appointing an arbiter bibendi. ET IS SERMO etc.: 'and the kind of talk in which following the fashion of our fathers we engage, beginning at the upper table, as the cup goes round'. The cup circulated from left to right, not, as with us, from right to left.
"Pooh! the passage is a compliment," said the Greek, who had recovered himself, and seemed wise enough to take the matter gaily "`Ingenium velox, audacia perdita, sermo Promptus, et Isaeo torrentior. "A rapid intellect and ready eloquence may carry off a little impudence." "Assuredly," said Nello.
It is, however, the duty of the historian and especially of the philologist to call back to life such words as have given up the ghost. May what I have here written about the meaning of the Logos fulfil this aim, and at the same time make it clear that my desire for the discovery of the original text of the Sermo Verus was not an idle one.
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