, and which Livy used in telling the story of
Rome as unnatural and perverse. All the specious arguments which his
teacher urges upon him, to prove that the periodic form of expression was
just as natural to the Roman as the direct method is to us, fail to
convince him that he is not right in his feeling--and he _is_ right. Of
course in English, as a rule, the subject must precede the verb, the
object must follow it, and the adverb and attribute adjective must stand
before the words to which they belong. In the sentence: "Octavianus wished
Cicero to be saved," not a single change may be made in the order without
changing the sense, but in a language like Latin, where relations are
largely expressed by inflectional forms, almost any order is possible, so
that a writer may vary his arrangement and grouping of words to suit the
thought which he wishes to convey. But this is a different matter from
the construction of a period with its main subject at the beginning, its
main verb at the end, and all sorts of subordinate and modifying clauses
locked in by these two words. This was not the way in which the Romans
talked with one another. We can see that plainly enough from the
conversations in Plautus and Terence. In fact the Latin period is an
artificial product, brought to perfection by many generations of literary
workers, and the nearer we get to the Latin of the common people the more
natural the order and style seem to the English-speaking person. The
speech of the uneducated freedmen in the romance of Petronius is
interesting in this connection. They not only fail to use the period, but
they rarely subordinate one idea to another. Instead of saying "I saw him
when he was an aedile," they are likely to say "I saw him; he was an aedile
then."

When we were analyzing preliterary Latin, we noticed that the
co-ordination of ideas was one of its characteristics, so that this trait
evidently persisted in popular speech, while literary Latin became more
logical and complex.

In the preceding pages we have tried to find out the main features of
popular Latin. In doing so we have constantly thought of literary Latin
as the foil or standard of comparison. Now, strangely enough, no sooner
had the literary medium of expression slowly and painfully disassociated
itself from the language of the common people than influences which it
could not resist brought it down again to the level of its humbler
brother. Its integrity depended of