Latin biography

  • First published in 1967, Latin Biography contains chapters on Nepos, Plutarch and Suetonius, the three best-known Classical biographers.
  • In his erudite and entertaining "biography," Nicholas Ostler shows how and why Latin survived and thrived even as its creators and other languages failed.
  • An in-depth biography of the Latin language from its very beginnings to the present day from the widely acclaimed author of 'Empires of the Word'.

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    Book Review – Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin and the World it Created.

    By Nicholas Ostler

    Latin is a language dead as dead could be;
    first it killed the Romans and now it’s killing me.

    So we used to chant as schoolboys, though actually I loved Latin even then. What people do not realise is that Latin was not confined to the Ancient Romans but remained, in many different ways, a living language up until modern times. Even today, though its use has greatly declined, it is still learned, enjoyed and seems to have a place in the formation of the human mind.

    Ostler, in this fascinating book, shows us some of the roots of Latin not only in Greek but in Etruscan and some the other languages of the people of Italy. Greek, of course, was hugely influential on Latin in helping Latin to develop literary and poetic forms. Ostler gives some attention to the classical period of Latin but then traces the different trajectories as Latin morphed into the Romance languages: French

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    Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin

    An in-depth biography of the Latin language from its very beginnings to the present day from the widely acclaimed author of ‘Empires of the Word’.

    The Latin language has been a constant in the cultural history of the West for over two millennia. It has shaped the way we think of ourselves and of our (central) place in the world. It has formed and united us as Europeans, has been the foundation of our education for centuries and defined the way in which we något som utförs snabbt exempelvis expressleverans our thoughts, our faith and our knowledge of the workings of the world. And yet, Latin began life as the cumbersome dialect of a small southern Italian city-state.

    Its active use lasted three times as long as Rome's Empire and its use echoes on in the lag codes of half the world, in terminologies of biology and medicine, and until forty years ago in the litany of the Catholic Church, the most populous form of Christianity.

    In ‘Ad Infinitum’, Nicholas Ostler examines the reasons why Lat

  • latin biography

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    Greek and Latin Biography
    by
    Alexei V. Zadorojnyi
    • LAST REVIEWED: 26 February 2020
    • LAST MODIFIED: 26 February 2020
    • DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195389661-0241

  • Averintsev, Sergei S. 2002. From biography to hagiography: Some stable patterns in the Greek and Latin tradition of Lives, including Lives of the saints. In Mapping lives: The uses of biography. Edited by Peter France and William St. Clair, 19–36. British Academy Centenary Monographs. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.

    Thought-provoking essay on the “deep” normative expectations behind biographical writing in the Greco-Roman and Christian traditions.

  • Burridge, Richard A. 2004. What are the Gospels? A comparison with Graeco-Roman biography. 2d ed. Biblical Resource. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans.

    Mapping out the “generic features” in the structure and contents of select Greek and Roman biographies, argues that the Gospels are related to the contemporaneous narrative matr