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Rh preceded the Via Labicana (see ), though the latter may have been preferred in later times. After their junction, the Via Latina continued to follow the valley of the Trerus (Sacco), following the line taken by the modern railway to Naples, and passing below the Hernican hill-towns, Anagnia, Ferentinum, Frusino, &c. At Fregellae it crossed the Liris, and then passed through Aquinum and Casinum, both of them comparatively low-lying towns. It then entered the interval between the Apennines and the volcanic group of Rocca Monfina, and the original road, instead of traversing it, turned abruptly N.E. over the mountains to Venafrum, thus giving a direct communication with the interior of Samnium by roads to Aesernia and Telesia. In later times, however, there was in all probability a short cut by Rufrae along the line taken by the modern highroad and railway. The two lines rejoined near the present railway station of Caianello and the road ran to Teanum and Cales, and so to Casilinum, where was the crossing of the Volturnus and the junction with the Via Appia. The distance from Rome to Casilinum was 129 m. by the Via Appia, 135 m. by the old Via Latina through Venafrum, 126 m. by the short cut by Rufrae. Considerable remains of the road exist in the neighbourhood of Rome; for the first 40 m., as far as Compitum Anagninum, it is not followed by any modern road; while farther on in its course it is in the main identical with the modern highroad.

See T. Ashby in Papers of the British School at Rome iv. 1 sq., v. 1 sq.

 LATINI, BRUNETTO (c. 1210–c. 1294), Italian philosopher and scholar, was born in Florence, and belonged to the Guelph party. After the disaster of Montaperti he took refuge for some years (1261–1268) in France, but in 1269 returned to Tuscany and for some twenty years held successive high offices. Giovanni Villani says that “he was a great philosopher and a consummate master of rhetoric, not only in knowing how to speak well, but how to write well.... He both began and directed the growth of the Florentines, both in making them ready in speaking well and in knowing how to guide and direct our republic according to the rules of politics.” He was the author of various works in prose and verse. While in France he wrote in French his prose Trésor, a summary of the encyclopaedic knowledge of the day (translated into Italian as Tesoro by Bono Giamboni in the 13th century), and in Italian his poem Tesoretto, rhymed couplets in heptasyllabic metre, a sort of abridgment put in allegorical form, the earliest Italian didactic verse. He is famous as the friend and counsellor of Dante (see Inferno, xv. 82-87).

For the Trésor see P. Chabville’s edition (1863); for the Tesoro, Gaiter’s edition (1878); for the Tesoretto, B. Wiese’s study in Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, vii. See also the biographical and critical accounts of Brunetto Latini by Thoe Sundby (1884), and Marchesini (1887 and 1890).

 LATIN LANGUAGE. 1. Earliest Records of its Area.—Latin was the language spoken in Rome and in the plain of Latium in the 6th or 7th century —the earliest period from which we have any contemporary record of its existence. But it is as yet impossible to determine either, on the one hand, whether the archaic inscription of Praeneste (see below), which is assigned with great probability to that epoch, represents exactly the language then spoken in Rome; or, on the other, over how much larger an area of the Italian peninsula, or even of the lands to the north and west, the same language may at that date have extended. In the 5th century we find its limits within the peninsula fixed on the north-west and south-west by Etruscan (see : Language); on the east, south-east, and probably north and north-east, by Safine (Sabine) dialects (of the, , , and , qq.v.); but on the north we have no direct record of Sabine speech, nor of any non-Latinian tongue nearer than Tuder and Asculum or earlier than the 4th century (see, , ). We know however, both from tradition and from the archaeological data, that the Safine tribes were in the 5th century migrating, or at least sending off swarms of their younger folk, farther and farther southward into the peninsula. Of the languages they were then displacing we have no explicit record save in the case of Etruscan in Campania, but it may be reasonably inferred from the evidence of place-names and tribal names, combined with that of the Faliscan inscriptions, that before the Safine invasion some idiom, not remote from Latin, was spoken by the pre-Etruscan tribes down the length of the west coast (see ; ; also : History; ; ).

2. Earliest Roman Inscriptions.—At Rome, at all events, it is clear from the unwavering voice of tradition that Latin was spoken from the beginning of the city. Of the earliest Latin inscriptions found in Rome which were known in 1909, the oldest, the so-called “Forum inscription,” can hardly be referred with confidence to an earlier century than the 5th; the later, the well-known Duenos ( = later Latin bonus) inscription, certainly belongs to the 4th; both of these are briefly described below (§§ 40, 41). At this date we have probably the period of the narrowest extension of Latin; non-Latin idioms were spoken in Etruria, Umbria, Picenum and in the Marsian and Volscian hills. But almost directly the area begins to expand again, and after the war with Pyrrhus the Roman arms had planted the language of Rome in her military colonies throughout the peninsula. When we come to the 3rd century the Latin inscriptions begin to be more numerous, and in them (e.g. the oldest epitaphs of the Scipio family) the language is very little removed from what it was in the time of Plautus.

3. The Italic Group of Languages.—For the characteristics and affinities of the dialects that have just been mentioned, see the article : Ancient Languages and Peoples, and to the separate articles on the tribes. Here it is well to point out that the only one of these languages which is not akin to Latin is Etruscan; on the other hand, the only one very closely resembling Latin is Faliscan, which with it forms what we may call the Latinian dialect of the Italic group of the Indo-European family of languages. Since, however, we have a far more complete knowledge of Latin than of any other member of the Italic group, this is the most convenient place in which to state briefly the very little tha n t can be said as yet to have been ascertained as to the general relations of Italic to its sister groups. Here, as in many kindred questions, the work of Paul Kretschmer of Vienna (Einleitung in die Geschichte der griechischen Sprache, Göttingen, 1896) marked an important epoch in the historical aspects of linguistic study, as the first scientific attempt to interpret critically the different kinds of evidence which the Indo-European languages give us, not in vocabulary merely, but in phonology, morphology, and especially in their mutual borrowings, and to combine it with the non-linguistic data of tradition and archaeology. A certain number of the results so obtained have met with general acceptance and may be briefly treated here. It is, however, extremely dangerous to draw merely from linguistic kinship deductions as to racial identity, or even as to an original contiguity of habitation. Close resemblances in any two languages, especially those in their inner structure (morphology), may be due to identity of race, or to long neighbourhood in the earliest period of their development; but they may also be caused by temporary neighbourhood (for a longer or shorter period), brought about by migrations at a later epoch (or epochs). A particular change in sound or usage may spread over a whole chain of dialects and be in the end exhibited alike by them all, although the time at which it first began was long after their special and distinctive characteristics had become clearly marked. For example, the limitation of the word-accent to the last three syllables of a word in Latin and Oscan (see below)—a phenomenon which has left deep marks on all the Romance languages—demonstrably grew up between the 5th and 2nd centuries ; and it is a permissible conjecture that it started from the influence of the Greek colonies in Italy (especially Cumae and Naples), in whose language the same limitation (although with an accent whose actual character was probably more largely musical) had been established some centuries sooner.

4. Position of the Italic Group.—The Italic group, then, when compared with the other seven main “families” of 