![]() Seeking with what of words and what of songįor thee the light beyond, wherewith to view To bear all toil and wake the clear nights through, Of thy sweet friendship do persuade me on Strange terms to fit the strangeness of the thing To tell the dark discoveries of the Greeks,Ĭhiefly because our pauper-speech must find Well, Lucretius, conscious of the linguistic difficulty of the work and perfectly raising the question, says in the verses of the Book I, 136-145: Lucretius is precisely the main source to know the thought of Epicurus, who incidentally has little to do with the caricature since Antiquity was made of him. He titled it "On the Nature of Things", "De Rerum Natura", and he expounds the theories of Epicurus, from whom we have little and rare texts. So Lucretius writes a great scientific treaty: physics, chemistry, natural science, in verse, in a poem of 7415 hexameters. Latin authors were very conscious of this problem. So the numerous Greek terms in the Romance languages, the languages derived from Latin, do not come directly from the Greek but through its Latin form. Latin authors respond to the problem by two possible ways: trying to translate and seek the equivalent Latin term or simply transcribing the Greek word into Latin adapting its spelling. Latin did not have technical terms appropriate to the invasion of new knowledge. Well, in this process of acculturation, the Romans found a huge lack when they came to translating and integrating into Latin the specialized and scientific terminology that Greeks had coined. Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit artes et intulit agresti Latio ![]() But Latin lacks sufficient scientific terminology.īut we know according to the happy verse of Horace in Epistles II, 1, verse 156 to 157 that ultimately it was Greece that dominated the Romans with their culture and civilization, which is ours civilization:Ĭonquered Greece took captive her savage conqueror and brought her arts into rustic Latium. Among the cultural contributions of Greece to the Romans highlights the Filososfía. One hundred and fifty years after the death of Alexander the Romans conquered Greece and declared it a Roman province, although a hundred years earlier they had already made contact with the Greeks of Sicily, the Magna Graecia, the Great Greece. The legendary and mythical foundation of Rome is dated 753 BC then the Greeks recited the two great epics of the West, the Iliad and the Odyssey.
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