Ausonius and his Aunt Aemilia Hilaria

Decius Maximus Ausonius is an author who deserves to be better known and appreciated. He covered the bulk of the fourth century AD (AD310–305) and rose from prosperous farming stock to become professor at the University at Burdigala (modern Bordeaux) and later was raised to becoming tutor to prince Gratian, who was emperor of the West from 375 to 383. Gratian made him consul in and at the same time Ausonius’ son was Pretorian Prefect of Gaul.

Among the most affecting of Ausonius’ poems are his eulogies to his family members, the Parentalia. These seem to have been written by his to be recited over their graves on the anniversaries of their deaths as part of what seems to have been a ‘pagan’ (or at least traditional)ceremony in which they were invoked by having their names recited three times. These verses seem to have been collected and ‘published’ late in his life, perhaps when his poetic energies were lower.

I want here to highlight the unusual case of Aemilia Hilaria, his maternal aunt (matertera), who was a doctor, as was Ausonius’s own father, Julius Ausonius. This is the text of his verses to his aunt’s shade. The ellipsis is believed to indicate a textual lacuna.

Aemilia Hilaria, My Mother's Sister, An Avowed Virgin

You too who, though in kinship's degree an aunt, were to me a mother, must now be recalled with a son's affection, Aemilia, who in the cradle gained the second name of Hilarus because,
bright and cheerful after the fashion of a boy, you made without pretense the very picture of a lad ...
busied in the art of healing, like a man. You ever hated your female sex, and so there grew up in you the love of consecrated maidenhood. Through three and sixty years you maintained it, and your life's end was also a maiden's end. You cherished as well me with your precepts and your love as might a mother; and therefore as a son I make you this return at your last rites.   (Ausonius Parentalia 6, from Loeb Edition Opuscula vol.1, trans Hugh G Evelyn White, 1919, pp.67 & 69)

It is hard to say what Aemila was. She might have been a lesbian, or more probably considered herself to be a male in some sense. It was not of course possible to alter the physicality of one’s sex in those days. But it was possible to transcend the social expectations, which she did, becoming a doctor. Perhaps she worked alongside Julius, the author’s father. While Ausonius describes his mother with little affection, and reports her spinning wool in the convention of the Roman matrona, Aemilia was clearly a but unusual. As we know from many studies, a lot of women worked outside the home, ran businesses and professions, ventured money as investors. Jane Gardner’s excellent book Women in Roman Law and Society (Indiana University Press, 1991) gives many accounts from Roman primary sources of just that, many in the eastern provinces; she discusses Aemila and other women doctors on pp.240-1).

There seems to have been a tension in parts of the empire between social expectations and individual wishes. Aemilia’s sister Aemilia Maura (‘the dark’) is said to be ‘perpendiculum’ (rigidly upright, as the word refers to a mason’s or carpenter’s plumb line), but no such terminology is given for Aemilia Hilaria, who is said to have more virum.

That her cognomen (given in the poem’s title as in female form, but the title might not be on the original) is given as masculine in the text suggests that she carried a male name and identified with that name. She supposedly did so ‘without pretense’, but ‘ever hated [her] female sex’.

Aemila Hilaria and her sister Aemila Maura seem largely to have brought up Ausonius after his mother died early. The term ‘virgin’ as translated by White need not make us assume anything of her sexuality or lack of it. Virgo just means ‘unmarried woman’ and the use of that word alone English sense of someone who has never had sex dates only to c.AD1300. Here virgo devota is someone who has pledged not to marry, which might simply be a dedication to her career as a doctor. It is only a generation back that most women did not drop their work upon marriage, and in the UK is was considered appropriate for women teachers to be single if at all possible. However, Graydon Snyder in Ante Pacem: Archaeological Evidence of Church Life before Constantine says there were ‘pagan’ communities of women with the term virgo devota (virgines devotae), but that a simple unmarried woman might be termed virgo innupta. (Mercer University Press, 2003, p.234), this being from analysis of memorials. Perhaps Aelia lived in a female community as a male, or relieved from the pressure of females to conform.

It is Ausonius’s comment that she hated her own sex (feminei sexus odium tibi semper et inde/ crevit devotae virginitatis amor,) which is slightly surprising.

Greek myth contain several instances of contrary sexuality. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Iphis is female but raised as a boy (Ov. Met. 9.9); the name Iphis, allegedly Cretan, was available for both sexes. The mother, impelled by her husband’s command to kill her first child if a girl, invokes Isis, who tells her to pretend the newborn girl is a boy; Iphis reaches adulthood and falls in love with a girl, Ianthe. Isis, invoked again, transforms Iphis into a male.

Antoninus Liberalis, a later Greek author, wrote a collection of Metamorphoses, which includes the myth of Leucippus, born female and given a male name, again in Crete, but in this case the deity is Leto, mother of Apollo and Artemis. Reference is made to other, mostly lost, myths. Leucippus means ‘white horse’ (leukos hippos). There is also a Leucippus, a male disguised as a female and a companion of Daphne.

Only in myth could sex be changed in those days. But there is a possibility that Aemilia Hilaria could have been intersex; a few years ago I remember reading of a number of children in Cuba, growing up in a remote community, who were male at birth, but who became female at puberty. This was a significant genetic indeterminacy, but every year many children are born biologically intersex. It is not impossible that children on Crete in antiquity were subject to the same limited gene pool in an island community and that such a prodigy entered myth.

However, there is real warmth in Ausonius’s writing about his unusual aunt, showing she was valued and loved in her own society.

Ovid: Exile or Not?

Two works assigned to Ovid, Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, have been taken literally to mean that he was exiled from Rome at the height of his fame. This assumes that the attribution is correct and that we know the correct order of his writings. There is no contemporary evidence of exile, nothing by either Tacitus or Suetonius in the Twelve Caesars; they both hated Tiberius; there is a minor reference in Suetonius’s Lives of the Grammarians 20 about Hyginus, who is described as an intimate friend of the poet Ovid. 

Exile was a punishment for aristocrats of rich and influential families, who could afford to fund the exiled member; Tiberius was himself exiled for a while by Augustus. Exile was not used long term and not used for non-aristocrats. If Ovid had committed a crime, the punishment would have been a fine or execution. If it had been a deep insult to Augustus or his family, the outcome would have been Ovid’s murder in a dark alley; after all, Augustus, when young, had had Cicero murdered, and there is some doubt over the death of Virgil.

 There is nothing outside the poems to suggest Ovid died in exile until the fifth century AD, rather too late to be considered credible. We don’t know if the Tristia and Pontic Epistles were written at the end of his career at all. Pontus is in Asia Minor (Pliny the Younger was its governor under Trajan), whereas Tomis is on the south bank of the Danube, hundreds of miles away.

 Books were not ‘published’ as they are today. It is hard to see how two works written by an exile could appear in Rome; there was no copyright, no marketing and no means to ensure that he, or any writer got paid. Any income would have come from subscription and patronage, neither of which were available to an exile; exile was ‘social death’. How too could exiled works be copied? The idea of Ovid as an oppositional figure published in samizdat underground editions is a modern fantasy.

 It is possible that this is a poetic fiction, and that the speaker in these poems is a persona, just as the ‘Juvenal’ who speaks in some of Juvenal’s satires is not the real Juvenal, but a mask. By that, later authors, some centuries later, thought this was a real exile. The same people tell readers that Virgil was a wizard who could create caves with beams from his eyes, and opened his works at random because they thought he was a god who could assist their problems; they also quoted his lines out of context and made centos, collage poems, out of carefully chosen lines.

 Not to labour the point too much, but we have no evidence whatsoever about the biography  of Ovid from his own times. He is mentioned by Pliny the Elder in 79AD, but what’s mentioned is a work on fishing, which is dismissed as a mistake by modern scholarship. That means the only references to him come from Seneca and Quintillian from the reign of Nero, 50 years later.  It is possible that the works of more than one author have been attributed to Ovid, maybe in the ‘Alan Smithee’ model, where works that film directors wished to remain anonymous were claimed for a fictive Alan Smithee.

How Did Romans Obtain Books and What Did They Read?

In a world without printing, how did the Romans obtain books? How did authors get paid? What exactly did the average Roman read? Whilst there have been countless studies of Latin literature and its most famous authors, what did people actually do to obtain and dispose of books?

Bookshops certainly existed in Rome in the centuries after empire, so we might assume that they had already existed. The Anglo-Saxon book Lives of the Abbots of Jarrow and Wearmouth, anonymous but written by a fellow-monk to Bede, tells of a visit to Rome by Benedict Biscop in the 650s AD. He bought books and brought them back to Jarrow. An analysis of Bede’s sources suggest he had a book of poems by Virgil, possibly only a school primer for children to learn good Latin by emulating Virgil’s style and a copy of Priscian’s Institutes of Grammar. Most of what Biscop brought back would have been works of Christian exegesis and saints’ Vitae.

The bookshop quarter of Rome seems to have been on the Vicus Tuscus, once the area in which Etruscans lived. It is tempting to think of London’s Charing Cross Road before it was taken over by coffee shops and other tat. Books were sold from a shop (horreum) and a number of horrea librorum congregated in that area. According to Horace, some books were sold in front of a statue of Vertumnus and one of Janus Geminus as well as in the Roman Forum. Perhaps we should think of stalls selling books on market days, something like the Sunday bouquinistes along the Seine in Paris today. At a guess, they sold second-hand volumines. Horace says they sacrificed to Vertumnus, suggesting that the sellers were Etruscans. The same street was also the centre for male prostitution, indicating that book selling was a marginal trade too. (Interestingly, Charing Cross Road leads up to both intellectual Bloomsbury and to the site of St Giles Rookery, once deemed the worst slum in Europe; Dickens went there with four policemen to guard him.)

Horrea Epagathiana et Epaphroditiana, Ostia

What did the bookshops of Rome sell? What, physically, was a book? Scores of Hollywood movies have portrayed emperors and others reading scrolls. These certainly existed, but weren’t read as they are shown in films. There, they are opened up from top to bottom and read left to right, starting at the top of the scroll, which is then unravelled downwards to reveal more text.

Esther Scroll in Hebrew

However, surviving Roman pictures show the scroll (volumen) was not held with hands positioned at ’12 and 6’, but at ‘9 and 3’. That is, the scroll was opened from the left, the handwritten block of text was read, and then the left side was rescrolled and the right side opened.  When the scroll was returned to its wound position, it was placed in a wooden tube or in a pigeonhole (columbarium) with a tag on it to say what it was. The volumen was often positioned on a desk with side rollers.

The Roman use of a bound book (codex) seems to date from about the time of Augustus and may have been brought back from Egypt. In basic form, it’s a block of text from a volumen, cut up and held at one side. The incipit, the nearest thing Roman books had to a title, would be written on the spine, and books were kept spin-inward on shelves and probably lying down, not upright.

If the stalls which Horace refers to sold second-hand books, they would have been volumines, not codices, as those were the latest thing. This presupposes a book trade, at least for older works, and therefore individuals who knew enough about books to know what buyers wanted and who had the means to source such works. Authors then as now went in and out of fashion, so over time the sort of books sold would change. We can imagine Benedict Biscop paying out for books in such a setting. Although, since England had no coins at that time, the payment must have been gifted locally.

If I can divert for a second, I have always been surprised that the Romans with their extensive empire and thousands of schools teaching a standardised curriculum did not feel impelled to invent printing. The principle of reverse type was well understood, since it underpins the signet ring, known for millennia, the pottery stamp, seen on billions of fragments at sites such as Monte Testaccio, and the woodcut, used for illustrations such as those which accompany the Notitia Dignitatum. We know from recent published research at Herculaneum that metal-based permanent inks existed before AD79. An extensive book trade would have been fuelled by such simple technology, but the only labour it saved would have been that of slaves, so the scriptorium endured.

How did booksellers acquire their stock? Authors, if paid at all, were sponsored, so it’s feasible that sponsors might have copies made of works, which is why so many had dedications to nobles; Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia is dedicated to the emperor Titus, who probably had some copies run off after Pliny died at Pompeii! The large amount of manuscripts of the Aeneid suggests knock-off copies were made.

The proscriptions of the second Triumvirate probably led to the seizure of the offenders’ libraries, which would then be auctioned off to booksellers at so much per pound of scrolls. When rich men left half their estate to the emperor, he probably didn’t want their books, so the heirs might need to sell books in order to maintain some lifestyle. One wonders if Ovid’s books slipped back into the stockroom when (and if) he was exiled, or if they sold better for it, just as the disappearance of Agatha Christie did not harm to her sales a jot.

Other than knock-off copies, would booksellers have any new stock to sell? According to Robert Knapp in his excellent Invisible Romans, there was a vast literature of popular subjects including proverbs, such as the Sayings of Publius Syrus, interpretation of dreams (Artemiodorus Interpretation of Dreams, the Oracles of Astrampsychus), books of fables, astrology, joke books (such as Philogelos, recently discussed by Mary Beard); the only book by Ovid mentioned in the lifetime of people who might have known him is a work on fishing, suggesting he needed to supplement fame with cash; we can imagine Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana, dedicated to empress Julia Domna, was a bestseller (it’s about a wonder working conjuror of the first century AD).

Take Marius Maximus, a popular author, author of Caesares, the story of the twelve Caesars from Nerva to Elagabalus, clearly a potboiler sequel to Suetonius.. Ammianus comments of the Roman nobility of his day that ‘Some of them hate learning as they do poison, and read with attentive care only Juvenal and Marius Maximus, in their boundless idleness handling no other books than these, for what reason it is not for my humble mind to judge.’  (28.3.14). His work survived to be criticised by St Jerome, but not a word survives. We can imagine that Suetonius’ Lives of the Famous Prostitutes was a bestseller too, and that hasn’t survived, probably due to wholesale burning of books in the late 300s AD by Christian zealots.

As every new technology seems immediately to lead to a new means to produce pornography, there may well have been a trade in that too (‘Were you looking for something a little stronger, splendissimus? I might have just what you’re after.’). It might well be in Greek, so that the average Roman bigot couldn’t read it anyway. Works like Petronius Satyricon, Apuleius’ Metamorphoses (the Golden Ass), novels like Heliodorus’ An Ethiopian Tale, Xenophon’s An Ephesian Tale and Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon. The Myriobiblos of Photius (in ninth century Byzantium) references 279 books, most of them lost, but they would have been those worthy of a Patriarch, so thousands of works have been lost and never noted.

Latin: New Sounds, New Letters, Same Old Problems

Latin is a member of the Indo-European family of languages. It was found at first in Latium (modern Lazio) in Italy, a region which includes Rome. Particular features of Latin suggest that it arrived before about 1200BC.

The languages closest to Latin are those of the Celtic and Germanic families. The language which became the Italic, Celtic and Germanic families arrived in Europe about 2000BC with bronze technology.

Germanic turned north and Celtic+Italic turned south. The first wave started when certain words contained a K or Q sound which was later replaced by a P. Latin and some other minor Italic languages are Q-Italic, while proto-Celtic speakers moved into Spain and later over to Ireland, probably by sea; Irish and defunct languages in Spain are termed Q-Celtic.

After the Iron Age (c.1200BC) a second wave arrived in Italy and France. By then, Q/K had become P; this can be seen in the Latin word Coquina (kitchen) which in the later arrival Oscan became Popina. Latin Quinque (five) is cognate with Welsh Pump (compare with Germanic fünf).

Latin was lucky that this was what the Roman rulers spoke. More people in Italy spoke Oscan than Latin. More people in the Roman Empire (29BC to 641AD) spoke Greek than anything else.

The Latin Alphabet

We still use the Latin alphabet. However, we have added extra letters: K was a Greek letter, only found when quoting Greek. All Cs in Latin are K sounds. J was separated from I only in the High Middle Ages so Julius Caesar was actually Iulius and Caesar was pronounced Keezer. Z is known, but mostly used for Greek words borrowed. U and V are the same character, used according to however pronunciation wanted, and W was just UU or VV. V is pronounced as W until the first century AD, when it starts to become a ‘bv’ sound and eventually a V. Y is known, but mostly in foreign words and names as an ‘eye’ . Some languages later added a character for ‘th’ such as ∂ (dropped from English in the 1400s), but Latin used ‘th’ as we do.

The emperor Claudius had a hobby horse about letters and introduced three new ones: antisigma (a C backwards plus a C, merged) to denote BS and PS), digamma inversum (an F upside down) and sonus medius, an H missing the right downstroke, a sort of schwa vowel. They ceased to be used when died, but could still be seem in the second century AD, when Suetonius notes it in inscriptions, books and official registers.

New Letters Invented by the Emperor Claudius

 The Frankish king Chilperic (r. AD561-584) also introduced four additional letters to Latin during his reign, according to Gregory of Tours. These too failed to survive his reign.

The King  also wrote books of verses following the style of Sedelius, but they were not at all compounds metric/poetic rules. He also added several letters in our alphabet, namely, ω of the Greeks, æ, the, uui, he figured in the manner as follows: ω, ψ, Ζ, Δ, and sent orders in all cities of his kingdom we should teach children in this way, and that the books were written previously erased pumiced out, and rewritten again.

The ego of kings and emperors knows no bounds.

Some characteristics of Latin

There were two types of Latin running alongside each other at the same time: Classical Latin, the speech and writing of the educated upper levels of society, and Vulgar Latin, mostly spoken and seldom written down. ‘Vulgar’ comes from ‘vulgus’, meaning a crowd (cf French ‘foule’), and does not have quite the level of disgust that the name would suggest. However, it is clear that since the elite were only a few percent of the population, a lot more people spoke the Vulgar variety.

In Classical Latin, there are two numbers: singular and plural and three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter. Nouns follow three major groupings and two minor ones. Noun endings (‘cases’) change according to how the word is used in a sentence.

Nominative Subject

Accusative Direct Object

Genitive    Possessive

Dative      Indirect Object

Ablative  Instrumental

Words quoted in a dictionary are shown as Nominatives. When used in poetry, as in ‘O Caesar!’, this is called the Vocative and is often identical to the Nominative. There is a minor case called the Locative, used only with place names.

Adjectives follow the case, gender and number of the noun they are connected with.

The First Declension is feminine: nouns in the Nominative end in –a and this includes all females (femina, woman; puella, girl, etc.), female names (Olivia, Julia, etc.), most country names (Italia, Britannia, etc.) and most abstract words (philosophia, eloquentia, etc.) Oddly nauta (sailor), agricola (farmer) and incola (inhabitant) are feminine, although those are not particularly female activities, as well as other seemingly random words such as mensa, table. To give an idea of the declension, here is mensa:

Nom mensa

Acc mensam

Gen mensae

Dat mensae

Abl mensa

This is not that useful to a Roman as the Genitive and Dative are identical and the Nominative and Ablative seem to be so too (in fact, from poetry we can tell the –a in the Ablative was slightly longer).  The plural is odd too:

Nom mensae

Acc mensas

Gen mensarum

Dat mensis

Abl mensis

In the singular, Genitive and Dative were the same, but in the plural the Dative and Ablative are the same. To make things worse, pronunciation guides to Latin survive, and say things like ‘Don’t forget to include the –m in the Accusative; we may not say it anymore, but you have to write it’!

The second declension comprises masculine nouns ending in –us (e.g. tribus, tribe) and –er (such as magister, master) and neuter nouns ending in –um (such as bellum, war). Endings are different from the feminine words, but follow the same pattern.

Adjectives follow the first two declensions in endings and gender. So for a man, someone might say ‘pulcher est’ (he is handsome) and for a woman ‘pulchra est’ (she is beautiful); people would use that of themselves too.

The third declension is where it all gets a bit weird, if you didn’t think it was weird already.

Third declension nouns can be either masculine or feminine and you often have to guess which. Many have a different Nominative/Vocative form to all other endings, so all are listed as two words, Nominative and Genitive (e.g. flos, floris = flower). Caesar is third declension.

Verbs take their meaning from the endings, which denote person (first, second, third) and number (singular or plural) and tense or mood. Personal pronouns do exist, but were only used for emphasis or contrast. Otherwise (as Italian and Spanish still do) they could be omitted.

In theory, in Classical Latin, words could be written in any order, because the ending would indicate the meaning. In English, John loves Jane can’t mean the same as Jane loves John because the word order determines the meaning. In Classical Latin, Julius Juliam amat means Julius loves Julia, whilst Julium Julia amat means the reverse.

In truth, few people reading a military report or a book on agriculture could abide this silly word play, so it was confined to poetry. The actual word order tended to be Nom, Dat, Acc, Abl, Verb.

There is no word for ‘the’ or ‘a/an’ in Latin (no definite or indefinite article) and no words for Yes and No; they had to use a phrase, which might be ‘sic est’ (it is so) or ‘non est’ (it is not).

The Romans were very aware of the oddities of their language, and a book De Lingua Latina (On the Latin Language) was written by a writer called Varro at the time of Augustus (29BC-14AD), trying to trace its origins and development.  A second century AD text, the Appendix of Probus (Appendix Probi) listed 227 words which were often given wrongly:

Vowel Lost	27
Vowel Changed	82
Vowel Added	2
Consonant Lost	11
Consonant Changed	42
Consonant Added	15
Word Ending Changed	29
Neologism	32

In summary, there were 111 changes to vowels (49%), 68 changes to consonants (30%), 29 grammatical changes (13%) and 32 dispreferred neologisms (14%). Essentially four-fifths of the changes were in speech and did not impact grammar or lexis. We do not know what community spoke the way Probus noted, the number of samples he took or how typical such variants were. A modern linguist would be expected to provide such metrics. But we can say that the variants in sound found acceptance in the local community or the speaker would not have been emulated and Probus would not have heard about them.

Vulgar Latin

We only get to see Vulgar Latin (VL) in chance survivals such as graffiti and in the comic phrases of lower-class characters in plays. VL used different words to Classical Latin (CL). So while CL called your head caput, capitis (whence ‘capital’), VL called it a testa, literally a pot, from which we get modern Italian testa and French tête. Likewise CL said equus (horse) but CL had caballus (nag) hence French cheval and Spanish caballo. Very often, when a modern Spanish, French or Italian word does not come from CL, it comes from VL.

Latin was at that time a living language and it does seem that many people spoke VL but wrote in CL. Some of the least VL is actually from the soldiers who wrote the Vindolanda Tablets, because they made almost no mistakes, even that pesky –m in the Accusative.

Latin had always changed. We are told by a Greek, Polybius, that in the 150s BC the Romans found an inscribed tablet about a trade treaty from 509BC, but which they were unable to read, c.350 years later.

Later Latin

From Donatus we know that the -m which ends words when they are the Direct Object of the sentence (the Accusative Case) was no longer pronounced, so that Mensa (table) was not pronounced ‘Mensam’ in the Accusative, but just ‘Mensa’. Donatus says that people should not forget to write ‘Mensam’, even if the -m is not actually spoken. Certain difficult clusters of consonants were simplified in speech, but not in writing, so for example ‘Mensa’ was actually pronounced ‘Mesa’, just as it is in Spanish today. It seems that the -us ending was weakened to an -o, so that ‘Marcus’ was actually pronounced ‘Marco’, as in modern Italian. The Emperor Constantine was therefore not ‘Constantinus’ but ‘Costantino’. In languages derived from forms of Latin, consonantal clusters are not preserved; either they are cut down, abandoned or have added vowels to make them easier to say.

After Latin

When the Roman school system collapsed in the fifth century AD, local preferences and quirks took over, the Church (a big user of Latin) started changing meanings and pronunciations. Complex sentences began to disappear. The sixth century Latin writer Gregory of Tours, who was Archbishop of that city and primate of France, comments that nobody understands a speechifier, but everyone understands a plain speaker.

By 800AD, the situation had become that everyone still wrote in Latin but spoke in something quite different. The French ruler Charlemagne had documents written for his government in ‘lingua latina rustica’ (rustic Latin), while the bulk of people spoke something that was no longer Latin, but wrote it down in Latin,

The first document to appear in writing in something that was clearly no longer Latin was the Oaths of Strasbourg (843AD). These were oaths given in front of soldiers by two kings, Charles of France and his brother Louis (Ludwig) of Germany to cooperate to fight another brother (Lothar) of the bit in-between and Italy, Charles swore in German and Louis in French, so their soldiers could understand:

Pro Deo amur et pro christian poblo et nostro commun salvament, d'ist di in avant, in quant Deus savir et podir me dunant, si salvarai eo cist meon fradre Karlo et in aiudha et in cadhuna cosa, si cum om per dreit son fradei salva dift in o quid il mi altresi fazet, et ab Ludher nul plaid nunquam prindrai, qui, meon vol cist meon fradre Karle in damno sit.

For the love of God and for the Christian people and for our common salvation, from this day forward so long as God gives me knowledge and power, I will help this my brother Charles both with my aid and in everything as by right one ought to help one's brother, on condition that he does the same for me, and I will not hold any court with Lothar, which, of my own will, might cause my brother Charles harm.

While it seems to have the odd Latin word (nunquam) in it, this proto-French contains many different things. ‘Romance’ as it is often called looks a bit like French and Italian, but is a long way from either and just as far from CL. The vocabulary is still rather closer to Latin than to ModFr (Deus, not Dieu, di not jour, podir not pouvoir, fradre not frère, cosa not chose, etc). Some Latin words (pro, nunquam, ab) survive unchanged in writing. Grammatically, Romance at this stage did not yet requirer je as French does today – meaning was still given through a case ending.

The important thing is that this is a supposedly accurate rendition of precisely what was spoken in front of an army of ordinary West Frankish people. It has not been glossed or dressed up, and therefore shows that Latin had changed massively to the point where a CL speaker could not have understood the vast majority of it in speech, although a CL speaker might have followed it in writing. But nor does it much resemble VL, having gone much further in the abandonment of case and the overall morphology of any variety of Latin.

In conclusion, it can be argued that CL was an artificial construct, used for specific purposes, namely oratory and literature, and hence an elite, prestige social dialect, that was used as the basis for military language, as evidenced from Vindolanda and Bu Njem (in North Africa), but which did not form the everyday speech of the vast majority of Romans, that is, those outside of elite circles. The fact is that many VL words formed the basis of later Romance languages whilst CL ones did not, or were borrowed much later from classical literature as prestige forms.